Bucharest, Romania (CNN)As Vice President Kamala Harris wasjetting to Poland this week,she got a mid-flight call from the White House.
It was President Joe Biden, looking to make sure his No. 2 was up to speed on the administration’s scramble to deal with a problem awaiting her in Warsaw, a senior administration official said. The Polish government was offering to send fighter jets through the US to Ukraine, an idea the administration had no choice but to firmly decline in a Pentagon statementthe day before Harris’ departure.Ordinarily such a scenario might prompt a cursory phone call between leaders to clear the air.
But in this case, the administration’s response was still unfolding as Harris was flying across the Atlantic to meet Poland’s President and prime minister, raising the stakes for a trip…
At just three meters wide, 2022 EB5 was around just half the size of an average male giraffe, which grows to be around five-six meters in height. As such, it was unlikely to do any damage if it had impacted the planet.
The 2022 EB5 had harmlessly burned up in the atmosphere, and it is unknown if any residual fragments have actually survived intact. Some in Iceland have reported hearing a boom or seeing a flash of light around this time, and the International Meteor Organization is looking for witness reports of anyone…
Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said Russian forces are “broadening their target sets” after rockets hit a Ukrainian military base near the Polish border overnight.
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Commentator on Russian state TV criticizes Putin’s invasion
“Look, this is the third now military facility or airfield that the Russians had struck in western Ukraine in just the last couple of days,” Kirby told ABC “This Week” co-anchor Martha Raddatz, on Sunday. “So, clearly, at least from an airstrike perspective, they’re broadening their target sets.”
The Yavoriv International Center for Peacekeeping and Security, located about 10 miles from Poland and an hour west of Lviv, sustained damage from the airstrike. Lviv Gov. Maksym Kozytskiy said at least 35 people were killed and another 134 injured during the attack on the Ukrainian military training base. Kirby confirmed no Americans were present.
Raddatz followed up, citing Ukraine’s defense minister calling the strike “a terror attack near the NATO border” and “saying action must be taken to stop this, close the sky.”
“Could a no-fly zone have stopped this?” she asked.
“No, I don’t think so,” Kirby responded. “Look, I mean, no-fly zone has a nice air policing kind of sound to it. But I participated in one as a young officer on an aircraft carrier way back in the early ’90s. It is combat. You have to be willing to shoot and to be shot at.” He added that U.S. troops in Ukraine “leads to war with Russia.”MORE: Pentagon again rejects Poland’s plan to make US provide Ukraine fighter jets
Raddatz asked, “If those attacks on military supply centers cross into Poland — and I know that is a fear of the United States and the NATO allies — what changes? Kamala Harris just reaffirmed the pledge — the Article 5 pledge — to defend NATO members. If they strike in Poland, what happens?”
“We take our Article 5 commitment very seriously and the vice president was pretty firm about that on her recent visit, so has been [Defense] Secretary [Lloyd] Austin,” Kirby answered. “An armed attack against one is considered an armed attack against all. That is why, Martha, we continue to flow and to move and to reposition forces and capabilities along NATO’s eastern flank to make sure that we can defend every inch of NATO territory if we need to.”
“Now, there’s no reason we should need to because there’s no reason that there should be war in Ukraine as it is, and we’ve made it very clear to Russia that NATO territory will be defended not just by the United States, but by our allies,” Kirby later added.
“But this was just 10 miles from that border,” Raddatz pressed again, saying, “I just crossed that border the other day. Doesn’t this change the way you look at things? They’re getting closer and closer to our NATO allies.”
“I can tell you that we have been consistently concerned about NATO’s eastern flank and that airspace and, of course, that ground space on that flank of NATO. And we continue to look for ways to bolster the defenses of our NATO allies,” Kirby said.
“It is of the Russian playbook that that which they accuse you of they’re planning to do now,” Kirby said. “Now, again, we haven’t seen anything into it indicates some sort of imminent chemical or biological attack right now, but we’re watching this very, very closely.”
But as Ukrainian leaders plead for a no-fly zone over their country, Markian Lubkivskyi, an adviser to the Ukrainian defense minister, said during an earlier “This Week” interview that Ukraine was “still waiting for the weapons, for the aircraft, for the anti-air systems to protect Ukrainians from the air.”
Kirby, however, said assistance would “continue to flow” to the country.
“The kinds of things we know they most need, the kinds of things that they’re using so well, we’re going to continue to help get them into their hands. And we know that it is working, that they are receiving them and they are using them.”
“I mean they have impressed everybody around the world and certainly they have impressed the Russians who have been increasingly flummoxed and frustrated about their lack of progress because of this Ukrainian resistance,” he added.
A Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries enforcement agent cited two men for alleged deer hunting violations in Allen Parish on March 7.
Corporal Zachary Meche cited Alex M. Bebee, 29, and Kinnley B. Howard, 29, both of Iowa, for hunting deer during a closed season, hunting deer during illegal hour and hunting deer from a public road.
The agent received a call on March 7 from the Kinder Police Department about a traffic stop they made where they found two harvested deer in ice chests in the bed of Bebee’s truck.
The agent arrived on the scene and during questioning BeBee admitted that he and Howard harvested the deer in the early morning hours on March 6 off Abie Fontenot Rd in Jefferson Davis Parish. Corporal Meche seized the deer and donated the meat to a local charity.
Shortly after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, Ukraine built a concrete dam cutting off 85 percent of the peninsula’s water supply. So one of Moscow’s first strategic moves after invading the country was to blow it up.
Ukraine had constructed the dam on the North Crimea Canal, a Soviet-era conduit that conveyed water from the Dnieper River to both Crimea and the Kherson region of Ukraine.
Russia has been diverting other water sources to the region since 2017, but those efforts could not compensate for the loss of canal flow, and the peninsula’s agriculture sector had essentially run dry.
“Environmental conflicts are interwoven with these kinds of complex histories,” said Saleem…
NEWS RELEASE MINISTRY OF NATURAL RESOURCES AND FORESTRY ************************* The Ontario government is safeguarding black bear populations by making sure they are hunted legally.
Yves Theriault of Smooth Rock Falls pleaded guilty to hunting big game that is swimming, for which he received a $2,000 fine, and to hunting big game without a licence, for which he received an $800 fine.
The court heard that on Aug. 26, 2020, Theriault was at his cottage on Shackleton Lake when a bear entered his property. Theriault decided to hunt the bear by chasing it across private property to the shore of the lake. Theriault shot at the bear multiple times while it ran on land and as it swam across the…
Hollywood star Mila Kunis has urged the world not to perceive the people of Russia as the ‘enemy’ amid the ongoing war with Ukraine as her fundraiser with Ashton Kutcher continues to raise millions of dollars for humanitarian aid.
Earlier this week,it was reported that a 40-mile ‘death convoy’ from Russia was on the move amid fears of a massive assault on the capital city of Kyiv.
The Ukrainian government has claimed that Russian troops shelled a mosque sheltering more than 80 people inside Mariupol, a besieged city that has seen trapped civilians struggle to gain access to food and water following continued barrages.
Kunis, who was born in Ukraine before fleeing with her family to the US when she was seven years old, has emphasised the importance of not blaming Russian civilians for the attacks, saying that they must not be viewed as the ‘enemy’.
Speaking on Maria Shriver’s digital series, she explained that she doesn’t believe that essential point is mentioned enough in the media.
‘I don’t think that we need to consider the people of Russia an enemy,’ the That ‘70s Show star said.
Kunis and her husband Kutcher, with whom she shares two children, recently set up a fundraiser on GoFundMe to ‘provide an immediate impact on refugee and humanitarian aid efforts’, with the money being sent to Flexport.org and Airbnb.
The couple explained that the two organisations ‘are actively on the ground providing immediate help to those who need it most’, setting a target of $30million (£23m) and raising over $20m (£15m) so far.
‘Today, I am a proud Ukrainian. While my family came to the United States in 1991, I was born in Chernivtsi, Ukraine in 1983,’ Kunis wrote on the fundraising page.
‘Ukrainians are proud and brave people who deserve our help in their time of need. This unjust attack on Ukraine and humanity at large is devastating and the Ukrainian people need our support.’
She added that they would begin the fund by matching up to $3m (£2.3m) in donations.
With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine bringing us images of murdered civilians, bombed maternity wards and the horror of urban warfare, you really have to wonder about the human race. How is it that 145 million Russians allow someone like Putin to rule over them?
The answer to that question has everything to do with Russian history and politics of course, but an even more sobering point is that Putin is hardly alone. The world today is rife with authoritarians, nationalists and dictators — tinpot and otherwise. And they are on the march. In fact you could make the case that we are moving towards an unprecedented anti-Democratic hegemony.
If conflicts in places such as Ethiopia, Palestine, Kashmir, Syria, and Yemen have proved anything, it’s that wars are easy to start, but are also brutal, intractable, and difficult to end. The fickle nature of the international media means that protracted conflicts quickly lose the world’s attention, if they ever had it to begin with.
At the moment, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has riveted the world, drawing more attention than the ongoing slaughters in other nations—adouble standardthat has been widely noted. But that gap in coverage is likely to become even more striking the longer the conflict continues, because the factors that make a long war in Ukraine seemingly inevitable are the same ones that make it…
SOUTH CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) — The number of white-tailed deer killed in West Virginia during the recently completed hunting seasons fell slightly compared to a year ago, wildlife officials said.
Hunters killed 105,278 deer last year, a 1.5% drop from the 106,861 deer killed in 2020, the Division of Natural Resources said Wednesday in a news release.
The most deer were killed in Preston, Jackson, Randolph and Upshur counties.
The DNR said hunters killed more than 42,000 bucks during the traditional buck firearm season, 31,000 were killed by bows and crossbows, nearly 28,000 antlerless deer were killed during all firearm seasons, and nearly 3,600 deer were killed by muzzleloader hunters. In addition, 633 deer were taken with primitive bow and rifles during the Mountaineer Heritage season.
