Rusia

Ukrainian troops now have more than half of the 90 howitzers that the U.S. pledged them to help beat back a Russian attack in the country’s eastern region, chief Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said Wednesday.

The 155mm M777 howitzers were included in President Joe Biden’s two $800 million aid packages approved April 13 and April 21, respectively, and represented the first time that the U.S. sent such artillery to Ukraine since Russian forces invaded Feb. 24.

Two explosions in a radio facility close to the Ukrainian border knocked a pair of powerful broadcast antennas out of service in Moldova’s separatist region of Trans-Dniester, local police said Tuesday.

Trans-Dniester, a strip of land with about 470,000 people, has been under the control of separatist authorities since a 1992 war with Moldova. Russia bases about 1,500 troops in the breakaway region, nominally as peacekeepers.

For months, Istanbul restaurant Tarihi Balikca tried to absorb the surging cost of the sunflower oil its cooks use to fry fish, squid and mussels.

But in early April, with oil prices nearly four times higher than they were in 2019, the restaurant finally raised its prices. Now, even some longtime customers look at the menu and walk away.

The U.S. pressed its allies Tuesday to move “heaven and earth” to keep Kyiv well-supplied with weapons as Russian forces rained fire on eastern and southern Ukraine amid growing new fears the war could spill over the country’s borders.

In March 2022, Senator John Barrasso (R-WY) introduced several bills calling for a ban on Russian uranium as a way to cut off funds for the war in Ukraine and also boost domestic uranium production. Although environmentalists applaud the Russian uranium ban, they are concerned that an expansion of domestic mining will have adverse effects on the environment and surrounding communities.

Russia’s foreign ministry said on Monday that it had declared 40 German diplomatic staff “personae non gratae” in a retaliatory move after Berlin expelled the same number of Russian diplomats, Reuters reported.

PART ONE

SOMETHING FUNDAMENTAL IN HUMANS DRIVES UKRAINIAN WAR FORWARD

If World War III’s Nuclear holocaust begins in Ukraine it will because of the same madness caused by the same hatred, greed, hypocrisy and fascism driven by the same oligarch’s, plutocrat’s and militarists in the same empires of both the west and the east, who, especially in the past one hundred years, have driven or caused all the same wars that have come before this latest pandemic of human madness in Ukraine.

Face it, we’re living in a world that, while anything but exceptional, is increasingly the exception to every rule. Only the other day, 93-year-old Noam Chomsky had something to say about that. Mind you, he’s seen a bit of our world since, in 1939, he wrote his first article for his elementary school newspaper on the fall of the Spanish city of Barcelona amid a “grim cloud” of advancing fascism. His comment on our present situation: “We’re approaching the most dangerous point in human history.”