Ukrainian forces targeted several settlements in Belgorod Region, Russia with drones carrying explosives on Monday night, according to Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov.

The region had been placed under "anti-terrorism operation" regulations in the wake of a raid by a Ukrainian saboteur group.

Late in the evening, several improvised explosive devices were dropped on civilian houses in the town Grayvoron, which is located 7km from the Ukrainian border, Gladkov confirmed on Telegram. Two houses caught fire, but there were no casualties, the official added.

Grayvoron is the administrative center of the district that had been targeted in a Ukrainian intrusion earlier in the day.

In a statement made today on a case concerning Title 42, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch breaks the painful silence on the topic of lockdowns and mandates, and presents the truth with startling clarity. Importantly, this statement from the Supreme Court comes as so many other agencies, intellectuals, and journalists are in flat-out denial of what happened to the country.

[T]he history of this case illustrates the disruption we have experienced over the last three years in how our laws are made and our freedoms observed.

Since March 2020, we may have experienced the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country. Executive officials across the country issued emergency decrees on a breathtaking scale. Governors and local leaders imposed lockdown orders forcing people to remain in their homes.

Excess deaths in the past year were thousands higher than in the pandemic year of 2021 - 67,724 vs 54,770 above the pre-pandemic five-year average - and just a quarter were from Covid. Lucy Johnston has the story in the Express.

Unexpected deaths are more than 10% higher than the pre-Covid average, with experts warning we are facing "a catastrophe of equal proportion to the pandemic itself".

They are calling for an urgent investigation into the causes, with figures showing that there were more excess - or unexpected - losses last year than in 2021.

This is a primer on the way the wind has been blowing since the Ukrainian ammunition stockpile was blown up at Khmelnitsky in the early hours of May 13.

Radiation measurements in the western Ukrainian city appear to have risen sharply on May 13 and 14, indicating that British-supplied depleted uranium shells for anti-tank warfare had been detonated. The radiation-level spiking caused by the release of the depleted uranium (DU) has been denied by Ukrainian officials.

US media reported on May 15 that "while not all of the facts and information about the multiple strikes on Western regions of Ukraine have been fully established, there are several elements to the viral conspiracy narrative that are provably false, misleading or lack evidence." "While Newsweek could not rule out the possibility that the 'depleted uranium' shells provided by the U.K. had been stored there, past reports about the nature of these munitions put a big question mark over that claim."

Newsweek endorsed Ukrainian government agency claims. "Energoatom, the National Nuclear Power Company of Ukraine, said in its official Telegram channel that 'the radiation level at the industrial site [in Khmelnitsky] and in the surrounding regions is at a level corresponding to the normal operation of power units and does not exceed natural background values.'"

A statement by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has repeated the Ukrainian government claim without publishing independent radiation measurements of its own. The IAEA was reported by Newsweek as having "poured cold water over the claims. "The State Nuclear Regulatory Inspectorate of Ukraine has informed the International Atomic Energy Agency today that there have been no measurements of elevated levels of gamma radiation in the country's western regions in recent days," a representative of the international body told Newsweek in an email."

New Zealand's ratio of sheep to people has dropped below five to one for the first time since national population records began in the late 1850s.

The vast ovine herds that outnumber human New Zealanders are a long-running joke outside the country; one of a few nuggets of information about New Zealand - alongside its links to The Lord of the Rings and Jacinda Ardern - that is know by the rest of the world.

The country once had enough sheep to provide a small flock for every person, with the ratio peaking at 22 sheep for every human in the early 1980s. But with international wool markets in long decline, and forestry emerging as a more lucrative use of the land, sheep numbers in New Zealand have been dropping.

National data released this week showed the national flock was 25.3m at June 2022 - a drop of 400,000, or 2% compared with the year before. With New Zealand's estimated human population at 5.15 million, it was the lowest ratio of sheep to people since the 1850s, when national sheep numbers were first recorded, said Jason Attewell​, Stats NZ general manager of economic and environment insights.

Supermarket prices have lifted off again, according to new data, placing pressure on households and feeding inflation while also denting hopes that shoppers were set to soon receive a respite from surging food costs.

Investment bank UBS has found that food and grocery prices at Australia's dominant supermarket chains, Coles and Woolworths, were running at an annualised 9.6% increase in April, according to its analysis of more than 60,000 items.

The UBS figure, which is disputed by Coles, represents a new high, with fresh food propelling the increases with near double-digit annual rises.

A few days ago, I received an email from my local council offering "climate anxiety" therapy for those worried about global warming. It was too interesting an invitation to refuse. A "climate psychologist" convened the group and asked for their feelings: afraid, angry, helpless and guilty were the main words offered. Such anxiety is natural, he said, but can be remedied by "distancing" oneself from negative climate news. He didn't quite say how such a feat could be achieved.

For children it would mean avoiding school, where much of this is now built into the curriculum. It would also mean avoiding television or radio news, seldom short of climate gloom. This week, for example, the BBC announced that the planet is "predicted to pass the 1.5 degree global warming threshold in the next few years," a tipping point after which terrible effects become irreversible. This was followed up by a guest saying how global warming would be worse for Europe than Bangladesh. But the balancing good news - of which there is plenty - was never mentioned.

Experts predict the wipeout of trendy vegan brands after a plunge in demand for animal-free food and drink products.

The latest casualty in the flatlining vegan market is Swedish oat milk firm Oatly, which has been forced to withdraw its dairy-free ice cream in the UK, The Observer reported.

Yorkshire sausage-making company Heck has reduced its vegan-friendly range from ten products to just two.

Managing director Andrew Keeble said: 'The public somehow wasn't quite ready for it yet.


They didn't want all that veg in the sausage.'

Supermarket sales of meat-free products fell by £37.3million in the year to September, analysts from NielsenIQ found.

Gov. Ron DeSantis is asking that a federal judge be disqualified from the First Amendment lawsuit filed by Disney against the Florida governor and his appointees, claiming the jurist's prior statements in other cases have raised questions about his impartiality on the state's efforts to take over Disney World's governing body.

DeSantis ' attorney filed a motion in federal court in Tallahassee on Friday seeking to disqualify Chief U.S. District Judge Mark Walker from overseeing the lawsuit filed by Disney last month. The lawsuit alleges that DeSantis and his appointees violated the company's right to free speech, as well as the contracts clause, by taking over the special governing district that previously had been controlled by Disney supporters after Disney opposed Florida legislation that critics have dubbed "Don't Say Gay."

The Republican governor's motion was filed a day after Disney announced that it was scrapping plans to build a new campus in central Florida and relocate 2,000 employees from Southern California to work in digital technology, finance and product development, amid an ongoing feud with DeSantis.

DeSantis' motion said Walker referenced the ongoing dispute between his administration and Disney during hearings in two unrelated lawsuits before him dealing with free speech issues and fear of retaliation for violating new laws championed by DeSantis and Republican lawmakers. One of those was a First Amendment lawsuit filed by Florida professors that challenged a new law establishing a survey about "intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity" on state campuses.

Walker, who was nominated to the federal bench in 2012 by President Barack Obama and is now chief judge of the district, tossed out that lawsuit on the grounds that the professors didn't have standing to challenge the law championed by DeSantis and Florida lawmakers.

About 20 years ago, I read a piece about the North Miami police department eliminating the swimming requirement for the police. With a working knowledge of geography and having visited Miami many times, I thought this was a bit odd and kind of a bad idea. After all, North Miami has hundreds of miles of canals, lakes, and beaches. Predictably, the reason the requirement was being dropped was that "blacks are less likely than whites to know how to swim because of economic disparities between the groups..." In other words, the change was because not enough blacks were qualified to become police.

That was long before the cancer of wokeness had taken hold of much of America. I was dumbfounded. Nobody with a functioning brain would have looked at that situation and said we must eliminate a key element of the job requirements to let more members of "X group" join. But that's what the people in charge decided. If someone with a functioning brain were actually in charge, he would have said something like, "If our goal is to have a more diverse workforce..." (a questionable assertion in the first place) "and not enough otherwise qualified black candidates can pass the swim test, maybe we should simply take those candidates who meet the other requirements and teach them how to swim."

But that's not what they did. And that is just another demonstration that Democrats aren't actually serious people seeking to help the communities they represent. No, their goal was to cater to the "equity" crowd, even before it had a name. And they have continued to do so for the last two decades.