Russia says its military repelleda fresh drone attack on Moscow, with the capital's mayor Mayor Sergei Sobyanin describing that anti-air defense systems intercepted "four drones flying towards Moscow."
International reports highlight that the attack appears "intended to unsettle Moscow’s preparations for events marking the end of the Great Patriotic War, commonly known as World War II elsewhere, on May 9." This year's commemoration events, happing throughout the country - but to include world leaders visiting Moscow - mark the 80th anniversary.
Russia's aviation watchdog, Rosaviatsia, announced a temporary halt to all flights at Domodedovo airport, a key airports serving Moscow, as a result due to the aerial danger in Russian skies.
Elsewhere, at least 17 drones were reported downed over the Bryansk region along with five more over Kaluga - though within the last several days the numbers of inbound drones from Ukraine were significantly higher.
The Black Sea port city of Novorossiysk has seen a state of emergency over the last couple of days as it's come under large-scale drone attacks.
Bloombergreported over the weekend that "Ukrainian drones damaged Russia’s largest grain terminal in the Black Sea port of Novorossiysk overnight, according to regional authorities and facility’s owner."
"Work is underway at the KSK grain terminal to eliminate consequences" of a fire triggered by falling drone debris.
Civilian neighborhoods were also reportedly hit, with regional media citing Novorossiysk mayor Andrei Kravchenko, who stated, "Apartment buildings in the Aurora residential complex and in Suvorovskaya Street were damaged. There is damage in the private sector of the Eastern District. If necessary, we’ll deploy temporary accommodation centers."
Last week President Vladimir Putin declared a unilateral three-day ceasefire for May 8-10, which Ukraine's Zelensky in turn denounced as but a "theatrical show" meant simply to ensure Victory Day events run smoothly as planned.
We reported earlier that Zelensky went so far as to hint that a Ukrainian attack on Victory Day events could happen. Here's what Zelensky warned early last week:
"Now they are worried that their parade is in question, and they are rightly worried. But they should be concerned that this war is still going on. They must end the war," the Ukrainian president said.
Moscow officials certainly took this as a direct threat. Various world leaders, including President Xi Jinping of China, will be present for the V-Day parade through Red Square and other observances.
Meanwhile in Moscow region, Russia's air defenders started lighting up multi-storey apartment blocks in Podolsk!
No wonder some locals are concerned.
Authorities claim to have shot down 4 attack drones already. Domodedovo airport has been closed for around 90 minutes. pic.twitter.com/RtXKn1IlnE
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova issued a statement Saturday saying that Zelensky "unambiguously threatened world leaders."
"After every terrorist attack on Russia's territory, the Kiev regime, its security services, and Zelensky personally boast that this is their doing, that this will continue. Therefore, the phrase that he 'does not guarantee security on May 9 in Russia' as it is not his area of responsibility is, of course, a direct threat," the diplomat stated. There's a likelihood Russian forces could ramp up bombing raids against Ukrainian cities, and even the capital of Kiev, as a result.
The Department of Justice on Monday said a lawsuit against the Food and Drug Administration seeking to sharply restrict the abortion pill mifepristone should be dismissed, continuing the position of the Biden administration.
In a court filing, the Trump administration argued Idaho, Missouri and Kansas have no ties to Amarillo, Texas, where the lawsuit was filed. The states are free to file in their own districts, the DOJ said.
“Aside from this litigation, the States do not dispute that their claims have no connection to the Northern District of Texas,” the DOJ wrote. “The states cannot keep alive a lawsuit in which the original plaintiffs were held to lack standing, those plaintiffs have now voluntarily dismissed their claims, and the States’ own claims have no connection to this District.”
The states did not file their own lawsuit but instead were granted the ability to intervene in a lawsuit first filed in 2022 by a group of anti-abortion physicians and medical associations.
Last year, the Supreme Court dismissed that lawsuit, saying that private parties had no legal basis to challenge access to mifepristone. The justices found the conservative doctors in the lawsuit did not show they had personally been harmed by the government’s actions regulating mifepristone.
Monday’s filing marks the first time the Trump administration has been asked to weigh in on the case.
The red states claim some of the FDA actions to loosen access to mifepristone allowed the pills to flood across their borders, endangering the lives of women and undermining their anti-abortion laws.
The states are challenging the FDA actions that have loosened restrictions on the drug since 2016, including approving it for use in the first 10 weeks of pregnancy and allowing it to be prescribed by telemedicine and sent through the mail.
The administration also urged dismissal based on timing, arguing the states’ challenge to FDA’s 2016 actions is outside the six-year statute of limitations.
The FDA has repeatedly found that mifepristone is safe and that a medication abortion regimen that includes mifepristone and a second drug, misoprostol, is a safe and effective alternative to surgical abortions.
The Supreme Court’s ruling on the case didn’t address the underlying regulatory or safety issues the plaintiffs raised, instead deciding the case only on standing.
President Trump will sign an executive order Monday to ban all federal funding of risky gain-of-function research in China, Iran and other countries without proper oversight of the experiments — more than five years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic that US intel agencies have since said most likely resulted from a lab accident.
The order will yank funding from “any present and all future” gain-of-function research as well as deputize the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other agencies to identify biological research harmful to public health or threatening to national security.
“These measures will drastically reduce the potential for lab-related incidents involving gain-of-function research, like that conducted on bat coronaviruses in China by the EcoHealth Alliance and Wuhan Institute of Virology,” according to a White House fact sheet reviewed by The Post.
President Trump speaking in the Oval Office on May 5, 2025.REUTERS
The FBI, Energy Department and CIA — as well as former public health officials like onetime Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Robert Redfield — have all pointed to a lab leak as the most likely explanation for the outbreak that paralyzed the world in 2020.
Others, like former NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins and former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci, have maintained that natural spillover from animals to humans is the most plausible explanation.
White House officials also dinged the Biden administration for allowing the possibly global-pandemic producing experiments that enhance the infectiousness of viruses and bacteria.
Additionally, all research with infectious pathogens and toxins will be paused until the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy and national security adviser develop a new policy with enforcement and reporting requirements.
Biden had signed a ban on gain-of-function research in China and other countries of concern into law in December 2022, though secretaries of Health and Human Services were able to override that restriction pending review and upon notifying Congress.
Federal agencies have also been unable to track where all of the funding ends up.
Since SARS-CoV-2 emerged and went on to kill more than 1 million Americans, federal officials, lawmakers and scientific experts have debated whether it was a result of US-funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
Virologists working in the the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China on Feb. 23, 2017.SHEPHERD HOU/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
The NIAID, then run by Fauci, and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) funneled more than $1.4 million in grants and subawards through EcoHealth to the Chinese lab between 2014 and 2021 for a project titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.”
That resulted in what ex-NIH principal deputy director Dr. Lawrence Tabak said were gain-of-function experiments at the WIV, though he and other officials have denied any direct link between the project and the COVID pandemic.
Drafts and notes for Project DEFUSE previously obtained by US Right to Know revealed that EcoHealth president Dr. Peter Daszak sought to “downplay” the involvement of Wuhan researchers.
“I simply wanted to stress the US side of the proposal,” Daszak testified to Congress last year, before admitting Chinese biosafety regulations were less strict than those mandated in the US.
EcoHealth Alliance, a Manhattan-based nonprofit, submitted the proposal to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in May 2018 and it was never funded — but Redfield has since suggested even unfunded projects can be tested under other research grants.
Peter Daszak, a member of WHO, sought to downplay the role of Wuhan according to a report.REUTERS
Daszak, in his hearing before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, also testified that he did not have access to all of the WIV’s genomic data and there may still be unpublished coronavirus samples at the lab.
A Defense Department whistleblower last year divulged that the details about DEFUSE weren’t used by ODNI to compile a US Intelligence Community assessment in August 2021 that claimed agencies were “divided” on the question of COVID origins.
FBI and Defense Department scientists also said they were “silenced” for compiling other evidence pointing to a lab leak that was left out of a critical briefing then-Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines delivered to then-President Joe Biden the same month.
Daszak and Fauci have long objected to claims that the COVID pandemic started from a laboratory accident or originated from gain-of-function experiments at the WIV — with the ex-White House COVID czar calling lab-leak proponents “conspiracy theorists.”
The Wuhan Institute of Virology seen on April 17, 2020.Photo by HECTOR RETAMAL/AFP via Getty Images
The Pentagon’s internal watchdog cited “significant limitations with the adequacy of data” — and noted that such research is technically classified as “offensive biological work,” according to the 20-page report, and concluded the “full extent” of defense funding for it “is unknown.”
However, the inspector general’s review found at least seven grants of more than $15.5 million were found to have flowed through subrecipients to “contracting research organization[s] in China or other foreign countries for research related to potential enhancement of pathogens of pandemic potential.”
Of that, $46.7 million from 13 projects funded by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) was funneled to EcoHealth Alliance.
Roughly 12,660 grants were combed through in total, amounting to more than $1.4 billion in US taxpayer funding.
Defense officials said the experiments did not involve “strengthening” any viruses.
Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) forced the audit by tucking a provision into the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act.
“I have been fighting for years to end the insane practice of sending tax dollars to China for sketchy pseudoscience,” Ernst said. “Thankfully, President Trump is ending the batty experiments, like those conducted in Wuhan, that are dangerous and wasteful.
“This is a great win for the American people and common sense,” she added. “I will continue working to expose and halt all taxpayer-funded risky research of pandemic potential in malign foreign countries!”
The communications app used by U.S. President Donald Trump's former national security adviser, Mike Waltz, says it is temporarily suspending services following a reported hack that exposed some of its messages.
In an email, Portland, Oregon-based Smarsh, which runs the TeleMessage app, said it was "investigating a potential security incident" and was suspending all its services "out of an abundance of caution."
A Reuters photograph showed Waltz using TeleMessage, an unofficial version of the popular encrypted messaging app Signal, on his phone during a cabinet meeting on Wednesday.
Waltz was ousted the following day, a move that capped weeks of controversy over his creation of a Signal group to share real-time updates on U.S. military action in Yemen.
That chat drew particular attention because Waltz, or someone using his account, accidentally added a prominent journalist to the group.
Concerns over the security of Waltz's communications were further heightened, when it was reported on Sunday that a hacker had broken into TeleMessage's backend infrastructure and intercepted some of its users' messages.
Tech news site 404 Media said the hacker provided them with stolen material, some of which the news site was able to independently verify.
Smarsh did not immediately respond to a request for more detail about the breach.
After an unprecedented on-air hissy fit last week over the forced exit of a longtime editor, 60 Minutes's Scott Pelley decided to go all in on the Trump-hate, using his on-air time to praise and promote Marc Elias, the architect of the Russia hoax scandal and probably the world's sleaziest lawyer.
CBS News’ 60 Minutes portrayed Democrat election lawyer Marc Elias as a victim of President Donald Trump’s supposed retaliation against law firms — without once mentioning Elias’s sordid background.
CBS’ Scott Pelley portrayed Elias as a hero, the only lawyer brave enough to speak out against a series of executive orders by Trump targeting large law firms that participated in, or hired, lawyers who opposed him.
Pelley neglected to mention that Elias was the architect of the Democrats’ “Russia collusion” hoax in 2016; that he led the effort to change election laws in 2020; and that he has a long history of dirty political tricks.
Nor did Pelley mention that Elias had been sanctioned by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit for unethical conduct. Instead, he was portrayed as an innocent victim, a symbol of the “system of justice.”
He isn't even trying to hide his partisanship. He's calling Elias a hero, courageous, a victim and all the other nonsense that can't be attributed to the sneaky acts of the Russia collusion hoaxers, let alone a Clinton lawyer. Pelley's pious intonations about "rule of law" are, to paraphrase an English writer, "like hearing the word 'love' from the mouth of a whore."
What's more, he's doing what a lot of Democrats do, accusing others what they themselves are doing, which in this case, taking revenge for personal purposes.
The premise of Pelley's piece was that Trump was striking out at Elias, a former attorney of Hillary Clinton's, for personal revenge, as if this hit piece, targeting President Trump by lionizing a man who should be hiding under a rock in disgrace after his Russia collusion hoax, weren't just that -- a personal revenge piece.
Plenty of people saw through it.
Another Sunday, another @60Minutes hit on Trump from Scott Pelley, this time centered on the grievances of a far-left activist lawyer: Marc “Elias and others are warning that Trump’s assault on the legal profession threatens the rule of law itself. Elias says that, for him, it… pic.twitter.com/0caigYKg7e
— Brent Baker 🇺🇲🇺🇦 🇮🇱 (@BrentHBaker) May 4, 2025
Everything about this piece was a distortion or omission of the truth about this worst-of-Trump-haters, this architect of lawfare and phony Russian collusion hoaxes.
Elias is THE Russia hoaxer. Plotted the “vote-by-mail” fiasco and the “lawfare” against Trump as well as any lawyers who helped him. Never mentioned. Tell me, where was this concern about targeting lawyers when Trump attorneys were being bullied and hit with phony Bar complaints? https://t.co/KWqvyRUGuH
Another Sunday, another @60Minutes hit on Trump from Scott Pelley, this time centered on the grievances of a far-left activist lawyer: Marc “Elias and others are warning that Trump’s assault on the legal profession threatens the rule of law itself. Elias says that, for him, it… pic.twitter.com/0caigYKg7e
— Brent Baker 🇺🇲🇺🇦 🇮🇱 (@BrentHBaker) May 4, 2025
How do you quote Marc Elias as a legitimate source on anything involving legal ethics? https://t.co/1EdKtykmDq
That it comes in the wake of Pelley's melodramatic statement last week about the firing of his longtime editor as the owners of CBS look to merge with another outlet is probably the most interesting thing about this. Pelley knows his days are numbered at the network. If his mentor and protector could get knocked out, it won't be long before he is, too.
So instead of being on his best behavior with his new bosses, he's going full bore leftist, perhaps to test the new management to see how far he can go so that when he's thrown out, he will have lots of defenders on the left. Or more likely, because he knows he's a goner, this is his way of getting it out of his system, doing the biased reports he's always dreamed of doing because he'll never have an audience of this size again.
If so, good riddance. It would be nice to see the new owners get rid of him earlier than expected for these stunts, because obviously, they are going to get worse.
Tragicomically, the "60 Minutes" interview of Kamala Harris that CBS extensively edited, so that Harris’ answers didn’t sound so much like Kamala Harris, has been nominated for an Emmy award.
The nominations for the 46th News & Documentary Emmy Awards were announced May 1st.
"60 Minutes" received numerous nominations, including one in the Outstanding Edited Interview category for its primetime special featuring then-Vice President Harris (and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. “Tampon” Timmy Walz.)
This now Emmy-nominated program is the reason for Donald Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against CBS, due to the network’s egregious attempt to help Harris any way it could, including editing her answers to make her look more intelligent and coherent.
That’s not Emmy-winning journalism, folks, that’s election interference. It is also pathetically biased reporting, unethical in the extreme … and “fake news.”
This is as if I penned an article in which I employed plagiarism, blatant lies, and libelous accusations … and was promptly nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
If deceptive editing, a.k.a., “fake news,” gets nominated for an Emmy, we are now living in an Orwellian world, indeed.
Speaking of Orwell, he once said, “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
