BREAKING NEWS Putin's revenge: Six dead, including a baby, as Russian drones pound Ukraine hours after Vladimir told Trump he would make Zelensky pay for Operation Spiderweb humiliation
At least six people, including a one-year-old child, were killed in a Russian drone strike on the northern Ukrainian city of Pryluky overnight, regional governor Viacheslav Chaus said Thursday.
The attack came just hours after Donald Trump spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin. According to Trump, Putin 'very strongly' said that Russia will retaliate for Ukraine's weekend drone attacks on Russian military airfields.
Six more people were wounded in the attack and have been hospitalized, Chaus said. According to him, six Shahed-type drones struck residential areas of Pryluky early Thursday morning, causing severe damage to residential buildings.
Hours later, seventeen people were wounded in a Russian drone strike on the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv early Thursday, including children, a pregnant woman, and a 93-year-old woman, regional head Oleh Syniehubov wrote on Telegram.
At around 1:05 a.m., Shahed-type drones struck two apartment buildings in the city's Slobidskyi district, causing fires and destroying several private vehicles.
'By launching attacks while people sleep in their homes, the enemy once again confirms its tactic of insidious terror,' Syniehubov wrote on Telegram.
Russian aircraft were damaged but not destroyed in a June 1 attack by Ukraine, and they will be restored, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said in an interview with the state news agency TASS.
'The equipment in question, as was also stated by representatives of the Ministry of Defence, was not destroyed but damaged. It will be restored,' Ryabkov said.
The United States assesses that Ukraine's drone attack over the weekend hit as many as 20 Russian warplanes, destroying around 10 of them, two U.S. officials told Reuters, a figure that is about half the number estimated by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
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The Independent
26 minutes ago
- The Independent
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Telegraph
32 minutes ago
- Telegraph
The West tried to make North Korea a pariah – but it's never been stronger
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'North Korea has never been as strong – strong militarily as well as strong in oppressing its civilian population – as it is right now,' said Joanna Hosaniak, deputy director general of the Citizens' Alliance for North Korean Human Rights. This is, in part, thanks to a new mutual defence treaty signed between North Korea and Russia in November last year. But it is also down to its increasing ability to source foreign income through hacking and forced labour, despite Western sanctions, as it wages an information war against its enemies and its own population. Taken together, these three factors are allowing North Korea quietly to transform itself. Shopping for an upgrade Since striking a deal with Russia, North Korea has supplied Moscow with 15,000 soldiers, 100 ballistic missiles and millions of munitions to help Moscow wage war against Ukraine. In return, the Kremlin allowed Pyongyang to have its pick of sophisticated hardware – a huge boost for a regime that commands predominantly outdated, Soviet-era weaponry. While North Korea still has a long way to go in terms of upgrading all of its inventory, the newly strengthened ties with Moscow have reinforced the regime's strength and power. With a defence budget less than one per cent the size of China's, North Korea has had to choose between conventional and nuclear weapons. Kim has largely sided with the nuclear program. Earlier this year, a new intercontinental ballistic missile site was detected near Pyongyang where Kim's 'Winter Palace' once stood, marking the latest developments in the country's nuclear progress. 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Bringing in cash North Korea is subject to dozens of sanctions, imposed by the United Nations, the European Union and governments including the United Kingdom, which aim to cut off Pyongyang from the international banking system as well as arms sales. While Russia has become an increasingly important partner in circumventing these restrictions, Pyongyang's relationship with China has also helped keep it afloat. Beijing is believed to have provided Pyongyang with military and nuclear expertise and a huge chunk of its foreign currency. 'China has been bankrolling the North Korean regime for a long time. About 95% of North Korean trade was with China for decades,' said Dr Petrov. Ms Hosaniak explained that North Korea is able to produce commercial goods domestically at a very cheap rate in forced labour camps, then sell them to the international market through China. She said: 'These goods can be sold in the EU, the UK…There are no restrictions, as long as the labels say 'Made in China', although the goods were produced in North Korea.' Companies facilitating this trade almost always need to have state backing to do so. 'In order to trade with North Korea you have to have an official North Korean trading partner so this is really a government-to-government kind of business that is operated by so-called private businesses,' Ms Hosaniak said. Beyond commercial ties with China, the North Korean regime has also brought in cash through cyber theft, especially from overseas workers. Local news outlet Daily NK reported that dozens of researchers from North Korea had been sent to China and Southeast Asia earlier this year to carry out attacks against cryptocurrency exchanges, engage in illegal cryptocurrency mining and target network firewalls. Pyongyang was also revealed to be carrying out an illegal scheme known as 'laptop farming', in which dozens of laptops in the US were being remotely controlled by thousands of North Koreans using stolen identities. Through these increasingly refined schemes, North Korean hackers have stolen an estimated $6 billion (£4.4 billion) in cryptocurrency, according to analysis firm Chainalysis. Shattering illusions As Kim expands his country's defence and revenue streams, he also has to contend with a population of over 25 million people. The most effective way of doing this is to wage a full blown information war. 'The more information that North Koreans get, the more they would know that their government isn't being entirely truthful and life perhaps is better on the other side,' said Shreyas Reddy, the lead correspondent at local outlet NK News. Before the advent of the internet, it was significantly easier to do this, but now Pyongyang has had to develop its own technology and enforce new, draconian laws. A key way that outside information has entered the country was through USB sticks and CDs. These contain a wide variety of media, from South Korean media to much more sensitive information about human rights and politics. The COVID-19 pandemic dealt a major blow to these efforts, as North Korea shut its borders and erected an electric fence between it and China. A new law introduced in 2020 also increased the punishment for anyone caught consuming or sharing foreign media and in 2023, Kim outlawed common South Korean phrases and made it illegal to speak in a South Korean accent. 'Videos smuggled out of North Korea show people being punished severely for these sorts of incidents and we've heard unverified reports about executions or other permanent punishments for watching or accessing foreign culture,' said Mr Reddy. The constant evolution of censorship and propaganda efforts have allowed Kim to retain an upper hand in the long-standing information war upon which his reign depends. Most experts agree that North Korea will continue on the same trajectory. Kim is only 41 years old and has put in place numerous mechanisms to ensure that his grip on power remains ironclad, while also posing a major threat to enemies abroad. His newly cemented partnership with Russia, forged from shared isolation, is the latest of these efforts. 'Politically, economically, militarily, it makes them stronger,' said Dr Petrov. 'Both need this alliance. It's a mutually beneficial symbiosis of dictatorial regimes, which have been at war with their neighbours for many years.'
NBC News
33 minutes ago
- NBC News
Breaking down 20 years of election data that shows how the two parties have evolved in the Trump era
President Donald Trump's second election win was different from his first in one big, important way: He won the popular vote, just the second time in the last two decades that Republicans had done so. And in the time between those two victories, from 2004 to 2024, there have been dramatic shifts in the nation's politics along geographic, racial, educational and economic lines. Trump is operating in a very different Republican Party than George W. Bush was 20 years earlier. A look at where the vote has shifted most in that time tells an eye-catching story. Over the last 20 years, the counties where Republicans have improved their presidential vote share by the largest margins are predominately centered in Appalachia and the surrounding areas. The 100 counties that saw the largest shifts include: 11 of West Virginia's 55 counties, 27 of Tennessee's 95 counties, 18 of Arkansas' 75 counties and 17 of Kentucky's 120 counties. These counties, on the whole, are much more heavily white than average, according to census data, with white residents making up at least 90% of the total population in about two-thirds of these counties. All but 12 of those counties are at least 75% white. The unemployment rate across these counties is about twice the national average. Residents are more likely to be reliant on food stamps and less likely to have moved in the last year. Residents of these counties, on average, also are significantly less likely to have a bachelor's degree or higher. While the national average in the American Community Survey's most recent five-year estimate is that 35% of Americans have a bachelor's degree or higher, the average in these counties is just 14%. In short, the shifts show how Trump has brought more white working-class voters into the GOP, causing spectacular changes in some localities. Elliott County, Kentucky, with about 7,300 people, shifted the most over this time period. While Democrat John Kerry carried the county over Bush 70%-29%, the county shifted significantly to the right by Democrat Barack Obama's 2012 re-election, when Obama narrowly outran Republican Mitt Romney 49%-47%. The county continued to shift with Trump on the ballot, ultimately with Trump winning a higher vote share in 2024 (80%) than Kerry did in 2004. It's a similar story in many of these other counties — particularly those in states like West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee, where rural voters that once voted Democratic have been leaving the party, especially at the presidential level. In the Trump era, heavily Hispanic counties shifted right A different look — at the counties with the largest pro-Republican shifts between Trump's three elections, from 2016 to 2024 — shows some major differences in the types of places that have moved to the right specifically within the Trump era. On average, the 100 counties that shifted most toward Republicans in the Trump era are significantly more Hispanic than the national average. These counties are also wealthier and more educated compared to the counties that moved most from 2004 to 2024, although they are still below the national average. While the biggest Republican-shifting counties from 2004 to 2024 are largely concentrated around Appalachia, the counties that shifted the most to the right in the Trump era are more spread out and predominantly in the South and West. Twenty-nine Texas counties show up in the list of 100 counties that saw the greatest gain in GOP presidential vote margin between 2016 and 2024, and 12 of those are among the 20 that saw the biggest shifts. All of these Texas counties are majority-Hispanic, and some are more than 90% Hispanic, emblematic of Trump's dramatic improvement among Hispanic voters in 2024 as well as his success in heavily Hispanic areas along the border in 2020. Another heavily Hispanic county, Miami-Dade County, saw the 15th-largest shift in margin toward Republicans between 2016 and 2024 out of more than 3,000 counties nationwide. Other major population centers in New York City — including the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens — are in the top 100 too. And the 14 counties in Utah are typical of another trend: Many Republicans initially skeptical of Trump in 2016 (including Mormons, who make up a significant part of the electorate in Utah) largely fell in line eight years later. Where Democrats have made their biggest gains Democrats have seen their own shifts — the flip side of those GOP gains in a country that has remained tightly divided even as the two party coalitions have shifted significantly from 20 years ago. While the counties that saw the largest GOP gains over the last two decades were predominantly rural and small, the counties where Democrats improved the most are much larger, primarily in suburban and urban areas. The 100 counties where the GOP presidential vote margin grew most over the last two decades cast just 782,000 votes in 2024. The 100 counties that saw the most improvement in the Democratic presidential vote margin cast almost 20 million votes all together in 2024. Those Democratic-trending counties include key constituencies that have become more important to the party's coalition in recent years. On average, they are more heavily Black, more wealthy, more educated and more urban, an unsurprising mix of voters mobilized in the Obama era and those who have fled the Republican Party in the Trump era. They're also broadly more likely to have more newer residents — according to census data, those Democratic-trending counties have higher-than-average shares of residents who have recently moved to the county. Many of those major trends intersect in exurban and suburban Georgia, particularly in the Atlanta metro area. Seven Georgia counties are among the top eight that saw the most movement toward Democrats the two decades since 2004: Rockdale, Henry, Douglas, Gwinnett, Newton, Cobb and Fayette counties. All but Newton are in metro Atlanta, all are at least one-quarter Black, and most have higher incomes and education rates than the national average. Extremely wealthy and highly educated areas in northern Virginia, as well as counties like Teton County, Wyoming — home to the ritzy Jackson Hole ski resorts as well as major national parks — and Los Alamos County, New Mexico — home to the Department of Energy laboratory that helped develop the atomic bomb — are also among the counties that swung most toward Democrats over this period. Los Alamos County is particularly symbolic: It has the highest share of Ph.D.s among residents of any county in the country. Two more notable counties included in this list are Sarpy and Douglas counties in Nebraska, which make up the vast majority of the state's 2nd Congressional District — the 'blue dot' that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris carried in the last two presidential elections, securing one electoral vote even as Trump carried the state. Democrats have gained in wealthier, whiter and more educated counties in the Trump era The counties that shifted most toward Democrats between 2016 and 2024, the Trump era, are significantly whiter and slightly older than those that moved most over the last two decades. Twenty are in Colorado and nine are in Utah, but there are a handful of important counties in the Midwest too. The two counties that saw the biggest Democratic shifts in the last eight years are both in Utah: Utah and Davis counties, around Provo and Salt Lake City, respectively. There's an important caveat here: In 2016, independent candidate Evan McMullin won 21% of the vote, deflating both parties' vote shares. Looking at more competitive states, almost one-third of Colorado's counties were among the 100 with the largest Democratic shifts in the Trump era, as were 11 in Georgia. Grand Traverse County, Michigan, and Ozaukee County, Wisconsin, have also seen more recent shifts, emblematic of how some educated, suburban Republican strongholds have been moving toward Democrats with Trump on the ballot. But those gains have been more moderate, an increase of 7 percentage points in the Democratic margin between 2016 and 2024 in Ozaukee, and 8 percentage points in Grand Traverse.
