đŸ”” Putin Backs Ceasefire

Author

Citizen Frank
March 14, 2025

Good evening. It’s Thursday, March 13.

 

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Thursday that Russia agrees in principle with the United States’ ceasefire proposal, but key terms still need to be negotiated. He stressed that any agreement should lead to lasting peace and address the root causes of the conflict.

Putin pointed out that Ukrainian troops remain encircled in their last foothold in Russia’s Kursk region, and it must be determined whether they will surrender before the ceasefire takes effect.

Speaking to reporters before his meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, President Donald Trump reiterated his call for Russia to agree to a 30-day ceasefire with Ukraine.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer made a dramatic U-turn Thursday and announced that he would vote to allow Republicans to forge ahead with consideration of their plan to avert a partial government shutdown Friday at midnight.

Schumer (D-NY) argued that if the Democrats stall a Republican plan to avert a partial government shutdown, it will give President Trump too much power and have far more devastating ramifications than the GOP spending patch.

“While the CR bill is very bad, the potential for a shutdown has consequences for America that are much, much worse,” Schumer declared in a Senate floor speech Thursday evening. “Allowing [President] Trump to take even much more power is a far worse option.”

Briefing materials for President Barack Obama, subjects and times for White House Situation Room meetings and discussions about sensitive conversations with foreign leaders and even fallout from leaked National Security Agency intercepts were forwarded to Joe Biden’s private pseudonymous email accounts when he was vice president, according to a new tranche of documents turned over to Just the News by the National Archives.

Security experts and lawmakers, who reviewed the records, said they were disturbed by the nonchalant transmission of sensitive government information to Biden’s insecure private email accounts and believed it put national security at risk.

“The new set of emails from Joe Biden’s time as Vice President are very troubling and are more evidence that Biden believed he did not have to abide by classification and document handling regulations,” former CIA analyst and former Trump National Security Council chief of staff Fred Fleitz told Just the News.

The Trump administration on Thursday removed the Internal Revenue Service’s top lawyer and rolled out plans to downsize nearly 20 percent of the agency’s staff as billionaire Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service seeks access to sensitive taxpayer records, according to five people familiar with the matter.

William Paul, a career official named to the position in January, will be replaced by Andrew De Mello, who was nominated to be the Education Department’s inspector general during Trump’s first term, three of the people said. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak with the media.

Also, DOGE officials instructed the acting IRS commissioner to eliminate 18,141 jobs across the agency by May 15, according to records obtained by The Washington Post.

A government watchdog is sounding the alarm on former President Joe Biden’s liberal use of an autopen to sign official documents, saying it raises concerns about who controlled the presidency, given Biden’s cognitive decline.

Biden pardoned six criminals on December 30, 2022, with the “exact same autopen signature” while the president was vacationing and golfing in the U.S. Virgin Islands, according to the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project.

“Note they all say they are ‘Signed in the City of Washington,’” the Oversight Project posted on X.

US stock futures rose after another brutal day of trading on Wall Street ended with the S&P 500 closing in correction territory.

Futures attached to the Dow Jones Industrial Average ticked up 0.4%. Futures attached to the benchmark S&P 500 rose 0.5%. Futures attached to the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite jumped 0.6%.

President Donald Trump has continued his trade war at a breakneck pace this week, unmoved by falling markets. On Thursday, Trump said at a meeting with the NATO secretary general that he didn’t plan to “bend at all” in an escalating round of tit-for-tat tariffs with America’s biggest trading partners, recognizing there could be “a little disruption” ahead.

Stargazers in North and South America will be able to view a red-colored “blood moon” starting Thursday night in the first total lunar eclipse visible on the continents since 2022.

The celestial event, observable with the naked eye, will have more than an hour of totality and can additionally be seen in parts of western Europe and Africa, as well as New Zealand.

A lunar eclipse occurs when the Earth goes between the moon and the sun, casting the Earth’s shadow on the moon.

Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel allegedly covered up a report from her country’s foreign intelligence service that concluded that the likelihood that the coronavirus pandemic originated from a Chinese lab was overwhelming.

The Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), German’s version of the CIA, conducted an intelligence gathering operation dubbed “Saaremaa” that concluded that there was an 80%-95% likelihood that the pandemic originated during a lab accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The findings were contained in a report from a joint investigation by two German newspapers, SĂŒddeutsche Zeitung and Die Zeit, that alleged Merkel decided to keep the bombshell that she learned about in 2020 “under lock and key.”

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