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Ukraine on Wednesday halted Russian gas supplies to European customers through its pipeline network after a prewar transit deal expired at the end of 2024 and almost three years into Moscow’s all-out invasion of its neighbor. Even as Russian troops and tanks moved into Ukraine in February 2022, Russian natural gas kept flowing through the country’s pipeline network — set up when Ukraine and Russia were both part of the Soviet Union — to Europe, under a five-year agreement. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Russia’s state-owned energy giant Gazprom earned money from the gas and Ukraine collected transit fees. Ukraine’s energy minister, Herman Halushchenko, confirmed Kyiv had stopped the transit “in the interest of national security.” “This is a historic event.

If “Ripley’s Believe It or Not!” had a book devoted to travel, three entries could be: 1) banana is a popular pizza topping in Sweden; 2) Alaska is both the westernmost and easternmost U. S. state; and 3) roughly eight of every 10 Americans have never cruised. Except for proponents of tomatoes being the only fruit that belongs on pizza, perhaps the most mind-boggling of the above is how many among the U.

Après-ski is a tradition as old as skiing itself. The words, literally “after skiing,” conjure images of Parisians toasting champagne in the sunshine of the Alps. They laugh, dance, eat, and drink because nobody drives anywhere. Here in Colorado, people tend to return to their cars, change, and get on the highway as soon as possible, hoping the traffic won’t be bad. But if you stay overnight, live in a mountain town, or want to wait out the worst of the traffic, ski country is full of amazing places to wind down. These are places where the soul of skiing lives, where locals meet to swap stories from the day on the mountain, and where the view of the Rockies will continue to inspire you after your ski legs have waved the little white flag.

SEOUL, South Korea — South Korean officials said Monday they will conduct safety inspections of all Boeing 737-800 aircrafts operated by the country’s airlines, as they struggle to determine what caused a plane crash that killed 179 people a day earlier. Sunday’s crash, the country’s worst aviation disaster in decades, triggered an outpouring of national sympathy.

Moo Deng might seem to most people like just an adorable viral baby hippo, but to the government of Thailand, where she’s from, she’s a cultural ambassador and shining example of the country’s push to boost what it calls its “soft power.” The term soft power was coined at the height of the Cold War by American political scientist Joseph Nye, who used it to describe “when one country gets other countries to want what it wants” without the use of force, in contrast to the hard power “of ordering others to do what it wants.” [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] But in the last year and a half, since the Pheu Thai party came to power in August 2023, Thailand has sought to redefine soft power instead as getting others to want what it has—with a particular emphasis on highlighting the country’s cultural prominence to attract tourists and foreign investment. Moo Deng isn’t alone.