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Extra! Prince Charles 'Black Spider' Letters Revealed

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The Times, May 14, 2015

After a 10-year legal battle, the contents of 27 secret letters written by Prince Charles to British ministers were published Tuesday, revealing the extent of the prince's attempts to influence the government.

On the front page of its Thursday edition, The Times ran a picture of the Prince of Wales in front of what have become known as the "black spider memos" (so called because of the prince's scrawled handwriting). According to the London-based newspaper, the heir to the throne wrote to members of the government, including then-Prime Minister Tony Blair, suggesting changes to policies concerning a variety of topics ranging from badger culling to global warming, agriculture, the defense budget and alternative medicine.

The letters are controversial because members of the royal family are not supposed to interfere with governmental matters. He wrote them between September 2004 and April 2005, and they were made public under the Freedom of Information Act on the orders of the Supreme Court.

ABOUT THE SOURCE: The Times is a British daily national newspaper based in London. It began in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register and became The Times on 1 January 1788.

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Russia

Exclusive: Russian Leak Reveals Extent Of Country’s Anti-War Protests That Kremlin Was Hiding

Independent Russian media Vazhnyye Istorii has obtained a major data leak from the top Kremlin information agency that reveals the scale and extent of anti-war protests across the Russian Federation.

photo of police detaining elderly woman holding up a protest sign

A St. Petersburg anti-war protester in March 2022

Valentin Yegorshin/TASS via ZUMA
Irina Dolinina, Polina Uzhvak

Since the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine, Russian government information agencies have repeatedly published public opinion polls showing that the overwhelming majority of Russians support Vladimir Putin's domestic and foreign policies, especially the war against Ukraine which is officially referred to as the special “military operation to denazify Ukraine and liberate Donbas.”

However, an unprecedented large-scale leak of data from Roskomnadzor, the Russian federal propaganda and surveillance agency, shows that protest movements in 2022 were expanding across much of the Russian Federation.

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