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Thailand's King has made his mistress a royal consort in a ceremony attended by his new wife, marking the first time the country's modern monarchy has publicly admitted to polygamy. King Maha Vajiralongkorn, also known as Rama X, made his former bodyguard Sineenat Wongvajirapakdi, 34, his chao khun phra (royal noble consort) in a ceremony on his 67th birthday. Queen Suthida was sitting next to him throughout the unusual ceremony and showed no emotion despite the fact she now has an official rival for the King's attention. He poured ceremonial water over Ms Sineenat's head to officially anoint her a...

FoxNews.com featured two entirely different takes the morning after the second CNN presidential debate. Two highly respected pundits, one Democrat and one Republican, came away with amazingly differing conclusions, based not on the party lines but on professional debate analysis. Democratic pollster Doug Schoen declared a winner: "Former Vice President Joe Biden dominated the debate stage and weathered the attacks of nine opponents for the Democratic presidential nomination Wednesday night, emerging the clear winner and standing by his promise to not be 'overly polite.'" Trump supporter Liz Peek saw a loser: "What a sorry spectacle it was. Poor Biden, tripping...

Hormone replacement therapy is a common treatment for menopause-related symptoms. In a study published today in the Journal of the American Heart Association, Pitt researchers showed for the first time that hormone replacement therapy affects the accumulation of heart fat. Importantly, they found that the formulation and delivery route of hormones—whether as a pill taken orally or a patch placed on the skin—mattered when it came to the types of fat deposits women developed and whether those fat deposits translated to hardening of the arteries. Menopause commonly comes with a host of challenges—including hot flashes, night sweats, vaginal dryness and...

He’s a few dollars short of a paycheck. A knucklehead Ohio bank robber slipped a teller a hold-up note — with his name and address scrawled on it, officials said. Michael Harrell, 54, entered a U.S. Bank branch in Cleveland on Monday and passed the not-so-discreet note, the FBI said.

MARY ESTHER — At least one early morning driver was shocked after seeing thousands of what looked like $100 bills scattered along U.S. Highway 98. Jorel Fountain, who was headed toward Fort Walton Beach at 8 a.m. Thursday, said he was near Tommy Lane when he saw paper scattered along the road. As he drove closer, he realized it was $100 bills and turned his car around and began to pick them up. “It looked real except there wasn’t a Benjamin Franklin in the right hand corner,” Fountain said. “On the back, there was a Japanese stamp, but it was...

Mayor Bill Peduto is pushing back against Pittsburgh Cultural Trust concerns about a “declining level of public safety” Downtown, vowing that he won’t criminalize homelessness or mental health issues. In a scathing rebuttal to a July 10 letter written by Cultural Trust CEO Kevin McMahon, Mr. Peduto said the city is working with Allegheny County and nonprofit agencies to address issues like homelessness Downtown and to get people into housing. “But it doesn’t happen at the snap of a finger and we’re not going to attack this national epidemic by criminalizing the status of those that have the least,” he...

Apple today released macOS Mojave 10.14.6 Supplemental Update which fixes an issue that may prevent certain Macs from waking from sleep properly. System Requirements: macOS 10.14.6. File Size: 954.8 MB. More info and download link here. For detailed information about the security content of this update, please visit: https://support.apple.com/kb/HT201222

Police were stationed outside the home of 91-year-old Ethel Kennedy on Thursday night, hours after paramedics responded to reports of an “unattended death” at her family's Hyannis Port, MA compound. A family statement had confirmed earlier that Saoirse Kennedy Hill, the 22-year-old granddaughter of Ethel and the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, had died at the home, though no cause of death was disclosed. A report in The New York Times, however, said the daughter of Courtney Kennedy Hill -- one of Robert and Ethel Kennedy's 11 children -- had died of an apparent drug overdose. "The world is a...

Today's Quotefall Puzzle features a quote by Sebastian Gorka. Click puzzle (or click here) for full size rendition, then use your browser's print command to print puzzle. Sebastian is a military and intelligence analyst, and had once served as Deputy Assistant to Donald Trump in the beginning of his administration. All hints, along with the answer, are provided in the first reply comment below, using filtered font to prevent accidental spoilers. Please refrain from disclosing the full answer in comments to prevent spoilers.To solve the puzzle: Enter the letters in the top half (letter columns) of the puzzle into the white squares...

Bartender at the local joint up the street showed me this had been passed to them sometime this week. A Google news search ("counterfeit $100 bill") shows dozens of recent articles about these things. Seems to be pretty easy to detect, mainly by the feel of the paper and of course the Chinese (or whatever) markings. Also notice the "stripe" is printed and not glossy, the "ghost" image is missing, etc. Banks are notoriously unsympathetic, and maybe even the local lawmen. Just a note to FReepers to be aware.

Music fans still talk about Woodstock to this day. Hundreds of thousands of people flocked to a dairy farm in Bethel, New York in the summer of 1969 to see the likes of Jimi Hendrix, The Grateful Dead, and CCR grace the stage for the world's most iconic rock concert. They'll be talking about Woodstock 50 too - but for a much different reason. Just about everything went wrong for the organizers behind the Woodstock 50th Anniversary Festival, and it's now curtains closed. First, there was some trouble with the production company (which changed hands a few times.) Then the...

Ketamine has gotten a bad rap as an opioid when there's plenty of evidence suggesting it isn't one, Johns Hopkins experts say. They believe this reputation may hamper patients from getting necessary treatment for the kinds of depression that don't respond to typical antidepressants. In a new paper, the researchers clarify the mechanism behind ketamine's mechanism of action in hopes of restoring the therapy's standing among health care professionals and the public. In March of this year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved ketamine as a nasal spray to treat depression. "A study done late last year delivered a...

Censoring evidence, “fiddling” with data and silencing skeptics were part of life at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, according to a former NOAA scientist who no longer believes carbon dioxide is Rex Fleming admitted that while he worked for NOAA, he attributed global warming to carbon dioxide despite “having doubts.” “Eventually I just read enough to realize it’s a totally wrong direction,” he said in a podcast interview July 25 with British journalist James Delingpole. “And so, in the past 10 years, I’d say, I’ve been on the other side.” His conversion, however, has shut him out of academic...

House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Elijah Cummings' home was broken into last weekend in Baltimore, further proving the city has a crime problem that is out of control. "Baltimore Police are investigating after the home of Rep. Elijah Cummings was broken into early Saturday morning," CBS Baltimore reports. "The burglary occurred around 3:40 a.m. at his Baltimore home in the 2000 block of Madison Avenue."Last weekend President Trump criticized the horrific living conditions in parts of Cummings districts after the break in occurred. The burglary wasn't made public until yesterday. Really bad news! The Baltimore house of Elijah Cummings was...

A new study released by the Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA) at Trinity uncovers some of the relationships between faith and mental health in Ireland. The study is published by the peer-reviewed journal Research on Aging. The research, involving over 6,000 adults aged 50 and over found that a majority of over 50s in Ireland attend religious services regularly, and that regular religious attendance was associated with lower depressive symptoms in this population. Observations took place for six years, from 2010 to 2016. The relationship between being religious and mental health was found to be complex. Although those with...

Man who donated his mother's body to an Arizona center for Alzheimer's research discovers it was sold on to the US Military for $6,000, strapped to a chair and blown up in 'blast test'. An Arizona man who donated his mother's body to science in the hopes neurologists could shed new light about Alzheimer's disease made a startling discovery.

UBC scientists have demonstrated for the first time a causal link between high insulin levels and pancreatic cancer. In a study published today in Cell Metabolism, researchers lowered insulin levels in mice predisposed to developing pancreatic cancer and found that these lower levels protected the mice against developing the disease. The findings hold promise for early detection and prevention of pancreatic cancer in humans. "Pancreatic cancer can be tricky to detect and is too often diagnosed at a late stage, making it one of the deadliest cancers," said James Johnson, senior co-author of the study, a professor and member of...

In his opening statement at Wednesday's Democratic debate in Detroit, Joe Biden addressed Donald Trump while pointing proudly to the racial and ethnic diversity of the nine Democrats standing beside him. "Mr. President, this is America and we are strong and great because of this diversity, not in spite of it. ... We love it. We are here to stay. And we certainly are not going to leave it to you." Whereupon the other nine -- three women, two African Americans, one Asian American and one Hispanic -- began a multicultural mugging of Biden that at times took on the...

"Twenty Four Hours from Tulsa" is a song written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, about a traveling man who detours to a romance in a motel and ends up never returning home, which was a hit for Gene Pitney. The song peaked at #17 on the December 7th, 1963 Hot 100 and #2 on the 6 December 1963 WLS Silver Dollar Survey.

President Donald Trump used a revved-up rally Thursday in Cincinnati to tear into the Democrats he has been elevating as his new political foils, attacking four liberal congresswomen of color and their party’s urban leaders, while also training fire on those he could be facing in 2020. But the president mostly avoided the racial controversy that has dominated recent weeks as he basked in front of the raucous crowd for nearly 90 minutes, unleashing broadside after broadside on his political foes. Trump, who had faced widespread criticism for not doing more to stop the chants of “Send her back” about...