Free Republic

THIS is the dramatic moment Russia's £300m stealth warship that was designed to carry hypersonic missiles went up in flames in a humiliating blow for Vladimir Putin. New footage shows devastating fire damage to the new £307 million warship intended to carry Putin’s lethal Mach-9 hypersonic missiles.... ...The scale of the blaze, which started on Friday in St Petersburg, has been viewed as a massive set back to the Kremlin’s naval modernisation programme. Huge flames and thick smoke were seen rising from the corvette Provornyy at Severnaya Verf shipyard where it was being built. The battleship was almost completely destroyed...

Russian President Vladimir Putin has blamed the West for increasing tensions in Eastern Europe and suggested a “military-technical” response if his request for security guarantees is not met — while a media mouthpiece for the Kremlin warned that Russia will hold a gun to “America’s head” if Ukraine is allowed to join NATO. In a speech Tuesday to Russian defense ministry officials, Putin said Moscow needs “long-term, legally binding guarantees” from the West that the US and NATO will not deploy missile systems in Ukraine, rather than “verbal assurances.” Russia has massed as many as 175,000 troops as well as...

China is building up its armed forces at a rapid pace. Its advances in missile technology, nuclear weapons and artificial intelligence have triggered serious concern among many Western observers, who believe a profound shift in the global balance of military power is under way. President Xi Jinping has ordered China's armed forces to modernise by 2035. They should, he says, become a "world-class" military power, capable of "fighting and winning wars" by 2049. It is a huge undertaking, but the country is on target. Spending big China has been criticised by some international experts for a "lack of transparency" over...

Ukraine is again looking warily over its eastern border as Russia threatens its territorial integrity. In recent weeks, a buildup of Russian troops along the Ukrainian border has rattled Western leaders fearful of an incursion similar to, or perhaps even more wide-ranging than, Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. Then, on Dec. 17, 2021, Vladimir Putin demanded that no former Soviet states, such as Ukraine, be added to NATO – the Western alliance that Ukraine has long expressed a desire to join – and that NATO cease all military cooperation in Eastern Europe. Such rhetoric harks back to the Cold...

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — The Trump administration overpaid corn farmers by about $3 billion in federal aid in 2019 and farmers in the South were paid more for the same crops than those elsewhere in the country, a federal watchdog agency has found. The Government Accountability Office said in a report released Monday that international disputes resulting from tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump hurt farmers but that the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s county-by-county methodology for computing the extent of damage was flawed, leading to overpayment....

Dr. Anthony Fauci is a thin-skinned, unstable ideologue with visions of grandiosity. He has wreaked havoc on our nation and permeated a major crisis on the global stage with his poor advice on COVID-19. He personifies a mentally and emotionally unstable person within his worldview.Fauci is representative of a group of psychologically unstable people who need a career operating in government systems and institutions, because they could never be successful in the private sector. They can only succeed in academia and institutions without merit-based structures.These are very disturbed people who have allowed a taste of power and influence to fuel...

Nearly $100 billion at minimum has been stolen from COVID-19 relief programs set up to help businesses and people who lost their jobs due to the pandemic, the U.S. Secret Service said Tuesday. The estimate is based on Secret Service cases and data from the Labor Department and the Small Business Administration, said Roy Dotson, the agency’s national pandemic fraud recovery coordinator, in an interview. The Secret Service didn’t include COVID-19 fraud cases prosecuted by the Justice Department.... ...Most of that figure comes from unemployment fraud. The Labor Department reported about $87 billion in unemployment benefits could have been paid...

Join with fellow FREEPERS across the world to pray for AMERICA: For those in Authority in Government, Family, Military, Business, Agri-Business, Healthcare, Education, Churches, Technology, and the Media. "I urge, then, first of all, that requests, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for everyone: for kings and all those in authority that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness." (1 Timothy 2:1-2) Religion Forum threads labeled [Prayer] are closed to debate of any kind. "Finally, brothers, rejoice. Set things in order. Be encouraged. Agree with one another. Be at peace. And the God of love...

Federal supply of the one monoclonal antibody treatment that has proven effective is now "limited," with more doses expected in January, a Health and Human Services spokesperson said. Major hospitals in the New York region say they have stopped using monoclonal antibody therapies because they have run out of the one treatment that appears to be effective against the omicron variant of the coronavirus, leaving doctors without a vital tool to treat severely ill Covid-19 patients. New York University and Valley Health System in northern New Jersey notified doctors Sunday... Meanwhile, Mount Sinai Health System in New York said it...

An Ohio man was arrested this week after taking things a bridge too far. David Bramley, 63, was charged with felony theft for allegedly stealing a 58-foot bridge last month from a park in Akron, Ohio. The bridge was sitting in a field on the outskirts of Middlebury Run Park when the community noticed that its deck boards were removed on Nov. 3. About a week later, someone had taken the entire structure. Bramley, who used to work in the Akron area, allegedly hired a crane service company to place the bridge on and off a vehicle, then drove it...

A former U.S. Navy sailor was sentenced Tuesday to 30 months in prison for illegally exporting military equipment to China for profit. Ye Sang “Ivy” Wang, 37, and her husband, Shaohua “Eric” Wang, 38, both of San Diego, pleaded guilty to federal conspiracy charges for selling equipment the couple obtained through Ivy Wang’s position as a Navy logistics specialist, according to prosecutors. Eric Wang was sentenced last year to nearly four years in prison. According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Eric Wang sold the equipment through his online business and housed the equipment in a warehouse in China. Ivy Wang,...

FIRST ON FOX: A Michigan Democrat claimed during a fundraiser Zoom call that the U.S. economy under President Biden is "flourishing," leading Wolverine State Republicans to push back Rep. Haley Stevens, D-Mich., not only claimed last Wednesday that the American economy was doing great, but also said it was the "best economic recovery" the U.S. has seen since the days of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. "We have an economy that is flourishing. We have literally the best economic recovery since FDR," Stevens claimed in the Zoom call. "If you want a job today, you’re going to make more money than...

Attorney General Merrick Garland's directive reverses a Trump administration decision that would have required thousands of convicts to return to their cells. ...In passing the CARES Act, the federal government's response to the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, Congress allowed the release last year of some prisoners based on their age, health and length of remaining sentence. William Barr, who was then the attorney general, acted to allow the release after five inmates died of Covid-related illnesses in Louisiana and Ohio. The department's Office of Legal Counsel said in January that federal law required many of those inmates to return....

I just increased the SSD in the desktop computer soon to be my primary machine to a 1 TB SSD. All went smoothly, except that Macrium Reflect* left me with the following for "Disk 0": 1st Partion = System 100 MB (Healthy) 2nd Partition = HP6300-I5-2-new.SSD-2 222.64 GB NTFS (Healthy) (Boot, Page File, Crash Dump, Primary Partition) 3rd Partion = 848 MB (Healthy) (Recovery Partition) 4th Partion = 707.95 GB (oops) (Unallocated)** -------------------------------- The Data disk (D:) is a 500 GB HDD -------------------------------- Backups presently go to a nearly new 500 GB Toshiba external drive. -------------------------------- Once I free it...

“He that loveth pureness of heart, for the grace of his lips the king shall be his friend. The eyes of the LORD preserve knowledge, and he overthroweth the words of the transgressor. The slothful man saith, There is a lion without, I shall be slain in the streets” (Proverbs 22:11-13).

When last we heard about Tariq Ramadan, at one time the most famous Muslim “public intellectual” in the Western world, he had fallen from grace. The curtain was pulled back and as one woman after another came forward to charge him with rape, he was revealed to be not only a serial rapist, but one who enjoyed humiliating – and physically hurting – his victims. He has been allowed out of prison, and awaits trial in Paris. He may also have to face trial in Geneva, with a different set of accusers. In the wake of these charges, he was...

Donald Trump on Tuesday evening said he was 'very appreciative' of President Joe Biden paying tribute to his administration's efforts to create the vaccine - adding that he was 'surprised to hear it'. 'Thanks to the prior administration and our scientific community, America is one of the first countries to get the vaccine,' said Biden. ... ...The 75-year-old - who on Sunday was booed when he confirmed he had had the booster shot - said Americans should be 'really happy' about having access to vaccines. 'When we came up with these incredible vaccines - three of them - and therapeutics,...

Bette Midler ought to try reading a book. To the uninitiated, books are these things made of paper that have words printed on them. Hard words, not just pictures. Stuff that illiterates — some of whom live in lazy, superior, effete, privileged Tinseltown — might hire underlings to decipher for them. The Not-So Divine Miss M, 76, would learn that in 1861, the proud people living in the western part of Virginia voted to tear off from the slave-owning state to form a Union state, many of whose citizens fought and died in the Civil War to end the scourge...

Within weeks, scientists at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research expect to announce that they have developed a vaccine that is effective against COVID-19 and all its variants, even Omicron, as well as from previous SARS-origin viruses that have killed millions of people worldwide.

FDA and CDC experts said the plan was ill-advised, so the agencies cut them out of the decision process.. The U.S. government is pushing Covid-19 vaccine boosters for 16- and 17-year-olds without supporting clinical data. A large Israeli population study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine earlier this month, found that the risk of Covid death in people under 30 with two vaccine shots was zero. Booster mandates for healthy young people, which some colleges are imposing, will cause medical harm for the sake of transient reductions in mild and asymptomatic infections. In a study of 438,511 males...