Free Republic

With the right military equipment, a single person can target a plane from three miles away using a heat-seeking missile. While such a nightmare is a rare occurrence, FedEx has applied to the FAA seeking approval to install a laser-based, anti-missile defense system on its cargo planes as an added safety measure. Military planes carry flares that can be remotely ignited and ejected by a pilot to throw off a heat-seeking missile’s targeting system with an alternate heat source, while the plane itself performs evasive maneuvers in an attempt to fool the incoming projectile. Those countermeasures are less effective for...

Pope Francis reassigned the second ranking official at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on Monday, the first in an expected series of moves that would overhaul the leadership of the Church’s doctrinal office. The Holy See announced Jan. 10 that Archbishop Giacomo Morandi had been appointed by the pope to lead the Italian Diocese of Reggio Emilia-Guastalla, replacing Bishop Massimo Camisasca, who turned 75 in November. While the appointment of a relatively unknown Vatican official to a small Italian diocese is unlikely to generate headlines, sources close to Morandi’s old department told The Pillar that it was...

Two of the country’s largest retail pharmacies are temporarily closing stores on weekends due to an increase in the number of COVID-19 infections among staffers. The two chains said that the rapid spread of the Omicron variant has depleted staffing at several locations nationwide, affecting customer service and delaying key services like medication prescriptions and vaccinations.

Spanish intelligence wanted to destabilize Catalonia prior to independence referendum, says Jose Manuel Villarejo. The 2017 terror attacks in Spain were orchestrated by the National Intelligence Center (CNI), a former senior police officer said Thursday. The aim was to destabilize Catalonia before an independence referendum but the outcome that left 16 dead, was a miscalculation, said Jose Manuel Villarejo, according to the Catalanews agency. Quoting Villarejo’s testimony in court, the news outlet said the attacks, which included a truck plowing those pedestrians on Barcelona’s La Rambla, "were a serious mistake" on the part of former National Intelligence Center (CNI) Director...

***** Tunes For Our Troops ~ Music From Florida ~ *****~ Support The Artists You Hear Throughout The Canteen ! ~ ***** Warning: Not all music may be appropriate for children! Please click with caution. Thank you! Tunes For The Troops This music is provided for the entertainment of our Troops, Veterans, Allies & their families! Enjoy the variety of musical selections that the Canteen DJs provide throughout the thread. Please ping any DJ with your requests for the Troops! All music is removed on Monday.Thanks to all the DJs for their time & effort providing entertainment for the...

FIRST ON FOX: Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Ks., published White House chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci's unredacted financial records and accused him of being misleading when he told the Senate his financial disclosure forms were publicly available. [cut] Marshall's office obtained the doctor's most recent disclosure after filing an Office of Government Ethics request with the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Jan. 14 (UPI) -- A federal judge on Friday ordered former pharmaceutical CEO Martin Shkreli to pay $64.6 million for illegally ballooning the price of a drug to treat parasitic diseases. U.S. District Judge Denise Cote of the Southern District of New York also barred Shkreli from the pharmaceutical industry for life. "Banning an individual from an entire industry and limiting his future capacity to make a living in that field is a serious remedy and must be done with care and only if equity demands," she wrote in her ruling. "Shkreli's egregious, deliberate, repetitive, long-running and ultimately dangerous illegal...

A Portland Police Bureau training presentation on protests ended with a PowerPoint slide listing a prayer for a “dirty hippy” and the promise to send “my humble servants” with hats and bats to “christen” their “heads with hickory” accompanied by a photo of a helmeted officer raising his arm to a woman. The last of the 110 slides in the presentation showed the “Prayer of the Alt Knight | Based Stickman” meme. “Based Stickman” refers to Kyle Chapman, the founder of a group called the Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights that formed as the “tactical defense arm” of the Proud...

Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said Thursday on CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360” that the Republican Party was a “shrinking minority party.” Raskin said, “I’m fundamentally optimistic about the history of American democracy, that we have always moved towards being a more perfect union. There has been backsliding, there’s been reaction, there’s been resistance, but in the big picture, we move forward.”

A federal appeals court shot down the bid of Democratic lawyer and discredited dossier funder Marc Elias to wriggle out of sanctions for misleading the court. The former Perkins Coie lawyer, best known for funding British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s discredited dossier while he worked as Hillary Clinton’s top campaign lawyer in 2016, was punished by a three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit in March. The reprimand came for his deceptive behavior in a battle against a Republican-backed Texas law banning straight-ticket voting. An attorney for Elias called the sanctions “unprecedented” in late December and...

We are now getting a channel on comcast called NTD - WMBTV. They're news seems to be down the middle with a slant to the right. It is refreshing to see. Is any one else here watching it? If you are is your opinion in line with mine.

First Week in Ordinary Time Mark 2:1-12 Friends, today’s Gospel focuses on the faith of the four men who brought the paralytic to Jesus for healing. How often the Bible compels us to meditate on the meaning of faith! We might say that the Scriptures rest upon faith and remain inspired at every turn by the spirit of faith. Faith is an attitude of trust in the presence of God. Faith is openness to what God will reveal, do, and invite. It should be obvious that in dealing with the infinite, all-powerful person who is God, we are never in...

Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s administration drastically undercounted COVID-19 nursing home deaths in the state, according to a state auditor general report reviewed by Fox News. The damning report, which is expected to be released on Monday, reveals suspicious similarities to how former Democrat governor Andrew Cuomo hid nursing home deaths in New York. Republican State Rep. Steven Johnson, the chairman of the Michigan House Oversight Committee, spoke with Fox News Digital in a telephone interview on Thursday. Whitmer [like Cuomo] is “well known” for her executive order “to place COVID-positive patients into nursing homes,” Johnson said. “And when we were...

Poland's foreign minister said on Thursday that Europe was at risk of plunging into war as Russia said it was not yet giving up on diplomacy but that military experts were preparing options in case tensions over Ukraine could not be defused. In Washington, the White House said the threat of a Russian invasion of Ukraine remained high with some 100,000 Russian troops deployed and the United States would make public within 24 hours intelligence suggesting Russia might seek to invent a pretext to justify one. "The drumbeat of war is sounding loud, and the rhetoric has gotten rather shrill,"...

The Clintons reportedly easing back into politics as Biden struggles They’re baaa-aaaack? After a period out of the spotlight, Bill and Hillary Clinton are trying to make a triumphant return to the front ranks of the Democratic party, according to a new report. Several people close to the former first couple tell Politico that the Clintons see divisions between moderates and progressives over key pieces of President Biden’s agenda as an opening to reassert their brand as dealmakers. “It’s a perpetual itch that will never go away,” one insider told the outlet. “They know how to slowly reenter. The Clintons...

I'd always loved meat growing up - sausage sandwiches, lamb cutlets and of course, Christmas ham. So I was far from thrilled when I discovered that I had developed an allergy to red meat at the age of 14. I had been bitten by a tick and developed what is now known as a mammalian meat allergy, which saw me develop the potentially life-threatening condition anaphylaxis, which means I have to carry an epi-pen. One reaction was so severe I had to be taken to hospital in an ambulance after being given a shot of steroids and antihistamines by my...

A distraught father who attacked his best friend when he discovered the man had sexually abused his daughter, then six, will not be charged with murder. Vyacheslav 'Slava' Matrosov, 34, was suspected of stabbing Oleg Sviridov, 32, to death in a forest near the village of Vintai in Russia after making him dig his own grave last year. It came after Matrosov found sickening footage on his friend's mobile phone which appeared to show his daughter being forced by Sviridov to perform a sex act on him. Matrosov originally faced trial for murder but sources close to the case say...

KFC is the latest fast-food giant to claim that “plant-based” chicken can taste as good as the real thing — but the chain picked the wrong faux fowl to make its case. The chain’s supposedly long-awaited Beyond Nuggets (six for $7.99) are beyond awful — worse than KFC’s near-flavorless real-meat chicken tenders. The fake chicken from within KFC’s new offerings come from Beyond Meat, a rival to Impossible Foods, which created the famous Impossible Burger. The idea behind offering artificial chicken at KFC is to “democratize plant-based protein,” according to Beyond Meat founder Ethan Brown.

Count Vlad does a Kraftwerk song. The count pushes the boundaries with this version. If you enjoy the music, please subscribe.

In Orthodoxy There Is Schism Between Moscow and Constantinople. But Rome Doesn’t Know Whose Side to TakeRight when the rumors are swirling about the place and date of the much-vaunted new meeting between Pope Francis and the Orthodox patriarch of Moscow, Kirill - now projected, with Kazakhstan out of the running, for the Hungarian abbey of Pannonhalma - relations between Catholicism and Orthodoxy are in reality paralyzed.The serious trouble for Francis comes from what is happening within the Orthodox world. Where Kirill is in open conflict, on the brink of schism, with two of the historic patriarchates of the East,...