Free Republic

Poland has decided to hand over to Ukraine a batch of security assistance. This was announced during a press conference in Warsaw on Monday by the head of the National Security Bureau (BBN) of Poland, Pawel Soloch, according to an Ukrinform correspondent. "It was decided to transfer to the Ukrainian side ammunition of a defensive nature for defensive, not offensive action. This decision is currently being implemented by the Minister of National Defense," Soloch said. According to the official, the decision was made in close cooperation between the government and the Office of the President of Poland. Asked whether the...

TOKYO, Jan 31 (Reuters) - Japanese trading and pharmaceutical company Kowa Co Ltd said on Monday anti-parasite drug ivermectin showed an “antiviral effect” against Omicron and other variants of coronavirus in joint non-clinical research. Kowa did not provide further details. The firm has been working with Kitasato University, a medical university in Tokyo. Clinical trials evaluating the drug, which is used to treat parasites in animals and humans, are ongoing but promotion of the drug as a COVID-19 treatment has generated controversy here. The drug is not approved for treatment of COVID-19 in Japan and the U.S. Federal Drug Administration...

California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who three years ago placed a moratorium on executions, now is moving to dismantle the United States’ largest death row by moving all condemned inmates to other prisons within two years. The goal is to turn the section at San Quentin State Prison into a “positive, healing environment.”

The PGA Tour has temporarily avoided a battle royale with its membership over the decision by a handful of golfers, including current world No. 3 ranked Dustin Johnson, to play in the Saudi International, an Asian Tour event set to take place in February at the same time as the Pebble Beach Pro-Am, one of the PGA Tour's most high-profile events. This did not sit well with the PGA Tour, which initially drew a line in the sand, declaring it would not grant the necessary releases and threatening fines, suspensions, and potential lifetime bans for players who chose to participate...

SOME 300,000 Brits are living with a stealth disease that could kill them within five years, doctors have warned. A third of those are likely to have no idea they are affected because they do not show clear symptoms. Aortic valve stenosis, or AS, is a heart condition that often shows no symptoms until it’s already too late. The condition is when the heart's aortic valve narrows, reducing or blocking blood flow from the heart into the main artery to the body (aorta). This can cause chest pain, dizziness, fatigue, or a rapid, fluttering heartbeat in the more severe and...

NEW YORK, NY—The entire cast of The View has threatened to go on strike and resign in protest should Joe Rogan not be removed from Spotify. The bold gesture came as more and more high-profile musicians and celebrities piled on Neil Young's move to remove his music from the service due to medical misinformation, though this is a significant development as it's the first time someone under the age of 75 has made the move. "It's either Rogan or us," said Whoopi Goldberg. "You decide. If you want our incredibly well-informed opinions, intelligent banter, and not-at-all grating commentary on the...

A culinary conundrum over two salads and a rice bowl has two restaurants at odds; ‘deconstructed Mexican salad symbolism’ Cafe Rio, a neighboring fast-casual Mexican chain, has argued in court filings that Chop Stop’s offerings violate a provision in its lease that no other restaurant in the same shopping center can make more than 10% of its sales from Mexican or Tex-Mex food. Chop Stop has said in response that its menu items are generic offerings that don’t belong in any culinary category. For Ms. Sada, an assistant professor at the Culinary Institute of America, one potential consideration in the...

BERLIN (AP) – Two police officers were shot dead while on a routine patrol in western Germany early Monday, police said. The shooting happened during a traffic check near Kusel at about 4:20 a.m., police in Kaiserslautern said in a statement. The officers – a 24-year-old woman and 29-year-old man – were able to radio for help but reinforcements were unable to help them when they arrived. The perpetrators fled but police had no description of them, the car they used or what direction they fled in. Police called on drivers in the Kusel area not to pick up hitchhikers...

ransomnote: I don't speak the language but was impressed with Croatian MEP Mislav Kolakušić's forceful delivery, the text of which I captured in a scrolling gif below.

Truckers in the United States are getting ready to follow the lead of their Canadian counterparts and form a convoy that will travel from California to Washington D.C. This after 50,000 Canadian truck drivers formed a 45-mile convoy to Ottawa this week to protest the government’s vaccine mandate. The same mandate issued by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security who is requiring that non-U.S. essential workers such as truck drivers be fully vaccinated against COVID. If they are not fully vaccinated, they will not be allowed to cross land borders, from Canada or Mexico. The American Truckers formed a Facebook...

SANTIAGO (Reuters) - Chilean protesters marched against immigration and crime in the Andean country's far north on Sunday, with some violent factions destroying belongings from migrant camps in the streets amid growing tension in the region over border controls. Despite pandemic restrictions in recent years, many migrants from Venezuela and elsewhere have kept trying to reach Chile, one of the wealthiest countries in the region, which has been rocked in recent years by protests over entrenched inequality. "This can't go on," read one protest banner from Sunday's march in the coastal city by several thousand people, who were complaining about...

The protests in Ottawa have been a gift to Canada’s Laurentian elite, who have framed it as if Adolf Hitler and Jefferson Davis were assaulting Parliament Hill. The trucker convoy was obviously no Panzer division, but goose-stepping rednecks weren’t needed for a narrative of something similar to be pre-packaged before the protesters even arrived in Ottawa.

LOS ANGELES, Jan 31 (Reuters) - On a Tuesday in January, four years after American authorities pried Maria Hernandez away from her daughters and deported her back to Honduras, she returned to the United States - this time with the blessing of the U.S. government. Hernandez was deported, one of thousands of parents separated from their children under then-President Donald Trump's controversial "zero tolerance" policy to deter illegal immigration. The Trump administration contended that allowing families to be released together in the United States while they applied for asylum only encouraged illegal immigration. In response, the administration sought to prosecute...

Telling a website to stick its cookies someplace else might not be enough to keep it from tracking you across the web—there are other identifiers that can help narrow down who you are and what you're doing as you travel the silicon superhighway. These techniques rely on tracking the exact configuration of hardware you're running inside your PC, though researchers suggest this form of hardware tracking could be done with even greater accuracy through something known as GPU fingerprinting.Outlined in a research paper [PDF warning] from co-first authors Tomer Laor of Ben-Gurion University and Naif Mehanna from University Lille, CNRS,...

I’m going to be straight with you guys. Football isn’t really my jam. You’ll find me at basketball games on occasion, but when it comes to football, I really only start to pay attention as we head towards the end of the season, and all the parties for playoffs and the big game at season end. As you can probably guess, it’s not because I care about who is actually playing. I’m just here for the snacks, okay? I even have a t-shirt to that effect, for wearing to these parties, haha! Why are game day snacks just so dang...

Can’t believe I agree with Megyn Kelly, a self-confessed “Never Trumper,” but, will giver her credit when she does the right thing.Megyn nails it on the never ending emergency of covid. https://youtu.be/lUMN6xFng6M

A former frontline COVID nurse shared her eyewitness experiences with vaccine adverse reactions and early treatments at the hospital that fired her for rejecting the jab. 2 Mon Jan 31, 2022 - 11:34 am EST (LifeSiteNews) — A frontline COVID nurse fired by Houston Methodist Hospital for refusing to take the COVID-19 jab told Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) that she saw people come in with adverse reactions to the shots. Jennifer Bridges also told Sen. Johnson during his January 24 panel on COVID-19, vaccines and early treatments that Houston Methodist used hydroxychloroquine early on during the outbreak of the virus....

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Department of Labor announced that 20,000 H-2B visas will become available Friday, after exhausting the 33,000 visas set aside for the first half of the year before it even began. Citing record job growth, the agencies made the additional visas that were first announced in December available for domestic employers that are facing down or already experiencing irreparable harm if they can't secure additional temporary nonagricultural workers before March 31. The government also set aside 6,500 of the newly added visas for migrants from the so-called Northern Triangle countries El Salvador, Guatemala...

ransomnote: A friend noted that he was able to walk into Walgreens without a mask on and no one said anything to him the entire time, although all others remained masked. The manager assisted him at one point, standing beside him at a product display (no social distancing). So we guessed mandates were quietly lifted in California.I checked California's website and some restrictions have lifted, but some for masking seem a little vague, perhaps hoping that people will continue with prior requirements. 'Public' spaces require masking, but that seems to be airports, government buildings etc. but not private businesses unless...

The business relationships between President Joe Biden’s son Hunter and Chinese Communist Party elites are explored in Peter Schweizer’s new book Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win. Some of Hunter’s Chinese deals were helpful to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China’s colonialist scheme for buying influence across the Third World and luring poor nations into taking loans from Chinese banks they can never repay. BRI first appears early in Red-Handed with Hunter Biden’s effort to use Chinese money to buy the national railroad of Greece. Hunter’s partner in this endeavor was the China Open Shipping Corporation...