Free Republic

march 14 (Reuters) - An online voting system that was criticised by some defeated candidates at parliamentary elections last year will be rolled out for use across Russia after President Vladimir Putin signed electronic voting procedures into law on Monday. A coalition of defeated parliamentary candidates in Moscow claimed they were cheated of victory in a parliamentary election last September by the system and sought to try to overturn the results via lawsuits and public pressure.

BREAKING: Fox News reporter Benjamin Hall seriously injured after incident near Kyiv, prosecutor says

UPS missed a priority window to make ferry reservations for its trucks to get to Nantucket this summer — leaving businesses scrambling to accommodate affluent locals and moneyed visitors. The shipping courier failed to request reservations for its trucks during an early priority window before ferries for the tony island’s busiest season from May to October were booked close to capacity, the Boston Globe reported. “It’s going to put us in a world of hurt,” Shantaw Bloise, business manager at the Nantucket Chamber of Commerce, told the newspaper. “I can’t imagine how we’ll be able to function just relying on...

Video at the link.

Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked war on Ukraine and the resulting global response will set Russia’s economy back by at least 30 years — close to old Soviet Union times — and lower its standard of living for at least the next five years, according to economists, investors and diplomats. The sweeping Western sanctions are designed to inflict maximum pain on the country’s economy by expelling it from global markets and freezing assets around the world. From the moment they took effect three weeks ago, the sanctions have opened a new chapter in Russia’s economic history.

A nearly 1,100-foot-long container ship ran aground Sunday night on its way out of the Port of Baltimore, and as of Monday the ship was still stuck with no indication of when it could be moved. Coast Guard Petty Officer First Class Stephen Lehmann tells Bay Bulletin the container ship Ever Forward, which sails under the Hong Kong flag, ran aground before 11 p.m. Sunday. No one was injured. The Evergreen Marine Corp. (also based in Hong Kong) ship was headed for Norfolk when it got stuck near the Craighill Channel. Ever Forward was built in 2020, is 1,050 feet...

ShadowStats.com is showing the actual inflation rate is running over 15%. So I just increased my monthly contribution by the same --> 15%. Just an idea -- for those who can donate more...

The research is the first peer-reviewed comprehensive investigation into the excess deaths seen around the world over the past two years since the pandemic began. A new study published in The Lancet is offering the first peer-reviewed investigation into the global death toll of COVID-19. By tracking excess death data from nearly 200 countries across 2020 and 2021 the study estimates more than 18 million deaths from COVID-19, a number that is three times higher than official estimates. Since the pandemic began in early 2020 researches have looked to excess death data as the best way to track the true...

A spike in hospitalizations for a dangerous low-salt condition is the latest in a growing list of health threats linked to climate change. An average global temperature increase of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit could lead to a 14% increase in hospitalizations for critically low sodium levels in the blood, a condition called hyponatremia, according to a Swedish study. Hyponatremia cases increase in the summer months, but the impact of warming temperatures due to climate change was unclear. To learn more, researchers at the Karolinska Institute in Solna, Sweden, analyzed nine years of data on Swedish adults and identified more than 11,000...

Ukraine's defense ministry on Saturday began using Clearview AI’s facial recognition technology, the company's chief executive told Reuters, after the U.S. startup offered to uncover Russian assailants, combat misinformation and identify the dead. Ukraine is receiving free access to Clearview AI’s powerful search engine for faces, letting authorities potentially vet people of interest at checkpoints, among other uses, added Lee Wolosky, an adviser to Clearview and former diplomat under U.S. presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden....

Eunice Yoon reports China is signaling openness to supporting Russia's military after Vladimir Putin's request over the weekend. vid at link

Former Trump National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster said on Monday’s broadcast of “CBS Mornings” that Russia and President Vladimir Putin were in “real trouble” as the invasion of Ukraine drags on. Co-host Tony Dokoupil said, “How concerned should we be at this point that this battle is encroaching on what could be World War III territory?”

Over 30 people were defrauded by the man's lease return scam. A good car salesman without a job can be a dangerous person. All that industry know-how under their belt can create the perfect storm for fraud if one wanted to go down that road of finessing people out of their money. That’s what happened with one Detroit car salesman. Fox 2 Detroit reports that this man, posing as a salesman, created an elaborate scam that involved lies and resold cars. Ricardo Perez was at one point a salesperson at Dick Scott Jeep, Ram, Dodge, Chrysler in Plymouth, Michigan. But...

Fellow veterans and active service you got to check this out !

Birds do it, bees do it—even the wasps that kill bees do it. A clever team of scientists now has an idea to use the Asian giant hornets’ horniness against them, in hopes of stopping the invasive species from decimating U.S. bee populations. They’ve identified the sex pheromones of the queen and propose trapping the hornet drones that are lured in by the pheromones. VIDeo at link............. The Asian giant hornet (Vespa mandarinia) preys on bees, and its stings are pretty painful to humans (they can kill people who are allergic to their venom). The hornets are native to Asia...

Prayers up. FR is funded solely by contributions made by the liberty loving patriots who love and use it. We are beholden to no political party. No advertisers, no outsiders, no sugar daddies, no corporate string pullers. Definitely no government subsidies or tax breaks. No 501c or other IRS non-profit status. This means no commercial ads. No annoying pop-ups. No ad tracking. No mail campaigns. No spam. No third-parties -- not even the IRS -- trying to control what we do or say. We are self-funded, fiercely independent and enjoy our freedom to speak plainly in the support of God,...

Second Week of Lent Luke 6:36-38 Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus calls us to “be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.” Mercy or tender compassion (chesed in the Hebrew of the Old Testament) is God’s most distinctive characteristic. St. Augustine reminded us that we are, by our very nature, ordered to God. But since God is tender mercy, “having” God is tantamount to exercising compassion, being merciful ourselves. And attend to what Jesus says next: “Stop judging and you will not be judged. Stop condemning and you will not be condemned. Forgive and you will be forgiven. Give and...

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — Frustrated by how much they were paying for health care, two groups of California workers sued one of the nation’s largest hospital systems. One group secured a half-billion-dollar settlement. The other lost in court. Both cases took nearly a decade to resolve, highlighting the difficulty patients and their employers often face when trying to corral the ever-increasing costs of health care. Now, instead of relying on the market or the courts to keep health care prices in check, California Gov. Gavin Newsom wants to order the state’s hospitals, doctors’ offices and insurance companies to keep their...

Miami, Florida imam, Fadi Kablawi, says a lot of incredibly offensive things. He has referred to Jews as “the lowest of the lowest” ... He has said that Christians practice a “fake” religion and that “Christianity can compete for first place in stupidity.” Kablawi’s insults and bigotry know no bounds. This past August, he looked to outrage once again, blaming women for rape and pondering why Allah has not destroyed the United States and all homosexuals. His rhetoric is dangerous, and it quite possibly has influenced his congregants to plot unspeakable acts. Fadi Yousef Kablawi (Qablawi) was born in Amman,...

<p>In addition to the speed at which the vaccine was developed, the shot did not fit the definition of a vaccine at that time, as the mRNA product the pharmaceutical companies were planning does not induce immunity in and of itself; rather, it delivers instructions to the recipient’s cells to do that by producing their own proteins to fight the targeted disease. So what did the CDC do? They changed the definition of vaccine.</p>