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Russia plans to resume some stock trading on Thursday after a near month-long hiatus, with 33 rouble securities to be traded on the Moscow Exchange. Non-residents will have to wait, though - they will be barred from selling stocks and OFZ rouble bonds until April 1. Trading in blue chips, including state lenders Sberbank and VTB, energy majors Rosneft and Gazprom, will take place between 0650 and 1100 GMT, with short-selling banned, the central bank said on Wednesday. Russian stocks last traded on the Moscow Exchange on Feb. 25.

US defense official: Ukrainians have pushed the Russians back to about 55 kilometers east/northeast of Kyiv

Putin: unfriendly states will pay Russia in rubles for natural gas. Putin ordered the Russian Central Bank to develop a system for payments in rubles within a week. The list of “hostile” states includes the United States, all EU member states, Switzerland, Canada, Norway, South Korea, Japan, and many others...

After three years of complaints and debate, the Army has scrapped its move to have a physical fitness test that is gender and age neutral, and will now allow women and older soldiers to pass while meeting some reduced standards. The decision comes after a study by the Rand research organization confirmed that men were passing the new six-event fitness test at a much higher rate than women and that older soldiers were also struggling with their scores in the expanded, more difficult test developed in 2019. The change, however, will affect only the regular fitness test that soldiers take...

Russian space agency Roscosmos will now seek payment in rubles when doing business with foreign entities and countries, Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin said on Wednesday. Earlier in the day, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that all gas contracts will be in rubles and ordered the government to instruct Gazprom to make the relevant changes to existing deals. "We will now also conclude all of our foreign contracts with the ruble (as Currency)," Rogozin told the Russian broadcaster Channel One.

In a study, scientists showed that sulforaphane, a plant-derived chemical, known as a phytochemical, already found to have anti-cancer effects, can inhibit the replication of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, and another human coronavirus in cells and mice. Sulforaphane's natural precursor is particularly abundant in broccoli, cabbage, kale and Brussels sprouts. Sulforaphane is derived from broccoli seeds, sprouts and mature plants. Previous studies have shown sulforaphane to have cancer and infection-prevention properties by interfering with certain cellular processes. In one experiment, the research team first exposed cells to sulforaphane for one to two hours before infecting the cells with...

BOSTON (AP) — Eviction rates in Massachusetts were about twice as high in communities of color compared to predominantly white neighborhoods during the first two years of the coronavirus pandemic, a report by a housing group said. The report, released on Tuesday from Homes for All Massachusetts, stated that after the state’s eviction moratorium expired in October 2020, 55% of eviction filings occurred in locations where most of the residents were people of color. But only 42% of the state’s renters live in those neighborhoods. According to the report, the pandemic could potentially worsen the long-term economic and racial disparities...

#TheirLivesMattered. In April 2021, Reuters wrote about a senior official for the European Medicines Agency (EMA) who admitted that there is a link between AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine and very rare blood clots in the brain but the possible causes are still unknown. ... On May 5, 2021, Alberta, Canada Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. Deena Hinshaw reported about the first death of a patient following an AstraZeneca COVID19 AB vaccine. I am sad to report tonight that we have confirmed Alberta’s first death from VITT following vaccination from the AstraZeneca #COVID19AB vaccine. My sincere condolences go out to those...

In 2020, Cherokee County, Ga., voted for President Trump by a margin of nearly +30. It is full of families where men do the muscular jobs and own businesses that keep the lights on, the internet humming, and the toilets flushing. It has also seen a steady influx of white-collar professionals with young families fleeing the chaos leaching out of Atlanta. Residents fly American flags in the county as a matter of course. There are more churches than bars, and high school football on Friday nights is still a thing. Yet viral video of a Cherokee County mom has surfaced....

A new type of ultraviolet light that is safe for people took less than five minutes to reduce the level of indoor airborne microbes by more than 98%, a joint study has found. Even as microbes continued to be sprayed into the room, the level remained very low as long as the lights were on. The study suggests that far-UVC light from lamps installed in the ceiling could be a highly effective passive technology for reducing person-to-person transmission of airborne-mediated diseases such as COVID and influenza indoors, and lowering the risk of the next pandemic. "Far-UVC rapidly reduces the amount...

If a criminal figures out a more effective way to break into people’s homes to steal more, should he receive a lighter sentence per dollar of what he steals? Biden’s nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, certainly thinks so. The legal system doesn’t normally work that way. If a rapist rapes two women, he gets two sentences, one for each crime. Each crime a criminal gets convicted for gets a separate penalty. That has traditionally been true for child pornography, where more pictures of children mean crimes have been committed.

Ukrainian refugees are refusing German government incentives to receive free COVID-19 vaccines. As reported in the German press, Ukrainian refugees are not responding very enthusiastically to the German government’s offers of free vaccination against COVID-19. “Unfortunately, it seems the refugees aren’t exactly snatching the vaccines out of our hands,” said Marcus König, the mayor of Nuremberg in an interview with Bavarian channel Bayerischer Rundfunk. Indeed, Ukraine has one of the lowest vaccination rates in Europe with only 35% of the population being double jabbed. Even that number could be an overestimation, however, as official data indicates that a large proportion...

Bob Saget was not feeling well the night he went into his hotel room and ended up dying -- at least that's what one of the last people to speak with him is claiming. A showrunner who works at the Ponte Vedra Concert Hall -- where Bob's last show took place before he booked it to Orlando that fateful night -- told investigators Bob had disclosed to her and other stage crew that he wasn't well health-wise pre-show. The woman, whose name is Rosalie Cocci, said Bob had told them he was battling long-term COVID, and it had taken a...

A man who pleaded guilty in the scheme to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) told jurors on Wednesday there was “no question” that the four defendants in the case knew the plot was a kidnapping. “There was no question in your mind that everybody knew?" Assistant U.S. Attorney Nils Kessler asked defendant Ty Garbin, according to The Associated Press.

A House Democrat has just been left with his chances of re-election in tatters after his wife got revenge by very publically exposing his “sordid” extramarital affair. Dr. Sonya Douglass broke her silence about her husband Rep. Steven Horsford’s (D-NV) affair because she is not happy he is running for re-election. Douglass accused her congressman husband of forcing his family to “endure yet another season of living through the sordid details.” The Nevada Democrat was 36 at the time he started an affair with 21-year-old Senate intern Gabriela Linder. Horsford admitted the relationship to his wife after Linder spilled the...

Russian President Vladimir Putin plans to attend the next G20 summit in Indonesia later this year and received valuable backing from Beijing on Wednesday in a pushback to suggestions by some members that Russia could be barred from the group. The United States and its Western allies are assessing whether Russia should remain within the Group of Twenty major economies following its invasion of Ukraine, sources involved in the discussions told Reuters. But any move to exclude Russia would probably be vetoed by others in the group, raising the prospect of some countries instead skipping G20 meetings, the sources said.

It’s not clear why the left has declared open season on little kids, but it has. Whether it is because they think they can seize the future by creating a generation of masked, woke, bitter mutants who don’t know what bathroom to use, or simply because at some level they want to pave the way for normalizing the diddlers, it’s clear our kids are in the cross-hairs. And this seems to be the outrage that is finally turning the tide against the cultural invaders. Speaking of perversions, the new Supreme Court nominee does not seem to think child molesting creeps...

Five painted tombs were recently unearthed in Saqqara, an ancient Egyptian necropolis just outside of Cairo, according to a report by Reuters. The The Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities said that a recent excavation of burial shafts resulted in the finding of the tombs, along with more than 20 sarcophagi, toys, wooden boats, masks, and more. The tombs are at least 4,000 years old, dating back to the Old Kingdom and First Intermediate period, a so called dark period in ancient Egyptian history as the regime of the Old Kingdom collapsed and political instability led to the destruction of...

NATO says that up to 40,000 Russian troops have been killed, wounded, taken prisoner or are missing in Ukraine, said a senior military official from the alliance. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization calculates the figure based on information provided by Ukrainian authorities and information obtained from Russia--both officially and unintentionally, the official said.

The first warm, sunny days of spring in the southern Mykolaiv region are ushering in a grim new reality: the smell of the dead. As the frost melts and ground thaws, the bodies of Russian soldiers strewn across the landscape are becoming a problem. In his nightly video address on Saturday, Vitaly Kim, the region's governor, called on local residents to help collect the corpses and put them in bags, as temperatures rise to above freezing. "We're not beasts, are we?" he implored residents, who have already lost so many of their own in this war.