Free Republic

A lifelong promoter of vaccines suspects he might be the rare, unfortunate exception. On september 22 of last year, Michel Goldman, a Belgian immunologist and one of Europe’s best-known champions of medical research, walked into a clinic near his house, rolled up his sleeve, and had a booster shot delivered to his arm. He knew he’d need it more than most. Just a few weeks earlier, Michel, 67, had been to see his younger brother, Serge, the head of nuclear medicine at the hospital of the Université Libre de Bruxelles, where both men are professors. Michel was having night sweats,...

Bandits who hid AK 47 rifles in their clothes and pretended to be worshippers attacked a Juma’at mosque in Zamfara State, killing 15 worshippers. The attack on a Juma’a mosque in Ruwan Jema town of Bukkuyum Local Government Area of Zamfara State also left many injured while others were missing. Although there is no statement from the state government or the police, a source said the Friday attack “came three weeks after terrorists attacked a Friday mosque in Zugu town in the same local government area where 45 worshippers were kidnapped.” The source went on: “The bandits hid their AK-47...

The continent's most powerful economy and its most powerful military are failing to meet the moment. Russian President Vladimir Putin's recent decision to partially mobilize Russian reservists represents a significant escalation in his war against Ukraine. Over the coming weeks and months, this could inject as many as 300,000 additional Russian troops into the Kremlin's war effort--and just as Ukraine has achieved some battlefield success. Increased Western assistance is vital for Kyiv to leverage and expand its gains and build up defensive positions, before additional Russian forces enter the fight. But not all Western powers have been pulling their weight...

With crime on the rise, Republicans are hammering their opponents as Democrats fear "defund the police" policies will turn off voters. Democrats' virtual 180 on the issue of crime — a journey from supporting the "defund the police" movement to espousing tougher law enforcement — has been accentuated by a striking pattern in recent months: prominent liberals being mugged, sometimes quite literally, by the harsh reality of rising crime as victims themselves. The latest liberal to embody this shift is Bill Walton, the 69-year-old basketball legend-turned-garrulous broadcaster, who has a history of stirring controversy and advocating a range of progressive...

She added, “You know, here’s the deal, Maria, the Republican Party, the new Republican Party, is the party of ‘We the people.’ It is no longer the party of warmongers. So Liz Cheney should probably turn in her voter registration. It turns out she really is a Democrat after all.”

More evidence of how vindictive, obsessive, and downright sinister Facebook is, now it appears to be monitoring private messages and suppressing material related to the whistleblower complaint of hero FBI special agent Steve Friend. After Friend’s bombshell revelations last week in a whistleblower complaint to the Department of Justice inspector general, his cause received an avalanche of public and private support, including from former FBI agents and conservative groups. As reported in this column, Friend’s complaint alleges that the FBI has been manipulating case-file management in order to falsely inflate the threat of domestic terrorism, and has been using unconstitutional...

My initial introduction to the CIA was through the medium of film and literature. The spy versus spy mystique was alluringly romantic, with a definite ‘good versus evil’ vibe. I grew up, after all, during the Cold War, where the ‘red menace’ permeated every fiber of American popular culture. I opted to serve my country in the military, and not as a spy, receiving a commission in the Marine Corps in 1984 as an intelligence officer. My specialty was combat, not espionage, and it seemed that my path and that of the premier American intelligence agency were never to cross....

An accused career criminal who was once the darling of bail-reform advocates is now being sought by cops for attempted murder outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral, law-enforcement sources say. Pedro Hernandez — who still has three other open gun cases against him — is wanted in the Aug. 28 Midtown shooting that stemmed from a game of three-card monte, sources said. Hernandez, 22, is suspected of firing into an occupied red Mercedes Benz after losing cash and a gold chain in the notoriously rigged sidewalk hustle.

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Regarding the $36 million Oberlin College has been required to pay Gibson’s Bakery: Leaving aside fees paid by the college to Washington lawyers and the cost of insurance, the $36 million might have been spent as follows: (1) By giving each of the 295 underpaid members of the full-time faculty an outright grant of $122,033. (2) By reducing this year’s tuition bill to all 2,658 students by $957. (3) Or the money could have been left in the endowment, to generate $2 million a year. Note also that the $36 million cost of Oberlin College’s campaign against Gibson’s Bakery equals...

The book also claims that King Charles III will abdicate and Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, will become the next monarch, instead of his brother William, the new Prince of Wales Nostradamus, the 16th-century French seer and astrologer, has been famous for his predictions. He has been credited with making accurate prophecies of the rise of Hitler, the 9/11 attacks and the wars in Europe. Now, following Queen Elizabeth II’s demise, the name of the French astrologer is surfacing again in UK, as it is being said that Nostradamus predicted the exact year of the monarch’s death in cryptic...

Whetstones are one of the most common finds from the Viking Age. What looks like a simple stone however, tells the tale of extensive trading systems - and perhaps even the reason for why the Vikings started raiding overseas.At the end of the 19th century, people emptied the water out of an old quarry in Trøndelag in mid-Norway. Some thought that it might contain a large silver deposit.But the only thing they found were lots of stones. A totally commonplace object...The ordinary stones were whetstones, also known as sharpening stones. They were used to, as the latter name suggests, sharpen...

The long season of presidential primaries is over, the fall campaigns have rushed by, and the voters have decided who is to be the next President of the United States. As the new presidential administration prepares for its inauguration on January 20, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is busy with another one of its unheralded jobs—planning for the transfer of hundreds of millions of textual, electronic, and audiovisual records, and tens of thousands of presidential and vice presidential gifts. It's something that happens every four or eight years—and sometimes when it's least expected. NARA is assisting in the...

Almost three hundred years after the Romans left, scholars like Bede wrote about the Angles and the Saxons and their migrations to the British Isles. Scholars of many disciplines, including archaeology, history, linguists and genetics, have debated what his words might have described, and what the scale, the nature and the impact of human migration were at that time.New genetic results now show that around 75 percent of the population in Eastern and Southern England was made up of migrant families whose ancestors must have originated from continental regions bordering the North Sea, including the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark. What...

Russia's invasion of Ukraine is "sadly… perhaps the final nail in the coffin" for the nuclear non-proliferation regime, former top diplomat Bilahari Kausikan says in The Straits Times' latest Conversations on the Future. "The lesson… many countries have taken away from the Ukraine crisis is that you have to be able to defend yourself. "And if your likely threat is a nuclear power… I don't think you can deter nuclear power by conventional means; that's a stark fact," said the former permanent secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs - currently chairman of the Middle East Institute at the National...

Sundays readings highlight the need for the poor to be taken care of.Social teaching that is an often overlooked requirement of our Faith. 14 min. YouTube link below. How Are You Taking of The Poor?

A people smuggler says the UK government's plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda is no deterrent for his customers. Jane Corbin meets him at his base in Turkey. Night is falling as I make my way up the creaking stairs of a safe house in an anonymous alleyway in Istanbul, Turkey. I'm here to meet a kingpin in the people-smuggling trade - it has taken months to arrange, working through a trusted intermediary. It is the culmination of a BBC Panorama investigation into how thousands of migrants end up on the beaches of southern England claiming asylum. The people...

Police in North Dakota said that there's 'no evidence' showing that politics were involved in an incident where a man fatally struck a teenager with his SUV following what he admitted was a 'political argument.'

ROME — The international community must make the “ecological commitment” a top priority, Pope Francis said in an interview published Sunday. “We have not awakened in the face of planetary wars and injustices, we have not listened to the cry of the poor, and of our gravely ill planet,” the pontiff told the Italian daily Il Mattino. “We thought we would always remain healthy in a sick world.” “Today a time of trial, a time of choice,” the pope declared. “The time to choose what matters and what doesn’t, to separate what is necessary from what is not. It is...

Outside the women's restroom at a subway station in the South Korean capital is a plaque that reads: "Women Friendly Seoul." The words, meant to assure women of their safety, have become tragically ironic. Last week, inside the restroom, a young woman who worked at the station was brutally murdered. The man suspected of killing her had been stalking her for years. The wall underneath the plaque has since become a shrine of messages left as notes, with women and men of all ages coming to express their fury, fear, and sorrow. "I want to be alive at the end...