Free Republic

Saudi Arabia, the largest U.S. export market in the Middle East, invited Chinese President Xi to visit Riyadh in March as relations with the U.S. have faltered since Joe Biden was elected, The Wall Street Journal reported. According to a report from CNN, U.S. intelligence agencies have assessed that Saudi Arabia is now actively manufacturing its own ballistic missiles with the help of China, a relationship that could lead to domino effects across Middle East countries. Under Biden, the US leader who suffers from severe dementia is openly mocked on the international stage. U.S. allies are now aligning with China....

The controversial fly-on-the-wall documentary series featuring the Duke and Duchess of Sussex for Netflix has been postponed until next year, following the widespread backlash over The Crown. Harry and Meghan had been working on the series as part of their rumoured $100 million (£88million) deal with the streaming giant. But with The Crown accused of fabricating a ‘hurtful’ smear against King Charles by depicting him secretly plotting to oust the Queen, Netflix has now pushed it back. The documentary had been expected in December, following the fifth season of The Crown. A source told Hollywood news website Deadline: ‘They’re rattled...

Revealing zinc's interaction with a critical transport protein underscores the need to study biological pathways under physiologically relevant conditions. Heavy metals in the body have long been thought to induce the aggregation of disease-linked proteins, but a study shows this is not always the case. It turns out that zinc ions tune the ability of human serum albumin (HSA), an abundant transport protein in the body, to better prevent α-synuclein from aggregating, a process directly linked to Parkinson's disease. The finding should "open new avenues for preventive treatments," says Samah Al-Harthi, a Ph.D. student. The unexpected role for zinc discovered...

Researchers at Boston University added a spike protein from the Omicron variant with the original Wuhan strain, which has an 80% kill rate.

There is a consistent inverse association between maternal exposure to perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) and semen quality in young adult male offspring, according to a study. Katia Keglberg Hærvig, Ph.D. and colleagues examined associations between maternal plasma PFAS levels during early pregnancy and male offspring reproductive function in adulthood. The analysis included 864 young men and first-trimester samples from their mothers. The researchers found that for a 1-unit increase in the weighted quantile sum index, combined maternal PFAS exposure was associated with lower sperm concentration, lower total sperm count, and a higher proportion of nonprogressive and immotile sperm in...

St. Petersburg lawyer Andrei Nikiforov was drafted into the Russian army four days after Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a “partial” mobilization in a bid to solve the military’s manpower problems in the ongoing Ukraine war. Less than two weeks later, Nikiforov became one of the first mobilized men to be killed as Ukraine pushed forward with its successful counteroffensive. “His sister received the draft paper,” Alexander Zelensky, president of the Neva Bar Association of which Nikiforov was a member, told The Moscow Times. “He notified me about it, gathered his belongings the next day and went to the training...

ERCOT’s board of directors on Tuesday named Pablo Vegas, a utility industry veteran and executive at an Indiana utility, to lead the state’s beleaguered power grid manager, still recovering from the catastrophic failures of the February 2021 winter storm. Public trust in ERCOT has remained low since the February 2021 freeze knocked out power to millions of Texans for days on end, leading to the deaths of hundreds. Ten years earlier in 2011 the exact same scenario resulted in the same number of deaths and economic losses. ERCOT will pay Vegas a $990,000 base salary, and his contract said he...

Three suspects have been accused of smashing their way into a Park Avenue jewelry store in New York City early Saturday morning. The incident occurred at Cellini Jewelers in the 400 block of Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, and the New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the suspects got away with over $500,000 worth of items, according to the New York Post.

Residents and businesses were casualties of almost encyclopedic misjudgments by police, the city, the province and the federal government.... After four days, there were no terrorist incidents, no deaths, no injuries and no arrests. “If they’d left after that weekend, it would have been an insignificant event,” he said. “We’d have cleaned up the city and moved on.” However, the fateful decision by Ottawa Police Service (OPS) to allow trucks on to Parliament Hill, and to let protestors build what Kanellakos called a “logistical compound” at the city-owned parking lot next to a baseball stadium, ended any hopes of a...

Women who used chemical hair straightening products were at higher risk for uterine cancer compared to women who did not report using these products, according to a new study. The researchers found no associations with uterine cancer for other hair products that the women reported using, including hair dyes, bleach, highlights, or perms. The researchers found that women who reported frequent use of hair straightening products, defined as more than four times in the previous year, were more than twice as likely to go on to develop uterine cancer compared to those who did not use the products. "We estimated...

Update from Ukraine: Oct 17, 2022 Update from Ukraine | Iran Drone Attack | Ruzzia lost Su-34 | Putin doesn't know what to do By the way follow me on Instagram I have up to date uploads there. https://www.instagram.com/denys_pilot/ Also, you may check military maps here: https://militaryland.net/

On Monday’s broadcast of CNN’s “The Lead,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) claimed that Republicans are the ones who want the Federal Reserve to engage in interest rate hikes that will “put millions of people out of work.” Warren said, “I just want to say here, it’s the Republicans who are trying to keep 43 million Americans from getting their student loan debt canceled. It is Republicans who want to repeal the laws that we just got in place to cut the cost of insulin and to let Medicare negotiate drug prices. It’s the Republicans who want to see us raise...

(interesting pro-Russian article out of India - elpadre) Two massive terrorist strikes misfired spectacularly and a terrible beauty is born in the Ukraine war. These two carefully planned attacks in quick succession — on Nord Stream gas pipelines and Crimean Bridge — were intended as a knockout blow to Russia. According to President Vladimir Putin, people ‘who want to finally sever ties between Russia and the EU, weaken Europe’ are behind the Nord Stream blasts. He named the US, Ukraine and Poland as ‘beneficiaries’. Last Wednesday, Russia’s domestic intelligence service FSB identified Ukraine’s military intelligence chief, Kyrylo Budanov, as the...

Hunter Biden reached a $40 million real estate deal in 2012 with Russian billionaire and wife of the former mayor of Moscow, Yelena Baturina, while President Joe Biden was vice president. The massive deal is connected to a previously reported $3.5 million fee Baturina paid Hunter’s real estate entity to access the American business market, the Daily Mail reported Monday from documents obtained by an anti-corruption group, the Kazakhstani Initiative on Asset Recovery. The $40 million Baturina invested into the fund reportedly flowed from a Swiss company she owned named Inteco Management AG, which is a plastics and construction giant...

Former FBI agent Peter Strzok said Monday on MSNBC’s “Deadline” that he believed the riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 was a far greater threat to American democracy than the 9/11 terror attack. Anchor Nicolle Wallace said, “I worked in the administration in which he served as FBI director. What he sort of gave birth to in the lexicon was the FBI would never again, first of all fail to sync up with a CIA, and all sorts of artificial and real walls were torn down and they would never again fail to connect the dots. I’ve...

RRepublican Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw’s campaign has paid a small agency that employs his wife hundreds of thousands of dollars since 2020, according to Federal Election Commission (FEC) records reviewed by the Daily Caller. The firm, Pink Cilantro, is a boutique branding agency based in Houston, Texas. The agency’s website, in service since 2013, went offline as recently as June, according to the internet archive called “The Wayback Machine.” Pink Cilantro’s owner, Basya Benshushan, told the Caller that they are in the process of “rebranding” the agency and that’s why the website is down. Since 2020, Crenshaw’s campaign has paid...

I recently found a black cat with a little white patch hiding (and starving) in my laundry room. It looks exactly like the Eveready 9lives cat. I sent a request to Eveready to see what the name of the cat was.

Ailing exhibition giant Cineworld Group, which is currently finalizing a reorganization plan having filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the U.S. earlier this month, has released encouraging interim results for the six months to June 30, 2022. Overall revenue rose to $1.5b against $292.8m in the same period in 2021, for an adjusted EBITDA of $364.2m (against -$21.1m in 2021) and an operating profit of $57.3m, against an operating loss of $208.9m in the same period last year. The company’s debt position worsened, however, standing at $5,2b on June 30, against $5.03b on December 30, 2021. The exhibitor, which operates...

California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced on Monday that California will be ending the COVID-19 state of emergency in February 2023. The governor’s office announced that the state is planning to end the COVID-19 State of Emergency on February 28, 2023, nearly three years after it was declared

~The FReeper Canteen Presents~ Road Trip: Naval Support Activity Charleston, South CarolinaNaval Support Activity Charleston, originally designated Naval Weapons Station Charleston, is a base of the United States Navy located on the west bank of the Cooper River, in the cities of Goose Creek and Hanahan South Carolina.The base encompasses more than 17,000 acres of land with 10,000 acres of forest and wetlands, 16-plus miles of waterfront, four deep-water piers, 38.2 miles of railroad and 292 miles of road. The current workforce (military/civil service/contractor) numbers more than 11,000 with an additional 3,600 people in on-base family housing.Under the 2005...