Free Republic

A Southwest Side alderman accidentally shot himself Monday afternoon in the Ashburn neighborhood, the Sun-Times has learned. Ald. Derrick Curtis (18th) suffered a gunshot wound to his wrist around noon while cleaning his gun in the 8200 block of South Christiana Avenue, according to a Chicago police alert.

Democrats have cause for concern that they’re fading at a bad time ahead of the midterm elections after a summer surge fostered optimism that the party could buck historical trends and retain control of Congress. A New York Times-Siena College poll released Monday found Republicans held a 49-45 lead over Democrats in the generic ballot roughly one month before November’s elections. That represents a shift from September, when the same poll found Democrats leading Republicans by 1 percentage point. That poll followed a trend among other surveys that as recently as late September showed Democrats leading Republicans on the generic...

Blow wrote that racist remarks made by the LA city council president worsened his fears New York Times columnist Charles Blow wrote Sunday that he was worried "white supremacy" would be replaced by "lite supremacy" after leaked audio revealed Los Angeles City Council President Nury Martinez making racist remarks. "It is a theory that worries me and that I have written about: that with the browning of America, white supremacy could simply be replaced by — or buffeted by — a form of "lite" supremacy, in which fairer-skin people perpetuate a modified anti-Blackness rather than eliminating it," Blow wrote in...

Republican Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley is calling on top law enforcement officials to release records detailing “potential criminal conduct” committed by Hunter and James Biden. “My office has received a significant number of protected communications from highly credible whistleblowers which have increased since my initial outreach to your offices,” Grassley wrote. “Based on recent protected disclosures to my office, the FBI has within its possession significant, impactful and voluminous evidence with respect to potential criminal conduct by Hunter Biden and James Biden.” Hunter and James Biden, President Joe Biden’s son and brother, respectively, reportedly conducted business through a holding company...

REPORT: Former Democrat Tulsi Gabbard is flying into Phoenix tomorrow to campaign with Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake. Via Eric Cartellessa from TIME mag. The Washington Examiner has more. Fresh off announcing her departure from the Democratic Party, Tulsi Gabbard will campaign for rising MAGA star Kari Lake, who is running for Arizona governor. Lake’s campaign announced Gabbard, who used to be a representative from Hawaii, will appear for an Arizona Young Republican Engagement Forum in Chandler, Arizona, on Tuesday. The event, which is scheduled to start at 7:30 p.m. local time, will also feature Blake Masters, GOP candidate for...

Perhaps the most influential judge who is up for retention in the current election cycle is Timothy C. Evans, the Chief Judge of the Circuit Court of Cook County. The chief judge does not hear cases, but he heavily influences the county’s justice system through judicial assignments, policy decisions, the operation of an electronic monitoring program for people awaiting trial, and management of the adult probation department and juvenile detention programs. Evans, 79, was a Chicago alderman from 1973 to 1991, when he lost a re-election campaign. He became a Cook County judge in 1992 and rose to chief judge...

Kyle Rittenhouse Welcome to my channel 28K views 1 day ago Hello! I am super excited to announce I will be starting a Youtube channel! I look forward to creating content about guns and talking about the 2nd amendment with all of you! My social media:

After Kanye West unleashed more than three and a half hours of anti-Semitic rants, untruths about George Floyd and hostile comments toward everyone from Trevor Noah to Diddy during a Sunday appearance on Revolt.TV’s “Drink Champs,” interviewer N.O.R.E. apologized for using his platform to have such views aired during a call to the”Breakfast Club” on Monday morning. N.O.R.E. (real name: Victor Santiago), who challenged West only occasionally during the interview, was on the receiving end of many angry social media posts for his tacit acceptance of many of the comments. “I made a mistake doing the Kanye interview,” he said....

MK Bhadrakumar, Former Ambassador (India) 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’. India should expect the defeat of the US and NATO, which completes the transition to a multipolar world order....

Link only Bloomberg article that may explain why the chip embargo basically went into place overnight. It's very possible that Xi Jinping will move on Taiwan in the next two years. And that is presumably why Biden has given 3 warnings to China, and Xi is downplaying any new policy on Taiwan. The big game we've been waiting for in the Western Pacific? It's coming. Anyone invested in equities should prepare to assume the position. What position? BOHICA.

Four Oklahoma men who were last seen riding their bicycles more than a week ago before being shot dead and dismembered were planning to commit a crime, police have said. Okmulgee Police Chief Joe Prentice said the bodies found late last week in the Deep Fork River are those of Mark, 32, and Billy Chastain, 30, Mike Sparks, 32, and Alex Stevens, 29. The men were believed to have left a house in Okmulgee on bicycles the evening of October 9. The police chief said the official cause of death was pending but that all four men had gunshot wounds...

In Canada those hearings continue into the crackdown on the Freedom Convoy protest in Ottawa opposing restrictive COVID policies earlier this year... US politics the White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre calling a Sunday social media post by President Trump: "antisemitic and insulting"... "MAGA doesn't Vote for stupid people with big mouths. Good luck Joe!" President Trump on social media talking about the Republican US Senate candidate in Colorado Joe O'Dea... This evening in Germany the Monday night protests that started against COVID restrictions and COVID vaccine mandates morphing into opposition to government economic and defense policies including its hostility to...

A New York City man has been arrested after setting fire to a restaurant that got his order wrong. Choephel Norbu, 49, set the blze at the Bangladeshi Ittadi Garden and Grill in Queens in the early morning hours of Sunday. Video released by the Fire Department of New York shows a man, allegedly Norbu, waiting outside the restaurant in the darkness. He is dressed in all black and holds a plastic bag with unknown contents. Several seconds in, he bends over to grab a bucket right next to him. Court records obtained by the New York Post say that...

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...