Free Republic

Ukraine and Russia are fighting a "First World War-like" battle for the city of Bakhmut as casualties pile up on both sides, western officials have said. But Britain said on Tuesday it was "not practical" to supply fighter jets despite the assessment of western analysts that the war is entering a stalemate. Ukraine is pushing Nato members to supply their jets after US President Joe Biden ruled out sending F-16s. Kyiv and Moscow are believed to be planning spring offensives as the war's anniversary approaches. The eastern city of Bakhmut has been the site of heavy fighting as Ukraine awaits...

Letter to the Stanford Daily: Why Is There a COVID Vaccine Mandate for Students?“Not to know is bad. Not to wish to know is worse.”—African proverbI can’t figure out why Stanford is mandating the COVID vaccine for students.Is it to protect students from the virus, hospitalization, or death?Is it to protect them from other students?Is it to protect the Stanford community members from the students? If it’s to protect the students from catching COVID, that doesn’t make sense because the CDC says it “no longer differentiate[s] based on a person’s vaccination status because breakthrough infections occur.”The CDC also acknowledges natural...

The Office of the Inspector General dropped a new report about the relationship between the National Institutes of Health, the EcoHealth Alliance, and the facilities that received grants from the organization.The contents do not reflect well on either the NIH or the EcoHealth Alliance. They were playing with fire, knew it, and failed to ensure that safety was front and center when messing with microbes.The report is entitled quite sexily: THE NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH AND ECOHEALTH ALLIANCE DID NOT EFFECTIVELY MONITOR AWARDS AND SUBAWARDS, RESULTING IN MISSED OPPORTUNITIES TO OVERSEE RESEARCH AND OTHER DEFICIENCIES.Catchy title, as you would expect...

As you may recall, one part of New York City’s brilliant plan to deal with the flood of illegal migrants being shipped to the Big Apple from our open southern border was to commandeer some of the city’s pricey hotels (at taxpayer expense) and convert them into “temporary” shelters. Two of the businesses appropriated in this fashion are the once-elegant Row NYC in Manhattan and the Watson Hotel in Hell’s Kitchen. I say “once-elegant” because investigative reporters have been touring both of these establishments and finding that they are no longer recognizable. One worker at Row NYC has spilled the...

Lawyers for Hunter Biden are demanding Fox News issue corrections about some of its coverage of the president’s son or risk a defamation lawsuit, according to the Washington Post. **SNIP** Biden’s attorneys allege Fox News defamed him when Tucker Carlson claimed Biden funneled $50,000 to his father, Joe Biden. In reality, the younger Biden was paying $49,910 for office space in Washington, D.C. every three months. “We demand that you immediately retract these statements by spending a significant of amount of air-time on such retraction,” Sullivan said in the letter to Fox News and Carlson. “If we do not receive...

Most of us probably knew this was coming after the Pentagon was forced to repeal the COVID vaccine mandate for the troops last month. The Marines had been hit particularly hard, with more than 3,700 troops being discharged after refusing to take the shots and nearly as many stuck in limbo with pending exemption requests. Very few exemptions were granted for either religious or medical reasons. But now that the mandate has been removed, some recruiters have been sending out text messages to the people who were discharged, inviting them to come back to the ranks. But as Alpha News...

OKLAHOMA CITY, Okla. — An Oklahoma State Senator has proposed a bill that would phase out the use of federal funding for public education. Senate Bill 863, written by Republican David Bullard, would create a timeline that would gradually end the use of federal funding for students in pre-kindergarten though twelfth grade. The ten-year plan would also include “a projected need for state funds to replace the federal funds.” If Senate Bill 863 is passed and approved, it would immediately take effect. The next legislative session begins Feb. 6.

The Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) suffered a power outage on Wednesday afternoon. The outage was brief, first reported around 2:30 p.m., then resolved within an hour – around 3:30 p.m. Most of the terminals were impacted, and operations such as TSA screenings came to a screeching halt.You cannot scan Real IDs and passports, nor can you do electronic frisking for weapons when your equipment has no power. Go figure.According to FlightAware, by 3:15, there were 140 delays and 64 cancelations. Whether these were a result of the power outage is yet to be revealed. The Los Angeles Department of...

The Biden administration on Tuesday formally accused Russia of violating the New START arms treaty over what it said was Moscow‘s failure to allow inspections of weapons sites or agree to meetings on treaty disputes. President Biden agreed to extend the New START treaty — one of the last major arms control treaties still in force — for five years shortly after taking office in January 2021 — without seeking changes or concessions from the Kremlin related to its strategic forces buildup. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine barely a year later has put bilateral relations in a...

Update from Ukraine | This Small town is the key to Bakhmut | Wanger Group is doomed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PD81deXXUdo Follow on Instagram up to date uploads. https://www.instagram.com/denys_pilot/ SUMMARY Military MAPS & COMMENTS here: https://militaryland.net/news/invasion-day-342-summary/ https://militaryland.net/maps/deployment-map

To note that the latest Disney/Marvel Studios woke Phase Four installment, “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” is a waste of time, is an insult to wastes of time. This tiresome flick aspires to be a waste of time. Disney/Marvel had a decision to make when the actor who originally played the Black Panther — the likable but mediocre Chadwick Boseman — died in real life: Either drop the BP franchise entirely, or bull ahead with a politically-correct sequel, composed of forgettable secondary characters from the first film. Guess which way they went. There’s a lot of furious fighting between black- and...

KYIV (Reuters) -Ukrainian state security officials searched the home of billionaire businessman Ihor Kolomoiskiy on Wednesday, in what several media outlets said was an investigation into possible financial crimes. The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) did not immediately reply to a request for comment about the reports, and Kolomoiskiy could not be reached for comment. A senior governing party official confirmed Kolomoiskiy's home had been searched - as well as that of a former interior minister - but did not state the reason for the search.

More than one million people attended Pope Francis’ Mass in the Democratic Republic of Congo on Wednesday morning, according to local authorities. The Mass in Kinshasa, DRC’s capital city, took place on the airfield of the N’Dolo Airport on the second day of the pope’s trip to two countries in central and east Africa. Catholics attended a prayer vigil with confessions and music the night of Jan. 31; some people who traveled from far away stayed at the airport all night until the morning Mass on Feb. 1. People gathered in the field hours before the start of Mass at...

Every day we continue to get even more evidence that our society is going completely and utterly insane. I really wish that this wasn’t true. I really wish that we could just hit the rewind button and go back several decades to a time when most people tried to behave normally and there wasn’t rampant corruption all around us. Unfortunately, our social decay has shifted into “turbo mode” over the past several years, and at this point a lot of Americans actually celebrate the evil that is gnawing away at the foundations of our society like cancer. Some of the...

Often debilitating, chronic pain is one of the most common reasons individuals seek medical help. Between 67 to 88 percent of them also suffer from sleep disturbances, including longer and more frequent nocturnal awakenings and poorer sleep quality. Because chronic pain and sleep are thought to be correlated, treatment of one could be beneficial to the other. One such treatment is spinal cord stimulation, which shows mounting evidence it improves aspects of sleep and has demonstrated efficacy in treating a multitude of chronic pain conditions. This treatment involves an implantable spinal cord stimulator that sends low levels of electricity directly...

Authorities have launched an investigation into the latest robbery and assaults of a postal worker in Oakland.

MIAMI – Benito Montes de Oca Cruz, 60, of Miami-Dade County, has pled guilty to abusive sexual contact with a woman serving part of her 51-month prison sentence in home confinement under his authority. Cruz, a site supervisor employed by Riverside House, conducted home visits to monitor compliance of federal inmates on home confinement. Riverside House, pursuant to a contract with the Federal Bureau of Prisons, is responsible for providing custodial, supervisory, and disciplinary oversight to federal inmates on home confinement. As admitted at the change of plea, on December 28, 2020, Cruz conducted a home confinement supervision visit to...

New Bill In Tennessee Aims To Create Digital Driver License. Democrat Senator Mark Mullet who sponsored the new bill stated “I learned from the ease of having vaccine information on your cell phone why it would make sense to also offer this option for folks when it comes to their driver’s license.”

A team of researchers has discovered five new meteorites in Antarctica—one of which weighs a whopping 16.7 pounds. For about a week and a half, the scientists rode snowmobiles and slept in tents, enduring the cold Antarctic summer temperatures of 14 degrees Fahrenheit as they searched for space rocks in the ice. Their largest find is among the heaviest meteorites ever found on the continent and could provide a glimpse into our solar system’s history. “The object comes from the asteroid belt and probably plopped down into the Antarctic blue ice several tens of thousands of years ago,” Ryoga Maeda,...

Russia is flouting its obligations under a major arms control treaty with the United States, according to State Department officials. “Russia is not complying with its obligation under the New START Treaty to facilitate inspection activities on its territory,” a State Department spokesman said Tuesday. "Russia’s refusal to facilitate inspection activities prevents the United States from exercising important rights under the treaty and threatens the viability of U.S.-Russian nuclear arms control.” Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s team outlined that breakdown in a notification to key congressional leaders on Tuesday. The assessment points to the degeneration of the last major arms...