Free Republic

Amid controversies around the COVID-19 vaccine and growing distrust of public health authorities, more than four in ten Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, and a third of parents, now say they oppose requiring children in public schools to receive some childhood vaccines, up since 2019, a new KFF COVID-19 Vaccine Monitor survey finds. Overall, nearly three in ten adults (28%) nationally now say that parents should be able to decide not to vaccinate their children for measles, mumps, and rubella rather than those vaccinations being required to attend public schools, up from 16% in a 2019 Pew Research Center poll conducted...

Compared to other common supplemental screening methods, breast MRI was superior at detecting breast cancer in women with dense breasts, according to a study. Roughly 47% of women have dense breasts, which is an independent risk factor of breast cancer. While screening mammography effectively detects up to 98% of cancer in fatty breasts, breast cancer is more easily missed in dense breasts. "Breast cancer masses appear white on a mammogram, and dense tissue also appears white, which makes finding breast cancers within dense breast tissue harder for radiologists," said Vivianne Freitas, M.D., M.Sc. The four most common supplemental imaging tests...

First son Hunter Biden’s lawyers admitted late Wednesday that the infamous laptop the now-52-year-old abandoned at a Delaware computer repair shop in the throes of his crack cocaine addiction does indeed belong to him. The revelation came in a petulant letter from Hunter’s lawyers seeking a criminal probe into what they called, attempts to “weaponize” its contents. In the 14-page letter to Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings, Biden attorney Abbe Lowell claimed that repair shop owner John Paul Mac Isaac “unlawfully” accessed Hunter’s laptop data and worked with former President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani to “weaponize” sordid and...

In an internationally conducted clinical trial lead by Dana-Farber involving patients with recurrent ovarian cancer that is resistant to platinum therapy, a novel conjugate therapy called mirvetuximab soravtansine resulted in substantially better responses than standard treatments. Mirvetuximab soravtansine was granted accelerated approval November 2022. "The results of the SORAYA study supported the accelerated FDA approval of mirvetuximab for patients with recurrent, platinum-resistant, folate receptor alpha-positive ovarian cancer," Ursula A. Matulonis, MD. The study enrolled 106 patients with platinum-resistant high-grade serous ovarian cancer that highly expressed folate receptor alpha. The participants had been treated with up to three prior treatments for...

If you have nothing going on and 10 hours to spare, you should still find something to do other than read the tragically long article in the Columbia Journalism Review that bills itself as a reckoning for the appalling misconduct of the news media during the Trump years. It’s too little and about six years too late for that trash. Mummified legend Bob Woodward is quoted in the piece, authored this week by former New York Times journalist Jeff Gerth, urging newsrooms to “walk down the painful road of introspection.” Gerth himself says “news outlets and watchdogs haven’t been as...

The Supreme Court has been under attack since the 2020 election, with protests outside the homes of judges, an unprecedented leak, and now scrutiny in the professions of family members. SCOTUS released its report earlier this month into who might have leaked the draft opinion by Justice Samuel Alito concerning returning the question of abortion back to the states. The report did not find the leak, but one lawmaker has expressed an opinion on the matter.Now there is a question about the professional work of one of the justices’ wives. U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts’s wife could face...

Investigators were continuing to work to determine what prompted the fight... Detectives say Giroux had left the school and was driving home when he stopped his car and called first responders. They found him in the vehicle and transported him to the hospital, where he died. State police have interviewed participants in the brawl and spectators at the game, and collected and reviewed video footage of the melee. State police were called at 6:56 p.m. to scene for a report of a large fight involving multiple spectators during a 7th-8th grade boys basketball game They say the melee ended before...

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...