Free Republic

A woman who was born without a womb has described current fertility treatment guidelines as "full of inequality and discrimination" after she was unable to have her eggs frozen through the NHS.Taelor Shand, 27, has Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser Syndrome (MRKH). She has had a privately-funded egg collection procedure to facilitate future IVF (In Vitro Fertilisation). The Scottish government said guidance to standardise access to fertility preservation was expected next year.

Over a dozen men have been charged with sex crimes in Australia following an American FBI investigation that proved fatal for two agents. Officials announced Tuesday that 19 men had been arrested and charged with a combined 138 offenses in connection to an international pedophile ring. "We will allege that these men were members of a technologically sophisticated online child abuse network that was operating across the country," Australian Federal Police Commander Helen Schneider told news outlets. Two of the suspects have already been convicted and sentenced, according to authorities. Those convicted are set to serve approximately 15 years in...

In a statement, the SVR said U.S.-supplied HIMARS rocket launchers, air defence systems and artillery ammunition had been delivered to the Rivne nuclear power station in the northwest of Ukraine."The Ukrainian armed forces are storing weapons and ammunition provided by the West on the territory of nuclear power plants," it said, adding that an arms shipment to the Rivne power station had taken place in the last week of December.

A petition calling for President Zelensky to support a new bill that would completely ban the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church will be taken under consideration by the head of state. Any petition registered on the official site of the President of Ukraine that receives at least 25,000 votes must then be officially considered by the President. As of 1:30 PM, November 29, the petition, authored by Deputy Oleksiy Goncharenko of the European Solidarity Party, has received 25,879 votes. The petition calls for the President to support draft law 8221, “which provides for a ban on the activities of institution subordinate...

Governor Ron DeSantis is poised to be the first Republican to win Miami-Dade County, FL in decades, which includes a heavy Hispanic-voting presence. During an appearance on FNC’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” DeSantis discussed this potential outcome, saying that his success there was proof you did not need to “move left” on borders and amnesty to win the Hispanic vote. “So I once saw Frank Luntz, who is a famous Republican pollster, tell Republican members of Congress that if they wanted to win Hispanic votes, they had to move left,” host Tucker Carlson said. “You’re saying you’ve won those votes by...

As midterm election campaigns heat up in the Senate’s top battlegrounds, the National Republican Senatorial Committee is canceling millions of dollars of ad spending, sending GOP campaigns and operatives into a panic and upending the committee’s initial spending plan. The cuts — totaling roughly $13.5 million since Aug. 1 — come as the Republicans’ Senate campaign committee is being forced to “stretch every dollar we can,” said a person familiar with the NRSC’s deliberations. Republican nominees in critical states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and North Carolina — places the GOP must defend this fall — have failed to raise enough money...

The King of Staten Island visited his castle. Pete Davidson was seen at the St. George Ferry Terminal on Friday, admiring the decommissioned Staten Island Ferry he and “SNL” co-star Colin Jost bought this week at auction. Video obtained exclusively by The Post shows the Staten Island native beaming through sunglasses at the new purchase from a pier jutting out into New York Bay. “It’s crazy,” Davidson said. “We used to take that ferry to do stand-up, all the time.”

A conservative group run by Marc Short, who served as former Vice President Mike Pence's chief of staff, is set to launch an ad campaign to encourage Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va) to oppose the $1.7 trillion social spending and climate package in an attempt to stop it from being passed. The Coalition to Protect American Workers is set to launch an ad campaign worth nearly $800,000 this week in West Virginia. According to NBC News, the ads will air over two weeks and will reiterate issues that Manchin has raised about the social spending package in the past

Pfizer (PFE) CEO Albert Bourla is betting big on repeating the success of its COVID-19 vaccine with an experimental oral treatment — and he's putting the company's money where its mouth is. Bourla told Yahoo Finance Wednesday the company is committing $1 billion to develop the oral treatment — a protease inhibitor — which would give the world an easy-to-use, targeted treatment, hopefully by year's end. The current market for COVID-19 treatments includes monoclonal antibodies and some repurposed drugs, including generics and Gilead Sciences' (GILD) Veklury (formerly Remdesivir) - all of which require being in a hospital or clinic to...

Guarded by Chinese police and sealed off from the outside world, this former copper mine in Mojiang some 1118 miles away from Wuhan could be a smoking gun on the origin of the pandemic. The Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) - a high security bio lab specalising in coronaviruses - is in the eye of the storm as questions rage whether Covid could have originally emerged from escaped from its campus. China and the lab furiously deny any allegations, but a new study has suggested the virus appears to have been manipulated and US President Joe Biden has ordered his...

The Walt Disney Co. has been hit with a lawsuit from one of its own executives who alleges the company discriminated against him on the basis of sexual orientation. The complaint comes as Disney is rolling out Pride Month-themed content across its media platforms, including the kid-oriented Disney+ streaming service. In a ten-page complaint filed Tuesday in Los Angeles Superior Court, Joel Hopkins claims he was denied promotion after his superiors learned about his sexual orientation. He alleges he was also put on a “dead-end career track” and that his compensation “is less than other individuals who are also department...

Around 71 per cent of people have had at least one dose of a COVID vaccine, and 62 per cent have been fully vaccinated. Of these, 57 per cent have received the Sinopharm vaccine, and 43 per cent AstraZeneca. Despite this, there has been a recent surge in cases, with 37 per cent of new active cases and 20 per cent of hospital cases being fully vaccinated.

The Supreme Court handed a victory to advocates of abortion rights Monday, wiping off the books lower court rulings that had upheld a Texas order banning nearly all abortions in the state during the coronavirus pandemic. Gov. Greg Abbott ordered a halt to nonessential medical procedures in late March to conserve hospital resources and personal protective equipment. Attorney General Ken Paxton then said the order applied to "any type of abortions," including medication abortions that do not involve surgery.

With President Donald Trump threatening to make real inroads into the black vote, will Democrats dare to nominate a candidate who has made racially biased statements? It is one thing to say that minorities commit crime at relatively high rates compared to whites, but it is something quite different to falsely claim that minorities commit virtually all murders. For a candidate who has already spent an astounding $350 million on his campaign -- more than all of his opponents combined -- it might be hard for his political opponents to get a word in edgewise. But, even as polls are...

Australian officials are airdropping poisonous sausages across the country in order to kill millions of feral cats that have taken over the continent. In 2015, the country’s government announced a plan to kill 2 million feral cats by 2020, according to a recent report from The New York Times.

What The Shack gets right by Lita Cosner Published: 7 March 2017 (GMT+10) It would be easy to write a standard, outraged review of The Shack. They portray God the Father and God the Spirit in human form, as females! They put words in God’s mouth that He never said! They substitute correct doctrine for mushy platitudes that sound like they came from Oprah! All those things are true, and they’re all problems, and those problems have been very thoroughly laid out elsewhere in reviews of William Paul Young’s best-selling 2008 book of the same title, so go there and...

If We Don’t Let Muslims into America, They’ll Kill Us Our immigration policy should not be a hostage crisis. February 1, 2017 Daniel Greenfield Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam Trump's executive order is "going to get Americans killed," Senator Murphy declared. The Connecticut Democrat was joining a chorus of the clueless warning us that if we don’t let Muslims into America, they’ll join ISIS and kill us. Singing their brains out in the same stupid chorus were Senator McCain and Senator Graham (“a self-inflicted wound in...

A (Cocagne) New Brunswick trapper received an unexpected gift on Christmas Day—a rare melanistic bobcat. Studies show there has only been one other black bobcat caught in Canada. "I thought it was a house cat," said Oswald McFadden, who has run the same trapline for the last decade. "When I saw the tail I knew it wasn't a house cat. Then I looked at the ears, I knew it was definitely a bobcat." Melanism is a genetic trait that displays a black-coloured pigment and can often be found in species like squirrels and jaguars. Much like jaguars, this bobcat's spots...

The 2016 presidential election season gets underway in earnest today as voters cast their first ballots at the Iowa caucuses. As usual, science-related issues aren't getting much attention from the candidates, as the debate has been dominated by national security, immigration policy, and the economy. But science does sometimes creep into the conversation, and ScienceInsider has been keeping its ears perked. Here's an overview of where the candidates stand on some select science-related issues (keeping in mind that the candidates have yet to sound off on many topics of interest to researchers).

The only one of the declared presidential candidates that Americans have positive feelings for overall isn’t a frontrunner and has never held public office before. According to a poll released Thursday by Public Policy Polling, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson is the sole presidential candidate whose favorability rating is higher than his or her unfavorability rating. When asked about Carson, 41 percent of the respondents in the national poll reported that they felt favorably about him, compared to 30 percent who have an unfavorable view. That puts him well ahead of all the other candidates in the field, though 29 percent...