Free Republic

Its early Friday morning in the UK results beginning to come in for the local government elections... Turkey (Türkiye) halting all trade with Israel... Eight Syrian soldiers wounded in an Israeli attack tonight in a Damascus suburb... A massive fire tonight in Moscow.. In the Uk 45 people arrested resisting efforts to detain illegal immigrants for transfer to Rwanda... Swedish authorities granting permission for a Quran burning rally on May 10th in Malmo... "If the Russians were to break through the front line, if there were a Ukrainian request--which is not the case today--we would legitimately have to ask ourselves...

The 44-year-old activist is well known nationally for his reports on the corruption that has flourished under President Vladimir Putin’s government. His wide support puts the Kremlin in a strategic bind — risking more protests and criticism from the West if it keeps him in custody but apparently unwilling to back down by letting him go free. Protests erupted in dozens of cities [90] across Russia on Saturday to demand the release of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, the Kremlin’s most prominent foe. Police arrested more than 3,000 people, some of whom took to the streets in temperatures as frigid as...

Biowarfare : Another “Sverdlosk Incident” in Russia ? I’ve been looking at two recent (and ongoing) outbreaks of Tularemia in Russia: (Source: ProMed : Archives # 20050824.2503; # 20050822.2467; # 20050718.2066 ) 1. 96 people –66 from Dzerzhinsk region; 30 from Nizhniy Novogorod. 2. 56 people – all from the Ryazan area , which borders on Nizhniy Novogorod and Vladimir. What makes it notable is that Tularemia is a fairly rare disease: the Ryazan area had only 4 known cases in 2004. (No historic stats were furnished on the Nizhniy Novgoros area or Dzerzhinsk , but the number of cases...

Two Russian planes that violated Swedish airspace earlier this month were equipped with nuclear weapons, it has emerged. The flyover near the island of Gotland on March 2 was a deliberate act designed to intimidate Sweden, according to Swedish news channel TV4 Nyheterna. A total of four planes had taken off from the Russian air base of Kaliningrad.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Experts said on Saturday they were worried by a leaked report that describes an outbreak of smallpox in the Soviet Union -- one they say may point to the testing of a smallpox biological weapon.Seven people became ill in the 1971 outbreak and three died of what appeared to be the more fatal, and more rare, hemorrhagic form of the infection, said Dr. Alan Zelicoff of the Monterey Institute of International Studies, one of the authors of the report."Someone has successfully disseminated smallpox as an aerosol," Zelicoff said in an interview."It has been talked about and it...

An explosion occurred at the Vector State Virology Research Center near Novosibirsk . This research center has one of the most comprehensive collections of dangerous viruses in the world. According to Rospotrebnadzor, on the fifth floor of a six-story laboratory building, a gas bottle exploded during repair work, after which a fire broke out on an area of 30 square meters. The fire is eliminated. One worker suffered. With burns of the second and third degree, he was taken to the hospital. In Rospotrebnadzor emphasized that in the room where the explosion occurred, there were no biohazardous substances. At the...

WASHINGTON – It was little more than a rumor during the darkest days of the Cold War. Did agents of the Soviet Union conceal nuclear and biological weapons of mass destruction inside the U.S. and other western cities? New evidence suggests they did – and that Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terrorists network is determined to find them and use them with the help of bribed Russian spies or special forces soldiers who have maintained their secret locations for all these years. According to a report by Gordon Thomas and David M. Dastych in the latest issue of the Polish news...