Singapore News Channel, Singapore News Network

A band of herpes-ridden monkeys are roaming across northeastern Florida after escaping from a state park miles away, threatening the locals and the environment.

The rhesus macaques were living at the Silver Springs State Park near Ocala, Florida, but the creatures, native to south and southeast Asia, escaped the area and have since been spotted in Jacksonville, St. Johns, St. Augustine, Palatka, Welaka, and Elkton, Florida, according to First Coast News.

While the monkeys tend to keep to themselves, over a quarter of the 300 feral creatures counted at Silver Spring State Park carried Herpes B, according to a 2018 survey by National Geographic.

While it’s extremely rare for herpes B to spread from monkey to human, when it does it can be fatal.

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Two may be better than one, at least when it comes to fighting arthritis. Recent research at the Salk Gene Expression Laboratory has found that a combination of two osteoarthritis drugs is better than either one alone. In fact, researchers say the medicinal cocktail actually reversed signs of the condition in rats.

Osteoarthritis, known as “wear and tear” arthritis, causes joint stiffness and pain. Over time, the cartilage that cushions bones breaks down and there is overgrowth on the underlying bones. So far, pain relievers and joint replacement surgery are about the only remedies offered for the 30 million U.S. adults who have this disease.

But that may change with the powerful one-two punch drug combo currently being studied for potential use in humans.

Scientists considered two drugs that singly offered some degree of success in treating osteoarthritis in animal studies. The first drug, known as αKLOTHO, keeps the mesh of molecules surrounding articular cartilage cells strong and healthy. The other, TGFβR2, stimulates growth in the cartilage cells themselves.

They wondered what might happen if the two were combined. Scientists conducted experiments on rats and isolated human cartilage cells in a laboratory setting, and found that the two drugs together reverse cellular and molecular symptoms of osteoarthritis.

“What’s really exciting is that this is potentially a therapy that can be translated to the clinic quite easily,” says Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, lead author and a professor at the Salk laboratory, in a news release.

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Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) is in Iowa doing last-minute campaigning on behalf of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). During an event in Clive Iowa, Omar explained how her idea of the “American Dream” were shattered once she came to America.

“When I first came to the United States, I remember one of the first things that I saw was homeless people sleeping on the sides of Manhattan when we arrived in New York. And I remember turning to my father and saying, ‘This doesn’t look like the America you promised.’ And my father looked at me and said, ‘Hush, child, we are going to get to our America,'” Omar recounted. “Because the America we were shown in the orientation tapes when we were coming here from the refugee camp in Kenya had beautiful homes with white picket fences, happy families eating a full meal in their beautiful living rooms. It had happy children getting on the bus to go to their beautiful schools. It had pictures of amazing malls, megamalls, and had pictures of beautifully built bridges and highways. It was a picture of abundance. Now that is the ideal.”

“That is the America we all know we deserve but our reality is full of homeless people. Our reality is full of families who have moms and dads who are going without dinner or lunch or breakfast just so that they can have enough for their children,” she explained. “Our reality is full of kids who are showing up to schools that are full of mold and leaking rooftops. Our reality has children who are facing drills every single day to learn about how they can escape being shot in our schools.”

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If past is prologue, the losing team in Sunday’s Super Bowl will swallow its bitter disappointment and graciously offer its congratulations to the winners.

Our politics used to be like that.

After Vice President Al Gore lost the 2000 presidential election by a 5-4 vote in the Supreme Court, he expressed his disagreement and frustration, but declared that “partisan rancor must now be put aside.”

“I accept the finality of the outcome,” Gore said in a televised address. “And tonight, for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy, I offer my concession.”

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Ronald Reagan once quipped, “They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong.” That’s a lesson Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., proved on Jan. 29 with his simple, but much needed, bill to improve our overburdened immigration courts.

His bill, barely more than a page long, would fix a long-standing weakness of the immigration courts by giving immigration judges the power to hold lawyers and litigants in contempt if they disobey court orders or ignore deadlines.

This would give immigration judges a power that every other state and federal trial court judge in the country has. It also would address a big reason the immigration courts are crushed under enormous and seemingly irreducible caseloads.

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A recently released study confirms the suspicion that American higher education has become absurdly and ruthlessly monolithic in terms of political ideology.

The study found that the ratio of college professor donations to Democrats as opposed to Republicans was 95:1.

Besides federal agency employees, few other industries outside working for the Democratic National Committee or the media are so strongly skewed toward Democrats and the left.

The authors of the study, Heterodox Academy Research Director Sean Stevens and Brooklyn College Professor Mitchell Langbert, admit to some uncertainty on the numbers.

But even if the disparity in donations isn’t quite so high, it’s still clearly extreme and highly problematic, as the researchers explain.

“Researchers have raised concerns that ideological homogeneity may lead to questionable research practices,” Stevens and Langbert wrote. “This concern is grounded in research on confirmation bias, group polarization, motivated reasoning, and the tendency for these phenomena to be even more pronounced among the highly educated. As well, partisan polarization has been leading to Republicans’ increasing skepticism about higher education.”

Beyond problematic research is the larger problem that, at all but a handful of Americans colleges, young Americans are being dropped straight into left-wing indoctrination centers.

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