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NIH cuts off funding for Russian lab work, animal experiments after Biden order

By Stephen Dinan
The Washington Times
Sunday, April 9, 2023
The National Institutes of Health says it has cut off all funding for work in Russian labs — including one that debilitated cats and then made them walk on a treadmill — as it seeks to comply with President Biden’s executive orders.

Mr. Biden ordered a halt to U.S. money for Russian research in the wake of President Vladimir Putin’s decision last year to invade neighboring Ukraine.

NIH says it’s in compliance.

“NIH currently does not fund any research in Russia,” the organization’s office of extramural research said in a statement to The Washington Times.

The White Coat Waste Project, which opposes federally funded animal testing, said millions of NIH dollars have flowed to Russia over the past decade.

That included research at the Pavlov Institute in St. Petersburg, which was part of an NIH grant to the Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech, to study spinal cord injuries and body motion.

Researchers “decerebrated” cats — removed part of their brain — then put them on a treadmill and hooked them to electrodes. Scientists then delivered electrical stimulation to prompt the cats to move

Simultaneous bidirectional hindlimb locomotion in decerebrate cats
V Lyakhovetskii et al. Sci Rep. 2021.

We show that epidural spinal cord stimulation can elicit stable bidirectional locomotion of decerebrate cats on a split-belt treadmill. The stepping pattern of one limb was similar to unidirectional forward walking and, the other-was similar to unidirectional backward walking. This confirms that spinal and brainstem circuitry are sufficient to control such complex and extraordinary motor tasks driven by somatosensory input. Interlimb coordination during forward and backward walking was preserved in 2 out of 4 animals during 'extreme' conditions when one of the treadmill belts was stopped. Bidirectional locomotion worsened but was still possible after temporary spinalization by cooling the spinal cord on a low thoracic level. These present evidence for the great degree of the automatism for this stepping mode defined by the spinal neuronal networks.

Lil Wayne, Post Malone Accused Of Scamming IRS Out Of Millions In SBA Grants
Preezy Brown
Mon, March 18, 2024 at 9:44 AM PDT

Lil Wayne and Post Malone are being accused of lying to the IRS about their respective workplace environments in order to secure millions in Small Business grants during the COVID-19 pandemic.

On Friday (March 15), Business Insider revealed that the outlet had filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Small Business Administration (SBA) in an attempt to gather information regarding celebrities they believe had wrongfully received business loans during the global crisis.

Among those accused are rap stars Lil Wayne and Post Malone, whom Business Insider says received grants for $8.9 million and $10 million, respectively. The loans were filed through Tunechi’s Young Money Touring Inc. and Malone’s Posty Touring Inc.

According to Business Insider, Wayne and Malone lied about having “drug-free work environments,” which is a required in order to receive a grant, on their respective SBA applications. The outlet pointed to each artist’s past admissions of drug use, such as Weezy’s consumption of marijuana and Malone’s usage of shrooms, as evidence to the contrary.

“The SBA’s process of monitoring and auditing of grant recipients is actively ongoing,” a statement from Business Insider read. “To date, about $40 million has been returned from SVOG grantees and additional files have been referred for ongoing criminal investigation or civil recovery. To date, none of the recoveries relate to the drug-free certification.”

Meanwhile, Gunderson took nearly $2 million in PPP loans that taxpayers forgave before selling his dealerships, but vehemently opposed support for working families through the Inflation Reduction Act – benefiting from federal aid while condemning financial relief for hardworking San Diego and Orange County residents.