Free Republic

The Seattle Times and Newsday have sued OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing the companies of copying hundreds of thousands of articles without permission to train AI systems and asking a federal court to destroy models and training datasets that incorporate their journalism. The copyright infringement lawsuit, filed September 4 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, targets the use of the newspapers' work in products including ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and AI features in Bing. The publishers say OpenAI and Microsoft scraped stories from their websites, including articles behind paywalls, and incorporated the material into their AI...

Grindr, the world's largest LGBTQ+ dating app, reportedly went down as the Republican National Convention's midterm event began on Wednesday. According to Downdetector, the app reported several outages just as the conservative event kicked off at the American Airlines Center in Dallas, Texas ahead of the speech of Donald Trump The highest number of reported outages appeared to occur in and around the Dallas area. "Man, I should become a Republican," joked one person on X. "Well, they say it's a big tent," posted another person. It comes after Trump's furious 5-word outburst at his pilot before storming off was...

Harry Potter author JK Rowling was forced to cover the name of her superyacht while moored in Marina del Rey harbor, according to a new report. The beloved author has endured a storm of protests since expressing 'deep concerns' about transgender activism in an essay June 2020. She celebrated on the deck of a boat after a UK ruling that decided the legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex in April 2025 She rose from homelessness to become one of the most celebrated children's writers of all-time. It was originally commissioned for LA businessman Eric Smidt, the...

Freddie Mercury’s closest friend Mary Austin discussed the moment she became certain the Queen star was gay – and it took place before the couple talked about it. They’d been living together for four years when Mercury told Austin he had something to say. But in a new interview with the Guardian, she revealed she’d known for some time. Explaining why she’d fallen for him in the first place, she said: “He was different from the others. He was more creative. He was just more interesting. “Like, he’d go to see the film Cabaret over and over again. I loved...

Recent remarks by US Vice-President JD Vance about the Antichrist and "the end times" are a "very common belief", one of his friends says. Vance recently mused on his religious views while responding to a question on a Christian podcast. He said he would "not [be] shocked if the Antichrist was walking among us" and speculated on whether the end of the world was nigh. Rod Dreher, a conservative writer, rejected any suggestion that the comments would harm the vice-president. He told the BBC's Today programme: "Most Americans who are inclined to vote Republican already believe this stuff." In his...

Kamala Harris suffered a humiliating moment on Jeopardy! as contestants were left stumped when asked for the name of her memoir. The contenders stared blankly and could not provide the title of the former vice president's tell-all book about losing the 2024 election. The question read: 'The title of this 2025 memoir by Kamala Harris refers to how long she had to launch and run her 2024 presidential campaign.' The answer – '107 Days' – eluded the panel of three contestants, leading to an awkward lull before the host stepped in. 'She had 107 days,' Ken Jennings chimed in with...

President Donald Trump has been praised after it was revealed woke American professors are being poached by Canadian universities, including an academic who teaches transgender philosophy. California State University philosophy professor, Talia Mae Bettcher, who is transgender, is among the many American-based educators who have packed their bags and headed north to Canada to become a part of the $541 million research funding project. 'I knew I had to leave,' Bettcher, who is a native Canadian but taught in Los Angeles, told The University of Waterloo, her new home. 'As a green card-holding trans-woman and outspoken academic in an area...

Apple is laying off 147 employees across its Silicon Valley offices – reportedly mostly software engineers working on augmented reality products – a fresh blow to the company's struggling virtual reality ambitions. The cuts come just weeks before Apple is expected to unveil its next generation of iPhones, including the highly anticipated iPhone 18 lineup and its first foldable iPhone. The Vision Pro goggles have struggled to attract mainstream consumers, thanks to its high price tag, hefty weight and limited selection of apps and experiences, all of which make it a difficult sell. The headset's launch in San Francisco in...

Official Music video for Zombie by The Cranberries.

Microsoft's purchase of Nokia's Devices and Services unit broke down to about $4.4 billion, while a patent license came in at around $1.9 billion, according to reporting by NBC News at the time. The deal included the transfer of about 32,000 Nokia employees to Microsoft, as well. Unfortunately, Microsoft's purchase didn't really pan out for the company. It wrote off $7.6 billion related to the acquisition in 2015, according to TechCrunch, admitting defeat within a year. Nokia, though, kept its name, its patents, and its network infrastructure business (the bit that keeps making money today), while it handed off the...

"Don't Bring Me Down" by Electric Light Orchestra extended remix version with beautiful girls dancing to the shuffle, all in HD.

For most Indians, paying by Unified Payments Interface (UPI) has become almost absurdly routine. Scan a QR code, tap a few buttons and the money moves instantly. There is no card machine, no cash, and - most importantly - for the user, no visible fee. That may be about to change. India has paved the way for banks and payment companies to charge merchants a fee on UPI transactions, potentially ending a decade-long experiment in free digital payments. The government has yet to decide the rate or exactly where it will apply, but proposals under discussion include a merchant discount...

P!nk's official live video for 'Try'

She denies Jesus is the Messiah, believes abortion and homosexuality are fine, and thinks Christians have bore false witness about the Pharisees, promising to rehab their image. The Catholic Biblical Association of America has spent nearly ninety years shaping how American Catholics read the Bible. It publishes the Catholic Biblical Quarterly, supplies scholarship to seminaries, helps train the people who train priests, and is well within the institutional machinery Rome uses to teach Scripture to Catholics. Last month, they acquired a new president. Amy-Jill Levine became the first Jewish scholar elected to lead the Catholic Biblical Association. Levine joined the...

NEW YORK (AP) — Before it was dubbed “the funeral screening,” it was just when Will Forte was going to see the movie. “Coyote vs. Acme” was finished. Director Dave Green, inspired by “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” had completed the editing on the Looney Tunes blend of cartoon and live action. The whole project, which takes an Ian Frazier “Shouts and Murmurs” column from The New Yorker as its source material, was an audacious comic gambit that seemed to be paying off. Hopes were high. Audience test scores were good. But days before Forte, who stars as Wile E. Coyote’s...

A small California city came into national view this week after a late-night host publicized its police department’s widespread surveillance network and questioned why its cameras had recorded a hotel property and its pool “for hundreds of hours.” In response, the spokesperson for the police department in Rialto, an Inland Empire city east of Los Angeles, downplayed concerns, saying the footage was only “passive monitoring.” John Oliver, host of “Last Week Tonight” on HBO, delivered a segment on police surveillance technology on Sunday. The comedian took jabs at several systems that have proliferated across the Bay Area, including Flock, the...

Terrifying doorbell camera video showed how a wide-eyed masked teenager dressed like a clown appeared to go door-to-door before being arrested in connection with an elderly neighbor's murder. The Illinois State Police said officers had responded to an intersection in East St Louis on Monday shortly after 10pm after reports of a body in the road. A 15-year-old, whose identity was not disclosed, was taken into custody on Tuesday as part of a homicide investigation. He was later charge with first degree murder. The victim was identified as John Wesley Allen Sr, 78, by the St Clair County Coroner, according...

A Michigan hair salon broke state law by telling prospective transgender customers to stay away and visit a dog groomer instead, officials have ruled. Studio 8 Hair Lab in Traverse City declared that anyone who did not identify as a man or woman was 'not welcome' in a Facebook post published in 2023. 'If a human identifies as anything other than a man/woman please seek services at a local pet groomer,' salon owner Christine Geiger wrote. 'You are not welcome at this salon. Period.' Geiger also warned that staff might refuse to use customers' preferred pronouns and instead call them...

Woke Jeopardy! host Ken Jennings has been condemned by an online transgender mob for playing one of The New York Times' online games. Jennings, 52, came under fire after he admitted to playing the Spelling Bee word game in a post he made on BlueSky, the left-wing alternative to X. 'My wife and I have a game where we try to invent the day's grossest-sounding word on NYT Spelling Bee,' Jennings wrote, with a screenshot. But a transgender BlueSky user calling herself Gwen Pepperoni was soon on the attack. She was seemingly outraged that Jennings would admit to subscribing to...

Concern is growing in Irish universities over a high rate of refusal of study visas to students in Gaza who are due to take up college scholarships in Ireland this September. RTÉ News understands that upwards of 20 Gazan students, who have all been accepted onto fully funded scholarships for third-level courses, have had their visa applications turned down by Irish immigration authorities. Others are awaiting outcomes. Sources within the universities say the refusal rate this year is in marked contrast to last year, when more than 80 Gazan students were granted visas and left Gaza in an evacuation organized...