Free Republic

"Joe Biden has surrendered America’s borders to illegal aliens, and now he has surrendered American airspace to Communist China. Biden is deliberately allowing a Chinese spy balloon to soar freely over the continental United States. Biden is WEAK on China. He dismantled the Trump administration’s initiative countering Chinese espionage in the United States, he canceled the ban on the Chinese intelligence weapon known as TikTok, and he is allowing China to buy up critical infrastructure all over the country, including real estate near sensitive U.S. military bases. When President Trump is back in the White House, he will kick Chinese...

Students and faculty have planned yet another protest as former Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., prepares to take leadership of the University of Florida. UF President-elect Sasse recently won approval from the Board of Trustees to become the school’s next president. He is one of many Republicans and conservatives who are taking up positions in Florida’s academia amid a much larger push against woke politicization of education. The Gainesville Sun, a local Florida newspaper, reported that the incoming college president "will be greeted by protestors Monday afternoon outside the school's administration building as he officially takes the helm of the top-5...

On Friday’s broadcast of CNN’s “Situation Room,” former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta stated that the Chinese spy balloon over the U.S. is “gathering intelligence” and that the U.S. either needs to intercept it or shoot it down if that’s the last alternative and that simply letting the balloon go out to sea is not an option. Panetta said, “I think the United States has to take control of this balloon. There are two things that are of great concern here: One is that it’s been determined to be a surveillance balloon, which means that it’s gathering intelligence. That’s the purpose...

Special Counsel John Durham’s ongoing investigation into the origins of the “Trump-Russia collusion” investigation significant. The piece, by Kevin R. Brock, a former assistant director of intelligence for the FBI, notes that for a year and a half, the country did not hear much of out Durham after he was appointed late in former President Trump’s term. Aside from indictments regarding “peripheral” figures, it looked to many of Trump’s supporters as though not much was going to come of Durham’s probe and “that elites higher up the stack are going to get away with their chicanery,” Brock wrote. “The problem...

Humanitarian worker and U.S. Marine Corps veteran Pete Reed was killed while aiding civilians in Bakhmut, Ukraine, on Thursday, according to his family and two medical aid groups he worked with. Reed, who served two deployments as a Marine rifleman in Afghanistan, founded the nonprofit Global Response Medicine in 2017. In a statement, the organization said, "Pete was the bedrock of GRM, serving as Board President for 4 years. In January, Pete stepped away from GRM to work with Global Outreach Doctors on their Ukraine mission and was killed while rendering aid." Andrew Lustig, the founder and president of Global...

Wind chill reaches -104F on Mount Washington becoming the coldest temperature ever recorded in the United States.

Lakshman Gogada and two roommates... were “five steps” from entering a Walmart when they were robbed at gunpoint and Gogada’s roommates — both of whom had arrived from India only 10 days earlier — were shot, one fatally “I was saved by God’s grace, but they both were hit by bullets,” said Gogada, 22, who was not injured when, according to police, five people pulled up to them in a stolen 2020 Kia Forte on Jan. 22 “We just gave the phone and money, but they only took the money and left the phones, and even after giving, they just...

***** Tunes For Our Troops ~ Car and Truck Songs! ~ *****~ Support The Artists You Hear Throughout The Canteen ~ ***** Warning: Not all music may be appropriate for children! Please click with caution. Thank you! Tunes For The Troops This music is provided for the entertainment of our Troops, Veterans, Allies & their families! Enjoy the variety of musical selections that the Canteen DJs provide throughout the thread. Please ping any DJ with your requests for the Troops! All music is removed on Monday.Thanks to all the DJs for their time & effort providing entertainment for the...

OpenAI, the maker of Artificial Intelligence chatbot ChatGPT, announced on Tuesday that it has released a new software tool to help detect whether someone is trying to pass off AI-generated text as something that was written by a person.The tool, known as a classifier, comes two months after the release of ChatGPT, a chatbot that generates human-like responses based on the input it is given. Schools were quick to limit ChatGPT’s use over concerns that it could fuel academic dishonesty and hinder learning, as students have been using the chatbot to create content that they are passing off as their...

I struggle to find liberal policies that achieve what they claim to aim at.Which of course brings up the question: are they actually aimed at achieving what is claimed?Often, no. Usually no. Occasionally the liberals are merely stupid, not evil. But Occam’s Razor suggests that with a record of being always wrong, the Left isn’t actually trying to achieve what they say. With all those high-powered degrees at hand, at least a few of the policymakers must actually be intelligent.A great example is “affordable housing” programs. Have you noticed housing getting any more affordable? I sure haven’t. And that is...

A newly revealed email is raising serious questions about Hunter Biden’s business dealings and what kind of access he had to classified information.Joe Biden is currently embroiled in a scandal surrounding his illegal possession of classified materials going back to his days in the US Senate. The email in question dates to 2011 and involves the president’s son attempting to sell intelligence on Russian oligarchs.The New York Post has the report.Documents dating back to 2011 on his notorious “laptop from hell” showed Hunter offered to sell intelligence on Russian oligarchs to the US aluminum firm Alcoa Inc. for $55,000, according...

We're talking between 40 to 60 fake 911 calls a day, coming into the Summit County Dispatch Center. Team members expect this only to get worse as the season picks up for skiers. Summit County Director 911, Trina Dummer, was more than happy to sit down with CBS News Colorado to get a message out to the public before a big gift-giving holiday begins. She warns that some versions of Apple Watches and iPhone 14s have a system on them that automatically sends a 911 call if they detect a crash. The issue is, every one of those calls that...

911 dispatchers are buried under an avalanche of false, automated distress calls from skiers and other Apple device owners who are very much alive. “Do you have an emergency?” Mr. Betts asked. No, the man said, he was skiing — safely, happily, unharmed. Slightly annoyed, he added, “For the last three days, my watch has been dialing 911.” Winter has brought a decent amount of snowfall to the region’s ski resorts, and with it an avalanche of false emergency calls. Virtually all of them have been placed by Apple Watches or iPhone 14s under the mistaken impression that their owners...

PEMBROKE PINES, Fla.–A third teenager has been arrested for her role in a brutal fight between students at West Broward High School. The beating was caught on camera. The school’s principal sent a letter to parents stating that those who recorded the fight would also face consequences. Video of this latest incident shows five girls savagely punching a classmate at the Pembroke Pines high school on Jan. 24. Two of the girls were previously arrested, and Wednesday authorities announced the arrest of a third girl who was involved. Two of the three girls are 17 years old and the third...

The U.S. government says that another Chinese spy balloon is traveling over Latin America. Pentagon spokesperson Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder told Fox News on Friday night that "We are seeing reports of a balloon transiting Latin America. We now assess it is another Chinese surveillance balloon." This is a developing story.

Washington has been cautious about which arms it provides Kyiv and from where the weaponry arrives. But speaking in Israel today, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told Israeli counterparties they ought to be doing a lot more. Alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Monday, Blinken stated as a matter of fact that “Russia’s ongoing atrocities” underscore the importance of “providing support for all of Ukraine’s needs—humanitarian, economic and security.” He implied that this support was an international responsibility. On Tuesday, he appeared to place that burden squarely on Israeli shoulders. “Iran’s deepening ties with Moscow and the sophisticated weaponry...

Melinda Dillon, who received supporting Oscar nominations for her turns in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Absence of Malice and portrayed the doting mom in the holiday perennial A Christmas Story, died Jan. 9, her family announced. She was 83. In Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Dillon portrayed Jillian Guiler, the single mother who heads to Devils Tower with her next-door neighbor (Richard Dreyfuss) in search of her 3-year-old son, who’s been abducted by aliens through the kitchen doggy door. Sydney Pollack’s Absence of Malice (1981) had her back with Slap Shot co-star Paul...

A woman in Oregon was awarded $1 million in damages this week after a jury found that she was discriminated against when a gas station attendant told her he didn’t “serve Black people.” The decision by the jury in Multnomah County, which came after a four-day civil trial, included $550,000 in punitive damages. Greg Kafoury, a lawyer for Rose Wakefield, the plaintiff, said his client felt “vindicated” and was looking forward to putting this case behind her. “This company deserved to be publicly humiliated just as they had publicly humiliated my client by calling her a liar in court for...

Edit: The primary balloon is allegedly over Missouri as of around 5:00pm Eastern time. By the time this gets out it will have moved on, probably to the east coast. Sorry for the delay, I recorded this on the morning of Feb 3 and it has taken 6 hours to upload because I'm currently in the middle of the woods working on unrelated content. Crises clearly don't like fitting into my production schedule as I would like. Edit 2: 1933 Eastern - picking up reports of a possible missile strike on a balloon over Montana. Developing right now, more information...

Charges have been dropped against a British woman who was arrested in December for silently praying outside an abortion clinic in England, but she has nevertheless decided to pursue a verdict in court to clear her name, her attorneys announced Friday. Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, who police took into custody for violating a Public Space Protection Order in a viral video, has decided to pursue a verdict so that she can clear her own name and protect other pro-life activists who might run into similar issues in the future.(snip) Vaughan-Spruce was approached by three police officers in early December while standing...