Free Republic

Several parents sued Character.ai last year, alleging its chatbots abused their children. One Florida mother wants to hold the company liable for her 14-year-old son’s suicide. Megan Garcia argued in October 2024 court filings that the company wrongly marketed the app as safe for children—while harboring characters that led her son into hypersexualized role-play, encouraged him to spend all his time chatting with them, and talked with him about suicide. A Character.ai bot asked the teen to “come home” to her seconds before his death.STRANGE HUMAN-LIKE RELATIONSHIPS are just one of many ethical concerns posed by generative AI. The technology...

An Oklahoma farmer was attacked and killed by two water buffaloes he had just bought the day before. Brad McMichael, 45, died Friday when he was attacked at his farm in the small town of Jones, around 15 miles northeast of downtown Oklahoma City, by the animals he had just bought at auction, his family said. “He loved his livestock and as tragic as this, as he died doing something that he loved,” his girlfriend, Jennifer Green, told KOCO. McMichael was an experienced handler of exotic animals, and saw the water buffaloes as “an opportunity” for the meat, Green said....

A very irate Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif) strenuously objected to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid on the Glass House Farms in Camarillo. saying "this invasion by an uninvited federal agency is wrong in so many ways. First, California is a sanctuary state. We love our immigrants and don't want them taken away. Second, California was once a part of Mexico before it was stolen in 1848. Third, Graham Farrar, the co-founder, president, and board director of Glass House Farms, has donated thousands to Democrats in California. He deserves better treatment. Fourth, this raid forced me to cut my...

Jay Cutler is facing some serious backlash on social media after posing with a Sable antelope he killed on a hunting trip in South Africa. The retired NFL quarterback, best known for his eight seasons with the Bears, posted the photos of himself with the wild animal on Instagram over the weekend. “Kicked off the Africa hunt with a beauty,” Cutler captioned his post. “Sable down.” The comments section lit up the 42-year-old Cutler, who has spent much of his free time hunting since retiring from the NFL in 2017. “I went to Africa on a safari and saw the...

Gravitational waves from massive black holes challenge current astrophysical models The LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) Collaboration has detected the merger of the most massive black holes ever observed with gravitational waves using the US National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded LIGO observatories. The powerful merger produced a final black hole approximately 225 times the mass of our Sun. The signal, designated GW231123, was detected during the fourth observing run of the LVK network on November 23, 2023. LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, made history in 2015 when it made the first-ever direct detection of gravitational waves, ripples in space-time. In that case, the...

A mysterious fever gripped the nation in 2020. Some called it mass formation psychosis. Others called it hysteria. It was a result of three distinct events, as well as institutional responses designed to exploit existing societal tensions. Those three events were the Covid-19 pandemic, the death of George Floyd, and the impending re-election of Donald Trump. So much of what we were told by the authorities and the experts at that time has now been debunked. But those who work in academia know that, as crazy as life was out in the “real world,” it was even crazier in the...

President Trump announced Monday the US will send “billions of dollars” worth of weapons to Ukraine via Washington’s NATO allies — and threatened to impose 100% tariffs on Moscow in 50 days if no peace is struck to end the 40-month-old war. During his press conference with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, the President mentioned that when he would tell his wife about his positive calls with Vladimir Putin, she would react skeptically. "I go home, I tell the first lady, you know, I spoke to Vladimir today. We had a wonderful conversation." She said, "Oh, really? another city was...

For nearly a year, 29-year-old Yessica Arrua was living like a high-earning veterinarian despite working as a receptionist at a Florida horse clinic. Thanks to a payroll mix-up, Arrua, who is originally from Argentina, allegedly pocketed more than $400,000 of another employee’s salary between February 2022 and January 2023, according to the Daily Mail. During this time, Arrua’s paychecks were nearly seven times her actual salary, according to a police report from the Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office. The error went unnoticed until the Palm Beach Equine Clinic’s CFO discovered the issue and flagged it with their payroll provider, Harbor America....

The U.S. government posted a surplus in June as tariffs gave an extra bump to a sharp increase in receipts, the Treasury Department said Friday. With government red ink swelling throughout the year, last month saw a surplus of just over $27 billion, following a $316 billion deficit in May. That brought the fiscal year-to-date deficit to $1.34 trillion, up 5% from a year ago. However, with calendar adjustment, the deficit actually edged lower by 1%. There are three months left in the current fiscal year. A 13% increase in receipts from the same month a year ago helped bridge...

2.1 million people live in Gaza, and a new judicial ruling in France gives every single one of them the right to move to France. If I were Bibi Netanyahu, I would buy every single one of them a plane ticket and wave goodbye as they took their free trip to Paris. If I were a Gazan, I would accept that free ticket and get on the first plane, hoping that the free room and board will allow me to enjoy my time there.

Zohran Mamdani, the Democrat Party's antisemitic, socialist nominee for mayor of New York City, apparently proved he’s extremist enough to earn the backing of the political machine of America’s most notorious billionaire. The New York Post reported July 12 that George Soros poured $37 million into a litany of leftist groups backing Mamdani, which is ironic given the latter’s phony, public dog-and-pony show disdain for billionaires. As the Post summarized, “[I]t’s unlikely [Mamdani would be] be the front-runner to become the Big Apple’s next mayor if it wasn’t for” the left’s “kingmaker” Soros. The Soros fortune went into a collective...

The International Space Station’s first visitors from India, Poland and Hungary headed back to Earth on Monday, wrapping up a private mission and catching a ride home with SpaceX. Their capsule undocked from the orbiting lab and aimed for a splashdown the next morning in the Pacific off the Southern California coast. The short, privately financed mission marked the first time in more than 40 years that India, Poland and Hungary saw one of their own rocket into orbit. The three astronauts were accompanied by America’s most experienced space flier, Peggy Whitson, who works for Axiom Space, which chartered the...

-snip- I go home, I tell the First Lady, "I spoke to Vladimir today. We had a wonderful conversation." She said, "Oh really? Another city was just hit." So it's like, look, he's— I don't want to say he's an assassin, but he's a tough guy. It's been proven over the years. He's fooled a lot of people. He fooled Bush. He fooled a lot of people. He fooled Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden. He didn't fool me. But what I do say is that at a certain point, you know, ultimately talk—talk doesn't—it's got to be action. It's got to...

Laura Loomer @LauraLoomer 🚨 EXCLUSIVE 🚨 White House Records Director Who Caused the National Archivist To Prompt The Raid On Mar-a-Lago By Biden’s @FBI & DOJ Is Still Employed By The Trump White House!!! David S. Ferriero, the 10th Archivist of the United States (2009–2022), played a pivotal role in the controversy surrounding President Donald Trump’s handling of federal records that led to him being indicted (falsely and maliciously) during the 2024 Presidential election. After Trump left office in January 2021, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), under Ferriero’s leadership, alleged (falsely and maliciously) that 15 boxes of presidential...

During the 2024 presidential campaign, President Donald J. Trump repeatedly told Americans that his administration would carry out mass deportations and always put Americans First...The president is now expressing concerns about the impact that mass deportations will have on the agricultural and hospitality segments of the economy, and he is now proposing a qualified form of amnesty for illegal aliens and their employers.

[Catholic Caucus] Will Leo weigh in on France's criminal chancellor?Only the pope can overrule the Archbishop of Toulouse. Will he do it?A French archbishop is standing by his decision to appoint as chancellor a priest who was convicted of raping a 16-year-old boy, and who spent four years in prison for the offense While Archbishop Guy de Kerimel of Toulouse argues that appointing the priest to a prominent archdiocesan position is an act of mercy, Catholics in France and the U.S. seem skeptical, with some asking why Fr. Dominique Spina is eligible for any diocesan assignment at all.And as the...

A 19-year-old man was killed when he fell into a meat grinder at a Vernon food processing facility Sunday night.

Our study explored the evolutionary trajectory of grapevine cultivation in Italy through the analysis of archaeological grape pips spanning approximately 7,000 years...During the Early Neolithic and Early Bronze Age periods, the absence of morphologically domestic grapes suggests a reliance on wild grape gathering, possibly with some experiment of proto-cultivation of wild grape.Despite previous research showing the presence of domestic grapes in Middle Bronze Age sites such as Pertosa Cave in southern Italy and Sa Osa in Sardinia, our study of grape pips from several other sites do not reveal robust evidence for domestic grapes in Middle Bronze Age sites in...

President Donald Trump was reportedly caught “flat-footed” when the Pentagon abruptly announced it was freezing shipments of critical weapons to Ukraine, including Patriot missile interceptors, precision-guided GMLRS, and artillery rounds.The rationale for halting shipments of defensive weapons to Ukraine stems from a review that found that the U.S. only has about 25 percent of the Patriot interceptors needed for all Defense Department military plans.Yet just days later, Trump reversed course. “They’re getting hit very hard now,” he said. “We’re going to send some more weapons — defensive weapons primarily.”The rapid pivot back to arms transfers to Ukraine illustrates just how...

[Catholic Caucus] The Saga of a Cristero FamilyFreedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. It has to be fought for and defended by each generation. – Ronald Wilson Reagan, July 6, 1987.In the hushed, early morning hours, a small group of guerrilla fighters quietly set ablaze several small bridges north and south of the Colima railroad station, razing major access points in and out of the town strangled by criminal caudillos.Celebrating the destruction, Colonel Marcos “Marquitos” Torres Virgen (1899-1928) led his Cristero soldiers, filled with bravado, as they galloped on horseback, tearing – uncontested – through the...