Free Republic

Over a single weekend in August, 1200 technology contractors found themselves locked out of their systems, their access badges deactivated, their projects suspended indefinitely. The mass termination wasn't the result of budget cuts or strategic pivots—it was the fallout from a corruption scheme that reached into the highest echelons of Walmart's Global Tech division. The retail giant's abrupt severance of ties with Caspex-sourced contractors followed the firing of a Global Tech vice president who had been orchestrating an elaborate kickback operation. Daily payments starting from $30,000 flowed from contracting agencies seeking preferential treatment in Walmart's vast technology ecosystem, sources familiar...

Someone in the cartel is in trouble. The U.S. Coast Guard, in partnership with the Department of Defense, seized over 75,000 pounds of illegal narcotics. The value of the rugs is estimated to be nearly $500 million. Most of the drugs were seized near the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean. The Washington Examiner reported more in-depth details about the drug seizure: The Coast Guard seized more than 75,000 pounds of illegal narcotics, valued at $473 million, from late June to mid-August, the service announced on Monday. The 76,140-pound haul, which was obtained in 19 different interdictions in the Eastern...

A judge on Monday ordered the Republican-dominated Utah legislature to redraw its congressional map ahead of the 2026 midterms, after the body appeared to ignore safeguards voters put in place to ensure districts aren’t gerrymandered. The Congressional map, which was drawn in 2021, divided the Democratic Salt Lake County into the state's four districts, which diluted Democratic influence. The districts have since been won by Republican candidates, per the Associated Press. U.S. District Court Judge Dianna Gibson ruled that the maps need to be redone because state lawmakers ignored an independent commission that was established by voters to limit partisan...

Pakistan's repression of its overseas critics demonstrates how mass, unvetted Islamic migration affects free speech in the West. Pakistan is one of the world’s most repressive regimes, as it systematically targets dissidents—critics as well as members of ethnic and religious minorities. Such targeting occurs in various ways, including through abductions, arrests, torture, and murders. As a result, many critics flee the country and seek asylum elsewhere, hoping for a freer and safer life. Yet, even in exile, they are targeted and persecuted by Pakistan’s Intelligence Services (ISI). Host countries (the UK, Netherlands, France, Sweden, Germany, Canada, and the U.S., among...

Top officials at the Pentagon are “thinking about” whether the U.S. should acquire equity stakes in leading defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Tuesday. The Cabinet secretary, in an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” revealed the Defense Department’s interest in taking those stakes days after the U.S. government acquired 10% of Intel stock in a roughly $9 billion deal. Lutnick was asked if the Trump administration would repeat that move with other companies that do business with the government. “Oh there’s a monstrous discussion about defense,” Lutnick replied. Lockheed, which makes most of its revenue...

Korean Air announced a $50 billion order on Monday for 103 Boeing airplanes and GE Aerospace engines and servicing, coinciding with the visit of South Korean President Lee Jae Myung to Washington. The order, the largest in the Korean air carrier’s history, includes a mix of 787s, 777s and 737 Boeing airplanes worth about $36.5 billion. Reuters first reported the deal earlier Monday. Korean Air also announced a separate deal Monday with GE on the purchase and maintenance of engines valued at $13.7 billion. Many countries negotiating trade deals with the Trump administration have announced or plan to announce significant...

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky stated on 25 August that Kiev plans to secure at least $1 billion monthly from European nations to purchase US weapons to continue his war against Russia. Zelensky made the comment while speaking alongside Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store during a press conference in Kiev on Monday…

Daily Readings from the USCCB“Blind guides, who strain out the gnat and swallow the camel! Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites. You cleanse the outside of cup and dish, but inside they are full of plunder and self-indulgence. Blind Pharisee, cleanse first the inside of the cup, so that the outside also may be clean.” Matthew 23:24–26Imagine if someone were to offer to wash the dishes after dinner and all they did was to wash the outside of the cups and bowls but left the inside untouched and then placed them back in the cupboard. The next time...

Well expectations were sky high when he held a massive outdoor rally in November of 2008 at the Chicago lakefront. But Obama took things in the exact opposite direction. The economy did stabilize but only for the already successful. Obama became the DIVIDER IN CHIEF.

Archaeologists unearthed a massive trove of gold coins in the Czech Republic, minted by a long-lost civilization — with the site described by officials as "exceptional." The discovery was announced by the Museum of Eastern Bohemia in Hradec Králové. The Celtic settlement was found along the route of a future highway, the July release said. The site dates back to the La Tène period, with archaeologists finding that the settlement peaked in roughly the second century B.C. It served as a "supra-regional trade and production center" that linked Central Europe to far-flung corners of the ancient world. The La Tène...

Weren’t we assured that Barack Obama went “into and out of office with not a whiff of scandal”? Yes we were. Former Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen told us so, as did many others. But it wasn’t true. There are many, the most recent a claim that Obama, and then Joe Biden, pressured bank executives to deny services to conservatives. It’s a serious charge that, like the Russia hoax, makes Watergate look like a sandbox squabble. Here’s what we’ve learned: According to Fox Business, major bank executives said “they were under pressure by the Obama and Biden administrations to deny...

Poland’s president has vetoed a bill that would extend aid to Ukrainian refugees. Karol Nawrocki, a nationalist conservative, commented that Ukrainians “make the effort to work in Poland” and pay taxes in the country in order to be eligible for support. Nawrocki, whose own party approved of the initial aid to Ukrainians, stated that the current financial package “places us in a situation where citizens of Poland are treated worse in their own country than our guests.” Over 1.5 million Ukrainians have fled to Poland since the beginning of the Russia-Ukraine war. Poland has offered every single refugee a taxpayer-subsidized...

Security researchers from Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 have discovered the key to getting large language model (LLM) chatbots to ignore their guardrails, and it's quite simple. You just have to ensure that your prompt uses terrible grammar and is one massive run-on sentence like this one which includes all the information before any full stop which would give the guardrails a chance to kick in before the jailbreak can take effect and guide the model into providing a "toxic" or otherwise verboten response the developers had hoped would be filtered out. The paper also offers a "logit-gap" analysis approach...

NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch told US Attorney General Pam Bondi on Monday that the city’s police force has crime under control and doesn’t need the National Guard, law-enforcement sources said. The pair met for about 30 minutes behind closed doors at One Police Plaza in Manhattan, with the tête-à-tête occurring as President Trump has taken a keen interest in boosting public safety in the city — including by potentially deploying additional boots on the ground in the five boroughs. The president has already sent armed National Guard troops to crime-riddled Washington, DC. But the Big Apple’s top cop politely pointed...

Apparently trumps threat is starting to get real. They have to have a preliminary plan to give [t]o the mayor by Wednesday of how CPD will respond if the national guard is deployed... will cpd have to assist in any way if anyone is arrested for local and non federal charges etc etc. some are hinting this may happen in time for Mexican independence weekend. This will be a disaster... Au contraire dear reader....this will not be a disaster. This will be entertainment of the highest order. We have contacts standing by at three different hospitals and a mole in...

NOTE: This interview is from April 25, 2025. Never been put up here. A view from inside the war in Ukraine. Over the past years, countless American journalists have embedded with Zelensky’s military. On the Russian side, there’s only one: Patrick Lancaster.

Screencap of Twitter/X video. Trump has had control of Washington, DC for a little over a week and it has already made a tremendous difference, and while partisans and talking heads on TV continue to describe this as ‘authoritarian’ many of the people who actually live there seem to appreciate it. In the video below, which has been shared widely on Twitter/X and other social media platforms, a young woman from Washington, DC marvels at what Trump has been able to do in such a short amount of time. You will not see this young woman featured on CNN or...

Forget the old-school thrills of "F1," the family charm of "Freakier Friday," and even the surprisingly pro-life "Fantastic Four: First Steps" — because this summer's feel-good movie turns out to be an August sleeper hit that virtually nobody saw coming. It's the story of a failed presidential candidate who raised record sums, left record debt, lost anyway, and gave her party the finger when it needed her most. It's called "Kamala's Revenge," and it's the kind of razor-sharp political comedy that Hollywood hasn't dared make since 1997's "Wag the Dog." The premise of "Kamala's Revenge" is even wilder than Chauncey...

VIDEOChris W Films asked AI to imagine the CEO of Cracker Barrel course correcting from her grievous error and this is the result. And I still haven't stopped laughing.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz does not have the ability to manage Europe’s top economy. “The welfare state that we have today can no longer be financed with what we produce in the economy,” Merz said in a recent meeting. At the same time, Merz agreed to begin sending Ukraine 9 billion euros annually in addition to all other aid. Merz tried to claim there would “not be any increase in income tax on medium-sized companies in Germany with this federal government under my leadership.” SPD Vice Chancellor Lars Klingbeil disagrees, and said that middle and high-income citizens could race an...