Free Republic

"The market has indicated this is not investment-grade debt." It’s 2026, and tech companies continue to insist they need to spend staggering amounts of money on AI data centers. Yet for all of its enthusiasm over the past few years, Wall Street is finally starting to squint at the numbers. According to new reporting by Business Insider, JPMorgan Chase is running into trouble finding investors interested in servicing billions in debt backing two of the first five Stargate data centers. Stargate is Donald Trump’s $500 billion AI project led by tech companies Oracle and OpenAI. Its vague goal, OpenAI has...

China Sets The Price Now GFN – SHANGHAI Trading in a major China-listed silver fund was halted for a full session on January 30 as regulators moved to contain price distortions, while global silver prices fell sharply from record highs amid elevated volatility and tighter derivatives margin requirements. China’s Shenzhen Stock Exchange suspended trading for the entire day on January 30 in the UBS SDIC Silver Futures Fund LOF, according to an official fund announcement. The notice stated that trading would be halted from the market open through the close as part of exchange risk-control measures. “该基金将于2026年1月30日开市起停牌至收市。” (“The fund will...

Taiwan will use a range of joint intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance methods, as well as intelligence-sharing, to "grasp" China's possible intentions, says its defence minister.Taiwan is monitoring what it called "abnormal" changes to China's military leadership after its most senior general was put under investigation, and will not lower its guard as the threat level remains high, the defence minister said on Monday (Jan 26). China announced on Saturday that Zhang Youxia, second-in-command under President Xi Jinping as vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission, and another senior officer, Liu Zhenli, were under investigation ⁠for suspected serious violations of discipline and...

Democrats seem to be getting their mojo back as the midterm season heats up. Democrats topped Republicans on the generic congressional ballot by a considerable six points, 52% to 46%, scoring the highest of any party on that metric in the history of the survey commissioned by Fox News.The minority party also made massive gains on key issues, crushing Republicans on affordability by 14 points, health care by 21 points, helping the middle class by 14 points, transgender issues by 22 points, and even taxes by one point.<“Democrats are taking back the House in November,” a confident Democratic Congressional Campaign...

Xi Jinping has offered Europe new trade partnerships and promised to uphold the “values” of the United Nations. The move is an apparent attempt to capitalise on the continent’s growing rift with the United States. On Tuesday, Sir Keir Starmer became the latest leader to travel to Beijing after Mark Carney and Petteri Orpo, the prime ministers of Canada and Finland. In a meeting with Mr Orpo on Tuesday, the Chinese president said China and Europe were “partners, not adversaries” and invited Finnish companies to “swim in the vast ocean of the Chinese market”. He also appeared to snub Donald...

The US Secretary of State—once the most powerful diplomatic title on earth—announced that the US would not permit Ukraine to engage in peace talks with Russia and China. Hours later, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky invited Communist China’s Xi to Kiev to work on a peace plan.

Researchers in China have revealed a new special-operations drone capable of firing a standard infantry assault rifle with perfect accuracy in controlled live-fire trials. During the test, the weaponized drone hovered about 33 feet above the ground and engaged a target positioned 328 feet away. It fired 20 single shots, striking the mark every time. The target was a human-sized silhouette fitted with a 20-by-20-inch chest board, simulating the vital area of a standing person. According to a peer-reviewed study published on December 9 in the Journal of Gun Launch and Control, the system achieved a 100% hit rate while...

While reports have identified the Jiutian as a “general-purpose drone,” concepts have shown it releasing drone swarms with a range of surface and maritime strike munitions....Notably, the drone has a 6 ton payload capacity for either munitions, drone swarms and humanitarian relief material. A concept video on CCTV 14 from May 2025 shows a group of Jiutians releasing swarms of hundreds of smart quadcopter-like systems and other winged attack drones. These were then shown coordinating and overwhelming the U.S. Navy’s aircraft carriers and supporting battleships, clearing the way for anti-ship ballistic, cruise and surface strike missiles. Footage in the same...

It pairs radar and electro-optical sensors with intense microwave pulses to deliver a “hard kill,” potentially engaging small, low-altitude UAVs beyond three kilometers. Designed to slot into a broader air-defense network—alongside lasers and traditional guns—the system is pitched as a low-logistics answer to cheap swarmsChina’s defense industry has disclosed new technical details and outlined some enhanced capabilities for its truck-mounted Hurricane 3000 high-power microwave (HPM) weapon, a directed-energy system designed to counter unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and drone swarms. The details were published by the South China Morning Post.China Drone Aircraft Carrier. Image Credit: X Screenshot. The Hurricane 3000, developed...

Steep terrain has turned elevation into a fact of everyday life in Chongqing. Beyond the viral images of its dizzying cityscape, CNA traces a quieter human story of adaptation, loss and resilience across generations.SNIP The sprawling metropolis in southwest China is dubbed an "8D city" - an exaggeration of 3D - for its maze-like streets and viral visuals of roads stacked atop buildings. Mountains account for 76 per cent of Chongqing’s land areas, followed by hills at 22 per cent, and flat land at just 2 per cent, according to academic reports. SNIP "When you enter a building from the...

It has been a while since Metallicman has been here, I thought that this post of his was interesting, especially now. This is a multi-part posting. The amount of content is enormous and the scope is too broad for a couple of paragraphs. Please follow the arrows to move between the different sections. Also note that this article covers a very politically-incorrect subject matter, and supporting photos and writings are very graphic. This is not for children or people of tender sensibilities. ...there are periods in history when the entire paradigm you’ve been accustomed to living under changes rather abruptly...

The United States would suffer a devasting defeat and lose its biggest aircraft carrier if it tried to stop China invading Taiwan, according to a top secret Pentagon report. War games showed the U.S. would be overwhelmed by China's arsenal of around 600 hypersonic weapons, along with missiles and nuclear submarines. The grim assessment, revealed by the New York Times, confirmed the conclusions of previous war games, but it also highlighted wider concerns about the future direction of the U.S. military and its continued reliance on outdated methods. *** Ships like the $13 billion USS Gerald R. Ford - the...

A leading scientist’s warning about intensifying technological competition has been interpreted by the market as a starting gun. Shares of U.S. quantum computing companies soared after John Martinis, a 2024 Nobel Prize laureate in physics, stated in a recent Bloomberg interview that China is catching up rapidly, with the U.S. lead potentially narrowed to “nanoseconds.” The episode highlighted how geopolitical anxiety can fuel a market frenzy. “China has caught up quickly… I’m worried that maybe we’re nanoseconds ahead of them,” Martinis said. While intended as a serious warning about eroding U.S. technological supremacy, the financial market drew a different implication:...

The ‘cement-coated’ YKJ-1000 could prove ‘formidably competitive’ internationally if sold at the relatively cheap price of US$99,000Chinese aerospace firm Lingkong Tianxing unveiled a hypersonic glide missile last week that has a range of up to 1,300 km (800 miles) and a top speed of Mach 7. The YKJ-1000 has been nicknamed the “cement-coated” missile for its use of civilian-grade materials such as foamed concrete in its heat-resistant coating. According to slides widely circulated online, the unit production cost of this missile, already in mass production after successful combat trials, may be as low as 700,000 yuan (around US$99,000). A single...

Hostility toward the US president is somewhat lower in Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, and PortugalPARIS, December 4. /TASS/. Almost one in two EU citizens surveyed perceive US President Donald Trump as "Europe’s enemy," according to the results of a poll of 9,500 residents in nine EU countries conducted in late November and published in the French magazine Le Grand Continent. "According to the latest figures, Trump is largely perceived as Europe’s enemy. On average, 48% of EU citizens surveyed see him this way, while 10% consider him a friend [of Europe] and 40% view him as ‘neither friend nor foe,’"...

At least one Republican senator has said that the U.S. government cannot afford a Trump administration proposal to send out $2,000 tariff-derived rebate payments. “If we’re bringing in revenue through the tariffs, that ought to be applied to reduce the deficit, not just to make cash payments to Americans,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) told Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo on Monday. Bartiromo then told him: “It sounds like you would vote ‘no’ in terms of $2,000 checks going to individuals.” He added that “we can’t afford it” and that he wishes the U.S. government was “in a position to return the...

The future of cars could be up in the air... A #flyingcar may seem like the stuff of science fiction. But in China, it's on the cusp of going into mass production. In a huge leap toward the age of personal air travel, #XPeng has opened the world's first flying car factory. CGTN Jen Copestake reports.

After successfully entering orbit, the Shenzhou-22 spacecraft completed its status setup and successfully docked with the forward port of the Tianhe core module of the space station at 15:50 Beijing time on November 25, 2025. Following the docking, the Shenzhou-22 spacecraft will enter the combined docking section and will subsequently serve as the return spacecraft for the Shenzhou-21 astronaut crew.Currently, the Shenzhou-21 astronaut crew is in good condition in orbit and is completing all planned tasks. The Shenzhou-20 spacecraft will continue to remain in orbit to conduct relevant experiments.After the Shenzhou-20 spacecraft's return was delayed on November 5 due to...

Success! #Shenzhou22LaunchSuccess# ] At 12:11 PM Beijing time on November 25, 2025, the Long March-2F Y22 carrier rocket carrying the #Shenzhou22# spacecraft was launched from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center. Approximately 10 minutes later, the spacecraft successfully separated from the rocket and entered its predetermined orbit, marking a complete success for the launch mission. After entering orbit, the spacecraft will autonomously and rapidly rendezvous and dock with the space station assembly according to the predetermined procedures.The Shenzhou-22 spacecraft is unmanned and carries space food, space medicine, fresh fruits and vegetables, a device for dealing with cracks in the Shenzhou-20 spacecraft's...

Our economic realities as Americans are tied directly to energy. But those of us working outside the energy industry must be forgiven for not noticing that in 2022, China began construction on an experimental thorium reactor that requires no water, generates substantially less toxic byproduct, purports and appears be vastly safer than all other reactor designs, and all but eliminates the possibility of meltdown. American citizens should be forgiven for not noticing because in 2022, as you recall, we were suffocating in the various tendrils of psychological operations and captured government. And when China operationalized the reactor and proved the...