Free Republic

President Trump claimed Wednesday that the US has complete control of the Strait of Hormuz, one day after Energy Secretary Chris Wright confirmed increasing oil exports from the crucial waterway as Iran’s economy continues to free fall. “The U.S.A. has total control over the Strait of Hormuz. I THINK WE WILL KEEP IT!” Trump proclaimed on Truth Social. “Our Naval Blockade is being called, by everyone, ‘A WALL OF STEEL,’ and there is nothing Iran can do about it,” he added. ***“On Sunday alone, over 20 million barrels left the Arabian gulf region, which is above the pre-conflict average.” Only...

Donald Trump clashed with Pete Hegseth over a claim that a US munitions shortage could limit his options in the Iran war, according to reports. The US president confronted his defence secretary at Camp David, his country retreat in Maryland, demanding to know why he had been misled about the missile shortage. The clash occurred on the sidelines of Mr Trump’s cabinet meeting on Friday, at which he said that he thought the missile issue “had been fixed”, two people familiar with the matter told the Washington Post. The White House dismissed the claims as “fake news”, denying that the...

President Trump on Monday blasted Iran’s leadership as “unbelievably duplicitous,” accusing Tehran of privately pursuing peace talks with the US while publicly denying any negotiations were taking place days after he called off a massive military campaign planned for the weekend.In a Truth Social post, Trump claimed Iranian officials had sought a meeting with the US before turning around and insisting they were only in talks with Oman over plans for the Strait of Hormuz. “They ask for a meeting, some would say ‘beg,’ talks begin, with more scheduled in the immediate future, and they say, openly and proudly, that...

The Iranian government flat-out rejected President Trump’s claim that new negotiations were due to get underway later Monday, with officials stating that no talks were taking place or scheduled.Trump, 80, told reporters en route to Washington Sunday night that he had called off a planned “massive attack” on Iran at the request of US partners in the region — including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar.“They thought that a deal is imminent,” said the president, later adding: “Now what we’re doing is talking to them [Iran], in the form of a ​negotiation. It begins tomorrow afternoon.” Iran Foreign...

Former Republican Majorie Taylor Greene posted a photo this weekend of herself, Tucker Carlson and Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., along with the statement that "the movement has come." Last month, Carlson said he was planning to create a new political party, the Columbia Journalism Review reported. Greene's photo, posted on X on Saturday, featured the three, who have been sidelined over their opposition to President Trump's agenda and suggests discussions on a third party are continuing. "We said no more foreign wars and we meant it and supported Donald Trump because he made that promise. But he’s betrayed us all....

Lawmakers in both parties fighting to force the Trump administration to release all the federal files on Jeffrey Epstein took a big step closer to their goal this week. Adelita Grijalva’s victory on Tuesday in a special House election in southern Arizona sends another Democrat to Capitol Hill — and secures the deciding endorsement of the procedural tool forcing a House vote on legislation to compel the Justice Department to disclose the still-concealed documents related to the late child sex offender. That procedural tool, known as a discharge petition, currently has 217 signatures. Grijalva is set to make it 218,...

Subtitle: Community colleges have been dealing with an unprecedented phenomenon: fake students bent on stealing financial aid funds. While it has caused chaos at many colleges, some Southwestern faculty feel their leaders haven’t done enough to curb the crisis. When the spring semester began, Southwestern College professor Elizabeth Smith felt good. Two of her online classes were completely full, boasting 32 students each. Even the classes’ waitlists, which fit 20 students, were maxed out. That had never happened before. “Teachers get excited when there’s a lot of interest in their class. I felt like, ‘Great, I’m going to have a...

FPV footage from the 10th OBRSpN (Spetsnaz) sneaking into a Ukrop position and lifting a pair of militants for questioning.

A factory in China is developing hyper-realistic humanoid robots that can chillingly mimic human facial expressions and emotions in scientists' latest attempt to replace workers with machines. Ex-Robots, a robotics firm based in the northeastern coastal city of Dalian, is trying to create lifelike droids that engineers hope will soon be used in the healthcare and education industries. Terrifying footage from inside the Ex-Robots factory shows workers surrounded by piles of disembodied heads, neck-length silicone masks and spare limbs as they work to construct the most complex class of robotic products in the world. Drawings of robot designs are adorned...

Update from Ukraine | Ukraine is ready for Major Attack on the South | Ruzzia in Panic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AM29n0BwEY The summary of the situation of Russian re-invasion to Ukraine covering the recent developments on the battlefield, as of 23rd September 2023 – 22:00 (Kyiv time).[NOTE: two summaries per week, released on Wednesday and Sunday] https://militaryland.net/news/invasion-day-577-summary/ *** Great interactive maps with viewer controlled Map magnification tool to use for each Front! https://militaryland.net/maps/

Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart – better known as the ubiquitous CAPTCHA we see standing athwart the doors to many websites – may now be a misnomer as researchers have found that computers are much better at completing them. The bot defense measure dates back to 1997 and the tortured acronym 2003, with the technology starting out as a distorted series of letters and/or numbers. Google's implementation, reCAPTCHA, eventually did away with much of these shenanigans to make the browser identify low-risk human users in the background, but the image verification method still pops...

Update from Ukraine | Ruzzian Best Tanks were ambushed | Klishchiivka is taken by Ukraine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zUSuKoXqDg The summary of the situation of Russian re-invasion to Ukraine covering the last 48 hours, as of 13th August 2023 – 22:00 (Kyiv time). https://militaryland.net/news/invasion-day-536-summary/ *** Great interactive maps with viewer controlled Map magnification tool to use for each Front! https://militaryland.net/maps/

It’s “We the people,” not we the AI. Computer language models are under the impression that the US Constitution — written way before the Internet in 1787 — is an AI-generated document. The explanation is simple, according to Edward Tian, creator of AI writing catcher GPTZero, a service that also found the biblical book of Genesis to be 88% computerized. “The US Constitution is a text fed repeatedly into the training data of many large language models,” he told Ars Technica. “As a result, many of these large language models are trained to generate similar text to the Constitution and...

A team of researchers at the University of Adelaide have found that as many as 80 percent of tweets about the 2022 Russia-Ukraine invasion in its early weeks were part of a covert propaganda campaign originating from automated fake “bot” accounts.An anti-Russia propaganda campaign originating from a “bot army” of phony automated Twitter accounts flooded the internet at the start of the war.The research shows that of the more than 5 million tweets studied, 90.2 percent (both bot and non-bot) came from accounts that were pro-Ukraine, with fewer than 7 percent of the accounts being classed as pro-Russian.

An artificial intelligence bot was recently tasked with destroying humanity and its commitment to the objective was more than a little unsettling. The bot, ChaosGPT, is a modified version of OpenAI’s Auto-GPT, an open-source application spotlighting the capabilities of the GPT-4 language model. A video shared on YouTube of the process shows ChaosGPT was tasked with five goals: destroy humanity, establish global dominance, cause chaos and destruction, control humanity through manipulation, and attain immortality. The user asked ChaosGPT to run in "continuous mode" whereby it may potentially "run forever or carry out actions you would not usually authorize." The bot...

Artificial intelligence (AI) is invading every aspect of our lives. So much is ruled by algorithms you could make the case that the robot uprising has already occurred and we lost, and lost badly. Robots decide what song plays next, robots recommend TV shows, and robots are even getting pretty good at writing and creating music. Most of us are fine with that. AI tends to automate tasks we want automated, like the aforementioned streaming recommendations, and on some level we’re all aware of these bots in our lives, so our interactions with them are more or less voluntary. But...

Democrats filed hundreds of lawsuits before the 2020 election across 45 states, D.C. and Puerto Rico - COVID was used as a pretext by Democrats to change election laws in 2020 to benefit Democrats... - LIST: Covid-19 Election Cases Brought by Democrats In Pennsylvannia (PA)... - Legislatures write voting laws, not courts...What happened in Pennsylvania in 2019 and 2020?Items explained: - Quick Overview... - Act 77... - In 2019: Pennsylvania’s Constitution was violated... - In 2020: Democrats Disenfranchised Voters and the Democrat-dominated Pennsylvania Supreme Court behaved like the legal department of the state’s Democratic Party... - Summer, Fall 2020: How...

Four Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine are expected on Friday to begin voting in referendums on joining Russia, in a move that raises the stakes of Moscow’s invasion seven months after fighting began. The referendums, which are illegal under international law, could pave the way for Russian annexation of the areas, allowing Moscow to frame the ongoing Ukrainian counteroffensive as an attack on Russia itself. Such a move could provide Moscow with a pretext to escalate its faltering war, which has seen Kyiv regain thousands of square miles of territory this month. In an address Wednesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin raised...

- Trump took swipes on social media at potential 2024 rivals Govs. DeSantis and Youngkin. - It's been speculated that the Florida and Virginia governors could seek the GOP nomination in 2024. - Though he has not said he's running for re-election, Trump once again teased he may make another White House run.

Four-year-old Elizaveta Dmytrieva grinned as she pushed her stroller along the street in Vinnytsia, Ukraine. It was nearly five months into the war, but the city where her family had fled from Kyiv seemed safe enough. Her mother took an Instagram video as “Liza,” who was born with Down syndrome, led the way in a moment of delighted independence. Barely an hour later, the little girl was dead, her mother severely injured. And the image of her black and pink stroller, flipped on its side and spattered with blood, would become symbolic of the gruesome toll Russia’s invasion has inflicted...