Free Republic

SAN FRANCISCO — Apple’s chief executive, Timothy D. Cook, may be the leader of the world’s most valuable public company, but lately he has had to act a lot like the tech industry’s top diplomat. Last month he visited the Oval Office to warn President Trump that tough talk on China could threaten Apple’s position in the country. In March, at a major summit meeting in Beijing, he called for “calmer heads” to prevail between the world’s two most powerful countries. (please see link, for full article)

The U.S. has filed a diplomatic complaint with China after recent incidents in Djibouti where it's believed Chinese nationals aimed lasers at the cockpits of U.S. military aircraft resulting in “minor injuries” to two U.S. pilots. Both the U.S. and China have military bases in the small African nation located on the strategic Horn of Africa. “They are very serious incidents,” said Dana White, the Pentagon’s chief spokesperson. “There have been two minor injuries. This activity poses a threat to our airmen.” “We have formally demarched the Chinese government, and we've requested that the Chinese investigate these incidents,” she added....

On May 30th, Secretary of Defense James Mattis announced a momentous shift in American global strategic policy. From now on, he decreed, the U.S. Pacific Command (PACOM), which oversees all U.S. military forces in Asia, will be called the Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM). The name change, Mattis explained, reflects “the increasing connectivity between the Indian and Pacific Oceans,” as well as Washington’s determination to remain the dominant power in both. What? You didn’t hear about this anywhere? And even now, you’re not exactly blown away, right? Well, such a name change may not sound like much, but someday you may look...

I'm hoping someone may have a way of finding an attorney that I can hire to sue my HOA and management company for damages. I have more than one family that will be seeking damages for non enforcement of the covenants in our subdivision. I have been trying to sell my home and have received feedback from multiple buyers about conditions in the development that I had previously reported. The board decided to waive fines on one particular party that had 108 violations. New board members are friends with this family. Secondly they are not responding to additional submittal. The...

It’s official: ABC has given a 10-episode series order to The Conners (working title), a spinoff of Roseanne, for fall 2018. The spinoff will take over the Tuesday 8 PM slot on the ABC schedule that was vacated when Roseanne was suddenly canceled following a controversial tweet by star and executive producer Roseanne Barr. (Roseanne‘s order had been for 13 episodes.) Barr will have no financial or creative involvement in the new series after reaching a settlement with series producer Tom Werner. The Conners will feature the rest of the Roseanne revival cast, John Goodman (“Dan”), Laurie Metcalf (“Jackie”), Sara...

Methheads Fighting

In the lawsuit filed in federal court, Tesla accused former Gigafactory employee Tripp of unlawfully hacking into the company’s “confidential and trade secret information” and transferring “that information to third parties.” Is Tesla Trying To Make An Example Of Tripp? How Tesla Found Out Not exactly a point to the alleged sabotage itself, but a question I’ve been wondering is how Tesla found out. The automaker hasn’t responded to questions about what tipped them off to Tripp, but a story from Business Insider earlier this month offers a possible hint: We sent Tesla an identification number for one of the...

Beleaguered ABC News was reeling Thursday morning after having to correct its latest anti-Trump error -- an on-screen caption Wednesday afternoon that falsely stated that Paul Manafort, Donald Trump's ex-campaign chief, pleaded guilty to five charges of manslaughter. ABC quickly apologized for the error – saying there “is no excuse” -- and an ABC spokesperson said the network is still “investigating” what went wrong. But ABC News sources tell Fox News that the false report was a “practice chyron” that had likely been maliciously written by a hostile ABC News employee (a chyron is a TV news term for words...

Who is the anonymous online poster claiming to be a high-level administration official? And can he or she bring us some much-needed truth in an era of fake news?I’ve been a writer and producer of television and movies working in Hollywood for over 30 years. One of my recent jobs was on the TV series Homeland, where I was involved in creating the season just concluded. The season was about information warfare. It’s a little-discussed subject, and it took a lot of research to find out exactly what this protean form of conflict is all about. The past season of...

I’ve never written a College World Series column like this, but it’s already a CWS like never before.(snip) Today, in the first game of the CWS, the real world throws out the first pitch. It will be thrown by Luke Heimlich, ace pitcher of Oregon State, one of the favorites to win the series. (snip) Heimlich, a senior left-hander who is 16-1 with a team-best 2.32 ERA and is a two-time Pac-12 pitcher of the year. But there’s one thing about Heimlich that you won’t find in the stat sheet. Heimlich pleaded guilty in 2012 to sexually abusing his 6-year-old...

Overweight office workers could be allowed to miss the rush hour commute, ask for a larger chair or work from home. Workers who are overweight should be allowed to turn up later to work, according to a government adviser. Leading employment specialist Stephen Bevan is to pitch a new plan to protect obese people under discrimination law, reports the Mirror. This could allow overweight office workers to miss the rush hour commute, ask for a larger chair or work from home. Professor Bevan, who is a member of Public Health England's advisory board and has advised the Department of Work...

They’re always listening. They’re on the internet. But what happens when digital assistants like Alexa go rogue? Could they share our private conversations without our consent? Privacy advocates have long warned this could happen, and now it has. A woman in Portland, Ore., told KIRO7, a television news station in Washington, that her Amazon Echo device had recorded a conversation then shared it with one of her husband’s employees in Seattle. Skeptics were quick to say we told you so, as the news rocketed through the connected world. Now, Amazon says it knows what happened: As the woman, identified only...

Every time I think the far left wing in this country mixing sports and politics can’t get any more insane — they do. Last night Donald Trump traveled to Duluth, Minnesota for a rally in that community. Trump, who lost the state of Minnesota by just 44,765 votes to Hillary Clinton out of nearly three million votes cast, spoke to over 9,000 at the rally. Among those in attendance? Legendary Boston Celtic player and former coach of the Minnesota Timberwolves and the Houston Rockets, Kevin McHale. McHale wasn’t on the stage or introduced by Trump, he was just in the...

Wednesday, June 20, 2018 04:57PM DURHAM, N.C. (WTVD) -- A 911 call released Wednesday gives more insight into the moments before three people were pulled from a pool at a Durham apartment complex earlier this week. The three people -- 15-year-old Abril Yuliana Flores-Ojeda, 16-year-old Brian Manuel Benites, and 21-year-old Luis Enrique Delgado-Romero -- all died at the hospital. In the call, the caller told dispatchers that a man, who appeared to be in his 20s, had knocked on the door of the apartment where he was staying and said his friend was drowning at the pool. The friend tried...

Japan’s commitment to addressing its dismal record on work-life balance has been called into question after a civil servant was punished for “habitually” slipping away from his desk a few minutes early to buy a bento lunch. The 64-year-old, an employee of the waterworks bureau in the western city of Kobe, was fined and reprimanded after he was found to have left his desk just three minutes before the start of his designated lunch break on 26 occasions over a seven-month period. Senior officials at the bureau then called a televised news conference, where they described the man’s conduct as...

Save Happy summer solstice. We in the Northern Hemisphere of the planet called Earth are tilted closest to the sun. According to the National Weather Service, the earth will have reached its maximum tilt at 3:07 a.m. today. Most of you probably missed the moment, but you can still celebrate. It’s the longest day of the year in terms of hours of sunlight, and we’ll continue to have more daylight than nighttime until the September equinox. It’s also the official start of summer, though we here in SoCo have had plenty already. A climatologist in Alaska says we will have...

We don’t really need the Old Testament, do we? (I actually enjoy the Old Testament a great deal and continue to benefit from it, but that is irrelevant to this topic.) There are those who try to say seriously that we really don’t need it. After all, Jesus is the most important, and with reference to Him the resurrection is the most important. It’s difficult to disagree with those points of importance, and yet the Bible itself and Jesus himself should be allowed to comment. Jesus had a great deal to say in John 5. Now, I don’t know if...

The thing you must realize about rabid killer cats and the brave Southern women who’ve fought them to the death is this: The heroic women are compelling. And their laconic way of putting things is just perfect, as if they’re characters in some Southern Gothic story by Flannery O’Connor. And their tales involve murderous cats going for the jugular. These are not your cat ladies. These are your survivors. “Well, there was a big telephone pole. I just got it by the tail and whipped it around the pole,” Isabelle Blankenship, 85, of Roanoke, Va., once told this column about...

A Texas Media outlet has just caught on to something we discovered and have shared with you. Previously we identified the BIG THREE large non-profit corporations getting massive grants from DHS and HHS. These were the “faith based groups” President Obama met in Dallas 7/9/14. ---SNIP-- “Dr. Sanchez is proud to have built one of the most diverse nonprofits in the country, where 93 percent of Southwest Key’s 2,000 employees, including most top managers and board members, are people of color“. We have much more on Southwest Key. Here are their 2014 HHS Grants for “Unaccompanied Alien Children” $122,285,100:

Phillie Phanatic's hot dog cannon is synomous with Phillies games. But the Phanatic's flying meat mobile helped injure one fan at Monday's game. Kathy McVay was sitting behind home plate when she got hit between the eyes with a hot dog from Phanatic's cannon, according to Philadelphia 6ABC. McVay had a shoulder injury, so she wasn't able to catch or deflect the dog. "It just came out of nowhere. And hard," she said.