Free Republic

Marine veteran and federal air marshal has been accused of scamming $70,000 worth of flights by faking military deployments. Dior Jay-Jarett, 29, used his job as an airline baggage handler to snag 130 flights after claiming military leave, according to prosecutors. jet first class to the likes of London, Las Vegas and Dublin, as well as travel standard class to Mexico and the Caribbean. then bragged on Facebook about a trip to Cabo San Lucas at the airline's expense. 'Out of the 13 countries I have visited this year so far, this has been my favorite solo trip,' Jay-Jarett finagled...

Social network Bluesky, an alternative to X built on open source technologies, has scored a big win in terms of attracting notable users to its platform. The company on Sunday confirmed that former president Barack Obama has joined its service. Bluesky OOO Rose Wang replied to a post where someone wondered if the account posting as Obama was legitimately him by writing “Confirmed!” In his first few posts on the platform, Obama celebrated the 15th anniversary of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), calling it “a reminder that change is possible when we fight for progress.” The former president maintains a...

The other day, this headline from Elizabeth Nickson’s Substack appeared on a website I visit daily: “’Give Us Back Our Fu**ing Money.’ How Washington Stole Everything.” Breitbart ran the following headline the same day: “Kyle Busch Threatens Opposing Driver: ‘I’m Gonna Wreck His A**!’” As reported in the article, that was the mildest of the NASCAR driver’s profanities.A post covering the appointment of talk show host Dan Bongino to the position of FBI Deputy Director included an obscenity-laced rant Bongino wrote in 2022 after that agency’s raid on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home. You can read it here.These headlines aren’t unusual...

The central Dutch city of Utrecht has installed a “fish doorbell” on a river lock that lets viewers of an online livestream alert authorities to fish being held up as they make their springtime migration to shallow spawning grounds. The idea is simple: An underwater camera at Utrecht’s Weerdsluis lock sends live footage to a website. When somebody watching the site sees a fish, they can click a button that sends a screenshot to organizers. When they see enough fish, they alert a water worker who opens the lock to let the fish swim through. Now in its fifth year,...

Research has found that nearly half of adults in the U.S. use, or have attempted to use, a VPN. A majority use VPNs to protect their IP addresses and usage is highest among Gen Z and millennials. … Experts expect America's 43% figure to rise and VPN usage to become more important than ever. But what exactly are people using VPNs for and should you get in on the act too? A survey from CNET has found that 2 in 5 (43%) of American adults have used, or do use, VPNs. Their motivations for using a VPN vary, but over...

In a major leap toward the development of a global quantum internet, researchers have successfully demonstrated real-time quantum key distribution (QKD) between a microsatellite and multiple mobile ground stations. The breakthrough, achieved with Jinan-1, the world’s first quantum microsatellite, was led by a research team from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in collaboration with the Jinan Institute of Quantum Technology, Shanghai Institute of Technical Physics, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Stellenbosch University in South Africa. The findings were recently published in Nature. By enabling highly secure, unbreakable encryption, quantum communication is seen as the future...

Alright, let’s dive into the full lowdown on Donald Trump, his family’s connection to Norman Vincent Peale’s church, and how that ties into the Trump-level energy you’re talking about—positive thinking, big vibes, the whole deal! Here’s the story, packed with the goods and delivered with some flair. Donald Trump’s connection to Norman Vincent Peale and Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan goes way back—deep roots, folks! His father, Fred Trump, a real estate mogul who built a fortune in Queens and Brooklyn, started taking the family to this Fifth Avenue gem in the 1950s. It wasn’t just any church—Marble Collegiate, part...

For years I've been using Cynwoody's Posting Form Enhancer and Tree Viewer extensions in Firefox to view and post comments on FreeRepublic. They have made the use of FreeRepublic so much more enjoyable. Unfortunately, a few days ago those extensions stopped working and Firefox now displays the following message for each of the extensions: "This extension could not be verified for use in Firefox and has been disabled." I'm curious whether anyone is currently successfully using those extensions and, if so, what version of Firefox is being used.

Watch NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang’s GTC keynote to catch all the announcements on AI advances that are shaping our future. GTC March 2025 Keynote with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang | 2:37:47 NVIDIA | 1.9M subscribers | 492,386 views | Streamed live 9 hours ago

Since the launch of DeepSeek's R1 model in January, the expectations for new foundation models have substantially increased. Baidu, a prominent Chinese technology firm, has announced the introduction of two new foundation models: ERNIE 4.5 and ERNIE X1. ERNIE 4.5 is a multimodal foundation model designed to understand text, images, audio, and video. It includes enhancements in language skills, understanding, generation, reasoning, and memory. According to Baidu, ERNIE 4.5 surpasses OpenAI’s GPT-4.5 in various standard benchmarks. A notable aspect of ERNIE 4.5 is its cost, which is just 1% of GPT-4.5's cost. Baidu achieved ERNIE 4.5's performance and cost-efficiency using...

Biden used the White House replica inside the EEOB throughout his presidency — most famously when he received his COVID-19 shot during the height of the vaccine rollout in the country. That set was created in the South Court of the EEOB, across the street from the real White House. It also featured fake windows and a digital display of the White House Rose Garden in full bloom. White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller accused Biden of needing the room to read scripts off the teleprompter, which he couldn’t inside the real White House. “The reason Biden uses...

In 2006, a retired AT&T engineer knocked on the door of the EFF's office in a rundown part of San Francisco's Mission district and asked, "Do you folks care about privacy?" With him he carried schematics exposing the largest US government domestic spying operation since Watergate.That person was Mark Klein, who died on March 8 this year from cancer. He was 79.After a life working in telecoms, Klein realized he had helped the NSA wire up a listening station in AT&T's San Francisco switching facility - the infamous Room 641A - that was being used to illegally spy on Americans.The...

The next time you’re due for a medical exam you may get a call from someone like Ana: a friendly voice that can help you prepare for your appointment and answer any pressing questions you might have. With her calm, warm demeanor, Ana has been trained to put patients at ease — like many nurses across the U.S. But unlike them, she is also available to chat 24-7, in multiple languages, from Hindi to Haitian Creole. That’s because Ana isn’t human, but an artificial intelligence program created by Hippocratic AI, one of a number of new companies offering ways to...

There’s a lot of chatter in the media that software developers will soon lose their jobs to AI. I don’t buy it.It is not the end of programming. It is the end of programming as we know it today. That is not new. The first programmers connected physical circuits to perform each calculation. They were succeeded by programmers writing machine instructions as binary code to be input one bit at a time by flipping switches on the front of a computer. Assembly language programming then put an end to that. It lets a programmer use a human-like language to tell...

A small wombat stands next to its mother in a zoo. Wombats at the Hannover Zoo in Germany. Sam Jones, a self-described outdoor enthusiast with a large social media following, was widely criticized in Australia after briefly yanking a wombat joey away from its mother in the night. Australians are celebrating the departure of an American influencer who separated a baby wombat from its mother, as concerns persist about the animal's wellbeing. The woman, who posts under the name Sam Jones and says she is a Montana-based outdoor enthusiast and hunter, drew ire this week when she posted a video...

MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell revealed on Wednesday night that he was exhausted by covering President Donald Trump and that he was taking a week off from hosting his show, “The Last Word,” lamenting that it was only day 52 of Trump’s second term. “I know you’ve pledged to cover and be here for the first hundred days of the Trump presidency. I hope you noticed that I did not make that same pledge,” O’Donnell told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. Maddow, who usually hosts her show once a week on the network, recently committed to hosting her program daily for the duration...

It’s 2026. You just bought a new laptop, and unlike your last one, this device is an “AI PC.” The distinction means you can now run all the latest AI applications directly on your device without draining your battery, keeping your data private and secure. AI PCs If you stopped by a Sears circa 1960 to buy a television, the sales clerk’s first question for you would’ve been, “Color or black and white?” Only after hearing the answer could they help you find the television that was right for you. Today’s computer buyers are facing their own fork in the...

After all the build-up, the transatlantic trade war has truly begun. US tariffs on steel are reciprocated with EU tariffs on jeans and Harley Davidsons. When announcing the EU tariffs president Ursula von der Leyen was clear that she is open to dialogue with the Americans to deescalate the trade conflict. We have seen in his modus operandi that this is how Donald Trump likes to operate. Bold statements and excessive tariffs to extort trading partners and get a better deal. He has been doing it to Mexico, Canada and Ukraine, and will do so to Europe. However, in exchange...

Scientists have discovered that lead-208, once thought to be spherical, is actually elongated. This challenges nuclear theory and sparks fresh questions about atomic structure and stability. Credit: SciTechDaily.com ==================================================================================== For decades, scientists believed that lead-208, a “doubly magic” and highly stable atomic nucleus, was perfectly spherical. However, groundbreaking new research has shattered this assumption, revealing that its nucleus is actually elongated, much like a rugby ball. By using an advanced gamma-ray spectrometer and high-speed particle collisions, researchers uncovered unexpected quantum behavior that contradicts long-standing nuclear theory. This revelation forces physicists to rethink fundamental principles of nuclear structure, potentially reshaping our...

Mathematicians have proven that Henry Dudeney’s 1907 four-piece dissection of an equilateral triangle into a square is optimal. Using matching diagrams, researchers from JAIST and MIT showed that no three-piece solution exists, marking the first formal proof of optimality in dissection problems. Their work has applications in mathematics, engineering, and material sciences. ======================================================================================= Researchers have demonstrated, using a novel approach, that the original solution to Dudeney’s famous dissection problem is indeed the optimal one. In 1907, English author and mathematician Henry Ernest Dudeney posed a fascinating puzzle: Can an equilateral triangle be cut into the fewest possible pieces that can...