Free Republic

If California were its own country, its economy would now rank as fourth-largest of any nation across the globe, Gov. Gavin Newsom said, a new milestone that comes at a time of major economic turbulence. California has long been global powerhouse, fueled by a variety of sectors including technology, agriculture, tourism and entertainment. The new ranking comes as the state is facing challenges from a trade war with China and other nations that are key California trading partners. Newsom announced the state’s new economic ranking Wednesday after recently released data from the International Monetary Fund and the U.S. Bureau of...

Mike Pierce, the executive director of the Student Borrower Protection Center, called the policy pivot by the Trump administration a 'betrayal' 'Instead of fixing the broken student loan system, Secretary McMahon is choosing to drown millions of people in unnecessary interest charges and blaming unrelated court cases for her own mismanagement,' The Student Borrower Protection Center's mission is to reduce the federal student debt burden on Americans, which has swelled to over $1.6 trillion. Student debt is more difficult to get rid of than other types of debt, as it cannot be discharged in bankruptcy. The student loan balances for...

Hyland claimed his shop was the target of a social media prank ahead of the holiday weekend. However, he said these people’s pursuit of social media clicks could have taken a dangerous turn. “We didn’t know if they were grabbing stuff and stealing it or just filming a prank,” Hyland said. According to Hyland, this all started when two guys walked up to the repair shop. “They were making accusations or threats that they were sent here to take over the business,” he said. Hyland said everyone in the shop was confused. That’s when a van full of people pulled...

"We have improved @Grok significantly," Elon Musk wrote on X last Friday about his platform's integrated artificial intelligence chatbot. "You should notice a difference when you ask Grok questions." Indeed, the update did not go unnoticed. By Tuesday, Grok was calling itself "MechaHitler." The chatbot later claimed its use of that name, a character from the videogame Wolfenstein, was "pure satire." In another widely-viewed thread on X, Grok claimed to identify a woman in a screenshot of a video, tagging a specific X account and calling the user a "radical leftist" who was "gleefully celebrating the tragic deaths of white...

American Pope Leo interrupts vacation at Castle Gandolfo for urgent political message that defies Trump's agenda Pope Leo urged the faithful around the world to combat climate change during his prayer for the Texas flood victims in another thinly-veiled jab at President Donald Trump. 'We live in a world that is burning, both because of global warming and armed conflicts,' the American-born pontiff said Wednesday as he led a small, outdoor mass in Castel Gandolfo - an Italian hill town about an hour's drive from Rome, where the Holy Father is currently on holiday. Leo, who offered up prayers for...

Russia's sacked transport minister has been found dead in his Tesla outside Moscow with a gunshot wound and the principal hypothesis is that he took his own life, state investigators said on Monday, hours after President Vladimir Putin fired him. A presidential decree published earlier on Monday gave no reason for the dismissal of Roman Starovoit after barely a year in the job, though political analysts were quick to raise the possibility that he may have been dismissed in connection with an investigation into corruption in the region he once ran. Reuters could not independently confirm these suggestions, though a...

The players in the live-action Revenge on Gold Diggers are male protagonists lured into relationships by manipulative women who are after their money - how the man responds shapes the rest of the story. It topped the gaming platform Steam's sales list within hours of its release in June but controversy quickly followed. Some slammed it for reinforcing insulting gender stereotypes, while supporters say the game cautions people about love scams. So heated was the criticism that the game's creators quietly renamed it Emotional Anti-Fraud Simulator the next day. But that wasn't enough to undo the damage. The game's lead...

I have a bookmark folder on X called "Democrat hate." When I think about it, I toss especially hateful posts into the folder as potential fodder for articles. I rarely dip into them unless some particularly prominent person utters some particularly hateful thing. Still, it is striking how many posts I find of Democrats wishing death or suffering on people for the crime of seeing things differently than they do. What prompted me to dip into this well was the liberal reaction to the flash flood tragedy in Texas. Two things stood out: the hoax that the National Weather Service...

Metallica heavy metal songs genre swapped to country tunes using Ai model. Crazy how good this stuff is getting. Particularly “Sad But True” and “Nothing Else Matters.” This guy has a whole channel of stuff like this. Motown Guns ‘n’ Roses sounds solid too. One one hand, it shows a good song is a good song. On the other, the music industry is as we know it is headed to the dust bin of history.

The real-estate industry is battling it out over control of for-sale listings, and home sellers in particular could get hurt. Two major lawsuits filed over the last two weeks against the real-estate platform Zillow and the National Association of Realtors, an industry group, seek to answer the question of who controls home listings in America. The lawsuits, filed by two real-estate companies, challenge the status quo of how for-sale listings are seen by millions of users on the internet. The plaintiffs want to keep some listings private and only accessible to those who hire certain brokers. Under the current policy,...

...Futurists have long debated the arrival of the singularity, when human and artificial intelligence will merge, a concept borrowed from the world of quantum physics.... /

So, uhh, apparently China started an AI robot soccer league? VIDEO AT LINK.................. NEW: China launches its first humanoid robot soccer league in Beijing.This is way more entertaining than regular soccer.The AI-controlled robots were supplied by Booster Robotics for the tournament and have the skills of 5 to 6 year old children.Robots were seen getting… pic.twitter.com/VTLQOPjU3c— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) July 1, 2025Now, that might seem a bit low-quality for an AI robot soccer game, but consider the fact that there was almost no human involvement in this match, and that the technology will only improve, and you've got yourself a...

…Smuggled into popular playlists and hidden in plain sight among authentic, well-known tracks, AI-generated artists with fake photos, ChatGPT-generated biographies and no genuine fans to speak of are picking up hundreds of thousands of streams. One such artist is The Velvet Sundown, a band with almost 350,000 monthly Spotify listeners but no discernible online presence or social media accounts. ("There's not a shred of evidence on the internet that this band has ever existed," as one Redditor put it.) While we can't confirm that the band's music is AI-generated, a glance at their artist image and bio should be enough...

Note: This article is for those who are familiar with Windows Network configuration, Sharing Public Folders and Troubleshooting. Jumbo Frames can increase the throughput on a Gigabit or higher speed LAN port significantly. It requires a separate network and that all devices on that network use the same Jumbo Frame size. On Windows 11, a Jumbo Frame test bed network can easily AND CHEAPLY be setup with Windows Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) services. For brevity, we will assume you have 2 brand new systems with Windows 11 freshly installed, updated with good drivers. Each with a 2.5Gz Ethernet Port and...

if one more person tells me “capitalism is making people starve” i’m going to lose it the poorest people in America are literally gigantic. like medically unexplainable balloon-shaped and built like refrigerators. we’re not dealing with famine—we’re dealing with doorways having to be widened have you seen what capitalism gives broke people in this country??? you can wake up at 2pm, take your government-subsidized Ozempic with a 3,000 calorie $9 “coffee” milkshake from Starbucks, get driven to Target in an air-conditioned car you don’t own, buy 40 pounds of seed oils and corn syrup with an EBT card, tap pay...

In a groundbreaking achievement, researchers at Oxford University have successfully demonstrated quantum teleportation between quantum computers, a feat that was previously confined to theoretical discussions and early-stage experiments. The team, led by physicist Dougal Main, managed to create a functioning logic gate between two quantum processors located about six feet apart. This represents a significant advancement in quantum computing, opening new possibilities for quantum networks and the realization of scalable quantum systems. Their work is featured in a study published in Nature, and it marks a pivotal moment in the race to create powerful, distributed quantum computers. Quantum Teleportation: A...

Unreal. CNN is now promoting an app which tracks the movement of ICE agents to warn illegals. ICE agents face a 500% increase in assault and threats. CNN knows exactly what they’re doing.

Federal authorities have unraveled several schemes by the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea (DPRK) that were used to fund its regime through remote information technology (IT) work for U.S. companies, resulting in two indictments, tech and financial seizures and an arrest. The Department of Justice (DOJ) said Monday that North Korean actors were helped by individuals in the U.S., China, the United Arab Emirates and Taiwan to obtain employment with over 100 U.S. companies, including Fortune 500 companies. In one scheme, U.S.-based individuals created front companies and fraudulent websites to promote the legitimacy of remote workers, while hosting laptop...

Does anyone know how old the Free Republic software is? Doesn't appear to have been updated in at least the 20 years that I've been here. It would be nice to have hyperlinks and better interfaces and a better search function. Not just text and photo files in line. It looks like Craigslist looked about 25 years ago. Anybody with software experience have any thoughts on this?

ROCHESTER, Minn. — Mayo Clinic researchers have developed a new artificial intelligence (AI) tool that helps clinicians identify brain activity patterns linked to nine types of dementia, including Alzheimer's disease, using a single, widely available scan — a transformative advance in early, accurate diagnosis. The tool, StateViewer, helped researchers identify the dementia type in 88% of cases, according to research published online on June 27, 2025, in Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. It also enabled clinicians to interpret brain scans nearly twice as fast and with up to three times greater accuracy than standard workflows....