Free Republic

The flight data and cockpit voice recorders on the Jeju Air jet that crashed on Dec. 29 stopped recording about four minutes before the airliner hit a concrete structure at South Korea’s Muan airport, the transport ministry said on Saturday. Authorities investigating the disaster that killed 179 people, the worst on South Korean soil, plan to analyze what caused the “black boxes” to stop recording, the ministry said in a statement. The voice recorder was initially analyzed in South Korea, and, when data was found to be missing, sent to a US National Transportation Safety Board laboratory, the ministry said....

President-elect Trump announced Tuesday that Emirati billionaire Hussain Sajwani plans to invest $20 billion in the United States “over a very short period of time” to build data centers across the country. The investment will support the construction of new data centers in the Midwest and Sun Belt regions, with the first phase of the project focusing on Texas, Arizona, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan and Indiana. The influx of funds will help “keep America on the cutting edge of technology,” Trump said at a press conference at Mar-a-Lago. “Artificial intelligence is very big into the data centers, and that’s...

Colorado’s employment counts have become so unreliable the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in an unprecedented move, has stopped issuing reports based on them. “BLS has observed data quality problems because of ongoing issues with the modernization of Colorado’s unemployment insurance system. As a result, BLS is temporarily suspending publication of Colorado employment, unemployment, and wage data,” the bureau said in a statement issued Dec. 18. The suspension was made in a program called State and Metro Area Employment, Hours & Earnings. It follows an earlier decision by the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, or QCEW program, to suspend...

According to a federal survey of school leaders, 40% of students in the nation’s public schools were behind grade level in one or more subjects at the beginning of the school year. The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) announced its findings this week that the percentage of students school leaders estimated to be behind where they should be was down 7% from the 2022-23 school year but still 8% higher than before the pandemic. School leaders told the federal education statistics agency in October that over a third of students were behind entering the 2024-25 school year. NCES data...

Arizona governor Katie Hobbs has called for a repeal of the state’s abortion reporting law, claiming — inexplicably — that giving people as many facts and statistics about abortion as possible is an “attack on women.” Hobbs statement came as the state’s Department of Health released its annual abortion report. The report gives a variety of data surrounding abortion in the state, including the number of abortions by mother’s age and race, methods of abortion used, gestational age of child, reported maternal reasons for abortion, and more. Absolutely no personal or identifying information is shared, and women do have the...

A new report by the House Judiciary Committee exposed how more than 14,000 federal employees accesses the private financial data for Americans over 3,000,000 times. The Committee and Select Subcommittee launched this investigation into government-led financial surveillance after a whistleblower disclosed that following the events of January 6, 2021, Bank of America (BoA), voluntarily and without legal process, provided the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) with a list of names of all individuals who used a BoA credit or debit card in the Washington, D.C. region around that time.

The rapid growth of data centers to support AI is significantly increasing global electricity demand.This surge in demand threatens to outpace the development of renewable energy sources.International regulations are needed to ensure tech companies use clean energy and minimize their impact on climate goals.The global electricity demand is expected to grow exponentially in the coming decades, largely due to an increased demand from tech companies for new data centers to support the rollout of high-energy-consuming advanced technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI). As governments worldwide introduce new climate policies and pump billions into alternative energy sources and clean tech, these...

GB News National Reporter Charlie Peters & Charlie Downes of the Centre for Migration Control discuss the record levels of foreign-born citizens in UK social housing, the Department of Working Pensions no longer publishing welfare claims by nationality. Are we hiding the truth? Join the Charlies as they dissect. Transcript linked below video.

In June, Victor Martinez-Hernandez was charged with the murder of Rachel Morin, a mother of five in Maryland. Police in Oklahoma tracked the accused repeat offender down with a sample of his DNA recovered from a Los Angeles home invasion in which a nine-year-old girl and her mother were assaulted. Police say he came to the U.S. illegally to escape prosecution for at least one other murder in his native El Salvador in December 2022. “That should never have been allowed to happen,” said Sheriff Jeffrey Gahler, referring to the numerous missed red flags the case presented. His office apprehended...

Players of "Pokémon Go" — an augmented reality (AR) mobile game that took the world by storm upon its release in 2016 — have been unkowingly training an artificial intelligence (AI) model to map the planet at street level. Niantic, the company behind the popular game, has revealed that it will use data scraped from its AR apps to construct a "large geospatial model" (LGM) that would enable robots and other devices to better navigate the physical world — even if they only have limited information. The announcement, made Nov. 12 in a blog post on Niantic’s website, reveals that...

Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist, has claimed without evidence that official economic statistics under the incoming Trump administration will be manipulated. In a recent interview with the New Republic, Krugman said that under the incoming Trump administration, government economic data would be distorted to flatter the president’s policies. “My guess is by sometime next year, we’re going to be having to look at proxies for what’s actually happening to the economy,” Krugman said, warning that official statistics on issues like the economy and crime could become “corrupted.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson on Tuesday ordered the entire administration of President Joe Biden to preserve all records and communications in the waning days of the outgoing Democrat administration as former President Donald Trump’s team prepares to take over.Johnson, Breitbart News has learned exclusively, has sent letters to all 18 federal Departments ordering them to retain and preserve documents. This could become an explosive storyline if outgoing Biden administration officials attempt to delete or destroy documents that shed light on some of the radical policies they pursued or scandals with regard to censorship or other major storylines of the past...

The FBI has a big transparency problem. For a year, the media has been using the FBI’s estimates of reported crime to claim that crime has been falling. When the FBI released its numbers for 2023 in September 2024, it hid that it had revised its earlier crime data for 2021 and 2022, hiding the increase in 2022 and that there had been a net increase in crime over 2022 and 2023. Just days before an election in which crime has been a major issue, the FBI continues to hide the revisions. On Thursday, House Oversight and Reform Committee Chair...

The FBI has quietly changed 20 years of homicide data from 2004 to 2023. Professor John Lott has published an article showing the FBI’s revised homicide data for 2022 and 2023. The previous numbers fed Biden/Harris administration talking points. A close look at the data shows the FBI “adjusted” the homicide data from the last two decades, not just the last two years. The largest adjustment outside of 2021 and 2022 happened to the data from 2005. As of 2006, the total number of homicides reported by the FBI for 2005 was 16,740 for 2005 and 17,034 for 2006. In...

Growing gap between the FBI’s annual crime victimization survey and its tabulations of reported crime indicates worsening trends in theft. Annual FBI crime victimization surveys show violent crime is up 10.4% and property crime is up 6.4% between 2019 and 2023. Each year, the FBI releases headline crime report data for the calendar year prior, and a separate crime victimization survey that asks Americans what crimes they have been the victims of. Comparing these reports provides insight into crime reporting rates and the accuracy of crime statistics. While earlier reporting demonstrated that theft is worsening and often underreported, the growing...

College Republicans at ASU question legality of campaign’s access to student data, demands transparency from school The Kamala Harris presidential campaign texted 70,000 Arizona State University students and a total of 150,000 students statewide, urging them to vote for her. Now, students, a professor, and a state representative are demanding answers. College Republicans at ASU announced on Twitter and Instagram that the Harris campaign texted “students from [all] Arizona universities,” including ASU, Northern Arizona University, and the University of Arizona. “If Kamala Harris has access to all of Arizona college students’ phone numbers, what ELSE do they have?” the group...

How many are repeats from the other rallies? Good question, 6122

Ah, the wind in your hair, the open road ahead, and not a care in the world… except all the trackers, cameras, microphones, and sensors capturing your every move. Ugh. Modern cars are a privacy nightmare. Car makers have been bragging about their cars being “computers on wheels" for years to promote their advanced features. However, the conversation about what driving a computer means for its occupants' privacy hasn’t really caught up. While we worried that our doorbells and watches that connect to the internet might be spying on us, car brands quietly entered the data business by turning their...

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill Wednesday prompted by a decade-long CBS News California investigation into California's newborn genetic biobank. We still won't know who is using your DNA for research, or what the research is for, but the California Department of Public Health must now reveal the number of newborn DNA samples that California is storing and the number of DNA samples that the state sells to researchers each year. In response to our decade-long investigation, lawmakers introduced several bills this year that were intended to shed light on how the state is amassing and using California's newborn DNA...

Over 3,000 congressional staffers’ personal information has been leaked across the dark web in a wide-scale cyberattack on the Capitol. Switzerland based security firm Proton, disovered 1,800 passwords used by staffers at the Capitol are avaible on the dark web. In an investigation, Proton along with the the United States based firm Constella Intelligence, revealed 1 in 5 congressional staffers had personal information exposed on teh dark web. In the report, Proton shared, the leaks made their way to the dark web through several sorces such as adult websites, social media and dating apps. In a statement to The Washington...