Free Republic

The pace of inflation picked up in the final full month of Joe Biden’s presidency, capping off the worst burst of soaring consumer prices in forty years. The personal consumption expenditures price index rose by 0.3 percent in December, an acceleration from the 0.1 percent increase in November. Over the course of 2024, the index—which is the Fed’s favored measure of inflation—rose 2.6 percent, still well-above the Fed’s two percent target. After excluding volatile food and energy prices, “core” inflation rose 2.8 percent last year, including a 0.2 percent rise in December. In November, core inflation rose 0.1 percent. The...

The Big Apple saw a 2% drop in major crime in the first few months of the fiscal year — along with a dip in transit crime, an early peek at Mayor Eric Adams’ annual report revealed. The Adams administration is expected to tout a 7% drop in transit crime, a 9% reduction in car thefts, 3% fewer grand larcenies, a 4.8% decrease in robberies and a 2.8% dip in burglaries from July to October of last year compared to the same time period in 2023, according to a City Hall source. “Our administration is focused on making New York...

A law enforcement expert is poking holes in the now-former Biden administration Department of Justice's repeated claims that violent crime sank to a 50-year record low, saying the agency "manipulated data" to reach its conclusion. In 2024, the Biden administration repeatedly claimed that violent crime was at a 50-year low, based on FBI statistics. The FBI defines the following as "violent crime": murder, manslaughter, rape, robbery and aggravated assault. But Ken Alexandrow, a security expert who served for 26 years as a Nashville, Tennessee, police officer, said the former administration "manipulated data" to reach a certain outcome. "The way crime...

Nearly four weeks since the start of the PowerSchool data breach began families, teachers and school districts remain in the dark about the scope of the breach compromising personal information uploaded on the platform.PowerSchool, a cloud-based platform that tens of thousands of schools use all over the country, has been the official student information system (SIS) since 2009 in South Carolina and 2013 in North Carolina.

After suffering alarming spikes in violent crime, some cities are now reporting better news. Washington, D.C., is reporting a 35% decrease in violent crime for 2024. That’s after a 39% increase in crime in 2023 and the most murders in 25 years. But how likely are we to get at the truth when it comes to crime statistics? Questions were raised about possible manipulation of the number when the FBI released its annual crime data in 2023, going into the election year. The statistics showed a 2.1% decrease in violent crime in 2022 under the Biden administration. To many, the...

An estimated 100 million Apple users are at risk of falling victim to malware. Cybersecurity software company Check Point issued an urgent warning to the millions of Mac users around the world who may be preyed on by malicious actors evading the devices’ built-in antivirus systems. According to the company, cybercriminals have developed malware, dubbed the “Banshee macOS Stealer,” which secretly steals credentials and other sensitive data while operating undetected for more than months. The malware first emerged last year in what Check Point calls “underground forums” and was called a “stealer-as-a-service” that was available to purchase for just $3,000....

AI takes an immense amount of resources—from endless water to an estimated $1 trillion worth of investor dollars—but Elon Musk warned the technology has already run out of its primary training resource: human-created data. Engineers and data scientists train AI by essentially reducing the entire internet, all books, and every interesting video published into a token that AI can digest and learn from, Musk told Mark Penn, CEO of marketing company Stagwell, in an interview streamed on X Wednesday. But AI has already consumed that information, and requires even more data to fine-tune itself.

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...