Free Republic

..... On Thanksgiving, Hamas was supposed to release the first group of 50 hostages. If it does so on Friday, children, mothers, and elderly women will be freed from more than a month and a half in the clutches of one of the most barbaric terrorist organizations to ever exist on the face of the Earth. Moreover, something truly historic will occur if the deal is truly fulfilled in its entirety: The International Committee of the Red Cross will be allowed to visit Israeli hostages in Hamas captivity and provide them with medical assistance. In 2009, following Operation Cast Lead,...

Researchers used artificial intelligence to extract the first word from one of the first texts in a charred scroll from the ancient Roman city of Herculaneum, which has been unreadable since a volcanic eruption in AD 79 — the same one that buried nearby Pompeii...The Vesuvius Challenge, a contest with $1,000,000 (£821K) in prizes for those who can use modern technology to decipher the words of these scrolls, has awarded a 21-year-old undergraduate student at the University of Nebraska $40,000 (£32.8K) for being the first to read a word from one of the ancient Herculaneum scrolls.Luke Farritor, who is at...

At its annual re:Mars conference today in Las Vegas, Amazon’s Senior Vice President and Head Scientist for Alexa, Rohit Prasad, announced a spate of new and upcoming features for the company’s smart assistant. The most head turning of the bunch was a potential new feature that can synthesize short audio clips into longer speech. In the scenario presented at the event, the voice of a deceased loved one (a grandmother, in this case), is used to read a grandson a bedtime story. Prasad notes that, using the new technology, the company is able to accomplish some very impressive audio output...

SACRAMENTO (CBS13) – The Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office has identified two students, who, they say, are responsible for writing racist graffiti on s wall at Rosemont High School. The incident happened on March 22 near the end of the school day. The graffiti read: “All n******* should die.”It was referred to detectives who worked closely with the school district and administrators, the sheriff’s office said Tuesday. Rosemont High School administrators say they obtained video surveillance footage showing two African-American female juveniles clearly writing the graffiti on the wall. From the video, school officials and sheriff’s office detectives learned the identities...

President Joe Biden gave Republicans an early Christmas gift this year. LL Cool J introduced the president and first lady Jill Biden on Thursday evening at the National Christmas Tree lighting ceremony, which was held at the Ellipse south of the White House, but the cheering crowd had to wait nearly two minutes for the pair to show up. Music played for part of the time — the rest was filled with silence until the rapper spoke up again and said, "We're going to do it again." He then told the crowd to sit down again. Someone else could be...

NVIDIA might be viewed as a company that makes GPUs for computers, but they are much more than that. They also work on AI and the company’s latest demonstration is actually very fascinating and also very impressive. This comes in the form of GauGAN2, an updated version of NVIDIA’s AI system that debuted on the Canvas app earlier this year. For those unfamiliar, Canvas is an app that can generate photorealistic scenes through simple brush strokes, meaning that users don’t need to have painting skills to create beautiful works of art, just let the AI handle the rest. With GauGAN2,...

Q is the result of the sacrifices and commitment of countless patriots to win back our captured country from the Deep State and achieve the transformation President Trump promised in this campaign video. President Trump has said the awakening of the public is key to this transformation.Q describes this awakening as follows: "The Great Awakening ('Freedom of Thought’), was designed and created not only as a backchannel to the public (away from the longstanding ‘mind’ control of the corrupt & heavily biased media) to endure future events through transparency and regeneration of individual thought (breaking the chains of ‘group-think’), but,...

On Sunday’s broadcast of ABC’s “This Week,” Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT), a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said “all transcripts” from the House’s impeachment inquiry will be made public. Jon Karl asked, “Congressman, why is this all happening behind closed doors? Why the secrecy? This is not a classified deposition. Why not do it out in the open?” Himes said, “First of all, all transcripts will be scrubbed for classified information and made available for the American public to see. There’s two reasons why these depositions are happening behind closed doors. One reason is when you’re talking to ambassadors...

House Democrats are looking to prevent the whistleblower from being identified by holding the person's testimony at a remote location and potentially changing their appearance and voice. Democrats are going to great lengths to hide the whistleblower's identity out of fear the Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee could leak their identity, according to The Washington Post, which cited three people familiar with the discussions. Democrats are considering holding testimony outside the Capitol as well as a staff-only session that would bar lawmakers from questioning the whistleblower, according to the Post. Democrats are also weighing options to distort the whistleblower's...

When a politician lamely tries to fake being cool, it’s worth considering just how false he or she really is. On a radio show, Kamala Harris “confessed” to smoking pot in college: “And I inhaled.” ..... while listening to weed-loving Snoop Dogg, she replied, “Definitely Snoop, Tupac [Shakur] for sure.” Oops: Neither rapper had made it before she graduated from law school, let alone college. But Harris' games run much deeper. In her book, “The Truths We Hold,” she lectures: “Something else it’s past time we get done is dismantling the failed war on drugs — starting with legalizing marijuana.”...

Illustrating how government hides information from the American public, former Attorney General Loretta Lynch used a fake name to conduct official Department of Justice (DOJ) business in agency emails obtained by Judicial Watch. As the nation’s chief law enforcement officer Lynch, Barack Obama’s second attorney general, skirted public-records laws by using the alias Elizabeth Carlisle in emails she sent from her official DOJ account. In the records provided to Judicial Watch, the DOJ explains it as necessary to “protect her security and privacy and enable her to conduct Department business efficiently via email.” This begs the question of how many...

Gehad El-Haddad, the now-imprisoned former spokesman for the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood's so-called "Freedom and Justice Party," was effectively the "Baghdad Bob" of the Arab Spring. Educated in the UK and the son of a top Muslim Brotherhood leader, Gehad served as the special advisor on foreign policy to deposed Muslim Brotherhood president Mohamed Morsi. Gehad incited violence, justified the torture of protesters, recycled fake news stories, and staged fake scenes of confrontation during the 2013 Rabaa protests. He was arrested in September 2013 after the fall of Morsi and the bloody confrontations during the breakup of the Muslim Brotherhood's protest...

Officials with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) blasted The Washington Post Friday over a story alleging that the FCC’s Chairman Ajit Pai is getting too cozy with the White House. Pai’s chief of staff, Matthew Berry, said in a tweet that WaPo reporter Brian Fung invented a fake meeting between President Donald Trump and Chairman Pai. {..snip..}

Israeli authorities have arrested a 19-year-old suspect in connection with dozens of hoax bomb threats to Jewish community centers in the United States and around the world. ABC News reports that the unnamed suspect is a dual U.S.-Israel citizen. Other reports indicate that the suspect is Jewish. The arrest was “part of an ongoing international investigation that has been taking place for several months with other police and security agencies in America and Europe,” Arutz Sheva reports.

So FOX news just carried a few seconds of a stump speech by 40 time loser John Kasich. Imagine how UNSURPRISING to see sitting attentively listening was a woman dressed in Muslim headscarf. Seems like a HUGE NUMBER of political speeches these days have Muslim WOMEN in the background...you know, to make the viewer on TV see the politician is TOLERANT. So I did a little search and found this article: http://www.idigitaltimes.com/muslim-population-us-new-poll-shows-none-us-have-any-idea-392930 that says the Muslim population is 0.8% of the USA. Figuring a 50/50 split among that number leaves one figuring that 0.4% is female.... Yet somehow, some WAY,...

In May, the History Channel will air its remake of Alex Haley's Roots: The Saga of An American Family. Unsurprisingly, the advertising for the broadcast fails to mention that Roots is a fake, and a fake of the first order. First of all, the book upon which the successful mini-series was based was actually authored by Murray Fisher, Alex Haley's editor from Playboy magazine. Secondly, Roots wasn't just ghost-written: it was plagiarized: In 1978, Judge Robert Ward concluded that Haley had stolen the idea for Roots from Harry Courlander, the white man who authored The African. Courlander charged Haley with...

An agitated President Obama has expressed frustration to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius about the faulty ObamaCare enrollment website. A visibly annoyed Obama behind closed doors has made clear to Sebelius that it’s her responsibility to fix what has become an unwanted second-term blunder, according to senior administration officials. White House officials say the strong words from Obama don’t mean Sebelius is necessarily in the doghouse but that she’s responsible for fixing the problem. In the words of one senior administration official, “She’s in a tough spot. She’s on the hook.” Sebelius is scheduled to appear before the...

Accountability: As with Fast and Furious, the designated scapegoats for the deaths of Americans at the hands of administration bungling will merely be switching desks. Only the maker of that irrelevant video is in jail. Reports of the resignation of four State Department officials after the Accountability Review Board's (ARB) review of State Department actions before during and after the terrorist attack on our consulate in Benghazi, Libya, may have been greatly exaggerated. Eric Boswell, the assistant secretary of state for diplomatic security, has not resigned from the department, as a State Department spokeswoman indicated Dec. 19. Boswell is instead...

The Mirror board said Morgan would be stepping down immediately Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan has been sacked after the newspaper conceded photos of British soldiers abusing an Iraqi were fake.

A journalist working for Arabic TV news channel al-Jazeera has been arrested in Egypt for allegedly fabricating videos of police torturing suspects. Huweida Taha Metwalli was stopped on her way to Qatar and 50 video tapes were found in her luggage, the Egyptian interior ministry said. She is reportedly charged with "tarnishing Egypt's reputation and harming Egyptian national interests". Al-Jazeera said the tapes showed a "documentary reconstruction" by actors.