Free Republic

Law enforcement veterans are expressing deep concerns that the Trump Justice Department's criminal investigation into former CIA Director John Brennan is being systematically stacked with politically motivated personnel who are intent on a partisan indictment. Brennan is the subject of two criminal probes being led by the Miami-area U.S. Attorney's Office. One is weighing allegations that he lied to Congress in 2023 about the U.S. intelligence community's assessment on Russian interference in the 2016 election. The second is a sprawling "grand conspiracy" probe examining whether Obama- and Biden-era officials were part of a long-running conspiracy to keep President Trump out...

The far-right social media network Gab now hosts a Hitler chatbot, sparking fears over AI’s ability for online radicalisation. There is no point arguing with Adolf Hitler, who only self-victimises and is, unsurprisingly, a Holocaust denier. This is not the real Hitler risen from the dead, of course, but something equally concerning: an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot version of the fascist dictator responsible for the mass genocide of European Jews throughout World War II. Created by the far-right US-based Gab social network, Gab AI is host to numerous AI chatbot characters, many of which emulate or parody famous historical and modern-day...

A new study led by Graham Taylor, a Ph.D. student in Portland State's Earth, Environment, and Society program and Paul Loikith, associate professor of geography at PSU, tested how well climate models represent large-scale weather patterns over the Pacific Northwest. Since all computer models have different strengths and weaknesses based on differences in physics, scientists often use the output from many different climate models to assess projections of future climate change. For this study, the researchers used data from the state-of-the-art sixth phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6) to test how well 26 different climate models could simulate...

It turns out that the ideal vice presidential candidate for Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, is the same person as the ideal vice presidential candidate for Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), the presumptive Democratic nominee, according to a sophisticated online survey by Affinnova Inc. For both candidates, the best running mate is Colin Powell, a former U.S. Army general and former secretary of state under President George H.W. Bush, according to the survey, which was powered by an Affinnova algorithm it calls "evolutionary optimization."

Robert Luskin, Karl Rove's lawyer, says he spent most of the day on May 12 taking his cat to the veterinarian and having a technician fix his computer at home. He was stunned, therefore, when journalists started calling to ask about an online report that he had spent half the day at his law office, negotiating with Patrick Fitzgerald -- and that the special prosecutor had secretly obtained an indictment of Rove. The cat's medical tests, Luskin says, found that "the stools were free of harmful parasites, which is more than I can say for this case."

<p>Just before election day, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch published a stunning poll about the governor's race in Illinois: GOP candidate Jim Ryan was ahead.</p> <p>The Republican's 43.5 to 43.2 percent edge over Democrat Rod Blagojevich, though tiny and statistically insignificant, landed with a bang in the world of Illinois politics because many earlier surveys had shown Ryan to be far behind. Moreover, the poll was conducted by nationally known pollster John Zogby, of Zogby International in Utica, N.Y., acclaimed for his accuracy in the past two presidential campaigns. Zogby told the Post-Dispatch that he had personally affirmed its accuracy.</p>