Free Republic

Barron Trump, the president’s very tall son, doesn’t spend a lot of time in the limelight, but it’s shining on him Wednesday as court testimony in London revealed that he helped a woman in desperate need and may have even saved her life by calling authorities on an abusive boyfriend who was beating her up.He reportedly was on a FaceTime call with the unnamed woman when he heard clear sounds that she was being attacked. He didn’t call 911, because the woman was in England — so he figured out a way to contact their emergency number, 999.It all happened...

BREAKING - The Secret Service are finally taking threats from leftists encouraging violence online seriously, as they showed up at the home of prominent leftist agitator Jamie Bonkiewicz after she called for Press Sec Karoline Leavitt to be killed on television. Now arrest her.

The Iranian government is reportedly planning to permanently sever its citizens from the global internet — confining them instead to a state-run system as part of a continued crackdown on dissent following the Islamic regime’s slaughtering of thousands of protesters. Filterwatch, a digital rights monitoring project which has tracked Iranian internet censorship since 2012, says info it obtained indicates Tehran is moving toward “absolute digital isolation.” The Islamic Republic is abandoning its old model of “mass internet censorship” in favor of a “permanent shift” toward a “sealed intranet” while “access to the outside world is granted only to those with...

Italy’s communications regulator, AGCOM, has fined Cloudflare €14.2 million after the company declined to apply government-ordered blocks on its public DNS resolver. The case has become one of the clearest examples in Europe of how national censorship mandates can collide with global internet infrastructure. Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 service, widely used for privacy and fast DNS resolution, was ordered to participate in Italy’s anti-piracy system known as Piracy Shield. The program, launched in 2024, was designed to cut off access to live sports streams and other copyrighted material in near real time. The program has been a disaster. The company refused. Cloudflare...

The woke left is descending into new levels of insanity following the ICE self-defense shooting of a leftist agitator earlier this week. As The Gateway Pundit reported, chaos erupted on Wednesday after ICE fatally shot a rioter who attempted to run over agents in Minneapolis. Video posted to X shows the moment an unhinged female was gunned down as she carried out her act of violence. Additional footage clearly shows that an ICE officer was in danger of being run over as Good accelerated. The Department of Homeland Security called it an “act of domestic terrorism.” The Star-Tribune later identified...

BREAKING: Despite intense attacks from the UK government and regulators, Grok has skyrocketed to the #1 spot as the most downloaded app across the entire UK App Store – topping all categories! It’s currently holding strong at: • #1 Top Apps (Overall) • #1 Top Overall • #1 Productivity This massive surge comes right in the middle of heavy criticism and threats of potential bans or restrictions on X and Grok from UK officials, including Prime Minister Keir Starmer calling the recent AI image generation controversy “disgraceful” and “disgusting,” and Technology Secretary Liz Kendall backing Ofcom to take swift action...

A 21-year-old man with German-Iranian citizenship has been charged in Germany with allegedly targeting dozens of children and teenagers online over several years, encouraging them to harm themselves and, in some cases, to take their own lives. The charges relate to actions said to have taken place between 2021 and 2023. Prosecutors allege that the suspect, identified as Shehriar J. under German privacy regulations, contacted more than 30 minors, most of them between the ages of 11 and 15. Using the online alias “the White Tiger," he is accused of hiding his true identity while building relationships with the young...

Iran’s government has cut off the country from the internet and international telephone calls.https://apnews.com/article/iran-protests-us-israel-war-nuclear-economy-ebddd998fbe7903e70ca62127250ebcb The demonstrations that have popped up in cities and rural towns across Iran continued Thursday. More markets and bazaars shut down in support of the protesters. So far, violence around the demonstrations has killed at least 42 people while more than 2,270 others have been detained, said the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency. The growth of the protests increases the pressure on Iran’s civilian government and its Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. CloudFlare, an internet firm, and the advocacy group NetBlocks reported the internet outage,...

China recruits top STEM talent globally through programs including the Thousand Talents Plan, focusing on AI researchers, quantum computing experts, semiconductor engineers, and biotechnology researchers. The U.S., by contyrast, issues extraordinary ability visas to TikTok creators, Instagram fitness models, OnlyFans creators, and YouTube personalities.

On Sunday, SpaceX-owned Starlink announced it is providing free broadband service to the people of Venezuela through February 3, with Elon Musk expressing support. NOTE: Ground News is an aggregator. Pick your source from those presented.

The generative AI chatbot integrated into billionaire Elon Musk's X is under international scrutiny over reports it has been filling the social media platform with sexually explicit images of children and women. Complaints of abuses began after an "edit image" button was added to Grok just before Christmas. The button allows users to modify any image on the platform, with some using it to partially or completely remove clothing from people without their consent, according to complaints. Grok maker xAI, which is run by Mr Musk, replied to an ABC request for comment with an automated response: "Legacy Media Lies".

musk26.com is a recently registered website with a low trust score, flagged as suspicious due to several red flags identified by online security evaluators. The domain was registered on January 3, 2026, making it very new as of January 4, 2026. It claims to be associated with Elon Musk and Tesla, promoting a cryptocurrency giveaway under the title "Elon Musk & Tesla: Giveaway". The site uses a valid SSL certificate issued by Google Trust Services, indicating encrypted communication, but the certificate is of the basic Domain Validated (DV SSL) type, which is commonly used even by scammers. The domain is...

Australia has activated a new requirement for search engines to verify the ages of their signed-in users, with companies now facing a six-month countdown to full compliance. The rule, which began on December 27, sits within a newly registered industry code under the authority of the eSafety Commissioner and extends the country’s expanding system of online content controls. Search services such as Google and Bing must soon introduce age-assurance checks when logged-in users perform searches that might surface adult or otherwise “high-impact” material. The mechanisms vary, but common approaches include prompting users to confirm their age through a pop-up screen...

I asked Grok why I have been inundated with liberal content on X. Reply at link.

The hackers, according to the porn company, didn’t get any passwords, credentials, government IDs or payment details. They did, however, get email addresses, locations, and the keywords used to search for what you're into. That isn’t likely the kind of information you want to get out there if you're a Pornhub Premium subscriber. It could ruin a few holidays.

Elon Musk has championed the First and Second Amendments in the United States Bill of Rights. However, X, formerly Twitter, has a policy that prohibits the promotion of weapons and weapon accessories worldwide. In effect, this bans paid advertising for all weapons and weapon accessories, even so far as to include airsoft guns, air guns, paintball guns, and imitation guns. From business.x.com: This policy applies to monetization on X and X’s paid advertising products.What’s the policy?X prohibits the promotion of weapons and weapon accessories globally.Examples of weapons and weapon accessories include:Guns, including airsoft guns, air guns, blow guns, paintball guns,...

It bars children younger than 16 from holding accounts with Facebook, Instagram, Kick, Reddit, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok, X, YouTube and Twitch. The platforms face fines of up to 49.5 million Australian dollars ($32.9 million) if they fail to take reasonable steps to remove the accounts. TRANSCRIPT As young Australians, we will be completely silenced and cut off from our country and the rest of the world with this ban. It's like we've just grown up with this our entire lives and now it's just being taken away from us all of a sudden. We wouldn't even know what else we...

When Stephen Scheeler became Facebook's Australia chief in the early 2010s, he was a true believer in the power of the internet, and social media, for public good. It would herald a new era of global connection and democratise learning. It would let users build their own public squares without the traditional gatekeepers. "There was that heady optimism phase when I first joined and I think a lot of the world shared that," he told the BBC. But by the time he left the firm in 2017, seeds of doubt about its work had been planted, and they've since bloomed....

Two baby-faced Florida teens allegedly lured a 14-year-old girl into the woods before they fatally shot her and set her remains on fire over an online dispute. Danika Troy was last seen by her mother Nov. 30​ and reported missing as a runaway the next day around 7 a.m., Santa Rosa County Sheriff Bob Johnson told reporters at a press conference Thursday. “Unbeknownst to the mother, Danika was murdered the previous night,” Johnson said. ​Danika’s body was found in a wooded area ​in Pace, Fl​a. — 17 miles north of Pensacola near the southern coast of the ​state’s panhandle —...

Over a decade ago, Google showed off a pair of smart spectacles called Google Glass, sparking a major ethical debate over wearables being used to covertly film people without their permission. At the time, the outrage was enshrined by the derogatory neologism “glasshole,” meaning a Google Glass wearer who was accused of having little regard for the privacy of those around them. A seeming eternity later, Meta has attempted to revive the idea with its Ray-Ban Meta glasses. While it’s arguably a significant technological leap over Google’s early forays, the debate has seemingly remained the same. Case in point, as...