Free Republic

BREAKING: SpaceX has announced that @Starlink now has over 9 million customers, up from 8M in November and 7M in August 2025. Starlink added a record 21,275 new customers on average per day since they hit 8M, smashing their previous record of 14,250. That growth rate is a whopping 49.3% higher than it was just last month! 🤯

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

A high-profile Zohran Mamdani appointee resigned Thursday after newly unearthed posts revealed a series of antisemitic comments online — including rants about “money hungry Jews” and defunding NYPD “piggies.” The short-lived appointment fell apart once the Anti-Defamation League of New York and New Jersey demanded answers Thursday from Mayor-elect Mamdani’s team about whether its members knew about Catherine Almonte Da Costa’s past antisemitic posts on X, formerly known as Twitter. Da Costa, whom Mamdani tapped on Wednesday as the city’s next director of appointments, had several vile stereotype-laden posts from 2011 and 2012, the ADL revealed in a post on...

Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), the operator of Truth Social, has agreed to an all-stock merger with nuclear fusion firm TAE Technologies, valued at roughly $6 billion. The deal is a strategic pivot to address the massive electricity demand from the artificial intelligence sector, transforming the social media company into a vertically integrated tech and energy giant. The new entity plans to build a 50-megawatt fusion pilot plant starting in 2026, marking an attempt to become one of the first publicly traded commercial fusion energy firms... ...The deal, which is set to close in mid-2026, would create one of...

A teenager attacked students with a knife at a school outside Moscow on Tuesday, killing one child. The first reports appeared on several Russian Telegram channels — Baza, 112, Mash, Shot, and Ostorozhno, Novosti — which said the incident took place at a school in the settlement of Gorki-2. Russia’s Investigative Committee later confirmed the information. According to investigators, one student died in the attack. Police in the Moscow region said the victim was a 10-year-old child who had suffered stab wounds; Telegram channels reported that he was a fourth-grader. The attacker has been apprehended. Telegram channels identified him as...

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,...

A Swiss wind instrument repairman is serving a ten-day jail sentence after refusing to pay a fine imposed for a comment he made on Facebook about biological sex. Emanuel Brünisholz, from Burgdorf in the canton of Bern, responded to a December 2022 post by Swiss National Councillor Andreas Glarner, writing: “If you excavate LGBTQI people after 200 years, you will only find men and women among the skeletons; everything else is a mental illness that was fostered by the curriculum!” As we reported, the comment, which stressed the immutability of biological sex, triggered complaints from activists who accused him of...

A Swiss man, Emanuel Brünisholz, is serving 10 days in prison in Switzerland for saying on Facebook that skeletons are either male or female. For that remark I was fined 500 Swiss francs. I refused to pay, and so, on the 2nd of December 2025, I will serve ten days in prison. It is worth noting that, legally speaking, this prison sentence is not a punishment for refusing to pay the fine. Instead, the prison sentence is an alternative way to be punished for the Facebook post itself. I have chosen to trade a monetary fine for time behind bars....

While shoplifting can be explained as thrill-seeking behaviour among youths, it should not be treated lightly, says SUSS’ Soh Kee Hean.Shop theft has been rising in Singapore in recent years. There were 3,244 cases of shop theft in 2022. This figure jumped 21 per cent to 3,939 in 2023, and again by 7.6 per cent to 4,237 cases in 2024. The first half of 2025 saw 2,097 cases, 4.2 per cent higher compared with the same period last year. Shop theft was the most common physical crime in the first half of the year, and remains one of the top...

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....

BREAKING: President Trump EVISCERATES the European Union for fining Elon Musk and X $140M, says he will be getting a "full report" on the situation The EU may have COOKED ITSELF! "Elon has not called me to ask for help, but no, that's tough. I don't think it's right, no! I don't see how they can do that!" "I'll speak about it later. I'll get a FULL report on it." "Europe has to be VERY careful...Europe is going in some BAD directions." @ElonMusk will win this!

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 —...

The European Union has moved this week to punish the social media company X and Elon Musk for allegedly “deceiving users” through certain company practices. On Thursday, X, which was formerly known as Twitter, was fined €120 million ($140 million) by the European Union for violating one of the international organization’s laws regulating technology companies. The move makes the social media platform the first company to be fined under the jurisdiction of the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA). “Deceiving users with blue checkmarks, obscuring information on ads and shutting out researchers have no place online in the EU. The DSA...

The EU has slapped Elon Musk with a $140 million fine for refusing to censor content on his social-media platform X, in contravention of the bloc’s controversial Digital Services Act Vice President JD Vance took to X to slam the EU for its actions, which he described as “garbage” The EU has slapped Elon Musk with a $140 million fine for refusing to censor content on his social-media platform X, in contravention of the bloc’s controversial Digital Services Act (DSA).The hefty fine, announced by Bloomberg, is the first to be issued under the 2023 law, with EU lawmakers promising...

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (TCN) -- A popular YouTube personality known as “Mr. Crafty Pants” for his online arts and crafts tutorials was arrested Oct. 22 for allegedly possessing and trading explicit images of minors on Kik, a messaging app. Michael David Booth, 39, was charged with 29 felony counts related to possessing and distributing matter portraying sexual performances by minors. He appeared in Jefferson County District Court on Oct. 23 and pleaded not guilty to all charges. According to WDRB, court docs say the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children tipped police off about Booth’s Kik account. A subpoena and...

New research shows that a substantial proportion of children aren’t playing outdoors at all, even on the weekends...researchers focused on a subset of 2,568 children between the ages of 7 and 12, analyzing responses from surveys filled out by the children and their parents... All told, 34% of kids reported not playing outdoors during weekdays, and 20% reported not playing outdoors during weekends. And based on their parents’ responses, the more the children played outside, the better their social-emotional skills were on average. Children with these skills are more able to clearly express their emotions or build positive relationships with...

The United Kingdom needs to be turned off and rebooted. No, I take that back. It needs a whole new operating system. The current one has become infected with a virus that has scrambled everything, and there is no way to set things right. In the opposite world view this is totally fine. pic.twitter.com/v5CahE52GL— Rich Stewart 🔰 (@richdstew) November 29, 2025If you think this story is bonkers, it really is only the tip of the iceberg. An IT consultant was arrested by police in Britain after he posted a picture online of himself posing with a gun in the US....

In a bizarre attempt at gaining online fame, 29-year-old Keith Castillo, who goes by the handle “povwolfy” on social media, has gone viral for distributing large machetes and bottles of alcohol to homeless individuals in Austin and New Orleans. The stunt, which Castillo claims is meant to “keep them safe,” has drawn sharp criticism from the public and law enforcement experts for its potential to incite danger and violence. Castillo, hailing from Corpus Christi, Texas, began his nationwide tour in October, traveling from city to city to film content for clicks and views. He currently has nearly 400,000 followers on...

Authorities describe the 764 network as a ‘disgusting group of criminals’ targeting children as young as 8.FBI Director Kash Patel said arrests for the infamous online exploitation ring, the “764” network, are up almost 500 percent over last year. In an exclusive interview with The Epoch Times’ Jan Jekielek, Patel said his agency made a “huge push” to protect children against the “predators” associated with the network. This group has proven to be dangerous for minors and other vulnerable groups who are targeted and threatened through forums and gaming platforms. The FBI announced on Feb. 20 that it has prioritized...