Free Republic

Taylor Swift has broken her long-held public political silence in an Instagram post encouraging her followers to vote in the November midterm elections and slamming Republican Tennessee representative Marsha Blackburn. “In the past I’ve been reluctant to publicly voice my political opinions, but due to several events in my life and in the world in the past two years, I feel very differently about that now,” Swift began the post, which was accompanied by a moody, black-and-white photo of the superstar. “I always have and always will cast my vote based on which candidate will protect and fight for the...

On a White House conference call with Iran experts last week, a senior administration official said the Trump administration will reimpose sanctions on financial messaging services later this year. That might sound boring. But the administration official was referring to what could soon become another major fight between the Trump administration and Europe. Why this matters In the context of Iran sanctions, "financial messaging services" refers to SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) — a linchpin of the global financial system that facilitates payments across borders and connects more than 11,000 banks around the world. SWIFT cut off Iran...

WEYMOUTH, Mass. (AP) — Taylor Swift is helping ease the pain of a Massachusetts city mourning the recent loss of a police officer. Weymouth Mayor Robert Hedlund tells The Patriot Ledger that Swift donated “a significant number of tickets” to the town for her shows this weekend in Foxborough, which were distributed among city police officers.....Hedlund says there were enough to send “every police officer, firefighter and extended family to the concert, and then some.” The extras were passed on to other nearby police departments.

U.S. Capitol Police have arrested a male Democratic operative for assaulting a female Interior Department communications official following a House budget hearing Thursday. The assault happened after Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke finished testifying on the department’s 2019 budget proposal before the House Committee on Natural Resources. The suspect identified himself as a reporter with American Bridge and pushed a female Interior Department communications official to the floor, chasing after Zinke, The Daily Caller News Foundation learned. Interior communications director Laura Rigas was “greatly alarmed and extremely irate that a female senior member of my DOI Communications team was physically assaulted...

An operative for a political committee that supports Democrats has been charged with assault following a confrontation with a staffer for Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke outside a congressional hearing. Capitol Police charged Wilfred M. Stark, 49, of Falls Church, Virginia, with simple assault following a confrontation with Heather Swift, a spokeswoman for Zinke. Stark works for American Bridge 21st Century, a group that supports Democratic candidates. According to a police report, Stark approached Zinke after a House hearing Thursday and started yelling at him. Zinke continued walking out of the hearing room at the Longworth House Office Building and Stark...

December birth baby Taylor Swift is finishing 2017 in grand fashion. She just turned 28 and has the best-selling album of the year, a feat that was accomplished just one week after its release. Young, rich, talented, and the world is hers...what's not to be happy about? According to liberal America, everything.

The ACLU and Taylor Swift are squaring off after the singer tried to get an article detailing how white supremacy movements have embraced her lyrics and music videos, and how her silence has exacerbated the matter, pulled from a website. On Monday, the ACLU sent a letter to Swift's legal team arguing that an article posted by PopFront that links the star to the white supremacy movement should not be taken down -- as Swift has requested -- because the writer has the right to free speech.

The Russian government will intensify efforts to cut the country’s dependence on US payment systems and the dollar as a settling currency, said Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov on Monday, as quoted by RIA Novosti. ... US President Donald Trump approved the law imposing new restrictions on the Russian banking and energy sectors.... The new law will punish individuals for investing more than $5 million a year or $1 million at a time in Russian energy export pipeline projects or providing such enterprises with services, technology or information support.

By Clare Baldwin and Joseph MennHONG KONG/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Documents and computer files released by hackers provide a blueprint for how the U.S. National Security Agency likely used weaknesses in commercially available software to gain access to the global system for transferring money between banks, a review of the data showed.On Friday, a group calling itself the Shadow Brokers released documents and files indicating NSA had accessed the SWIFT money-transfer system through service providers in the Middle East and Latin America. That release was the latest in a series of disclosures by the group in recent months.Matt Suiche, founder...

A huge range of security exploits, said to be worth over $2m if sold on the black market, have been leaked online.The tools are said to have been created by the US National Security Agency (NSA), and accompanying documents appear to indicate a possible breach of the Swift global banking system.Such a hack could have enabled the US to covertly monitor financial transactions, researchers said.The files were released by Shadow Brokers, a hacking group that has previously leaked malware.If genuine, it represents perhaps the most significant exposure of NSA files since the Edward Snowden leaks in 2013.On Twitter, Mr Snowden...

If the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) is shut down in Russia, the country’s banking system will not crash, according to Central Bank Governor Elvira Nabiullina. Russia has a substitute. "There were threats that we can be disconnected from SWIFT. We have finished working on our own payment system, and if something happens, all operations in SWIFT format will work inside the country. We have created an alternative," Nabiullina said at a meeting with President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday. She also added that 90 percent of ATMs in Russia are ready to accept the Mir payment system, a...

VISA and blockchain-technology partner BTL will invite a select group of European banks to participate in a blockchain project that will see inter-bank payments made via transfers over the ledger. Hot on the heels of the likes of R3, Visa will experiment its own blockchain-based payments platform with a select group of banks who will send money over a blockchain. The proof-of-concept project will use Interbit, a cross-border blockchain remittance and settlement platform developed by industry startup BTL. Launched earlier this year, the Interbit platform is seen by Visa as the solution to “reduce cost, settlement time, credit risk, and...

He'd borrowed from banks and investors and retirement funds, all in a frenzied mission to drill for oil and gas, and by the time Terry Swift realized he'd gone too far, this was his debt: $1.349 billion. His company, founded by his father almost 40 years earlier, had plunged into bankruptcy and laid off 25 percent of its staff. Its shares had been pulled from the New York Stock Exchange. And now Swift was in a company Chevrolet Tahoe, driving back to the flat and dusty place where his bets had gone bust. Swift was coming to this energy-rich strip...

As promised earlier in the year, Apple’s Swift team has now posted source code for the Swift compiler and standard library functions and objects. Open-sourcing Swift is a big win for the developer community as it means Swift can now be setup to run on a server and many other use cases, bringing Apple programming talent and expertise beyond ‘just’ making apps iOS devices and Macs.Making Swift open-source also gives the developer community as a whole more confidence in the language. Theoretically, if Apple ever decided to move away from Swift (which is unlikely), the language could be picked up...

An article by Italian journalist Maurizio Blondet is making the rounds alleging that Pope Benedict XVI was blackmailed into abdication by forces allied with SWIFT (the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication), which had a hand in the shutdown of ATM and bank card services at the Vatican in January of 2012. According to Blondet: There was a blackmail of Benedict XVI, coming from who knows where, through SWIFT. The underlying reasons for this have not been clarified, but it is clear that SWIFT has intervened directly in the management of affairs of the Church. This particular theory is not...

This is starting to not be funny anymore. Ratzinger non poté “né vendere né comprare” Ratzinger he could "neither sell nor buy" Maurizio Blondet Roughly translated by Google: "Few know what SWIFT (the acronym stands for Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) is: in theory, is a global "clearing house", uniting 10,500 banks in 215 countries. In fact, is the most occult and sole center of American-globalist financial power, a bastion of blackmail on which the hegemony of the dollar, the most powerful means of political and economic espionage (to the detriment especially for us Europeans) and the means by...

That's $20M a stem... Much like how Fred Astaire took-out a policy on his legendary dancin' legs for $75K a pop -and national treasure Dolly Parton hedged her ginormous, iconic boobs for $600K (for the set)- contemporary pop star Taylor Swift has now insured her own (Grade-A) legs for a cool $40M. And although her music is not entirely my cup of tea, I've heard worse (plus she's actually a songwriter- I respect that). Alas, they might have guessed a bit light on the legs appraisal- seems to have become her trademark already, and no doubt more than a minor element of...

Jalene Salinas loves Taylor Swift. All the 4-year-old Texas girl wanted was a chance to meet her idol and dance to her hit song “Shake It Off.” Meeting the pop singer was the only thing left on what the toddler’s bucket list – as the family calls the list that they started about 10 months ago after she was diagnosed with brain cancer. On Monday night, the little girl got her wish. Jalene’s mom Jennifer Arriagas told Eyewitness News that the pop singer chatted with the family for 20 minutes during a surprise call via Facetime.

Once more the spoiler. Despite the earnest persuasion of the White House to preserve a useful weapon in the war against the terrorists, the New York Times has revealed the workings of a covert surveillance program, indisputably within the law, to use administrative subpoenas to examine, through a Belgian financial consortium known by the acronym SWIFT, the financing of international terrorism. Once the story was out, the Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal covered it as well. Now the program is damaged, perhaps severely so, and the financing of terror is harder to track. This is another unnecessary leak,...

New York Times reporter James Risen is facing prison if he doesn’t reveal sources that gave him highly classified information on U.S. intelligence in Iran. Gabriel Schoenfeld says no reporter is above the law.