Free Republic

Leopold Aschenbrenner was hailed as the ‘Nostradamus of AI.’ But his Situational Awareness hedge fund took on too much leverage, leading to a crash he never saw coming.When the week began, Leopold Aschenbrenner was preparing for his wedding. The plan was for a multiday celebration in Carmel, a seaside town in Northern California, with the ceremony at a Tuscan-style villa and the send-off at a spa in the forest. There would also be a pre-wedding colloquium to discuss ideas in panels and breakout sessions. The couple’s only request: no gifts.The 24-year-old investor had amassed a fortune by promising he could...

The Ukraine war has evolved into an innovation contest since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. Faced with a larger adversary that it can’t match tank for tank or aircraft for aircraft, Kyiv has compensated with ingenuity—adapting commercial tech for military purposes, pioneering new applications for drones, and refining battlefield tactics for maximum effect. The result has been a conflict in which information is as crucial as firepower. Ukraine is now exploiting that advantage in a new way. This summer, President Volodymyr Zelensky launched an online platform called TrophyLab, a digital repository devoted to the analysis of captured Russian military equipment....

Ukrainian leader met with Trump on Tuesday at the White House WASHINGTON—For more than a year, President Trump insisted in private conversations with advisers that Ukraine was losing the war.But in recent weeks, the president has expressed fresh optimism about Ukraine and its leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, according to people who have spoken to him. Trump, the people said, has been impressed with Zelensky’s resilience as he takes the fight deep into Russian territory.The shift comes after several meetings on the sidelines of global summits where the Ukrainian president has tried to charm Trump, the people said, part of a concerted...

After a year of holding back on new hires, companies from tech and transportation to defense now say they need more people to work alongside AIAmerica’s biggest companies say they might need more people after all. For months, major employers treated hiring as an expensive last resort. Now, a shift is emerging across industries. Companies ranging from railroad giant CSX to Google parent Alphabet GOOGL have told investors in recent days that they plan to hire to meet growth goals or to seize on emerging technologies.The push to expand head count, at least modestly, is a reversal from the prevailing...

Republicans will make even moderate opponents answer for the radical views of DSA candidates. I have no objection to the Democrats’ nominating an oysterman for a Senate seat. When I led our party’s effort to recapture the House in 2006, we made a point of recruiting candidates with “authentic” broad-based appeal. But that strategy, which flipped 31 seats during my tenure, and claimed 21 more in 2008, was predicated on a substantive premise: We needed to allay voters’ worries that Democrats were weak on national defense and culturally out of touch, vulnerabilities born from previous elections. If we could do...

It isn’t exactly news that Homer’s “Odyssey” is a very, very good poem. But seeing Christopher Nolan’s screen adaptation drove this home again for me. The hotly anticipated mega-spectacle is, in the end, pretty good. But it isn’t Homer. Mr. Nolan’s shortcomings have made me love Homer more by comparison and sent me running back, agog, to his deathless masterpiece. Mr. Nolan’s “Odyssey” succeeds as well as any adaptation can. It tells the story of Odysseus’ 10-year journey home from the Trojan War with verve and affection for the source material. It isn’t the hostile woke takeover that some high-profile...

For four years, Russia has bet on outlasting Ukraine in a war of attrition. Now, as Kyiv’s drones inflict growing damage on both Russia’s army and oil industry, Moscow is finding out that time isn’t necessarily on its side. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion force is making ever-smaller gains at the front line, its losses exceed recruitment, and it is struggling to adapt to a Ukrainian drone campaign pounding its supply routes to its forward positions. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s stretched army hasn’t buckled as Russia hoped and is even pushing back the invaders in places with small counterattacks. Its increasingly capable...

Mark Carney swept to power on a backlash to President Trump’s talk of making Canada the 51st state, which many Americans took for mere shtick. But for the new prime minister, reading intelligence reports detailing the gravity of the crisis, it was a breaking point. In private phone conversations with Carney’s predecessor, Justin Trudeau, Trump had threatened to scrap the 1908 agreement delineating their shared border. “I tear that up and your whole country unravels,” Trump told Trudeau in one call, according to two people familiar with the matter. Over dinner at Mar-a-Lago, Trudeau’s envoys tried to dissuade Trump from...

North Korea is the world’s most unlikely growth story. Its economy is flourishing in ways not seen in years, aided by arms sales and troop deployments to Russia, supplies and financing from China, and the ability to flout international sanctions to import more energy, components and materials. Chinese leader Xi Jinping traveled to North Korea this week for his first foreign trip of the year. The Kim regime slammed its borders shut during the Covid-19 pandemic. It has since reopened to only a select few outsiders, including Russian and Western travelers and diplomats. Those visitors describe a North Korea unrecognizable...

Each and every update about the Democratic Senate candidate in Maine somehow makes the guy seem even worse. Over the weekend, The New York Times and Wall Street Journal released verified investigative reports that Graham Platner was sexting between six and twelve women, despite being newly married. After this revelation, Platner and his wife addressed the media and said this was just gossip that is distracting people from things that matter. Unfortunately for Platner, his attempts at damage control are getting harder by the moment. We now have evidence that he created a raunchy profile on Kik, a social messaging...

The wife of the Maine Democratic Senate candidate last year told the campaign about texts she had found between Platner and other women Days after Graham Platner announced his Maine Senate bid, his wife informed the campaign about a potential political problem she had previously discovered on the oyster farmer’s phone: sexually explicit texts with several women, according to people familiar with the matter. Amy Gertner, who married Platner in 2024, told the campaign about messages she had found early in their marriage in the spring of 2025. In late August, as some aides were conducting opposition research on their...

The establishment consensus is hardening. President Trump’s war with Iran is the culminating disaster of the most damaging and misguided American foreign policy in history. Iranian leaders are humiliating the U.S., German Chancellor Friedrich Merz warned. “Superpower suicide” is how Wendy Sherman, a top Iran negotiator under President Obama and Joe Biden’s deputy secretary of state, described Mr. Trump’s Iran policy to ABC News. As Ms. Sherman sees it, the Iran war has alienated allies, assisted Russia financially, and weakened America’s position vis-à-vis China. For Fareed Zakaria, the question is no longer whether the administration’s policies will backfire but whether...

The fight against Russia in Ukraine is now firmly Europe’s war. The European Union this week signed off on the equivalent of $105 billion in loans to keep Kyiv afloat through the end of next year—but officials warned that it may not be enough. With Russia determined to continue its four-year invasion until it dominates its neighbor, and President Trump pulling back from Europe and focused on the Middle East, Ukraine finds itself reliant on the traditionally gun-shy EU in its war for survival. The confirmation of the loan ahead of a summit in Cyprus on Thursday, long blocked by...

And it came to pass at that time that a man named Donald came forth from the land of Queens, across the great East River from the city they called the New Jerusalem. Now this Trumpite was a master builder and a skilled storyteller, but he was not at first a man of God. He built vast temples to Mammon, some of which, heavy with debt, collapsed in a heap. He had lain with many women, numbering more than his wives. It was even said that he had kept company with a man from Sodom known as Epstein the Onanite....

The Wall Street Journal, quoting Middle Eastern officials, reports that Iran has only cut off its "direct" communications with the US not its talks with ceasefire mediators.While the move has temporarily complicated efforts to make a deal by Trump’s 8 p.m. deadline, it hasn't ended the talks, the report said."Iran intended to send a signal of disapproval and defiance by severing communications," one official was quoted as saying.Iran's state-run Tehran Times later reported that "diplomatic and indirect channels of talks with the US are not closed."The Tehran-based paper had earlier reported that Iran had cut "all diplomatic and backchannel talks"...

The 60-vote threshold stops bad bills, but it also makes it impossible for the GOP to pass good ones. I’ll admit that the 60-vote cloture threshold has prevented many bad bills from becoming law, and that without it bad bills would become law more easily. But it also prevents good bills from getting passed. Before 1917, when senators established the cloture vote in Senate Rule 22, there was no formal way of ending debate (a filibuster) in the Senate. Because unlimited debate was the tradition of the Senate, cloture was invoked only five times in the first approximately 50 years...

Prominent Democrat lawyer David Boies, best known for representing Al Gore in Bush v. Gore after the contested 2000 election, riled many of his fellow Democrats by recently writing a Wall Street Journal op-ed, "Partisanship on Iran Is Dangerous for America," with the subtitle of "Trump is doing the right thing for the U.S., and we Democrats should judge the war on the merits."Needless to say this set many liberals on edge, including a highly irked Isaac Chotiner of the New Yorker. He doesn't tolerate dissent from the Democrat party line well. Earlier, Politico found an anonymous Democrat strategist to...

President Donald Trump’s complaints about how the media has covered the war in Iran are “entirely justified,” according to an op-ed published by Mark Penn — a former pollster for President Bill Clinton — and former New York City Council president Andrew Stein in the Wall Street Journal. Penn and Stein argued the mainstream press appears hellbent on painting Operation Epic Fury negatively, no matter how the war is actually going. Their Monday article — titled “On Iran, Is Only Bad News Fit to Print?” — said coverage of the war has gone far beyond merely being critical and instead...

Not satisfied with being commander-in-chief, Donald Trump has become the White House’s very own shoe salesman. The US president has been buying his favourite shoes for his staff so frequently that they have become the unofficial White House uniform. One female White House official told the Wall Street Journal: “All the boys have them. It’s hysterical because everybody’s afraid not to wear them.” Mr Trump has fallen in love with Florsheim, a brand that sells some pairs for as little as $49.90 (£37.27) – a far cry from his expensive Brioni suits. The president has been buying the shoes for...

A 6-3 Supreme Court majority on Friday struck down President Trump’s sweeping emergency tariffs (Learning Resources v. Trump) in a monumental vindication of the Constitution’s separation of powers. You might call it the real tariff Liberation Day. It’s hard to overstate the importance of the Court’s decision for the law and the economy. Had Mr. Trump prevailed, future Presidents could have used emergency powers to bypass Congress and impose border taxes with little constraint. As Chief Justice John Roberts explains in the majority opinion, “Recognizing the taxing power’s unique importance, and having just fought a revolution motivated in large part...