Free Republic

Longtime Apple board member Al Gore is retiring from the board, the company announced Thursday. The former U.S. vice president had been a board member since 2003, a witness of the company’s rise and transformation a few years after the return of co-founder Steve Jobs as chief executive. “For more than 20 years, Al has contributed an incredible amount to our work—from his unconditional support for protecting our users’ privacy, to his incomparable knowledge of environment and climate issues,” Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook said in a statement. Retired Boeing company executive James Bell, who joined Apple’s board in 2015,...

I use a third party Email program (Thunderbird) to get my Email (via a POP setup) from Verizon (now hosted by AOL). I noticed some months ago that spam filters it was using were not always reliable. I began going on line to AOL mail to see what had been placed in the "Trash" folder (Emails I got via Thunderbird) and what it had in a "SPAM" folder. I found Emails assigned as Spam were not and some Emails they sent ot me should have been sent to the Spam folder instead. I made corrections on their Email web page....

Yesterday, on October 1st, Ukrainian media got flooded with reports about some suspicious containers that were planted underground as they appeared in the drone footage published by Ukrainian soldiers. Dozens of strange-looking spheres were put in a trench with an explosive charge from the UR-77 vehicle. Instantly, a suggestion appeared that those were containers with chemical weapons, and they looked like ones, indeed. Another variant was that it is some sort of a "conventional" trap against the Ukrainian Armed Forces. However, it turned out to be preparations for the shooting of a propaganda movie, according to the latest reports. The...

The president's admission that he willingly failed to signal a looming Russian attack has ?punctured the bubble? of his image Many Ukrainians have been infuriated by an admission, from President Vladimir Zelensky, that he concealed news of the imminent Russian special military operation last spring. That's according to the Washington Post, where he made the revelation earlier this week. Zelensky's disclosure that he sacrificed lives to avoid ruining the economy was his first serious communication blunder since the conflict began, the paper said.

On Thursday, August 18, for the first time since July 6, Russia did not declare "territorial achievements in Ukraine. Ukrainian official sources also did not declare new losses of territories. This is reported by the American Institute for the Study of War (Institute for the Study of War, or ISW). At the same time, it is noted that Russian troops continue to make limited and unsuccessful ground assaults in eastern Ukraine. Also, the Institute for the Study of War draws attention to Russian reports of explosions throughout the Crimea on the night of August 18, probably caused by Russian air...

A Pentagon official, whose name was withheld, told Reuters news agency that the ship sank as a result of two Neptune missiles from Ukraine hitting Moscow, calling it a "big blow" for Russia. The Russian Defense Ministry announced yesterday that the cruiser ship named Moscow in the Black Sea was severely damaged as a result of a fire and explosion, and confirmed reports that the ship sank in the evening. Late Thursday, Russian state media reported that the Russian Defense Ministry announced that the Moscow ship had sunk. According to the agencies, the ministry, "While moving towards the targeted port,...

Microsoft will finally end support for Internet Explorer on multiple Windows versions on Wednesday, June 15, almost 27 years after its launch on August 24, 1995. After finally reaching its end of life, the Internet Explorer desktop application will be disabled. It will be replaced with the new Chromium-based Microsoft Edge, with users automatically redirected to Edge when launching IE11. This retirement affects Internet Explorer 11 desktop apps on specific versions of Windows 10 delivered via the Semi-Annual Channel (SAC) to systems running Windows 10 client SKUs (version 20H2 and later) and Windows 10 IoT (version 20H2 and later). Internet...

The Senate Judiciary Committee’s top Democrat opened the hearings for Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, brushing away attacks from Republicans who claimed she had been too lenient on “child porn offenders.” Committee chair Dick Durbin referred to the allegation in his opening remarks, rebutting it as he cited an unlikely source: Andrew McCarthy, a conservative former prosecutor and National Review columnist. In a series of tweets last week, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., said he had discovered an “alarming pattern when it comes to Judge Jackson’s treatment of sex offenders, especially those preying on children.” "In every single child porn...

Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., brought Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson to tears Wednesday with an impassioned speech hearkening to the plight of Black Americans and the efforts of their forebears that led Booker and Jackson to be sitting together in the same Senate hearing room. “It’s hard for me not to look at you and not see my mom. Not to see my cousins, one of them who had to come here and sit behind you. She had to have your back. I see my ancestors and yours,” Booker said. “But don’t worry, my sister. Don’t worry. God has...

Yahoo has shut down its services in mainland China, becoming the second Western tech giant to pull the plug on China over the past month.The company stopped providing content for mainland Chinese users as of Nov. 1, according to a statement from its official website. “Products and services remain unaffected in all other global locations,” it said.Yahoo made the decision “[i]n recognition of the increasingly challenging business and legal environment in China,” a company spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an email on Tuesday, adding that “Yahoo remains committed to the rights of our users and a free and open...

Microsoft said it is retiring Internet Explorer, the browser it created more than 25 years and which is now largely abandoned as people instead use competitors like Google's Chrome or Apple's Safari. "We are announcing that the future of Internet Explorer on Windows 10 is in Microsoft Edge," the company said in a blog post Wednesday, referring to its other browser. "Not only is Microsoft Edge a faster, more secure and more modern browsing experience than Internet Explorer, but it is also able to address a key concern: compatibility for older, legacy websites and applications," Microsoft said. People ribbed Internet...

A sizable portion of the “misinformation” released by the Trump White House originates from stories that first appear on Fox News, CNN media critic Brian Stelter told Yahoo News. “The Fox-Trump feedback loop is unlike anything we’ve seen in media before,” Stelter said. “There’s never been anything like this. ... He gets swamped by misinformation.” While critics have decried Fox News as taking orders from the White House, it’s actually the network that tells Trump what to say, according to Stelter. “A lot of what [Trump] is saying is coming straight from ‘Fox & Friends’ and is coming straight from...

Fauci did not immediately respond publicly to the remarkable attack. The revered public health expert is viewed by the public as the most trusted figure in the fight against coronavirus. It’s coronavirus chaos at the White House. The Trump administration erupted in open not-so-civil war Wednesday as a top aide to President Trump was accused by White House officials of “going rogue” with an unauthorized opinion piece slamming Dr. Anthony Fauci. Peter Navarro, a top presidential economic adviser and close Trump ally, came under withering friendly fire for his shocking USA Today piece late Tuesday in which he slammed the...

The record unemployment rate reported on Friday captured the pain of a nation where tens of millions of jobs suddenly vanished, devastating the economy and forcing President Trump to overcome historic headwinds to win a second term. Months ago, Trump planned to campaign for reelection on the back of a robust economy, now a distant memory after more than 20 million jobs were lost in April, leading to an unemployment rate of 14.7%, the highest since the Great Depression. There's no parallel in U.S. history for the suddenness or severity of the economic collapse. The president is now tasked with...

Snickers bigwigs just went nuts. On Thursday in Waco, Texas, confectioner Mars, Inc. unveiled the largest Snickers bar ever created. Tipping the scales at a gargantuan 4,700 pounds and measuring two feet high and 26 inches wide, the Guinness Book of World Records declared it a world champ. “This is incredibly impressive,” Guinesses judge Michael Empiric told Waco TV station KWKT. “Some of my favorite record categories are big food because it has to be edible and it is also an engineering feat, so to get a 5,000-pound bar of chocolate to stay together is really challenging.”

A man calling in late for work witnesses a car crash and the ensuing confrontation; he narrates the entire episode to his coworker's voice mail.

When it comes to improving fact-checking, most of the focus tends to be on how fact checkers select the claims they examine, the sources they turn to in determining “truth” and the strength of their arguments. While it receives less attention, the editorializing language fact checkers use can be just as harmful to the public’s trust in their work. Browse through the first five pages of FactCheck.org’s Barack Obama archive and fact checks of the former president’s statements are headlined with relatively clinical terms such as “misrepresents,” “misleading” and “cherry-picks.” In contrast, the first five pages of the site’s Donald...

The Verizon division formerly known as Oath is laying off 7 percent of its workforce, which amounts to roughly 800 employees. Oath was created after Verizon acquired AOL, followed by Yahoo, bringing them together two years ago as a combined digital media entity with a new name. However, it seems that the organization hasn’t performed as well as Verizon executives had hoped, with layoffs, the departure of AOL CEO Tim Armstrong and Verizon’s recent $4.6 billion writedown on the media business

The height of the Ebola outbreak in Africa, Europe, and the United States also coincided with a period in which the Obama administration came under the heaviest scrutiny over its response to that health crisis. Amid criticism, President Barack Obama rejected calls from lawmakers to impose some travel restrictions on the areas affected by Ebola, but he did say his administration was open to appointing one figure to oversee his government’s response to the crisis. Days later, Obama appointed Ron Klain, a long-time Democratic political operative and veteran of both Bill Clinton and Al Gore’s presidential campaigns, to serve as...

The first daughter attended the White House pardoning ceremony for the National Thanksgiving Turkey yesterday in a short leg-baring outfit, stealing the spotlight from the two turkeys being granted a second chance — Wishbone and Drumstick. For the occasion, Tiffany wore a short red tweed peacoat with hints of pink. She must have been wearing an even shorter dress or skirt underneath, as her legs were bare and accentuated by black pumps. The public was in large part shocked; multiple news outlets have reported not on the event, but on Tiffany’s outfit. Hollywood Life called her jacket “very short” and...