Free Republic

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.

Jennifer Hudson, Taylor Swift, James Corden and Ian McKellen have been cast in Working Title’s upcoming movie version of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s smash musical “Cats.” Tom Hooper, the Oscar-winning director of “The King’s Speech,” will direct “Cats,” which is set to begin shooting in Britain in November. The screenplay by Lee Hall (“Billy Elliot”) is based on Lloyd Webber’s musical, which was itself adapted from a book of children’s poems by T.S. Eliot. Hudson, who won an Oscar in 2007 for her breakout role in “Dreamgirls,” will play Grizabella, the former “glamour cat” who falls on hard times and gets...

When APD officers arrived on the scene, the say the suspect exited the building, carrying bottles of wine. Caldwell ran north in the alley before he was detained. According to an affidavit, numerous matchbooks from The Austin Club were found in his pockets. Caldwell told investigators he didn't know what was going on and denied being in the building when the fire started. Caldwell then told police "My name is Taylor Swift, I told him to burn it down and he did what I told him."

With the curtain rising on her “Reputation” tour, Taylor Swift blinked. She buckled by having Ticketmaster turn off resale ticket listings on its interactive venue charts for the first leg of her North American tour, according to music-industry veterans. The tour, which begins on Tuesday in Glendale, Ariz., shows plenty of primary tickets still available for the first nine shows. But the delisting of secondary, or resale, tickets — a move experts called unusual if not unprecedented — makes the inventory of available seats seem much smaller. On July 20, for example, Swift is scheduled to appear at MetLife Stadium...

The man suspected of gunning down four people at a Waffle House restaurant in Tennessee during an early-morning, half-naked rampage has a history of run-ins with police -- including once telling cops that music star Taylor Swift was stalking him. Authorities in Tazewell County, Ill. revealed Sunday that police encountered Travis Reinking, 29, in a CVS parking lot on May 27, 2016 during an apparent "mental health crisis," according to a police report obtained by Fox News. At the time, deputies said Reinking believed Swift was stalking him, hacked his phone and had climbed a building to chase him. He...

Taylor Swift surprised the police department where Sgt. Delbert Pickney used to work by sending a heart-shaped wreath of roses in memory of the late police officer on Thursday.

The phrase "haters gonna hate" is too "banal" to be copyrighted, a US judge has declared. Judge Michael W Fitzgerald made the comments while dismissing a copyright case against Taylor Swift. Songwriters Sean Hall and Nathan Butler sued the star last year, arguing her single Shake It Off stole from their composition, Playas Gon' Play. They said the chorus of her song relied on their lyric, "playas, they gonna play, and haters, they gonna hate". Although short phrases are generally immune from copyright claims, the writers argued that combining the two thoughts was original enough to warrant protection. Fitzgerald disagreed...

I couldn’t tell you a single Taylor Swift song. I know everyone says that, but really, I couldn’t. And for a while I didn’t know which one was Taylor Swift and which one was Katy Perry. But I know now, and for the worst possible reason: politics. Perry, you will recall, ferociously backed Hillary at the last election, at the urging of her foolish management team. She isn’t now talked about for much else. As a host, she was a car crash at the VMAs, which I watched her stumble through from my ringside seat at The Forum Las Vegas....

Less than 48 hours after launching, Taylor Swift's new app has become plagued with Trump-loving trolls and homophobic comments.

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.

Pop star Taylor Swift apparently struck a nerve with leftists and Internet trolls this week after she said she “couldn’t have asked for a better year” in 2017 and thanked her fans in a birthday Instagram post. “I love you guys so much,” Swift captioned a photo taken at a recent London concert. “I couldn’t have asked for a better year, all thanks to you. Thanks for all the birthday wishes. Can’t wait to see what 28 will be like. See you on tour.” That simple message was apparently too much for some Twitter users — and at least a...

Microsoft' newly launched A.I.-powered bot called Tay, which was responding to tweets and chats on GroupMe and Kik, has already been shut down due to concerns with its inability to recognize when it was making offensive or racist statements. Of course, the bot wasn't coded to be racist, but it "learns" from those it interacts with. And naturally, given that this is the Internet, one of the first things online users taught Tay was how to be racist, and how to spout back ill-informed or inflammatory political opinions. [Update: Microsoft now says it's "making adjustments" to Tay in light of...

** PROFANITY ALERT ** It took less than 24 hours for Twitter to corrupt an innocent AI chatbot. Yesterday, Microsoft unveiled Tay — a Twitter bot that the company described as an experiment in "conversational understanding." The more you chat with Tay, said Microsoft, the smarter it gets, learning to engage people through "casual and playful conversation." Unfortunately, the conversations didn't stay playful for long. Pretty soon after Tay launched, people starting tweeting the bot with all sorts of misogynistic, racist, and Donald Trumpist remarks. And Tay — being essentially a robot parrot with an Internet connection — started repeating...