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President Carmen Twillie Ambar’s Feb. 18 announcement that the College is formally considering outsourcing 108 dining and custodial jobs currently held by United Automobile Worker union members incited a campus-wide conversation and student-led protests and demonstrations. As activism in support of UAW continues, the College is in the midst of considering how best to approach its relationship with student activists. One approach taken by the Division of Student Life is to assemble a Rapid Response Team, meant to engage with student activism on campus in a constructive way. The team intends to inform students about different demonstration policies — such...

President Carmen Twillie Ambar, Oberlin College’s first Black president and just the second female president, shared with us all an impressively argued, 900-word announcement titled “Dining and Custodial Negotiations,” which reported that the College has proposed to, very shortly, cut every single one of its custodians and dining hall workers without warning, unceremoniously — a Trump-like “Get out of here, you’re all fired!” President Ambar’s defense of her actions is quite solidly based upon One Oberlin, which is the name of the final report produced by the Academic and Administrative Program Review. The president offers an unassailable argument for the...

In a torturous, twisted interpretation of federal immigration law, a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a preliminary court order Friday to block the Trump administration from continuing to implement its Migrant Protection Protocols, known informally as the Remain-in-Mexico policy. But shortly after issuing the ruling, the three-judge panel voted 2-1 to put a hold on it, preventing it from going into force until the federal government can file written arguments by the end of Monday in favor of the Remain-in-Mexico policy and plaintiffs can respond by the end of Tuesday arguing in favor of...

Democrats in the US Senate were able to exploit the cloture rule to prevent the “Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act” from coming to a vote. The bill introduced by Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb) would have required a health care practitioner to render medical assistance to a baby that survives an attempted abortion. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) called the legislation “fake, dishonest, and extreme legislation. It would interfere with the final execution of a woman’s decision to terminate an unwanted child. Just because a doctor flubs the abortion procedure doesn’t mean the mother’s right to abort this child is...

Minutes before President Trump was preparing Wednesday to reassure a skittish nation about the coronavirus threat, he received a piece of crucial information: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had identified in California the first U.S. case of the illness not tied to foreign travel, a sign that the virus’s spread in the United States was likely to explode. But when Trump took to the lectern for a news conference intended to bring transparency to the spiraling global crisis, he made no explicit mention of the California case and its implications — and falsely suggested the virus might soon...

Biden, who has frequently flubbed words and phrases on the campaign trail, was asked by the Fox News Sunday host about some of the recent times he misspoke, including when he discussed being a Senate candidate and said to “vote for the other Biden” if people don’t like what they see. At the end of the interview, Wallace thanked Biden for taking the time to speak with him. “All right, Chuck, thank you very much,” Biden said. “Alright, it’s Chris, but anyway,” Wallace responded with a grin.

I took a picture of the table of cases around the world. I would post it here if I remembered how or if there is an easy way to do it. So I will type it. There is something glaring missing in the list. China (includes Taiwan, Hong Kong & Macao)- 79,251 South Korea - 3,150 Italy - 1,128 ICCS (International Conveyance Cruise Ship) - 705 Iran - 593 Japan - 226 France - 100 Singapore - 98 United States - 62 German - 57 There are 10 more countries in the list all are consecutively lower. Lowest being Canada...

Don Pietro Leone: The Coronavirus and Holy Communion in the Hand Translated from the Italian by Francesca Romana If honour is due to another according to his dignity, that is to say according to the excellence that he possesses, it is due to God absolutely in virtue of His infinite dignity and excellence. The name of this honour due to God is ‘Adoration’, which encompasses an attitude both of the mind and of the body. That of the mind is defined by Bossuet as: ‘The recognition of God’s Highest Sovereignty, and of our own most profound dependence’. The attitude to...

Welcome to The Bicycle Thread. A monthly PING List for bicycle enthusiasts to share experiences, information and ideas.

I think that we should have one thread where everybody on Free Republic Can list their concerns about the Coronavirus. It’s simply becoming too time consuming to keep up with all the different Coronavirus concern threads that keep popping up every few minutes. This way, we can all be on the record on one thread with our concerns about the Coronavirus.

They intended evil against you. Therefore, you should make them turn their back. On February 26, 2020 Pope Francis spoke of the too many offensive and harmful words, too much verbal violence, amplified by the Internet. Words indeed range from the brutal and most cruel to the insensitive. The brutal is often accompanied by discrimination, persecution, violence, massacres, pogroms, and, at its worst, death camps. Auschwitz is still the global personification of evil. The insensitive may be couched in false prudence, or as Abraham Lincoln said, blowing out the moral lights around us. Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo at a conference...

She’s traded in the Windsors for Hollywood royalty. Meghan Markle is trying to get back into acting and is searching for roles in a blockbuster superhero flick, the Daily Mail reported Saturday. “Meghan is planning a series of meetings in Hollywood,” a source told the outlet. “She has already done the voice-over for Disney and now the word is out that she’s looking for a superhero film, as a voice-over or even on screen

Robert Spencer recently published The Palestinian Delusion, which depicts the modern struggle between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs (and the Arab world). This incredibly well researched and readable volume reveals the lack of historical truth in the Arab narrative. It also depicts the weakness of American presidents from Jimmy Carter through Barack Obama, the inherent contradictions and deceptions of all proposed "two-state solutions," and the importance of the Qur'anic notion of jihad that is driving Arab politics. The book is a tour de force of historical knowledge, of understanding of modern negotiations, and of the failure of American leadership to...

Interior Secretary David Bernhardt said on Saturday at the American Conservative Union’s 2020 CPAC in Oxon Hill, Maryland, that President Donald Trump has made it a priority to give Americans access to federal lands for both pleasure and business. In keeping with that goal, Bernhardt said that his agency is committed to making sure that 245 million acres in the western United States be “specifically designated to be managed for multiple use.” “We’ve expanded by 1.4 million acres this last year as opportunities for hunting and fishing on public lands and in forests, but more importantly we have ensured the...

MSNBC host Ali Velshi brought Roland on to discuss the South Carolina primary. “You are a man of faith,” Velshi touted, “and one of the issues in the last several years has been Donald Trump has been viewed as an object of suspicion by some people of faith… How do Democrats who are trying to court particularly the black religious vote deal with this?” He trashed all Trump-backing white evangelicals as not just fake Christians, but as racists

Tiger Ye, 21, lives in Wuhan and started showing symptoms in mid-January. Here he tells the story of his illness and recovery Tiger Ye in Wuhan Sat 29 Feb 2020 00.00 ESTOn 17 January my muscles became sore all over. I may have had a slight fever, but it wasn’t strong enough to notice. Looking back, it is a little scary, because my house and the language school where I study Japanese are within a 5km radius of the Wuhan seafood market (where the virus is believed to have originated).To treat my muscle soreness, I took some cold tablets because I thought...

In 1929 in an edict that seemed both impossibly savage and self-destructive, Stalin announced the "liquidation of the kulaks as a class.” The people he called kulaks were the relatively wealthy peasants in the countryside. For much of the eighteenth, nineteenth and into the early twentieth century, they were the most important single economic sector of the Russian empire. They were also the cultural center. They preserved Russian traditions and honored religious faith. They grew more than enough food to feed the nation. The excess they produced created more wealth in international trade and hard currency for Russia than any...

Just before Christmas last year, Jill Biden figuratively stepped over the huddled masses of homeless on the streets of America, and headed across the border for a high-profile campaign photo-op. Her destination was a camp for migrants who had entered the US illegally and were awaiting adjudication of their cases in Mexico. Twelve thousand children are homeless here in California, and our homeless population has risen to 151,000. Last year, California was single-handedly responsible for the national increase in homelessness. Homeless camp on a street in front of a school in Los Angeles (YouTube screen grab) Adjusted for cost of...

Billionaire Tom Steyer wasted over $252 million on his failed presidential campaign, according to federal election records. The campaign finance report filed on January 30, showed Steyer spent $252,841,942 on his campaign, according to Open Secrets. Millions more were likely spent as Steyer continued to advertise in Nevada and South Carolina before calling it quits on February 29. “Honestly, I can’t see a path where I can win the presidency,” Steyer said on Saturday night, sharing his decision to end his campaign. Steyer was a self-funding billionaire candidate, as 98 percent of his campaign money came from his own pocket....

It is perhaps no accident that the coronavirus panic only began roiling world markets after Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) emerged as the frontrunner for the Democratic Party’s nomination for president after the Nevada caucuses last weekend. The “democratic socialist” is still the frontrunner, despite former Vice President Joe Biden’s win in South Carolina on Saturday. He is widely viewed as the least likely to defeat President Donald Trump in November’s general election. There are no alternatives to a Sanders-Biden contest, which Biden may struggle to win. The Mike Bloomberg bubble burst at the Nevada debate, and may not recover if...