Free Republic

Siemens Energy shares plunged on Friday after the company scrapped its profit forecast and warned that costly problems at its wind turbine unit could last for years. Shares were last seen down 36% during afternoon deals in London. The company, born from the spinoff of the former gas and power division of German conglomerate Siemens, announced late Thursday that a review of issues at subsidiary Siemens Gamesa had found a “substantial increase in failure rates of wind turbine components.” The Siemens Gamesa board has initiated an “extended technical review” aimed at improving product quality that the parent company said will...

In prank call with Russian radio-hosts posing as Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky, Jerome Powell confirms that Federal Reserve will increase rates at least two more times, and probably keep rates "higher for longer"

Due to Russian law against the LGBTQ+ community, Buffalo Sabres defenseman Ilya Lyubushkin - with the support of his teammates - has decided not to participate in Monday's "Pride Night" against the Montreal Canadiens. Lyubushkin will dress for the game, but will not take part in the warm-up, where the Sabres will be wearing Pride jerseys. Lyubushkin lives in Russia during the offseason, and he fears for the safety of his family from the Russian Government. This is an issue the Sabres players have talked about as a team. Head coach Don Granato says he was not involved in those...

Hungary expects Ukrainian leaders to make every effort to stop the attacks and atrocities suffered by ethnic Hungarians, Tamas Menczer, the foreign ministry state secretary for external relations, said on public radio on Friday. Menczer reacted to reports that Hungarian flags and signs have been removed in Mukachevo district (Munkacs), in western Ukraine, and the director of a local Hungarian school, Istvan Schink, was sacked. Before the war, “the ethnic Hungarian community was being stripped of their rights”, he said, citing measures that restricted the use of their mother tongue and education in Hungarian.

The fact-checkers at the ABC jumped to the government’s rescue when I asked a few pointed questions about the reported decline in birth rates following the national Covid vaccine roll-out. ‘It has been four weeks since the Australian Bureau of Statistics published data showing a 70 per cent reduction in Australia’s monthly birthrate between July and December 2021 as compared to the long-term average – a startling decrease. I drew attention to this data during Senate estimates, hoping for some reassurance. None was forthcoming. Let me ask again: Minister [Gallagher], why has Australia’s birthrate declined from 30 June 2021 to...

UN Special Representative Pramila Patten has been exposed for fabricating her claim that Russia was supplying its troops with Viagra as a part of its “military strategy” in the Ukraine conflict. The widely publicized lie was recycled from baseless NATO propaganda deployed during its 2011 Libyan regime change war. In a November 10 call with Russian pranksters Vladimir Kuznetsov and Alexey Stolyarov, better known by their aliases Vovan and Lexus, UN Envoy on Sexual Violence Pramila Patten admitted that there was no evidence to back up her widely publicized claims from October that the Russian government was using Viagra-fueled mass...

The rise of a ‘woke’ activist-driven, social justice-oriented politics—particularly among the members of academia, media, and the professional managerial class—has provided the latest ideological justification for interventionism, and it has become readily adopted by the U.S. foreign policy establishment. These groups now have an even greater level of symbiotic relationship with state actors. Professional selection and advancement under these conditions require elite signaling of loyalty to ‘progressive’ universalism as the trending state-sanctioned ideology, which further fuels the push towards interventionism. This combination of factors encourages a new institutional and elite consensus around trending shibboleths.

This should have been a Monty Python sketch, along the lines of the “Dead Parrot” classic. Germany’s leading center-right newspaper Die Welt posted a banner headline at the top of its page last Friday evening just before Shabbat came in here in New York: “[Ukrainian Ambassador to Germany Andrej] Melnyk’s statement trivializes the Holocaust.” In a radio interview last week, Melnyk compared Ukrainian Nazi leader Stephan Bandera to Robin Hood and vehemently denied—in the face of massive historical documentation—that Bandera had helped to murder 800,000 Ukrainian Jews during World War II.” The Banderites also helped to murder between 40,000 and...

The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee has approved the No Oil Producing and Exporting Cartels Act (NOPEC) bill, Reuters reports, paving the way–if signed into law by the president–for a lawsuit against OPEC for antitrust behavior and market manipulation. The Thursday vote saw the U.S. Senate panel come out in favor of NOPEC, which has been on and off the table for decades, failing to get past Congressional committees until recently, when gasoline prices in the U.S. have maintained all-time highs. It is still unclear whether the bill, approved by the Senate panel, will move on to the Senate or to...

Propagandists may repeat the mantra “Zelensky is a Jew, so he cannot be a Nazi” as often as they want, but the truth is that radicals control the political process in Ukraine through violence against those who dare confront their nationalistic and supremacist agendas. The case of Anatoliy Shariy — one of the most popular bloggers in Ukraine living in exile—is a good example to illustrate this point. Not only does he, along with his family members, permanently receive death threats, radicals constantly intimidate the activists of his party (banned by Zelensky in March 2022), beating and humiliating them. This...

This is a long, and very disturbing compilation of social media videos out of China, particularly Shanghai, taken by average people, showing the human cost of China's Marxist, tyrannical, CCP political covid lockdown. Some are humorous, some are strange, but many are highly disturbing.

Six years ago, before Russia’s full-scale invasion of their country, the Ukrainians bet that a Hillary Clinton presidency would offer better protection from Russian President Vladimir Putin, even though he had invaded Crimea during the Obama-Biden administration, whose Russian policies Clinton vowed to continue. Ukraine worked with Hillary Clinton and the Democrats against Donald Trump as protection against President Vladimir Putin of Russia, but Ukraine's bet backfired both when Trump won in 2016 -- and when Russia invaded after the Democrats regained power under Joe Biden. Working with both the Obama administration and the Clinton campaign, Ukrainian government officials intervened...

Mainland China’s population increased by less than half a million last year, and the number of births also dropped for the fifth consecutive year in 2021, data released on Monday showed. China’s overall population increased by about 480,000 people – to 1.4126 billion in 2021, from 1.412 billion a year earlier, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) confirmed. The population includes China’s 31 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities, as well as servicemen, but excludes foreigners. It does not include Hong Kong, Macau or Taiwan. Chinese mothers gave birth to 10.62 million babies last year, an 11.5 per cent drop from...

Less than a month after voting to form a union, employees at a Starbucks store in Buffalo, N.Y., have gone on strike over grievances about working conditions. Six employees on the schedule to work instead formed a picket line in front of the store. Three other employees reported to work as scheduled, but Starbucks closed the location for the day. The striking employees stated that the surge in coronavirus cases and illnesses among the staff had created “unsafe working conditions.” In recent days, Buffalo area Starbucks locations have been operating on a take-out-only basis. “Pressure to go to work is...

kWh Analytics’ most recent figures place the median annual degradation for residential solar systems as 1.09% and non-residential systems at 0.8%. The report states that over a 20-year asset life, project degradation could therefore be underestimated by as much as 14%, resulting in severely overestimated performance and revenue forecasts produced within a P50 model.

Four years after signing the now-infamous “Never Trump” letter condemning then-presidential candidate Donald Trump as a danger to America, retiring diplomat Jim Jeffrey is recommending that the incoming Biden administration stick with Trump’s foreign policy in the Middle East. But even as he praises the president’s support of what he describes as a successful “realpolitik” approach to the region, he acknowledges that his team routinely misled senior leaders about troop levels in Syria. “We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there,” Jeffrey said in an interview. The actual number...

The City of Milwaukee reported record turnout of 84 percent Tuesday; 243,144 of 288,833 registered city voters cast a ballot. Biden defeated Trump in Milwaukee 195,034 to 48,110, a margin of 145,916. He won 80 percent of the city’s total vote. Of the city’s 327 voting wards, 90 reported turnout of greater than 90 percent; 201 reported turnout higher than 80 percent. In 2016, city voter turnout was 75 percent. Trump received 15 or fewer votes in 16 Milwaukee voting wards including a total 7,389 registered voters. Biden defeated him 5,217 to 151 in them.

The US Census has developed a ranking of “Community Resilience” by county. It is very interesting. It already confirms many things we know about America’s urban areas. It focuses mainly on health conditions of citizens and thus their ability to respond/survive natural disasters (or man-made disasters?). I think it could and should be broadened to include many other categories like dependence on government, stability of power and water supply, etc… its an interesting concept and I’m interested to get FReepers’ thoughts.

A leading German epidemiologist who predicted the coronavirus crisis in Europe is now calling for governments to end the lockdown. But he now believes the lockdown is in danger of going on too long and causing more damage than the virus, and has drawn up a plan for how it can be safely lifted. “It’s impossible to wait for a vaccine,” Prof Kekulé told The Telegraph. “The quickest we could have a vaccine ready is in six months. Based on experience, I’d say the reality is closer to a year. We can’t stay under lockdown for six months to a...

Almost 10 percent of the crew of the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt have tested positive for the novel coronavirus, while hundreds of test results remain to be reported, the Navy said Friday morning. Of the 92 percent of the crew that has been tested, 447 have tested positive for COVID-19. The Navy is awaiting results for 775 sailors and 339 have yet to be tested, according to a Navy official with knowledge of the tests. The San Diego-based carrier has a total crew of roughly 4,845 service members, including its embarked air wing and command staff. The Roosevelt pulled into...