Free Republic

EU member states gave political backing to Brussels’ planned investment pact with China on Monday, clearing the way for a deal between the world’s biggest economic blocs. At a meeting of ambassadors, the German EU presidency noted that no member had “raised a stop sign and the way for a political endorsement was thus cleared.” The diplomats noted “recent positive developments” in negotiations, with China reportedly addressing concerns over the alleged use of forced labour on its farms. This came after the Chinese foreign ministry said last week that “negotiations have entered the final stretch” — and a second EU...

Carmakers will increasingly find themselves in a race to shut, switch or sell factories producing vehicles with internal combustion engines to avoid being left with “stranded assets”, as regulators set a course for a decade of electrification to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Traditional manufacturers are currently playing a “zero sum game” because growth in electric car sales eats into the value of internal combustion engine factories, which “are effectively stranded assets”, a leading analyst has warned. Philippe Houchois, an analyst at Jefferies, an investment bank, said carmakers’ share prices will be in large part dependent on their ability to avoid...

It seems like, year after year, the number of words we Americans are allowed to say continues to shrink. That trend is particularly evident on college campuses, where almost once a month there’s a newly deemed offensive or non-inclusive word students and faculty are encouraged to avoid. Over the last 12 months The College Fix has chronicled several examples, striving to keep tabs on the ever-expanding list of verboten words and phrases, according to the campus PC police. ================================================================ Low-hanging fruit: At an event led by Elgin Community College’s Multicultural and Global Initiatives Committee, it was explained that the term...

( Waters opening first 8 minutes of this video is a good listen)

A look at the experts and the arguments that persuaded a government agency to prioritize 'equity' over saving lives. In 2015, Dayna Bowen Matthew, the dean of George Washington University Law School, published a paper concerning racial disparities in health care. She traced those disparities back to the Founding Fathers and argued their persistence today reflects the "structural violence" of American society. Matthew was 1 of 11 people who helped draft the Centers for Disease Control's ethical framework for allocating COVID-19 vaccines. She is also listed as a "health equity" consultant to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which voted...

Removing time-tested classics and assigning easy fiction with leftist themes fails in cultivating any love of reading in the students that need it most.Burbank Unified School District in California recently made headlines with its decision to ban the classic novels “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Of Mice and Men,” “The Cay, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry,” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” District leaders apparently responded to several complaints from parents who took issue with the purported racism of the books as well as incidents of white students taunting their nonwhite peers with racist language from their assigned reading. Yet,...