Free Republic

The commanding officer of the guided-missile destroyer John Finn was relieved of command Friday. Cmdr. Angela Gonzales was relieved “due to a loss of confidence in her ability to fulfill her responsibilities in leading the ship,” according to a brief Navy statement issued Saturday. As is the case with nearly every Navy CO firing, no other information was provided regarding the reasons for Gonzales being relieved of command. John Finn is assigned to U.S. 7th Fleet in Yokosuka, Japan. Cmdr. Matthew Hays has assumed interim commanding officer duties, and Gonzales has been reassigned to Naval Surface Force Pacific. US Navy...

Longish article. Several embedded videos. Good stuff. Excerpts below. “The latest incident to befall the U.S. Navy’s troubled Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) was an embarrassingly public one, and one that left the brand-new USS Cleveland (LCS-31) damaged in the process of being launched, in front of around 3,000 people, including members of the media. The Navy has now issued a statement providing more details of the collision between the Cleveland — which is the last of the 16-strong Freedom class — and a tugboat involved during the warship’s recent christening.” “No personnel injuries occurred, but there was limited damage” to...

Groom Hemendra Maravi, 22, and his brother Rajkumar, 30, were killed in bomb.. Bride's former lover Sarju Markham was arrested on suspicion of a revenge plot.. Shocking incident in Chhattisgarh left four injured, including 18-month-old boy .. .... An Indian groom and his older brother have been killed after a wedding gift allegedly given to the family from a scorned former lover exploded in their home. Newly married Hemendra Maravi, 22, and his sibling Rajkumar, 30, were blown up while setting up the gifted home theatre system. While the groom died immediately from the explosion, Rajkumar succumbed to his injuries...

The medical school at the University of Buffalo earned high marks for its commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion from the Association of American Medical Colleges and has incorporated aspects of critical race theory into its curriculum. The University of Buffalo's Jacobs School of Medicine's responses to the AAMC's diversity, inclusion, culture, and equity survey were obtained by the medical watchdog group Do No Harm ... The replies to the survey show the school achieved a score of 90%, indicating "substantial diversity, inclusion, culture, and equity efforts." The medical school affirmed that it ensured a "diverse" student body by implementing...

With everyone distracted by China, skyrocketing crime and inflation, a nonexistent Southern border, and rapidly increasing authoritarianism in Washington, the Islamic State (ISIS) has taken the opportunity to strike again in North America. ... An attack on a transit bus in Surrey, B.C. over the weekend is being treated as terrorism after RCMP national security police took over the investigation.” It seems that the perpetrator, a manifestation of Canada’s deep commitment to diversity and multiculturalism named Abdul Aziz Kawam, was “initially charged with attempted murder for allegedly slashing a bus passenger’s throat on Saturday morning, but prosecutors added four counts...

The Aircraft Rescue and Fire Fighting, or ARFF, vehicle crossed Runway 15R at Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport (BWI) without authorization on Jan. 12, DC News Now said Tuesday. The Southwest Boeing 737 had just been cleared for takeoff from the same runway and missed the ambulance by less than half the length of a football field, the outlet reported. “The closest estimated horizontal separation occurred at a distance of 173 feet,” the Federal Aviation Administration said in new analysis of the harrowing incident. The ARFF driver was told to “hold short” of the runway, but read back the instruction...

The vast majority of Americans believe U.S. companies should hire executives based solely on merit, character and quality, according to a CRC Research poll shared exclusively with the Daily Caller News Foundation. Among respondents, 87% supported a merit-based approach, compared to 8% who supported a quota system for race and gender and 5% who were unsure or refused to answer, according to the CRC Research poll conducted for the 85 Fund. The pattern held true across political affiliations, with most Democrats, Republicans and independents favoring a merit-based hiring approach for executives. At 93%, Republicans were only slightly more likely to...

Fascism involves government control, but not ownership, of the means of production. Private companies exist, but they’re simply arms of the government. That’s pretty much how things work in America today, except that even functions traditionally government-performed in countries like Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy have been outsourced to private organizations. ... The Nazis’ program of Gleichschaltung rearranged everything to suit the party’s goals, with the supervision of party officials and government boards. In America, on the other hand, the corporations that control the commanding heights of our national economy do it themselves, following the philosophy of environmental, social and...

Not only did @UofDenver offer students to use ze/hir/faer pronouns- they actually sent out an official email to all students announcing the new pronoun choices. 15 options! This is what they’re focusing on. Imagine going into debt for this. And here is the "Vice Chancellor of Diversity, Inclusion and Equity, Christopher Whitt", from where such ideas emerge:

A report obtained by The Tennessee Star, published by an organization of physicians, healthcare professionals, medical students, patients, and policymakers, reveals the pervasive infiltration of woke diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) ideologies in Tennessee medical school curricula and programs. The report from Do No Harm, titled “The DEI Bureaucracy in Tennessee’s Medical Schools: Woke Ideologies Are Reshaping Medical Education in the Volunteer State,” warns of vast implications for medical students and all who receive medical care in the state of Tennessee. ... Laura Morgan, MSN, RN, who authored the report for Do No Harm, told The Tennessee Star during an...

SAINT PAUL, Minn. (CITC) — Minnesota is the latest state to join a growing national trend of public schools with zero students meeting grade level in mathematics, and its two largest cities are accounting for the bulk of the declines. Minnesota-based think tank The Center of the American Experiment (CAE) conducted an analysis of state test scores from the 2021-22 academic year. Traditional public schools, online public schools and charter schools were all evaluated to determine where students are struggling to recover from pandemic-related learning losses. CAE's findings concluded that while declines were evident statewide, two of Minnesota's largest public...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States is nominating former Mastercard CEO Ajay Banga to lead the World Bank, President Joe Biden announced on Thursday, crediting him with critical experience on global challenges including climate change. The news comes days after Trump appointee David Malpass announced plans to step down in June from his role leading the 189-nation poverty reduction agency. His five-year term was due to expire in April 2024. Addressing the impacts of climate change at the multilateral bank is a priority for the U.S. And leading climate figures have urged the Biden administration to use Malpass’ early departure...

Arguably, the greatest character flaw (and there are many) of "tolerant" and "inclusive" leftists is their oh, so reliable propensity to make decisions based on subjective emotion rather than objective reality. Our facts may not care about their feelings, but their feelings sure don't care about our facts...and in Germany, the chickens came home to roost. From a report by John Cody at Remix News yesterday:In a new interview with one of Germany's top newspapers, principal Norma Grube, who runs two schools in Chemnitz, describes increasingly chaotic conditions[.] ...'...The psychological stress is enormous and it has increased significantly,' said Grube.You...

We have been discussing the virtual elimination of Republican and conservative scholars from many faculties despite the fact that roughly half of the country regularly votes for Republicans or conservative causes. Now a new survey by The College Fix of 65 departments in various states found that 33 do not have a single registered Republican. For these departments, the systemic elimination of Republican faculty has finally reached zero, but there is still little recognition of the crushing bias reflected in these numbers. Others, as discussed below, have defended the elimination of conservative or Republican faculty as entirely justified and commendable....

The young schoolgirl was raped, stuffed in a suitcase, and found inside a car trunk French police has four Algerians in custody suspected of participating in the brutal murder and rape of a 12-year-old schoolgirl only identified as Lola. The suspects (Dahbia B., Amine K., Friha B., and Rachid N.) all hail from the same Algerian village, and one of them may be in the country illegally. The body was found in a suitcase curled up, shackled, with a deep wound in her throat, and marked with inscriptions. According to the autopsy, carried out on Saturday, her death was due...

A Rubicon has been crossed in Australia. For the first time, someone has lost their job not because of something they said or did, but because of the church they belong to. Essendon AFL is an Australian rules football team. Based in Melbourne, it has a membership of over 80,000 and is a major player in what is a large and lucrative sport in Australia. This week it appointed a local businessman, Andrew Thorburn, as its chief executive. He lasted one day in the job and the story is best summed up by the Herald Sun headline, "Essendon's chief executive...

Ted was on with Dan and Amy to talk about the the diminishing enrollment numbers at Chicago Public Schools, Mayor Lightfoot’s proposal to add affordable housing downtown, the damage the SAFE-T Act will do to Illinoisans’ safety and more. ... Trapped in a death spiral: Chicago Public School spending hits record $29K per student as enrollment shrinks, outcomes plummet.. Chicago 2022 homicide rate 5 times higher than New York City’s, 2.5 times higher than Los Angeles’.. Chicago 2022 homicides will exceed 2019 baseline; McDonald’s CEO warns city’s future at stake..

Yesterday morning, Swedes woke up to news of a kind that has become all-too familiar: During the night, powerful bombs exploded at apartment buildings in two different towns in southern Sweden. One person was severely injured in Åstorp, where a witness told the press: “People screamed and cried. It felt so unreal.” A resident told Radio Sweden that his 7-year-old had come running into his bedroom screaming, as the blast made their apartment shake. ... Since 2018, there have been almost 500 bombings—yes, bombings—in what is known as one of the most stable societies in the world. There’s not just...

Elite medical schools are deliberately recruiting woke activists, jeopardizing their mission of training physicians. That’s what our organization found in a review of the application process for America’s top 50 medical schools. Nearly three-quarters of these institutions — and 80% of the top 10 — ask applicants about their views on diversity, equity, inclusion, anti-racism and other politicized concepts. The clear goal is to find the students who will best advance divisive ideology, not provide the best care to patients. We based our review on the 2023 “Best Medical Schools” rankings by US News and World Report. We then looked...

Residents express anger at Angela Merkel’s open border policy.. Some have expressed anger at former German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open border migrant policy after a Syrian national was arrested for the murder of a teenage girl whose body was found at a sewage treatment plant. 17-year-old Tabitha E. left an apartment in Asperg, southern Germany, on Tuesday afternoon last week, but the alarm was raised after she didn’t return home that evening. After an extensive police search, the girl’s body was found on Sunday at the Leudelsbach sewage treatment plant. After the home of a suspect was search and investigators...