The current standoff is, in essence, about the future of free speech in Europe. If notoriously feckless European officials fail to stand firm in the face of mounting Chinese pressure, Europeans who dare publicly to criticize the CCP in the future can expect to pay an increasingly high personal cost for doing so.

"Beijing's message is unmistakable: You must choose. If you want to do business in China, it must be at the expense of American values. You will meticulously ignore the genocide of ethnic and religious minorities inside China's borders; you must disregard that Beijing has reneged on its major promises—including the international treaty guaranteeing a 'high degree of autonomy' for Hong Kong; and you must stop engaging with security-minded officials in your own capital unless it's to lobby them on Beijing's behalf.

The forecasting error, coming as 25% of power generation was off line for seasonal repairs, was another grim reminder of the vulnerability of Texas’s grid. Two months ago, a deep winter freeze knocked out almost half the state’s generating capacity, leaving millions of people in the dark for days. But Tuesday’s weather was hardly extreme, and the close call has raised questions about whether the grid operator, known as Ercot, can prevent a repeat of the February energy crisis.

“It’s a disgrace for a power grid in modern times to struggle to keep the lights on during a mild day,” said Daniel Cohan, an associate professor of environmental engineering at Rice University. “We’ll be in trouble when a summer heat wave comes in and demand is one-and-a-half times as much as it was yesterday.”

The National Weather Service received dozens of reports of large hail from a severe thunderstorm over parts of north-central Texas. The storm left smashed windshields and dented vehicles in its wake. NOAA said the "gorilla" hail was remarkable not only because of its size but also because it accumulated up to 76 mm (3 inches) on the ground, particularly in Llano, where the largest hail fell.

Maybe you've heard of IoT, but in case you haven't it's easily explained. It’s all about dumb, inanimate objects. These are elevators, engines, machinery, trucks, phones, sprinkler systems, inventory and, yes, even fish-tank thermometers. These objects are being equipped with sensors and then connected back to networks, databases and communication systems. So much so that by 2025 some analysts predict that there will be as many as 31 billion connected devices worldwide.

This is a good thing, because the “smarter” you make these objects, the more information we can glean from them to ward off issues and optimize their use. Rolls Royce, for example, is using IoT-connected airplane engines to report back performance data on the fly. Elevator-maker ThyssenKrupp is creating “smart buildings” by connecting their individual lifts to monitoring stations around the world in order to warn of any potential problems.

But all of these connected devices are creating an enormous opportunity for hackers. That’s because many of them aren’t equipped with the kinds of security protections seen in laptops, servers, phones and tablets. And unfortunately, many of us aren’t aware of the risks.

It's all because of the Ladenschlussgesetz or "Shop Closing Law." A federal German law in place since 1956, it bans retail stores of all kinds from opening their doors on Sundays and public holidays, along with some other restrictions. Calls for a loosening of the law crop up occasionally. But according to Gerrit Heinemann, professor for retail and trade at Niederrhein University for Applied Sciences, there are three reasons why he believes things will not change anytime soon: the resistance of the Catholic and Protestant Churches, the influence of trade unions and works councils and finally, the opposition of city parliaments.

The two churches' influence as lobby groups is particularly strong he believes. "It is just a very important opinion when the church says no. Especially when the main political party has the word 'Christian' in its name," he told DW. Beyond religious reasons, many associate Sundays as a time for family, and cultural opposition to Sunday opening is particularly strong. Michael Lind, the managing director of three Nahkauf (Rewe) supermarket franchises in Berlin, told DW that it was good for his employees to have their Sundays free.

"Sunday is still a day where you do a little something with the family," he says. "If you are now open every day, well, say the husband of a worker is a painter and he has Sundays off but his wife is a saleswoman and now she has to work on Sundays, then family life is disrupted."

“With Nord Stream 2 pipeline, the Germans are giving the Russians a Get Out of Jail Free card. It’s a huge amount of leverage because the Russian economy is in trouble. Their single biggest export is gas. Because their economy is in such freefall they desperately need to export this gas to Europe.” Unlike Germany, the UK was “acting very sensibly”, Mr Kawczynski said, by importing liquefied gas from Qatar, Norway, America, and other countries besides Russia.

He added: “I think the Germans need to follow the British example, which is not to buy gas from a country which is the single biggest single threat to NATO. It's illogical, and it's also putting Ukraine in a very invidious position for blackmail over its own energy supply. The Russians could turn the taps off tomorrow."

According to a report from Campus Reform, the researchers examined several studies that involved preschool classrooms. According to the researchers, one indicates that “young children are, in fact, quite capable of understanding and discussing issues related to gender diversity, including gender expectations, gender nonconformity, and gender-based oppression.”

They claimed that “4-year-olds expressed an inclusive understanding of marriage and a social justice stance on LGBTQ rights.” Their study asserted that there is “substantial evidence that sexuality education is most effective when begun early and before sexual activity begins.”

“This review suggests that not only are younger children able to discuss sexuality-related issues but that the early grades may, in fact, be the best time to introduce topics related to sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, gender equality, and social justice related to the LGBTQ community before hetero- and cisnormative values and assumptions become more deeply ingrained and less mutable,” the study concluded.

Of course things were not always this bad. In fact, if you go back to the early days of the Bush administration, syphilis had almost been entirely wiped out, and cases of chlamydia and gonorrhea were at very low levels…Unfortunately, the landscape has completely changed since that time.

There are a lot of things that we want America to be great at, but spreading sexually-transmitted diseases is not one of them. So why is this happening? Well, an NPR article on this subject is pointing out that dating apps have made finding casual sex easier than ordering a pizza…These dating apps are particularly popular among young people and in the gay community, and this is clearly showing up in the case numbers…

It is important to keep in mind that chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis are just three pieces of a much larger puzzle. According to the CDC, there are dozens of STDs currently spreading in the United States. Approximately 20 million new STD infections occur in the US every single year, and at any moment in time approximately 110 million Americans are dealing with a sexually-transmitted disease…

According to Google, the current population of the United States is 328 million. So if you have casual sex with some random person, there is a more than one in three chance that person will be infected. Meanwhile, a Gallup survey just discovered that the percentage of Americans that consider themselves to be a member of a church, synagogue, or mosque has hit an all-time low…

So that means that over roughly the same period of time that the number of cases of chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis has more than doubled, the percentage of Americans that belong to a church, synagogue, or mosque has plunged from 70 percent to 47 percent… most Americans are living their lives as if our society’s seemingly endless party can continue indefinitely, but each new day brings us even closer to our moment of reckoning.

Blinken’s State Department is racing to address a 232-year-old problem: the department’s overwhelming and entrenched whiteness, Ryan Heath reports. The new Secretary is creating a departmental Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer, and appointing a Deputy Assistant Secretary in every departmental bureau to take charge of diversity, equity and inclusion issues. He’s also talked to HBCU students and met with staff groups to hear firsthand about their experiences.

But it’s a long, tough road ahead. After 58 years of active diversity efforts, nearly 90 percent of senior staff is white, notes career diplomat Ambassador Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley. “It was more diverse in 1986,” said Eric Rubin, president of the American Foreign Service Association.

The new team is also leading by example: public facing senior staff include spokesperson Ned Price, who is openly gay, and his deputy Jalina Porter. The first confirmed ambassador is Linda-Thomas Greenfield. But pressures are building between State’s culture of conformity, America’s race reckoning, changed expectations after #MeToo, and the demands of younger staff.

How has America thrived and survived with such low levels of melanin in the State Department? Diversity. Inclusion. Equity. As Steve Sailer has noted, equate to a fitting acronym for what the establishment/elite hope happens to whitey: D.I.E. Entrenched whiteness must be overcome, by any means necessary!

They have just pulled out of peace talks. They are apparently preparing to fight a full-scale civil war against an often corrupt and ineffectual Afghan government, which will be deprived of US and British know-how. It seems possible, even likely, that despite all the hundreds of lives lost and billions spent in fighting the Taliban, these pitiless fanatics will end up occupying the capital, Kabul, and running the country.

I think British involvement in Afghanistan was the biggest foreign affairs blunder of recent years. Its chief author was, of course, Tony Blair. The former Labour prime minister is rightly castigated for sending British troops into Iraq in 2003 to support the Americans in search of weapons of mass destruction that didn't exist. But his Afghan misjudgement was arguably an even more egregious error.

In the event, 456 British servicemen and women have died — about two and a half times the number of casualties suffered in the Iraq War (179) and getting on for twice the number killed in the Falklands (258). It was the biggest loss of British lives in a foreign conflict since the 1950-53 Korean War.

The cost was not only young lives squandered. By 2010, there were more than 10,000 British troops in the country, occupying a base the size of Reading. Unsurprisingly, the bill was astronomical — officially £20 billion, though some observers reckon twice that amount. If only Tony Blair had known some history! He would have remembered that in 1842 a British army was driven out of Afghanistan after hundreds of soldiers had died. This was at the very apogee of British imperial might.

The Taliban have arranged a display of force for us. Lined up on either side of the street are heavily armed men, one carrying a rocket propelled grenade launcher, another an M4 assault rifle captured from US forces. Balkh was once one of the more stable parts of the country; now it's become one of the most violent.

Baryalai, a local military commander with a ferocious reputation, points down the road, "the government forces are just there by the main market, but they can't leave their bases. This territory belongs to the mujahideen". It's a similar picture across much of Afghanistan: the government controls the cities and bigger towns, but the Taliban are encircling them, with a presence in large parts of the countryside. The Taliban believe victory is theirs. Sitting over a cup of green tea, Haji Hekmat proclaims, "we have won the war and America has lost".