Free Republic

Pandemic policies at tech companies have created a rift between parents offered more benefits and resentful workers who don’t have children. When the coronavirus closed schools and child care centers and turned American parenthood into a multitasking nightmare, many tech companies rushed to help their employees. They used their comfortable profit margins to extend workers new benefits, including extra time off for parents to help them care for their children. It wasn’t long before employees without children started to ask: What about us? At a recent companywide meeting, Facebook employees repeatedly argued that work policies created in response to Covid-19...

South African farmers see barren future with evictions on horizon By Stephen Bevan in Ventersdorp, North West Province (Filed: 23/10/2005) He does not look like the leader of a resistance movement. Yet, as one of the first half-dozen white farmers in South Africa to be forced to sell up under its land reform programme, Pieter Jacobs is at the forefront of a battle likely to be as bitterly fought as that in neighbouring Zimbabwe. For eight years Mr Jacobs, 53, and six neighbouring landowners in the Ventersdorp district of North West Province, have been disputing the claims on their farms...

I have been arranging my extensive CD collection which lead me to play some of those long forgotten CD. This afternoon it was Mendelssohn "Reformation" Symphony. This might not be the best symphony of this rather underrated composer. The 5th popularity has suffered from being a "heftier" work, more intellectual, less crafted and vital than the "Italian". As if trying to encompass the reformation movement in music were possible. Still, the last movement opening is one of the most stirring moments of the repertoire, and a powerful musical image of the liberation of the spirit, no matter what religious connotation...

I have mentioned Carlos Machado Allison in this blog before. He is retired from Universidad Central de Venezuela, was President of the Venezuelan National Fund for Agrarian Research .... He is just finishing a book called “Agriculture in Venezuela”. Today he is interviewed in page 3 of El Nacional ... here are some excerpts: “The agricultural states are the poorest of the country” On the state being the biggest landowner: “This is true; it has so much that it does not even know what it has. Some say it has 8 million hectares, other say 20 million. But there is...

Putin: Ally or Terrorist? by William F. Jasper Counting Vladimir Putin as an ally against terrorism ignores his career in the murderous KGB/FSB and his ongoing support for terrorist regimes and organizations. ‘‘Lena Goncharuk, aged 38, said that she was the only one to survive out of a group of six who were ordered out of the cellar where they had been hiding and shot at point blank range. Resting in her hospital bed, her voice barely rising above a whisper, she said she had survived only by pretending to be dead." So reported Paul Wood from the Chechen border...