The EU quickly moved to trigger Article 16 to prevent the exports, effectively creating a hard border on the island of Ireland and disregarding much of the intricacies agreed on in the Brexit deal. All the moves were quickly backtracked by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen following a tense call with Prime Minister Boris Johnson over the weekend.

It is an instance, said Robert Tombs, the renowned historian, that perfectly highlights the bloc's tendency towards "operating like an empire". This behaviour, however, doesn't stop at vaccines. The EU has in place many tariffs on foreign goods, ranging from the continent of Africa to south-east Asia, from the US to South America. Its policy has been described as having created a "protectionist racket" that means you're safe if you're in the club, but not so much if you're not.

Professor Tombs said: "It's true that the EU operates in some ways like an empire." Guy Verhofstadt, the EU Brexit coordinator, talked about this being the age of empires. "One of the motives behind the EU has always been to create something very big, which they thought could compete with the US and Russia - so it is a bit like an empire."

Professor Tombs was referring to a now famous speech in which Mr Verhofstadt, speaking in Maastricht in 2019, said: "The world of tomorrow will be totally different from the world of today. It will be a world dominated by empires like China, India, the US, the Russian Federation. It will be a world in which our standards, our way of living, our values, our way of thinking will be under threat by these empires. That's why we need to create a strong Europe, a united Europe as a counterweight for that."

In the cosmos of political cartoons, Europe has been depicted as a snail and as a hydra, as a snake pit or a pigsty. The European Union can be a sick man, an old woman in a wheelchair, a neglected child or a sad woman. Europe found itself mocked as a deflating balloon, as a race car without an engine, as a derailed train, as a sinking ship or as a jumbo jet too big for any runway. The Continent has been portrayed as a barren mountain range of EU summits, as a garbage dump of files, as a befouled land of plenty with lakes of milk and wine. Europe in caricature is a house of cards, a ramshackle home, a burning hut, a crumbling temple. It is always in ruins. The idea that, despite everything, the European Union is in fact a world power, never seems to occur to the cartoonists.

The EU is the most important export market for the US, India, South Africa and Russia. It is the second-largest market for China and Brazil and the third largest for Japan and South Korea. Three-quarters of South African exports of fruits and nuts go to the EU, 87 percent of US pharmaceutical exports, 51 percent of Brazilian coffee traded on the global market, 45 percent of Indian textile exports and 40 percent of toys made in China for the world market. These figures speak of a European market and purchasing power that is mind-bogglingly big.

If it weren’t for the European market, the American, Korean and Japanese giants in the entertainment and digital industries could also pack it in. The data shows, for example, that Apple generated fully $16.9 billion in revenues in Europe during the third quarter of last year despite COVID-19. With its 90 percent market share in search services, Google generates billions in advertising revenues in Europe. Facebook, meanwhile, has 277 million daily users in Europe, more than in the US.

The agreement in principle reached over the Christmas holidays on a trade deal between the EU and China points in this direction and will open up new avenues for discussing labor market protections and human rights issues. Either way, China is already having to defer to Europe's ideas and regulations in many areas. For not only is the EU an economic superpower, it is now also the Number 1 global regulator.

Every day, miraculous things are happening around the globe of which most Europeans take no notice. Technology companies in California build their devices according to EU regulations. Cocoa producers in Ghana and Ecuador are transforming their operations to meet European standards. In Argentina, Israel and Russia, plaintiffs are suing internet companies and invoking the "right to be forgotten” that was formulated in the EU. Regional blocs of countries in South America are organizing themselves along the lines of the EU. Laws drafted in Europe are adopted almost verbatim into national law in countries around the world.

Fast food chains like McDonald’s, Subway and Wendy’s are taking chemical additives out of their products because the EU doesn’t allow them. The Brazilian company Citrosuco, the world’s largest producer of orange juice, strictly adheres to European regulations, even in countries where they do not apply. Adidas, Nike, and Zara are changing the composition of the plastic in sneakers around the world to make less toxic, EU-compliant goods. It’s a tremendous list, and it is very long.

When Microsoft, Google, Apple, Intel or other big companies sue each other for competition offenses, they don't just take their case to San Francisco or New York – they call on the European Commission to arbitrate and then fight it out in Europe's high courts. Mergers of large American corporations are approved or prohibited by European authorities.

Most Europeans ...are in danger of failing to see what the rest of the world has already realized: that we have been successful in transforming an entire Continent - a place where people tore each other apart for centuries - into a model for the 21st century. It’s not possible to be much more of a world power than that.

First of all, we won’t drop everything to address questions in under an hour.

Secondly, what does our stance on vaccine safety have to do with our legal right to conduct business? Nowhere on the paycheck protection program (PPP) loan application must you profess your undying loyalty and adherence to vaccine propaganda. The argument that we should not receive federal assistance “given our views on vaccines” is as authoritarian as it gets, which is perhaps what one should expect, given that Forbes is owned by a Chinese company.

Thirdly, Forbes received a PPP loan in the amount of $8.03 million in April 2020,2 which raises a far more obvious and reasonable question: Why are Americans subsidizing a Chinese-owned media company? ...In 2014, the Chinese company Integrated Whale Media Investments bought 95% controlling interest in Forbes.4,5 Basically, with just 5% worth of shares in American hands, I think it’s safe to say Forbes is a Chinese-controlled company.

The bellicose statements on nuclear war are more dangerous than they might seem, former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter told RT. The US hasn't built up its conventional military forces to the extent it could be guaranteed victory over Russia or China, so Washington would likely deploy nuclear weapons in a war with either of those countries, Ritter argued. Russia would have no choice but to respond to such an attack in kind, he said.

“This is what makes the admiral's statements about preparing for nuclear war so dangerous because there is no way of containing it,” Ritter said. “If there is a nuclear war between the US and Russia, it will be a general nuclear war, which means not only will both nations be annihilated, but the world will also be destroyed as we currently know it.”

Flashing forward — two modern avenues of proof have been invented. One, twist and reverse the meaning of “isolation.” And two, sequence the genetic structure of viruses by using pre-set computer programs to build, out of thin air, without justification, collections of genetic information, ending up with nothing more than virtual entities. In past articles, I’ve analyzed and rejected both avenues of “research.”

In the first case, there is the unjustified presumption that the virus is contained in a soup in a dish in a lab, and this is called “isolation,” when it is actually non-isolation. In the second case, there is no true sequencing. It’s all made up out of unmerited supposition and guesswork. However, 99.9% of mainstream scientists are true believers in their own methods and fabrications. They actually accept what they’re doing as science.

This year’s full list of nominations, which closed just yesterday, has not been confirmed. But bookmakers seem to think it includes such luminaries as grumpy teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg, that old fella off the BBC nature shows David Attenborough, ex-US President Donald Trump as well as his gopher son-in-law Jared Kushner, Princess of Woke Meghan Markle, Covid-19 survivor Boris Johnson, Turkish hardman President Recep Tayip Erdogan, the World Health Organization and in case you missed the overarching political correctness of the whole show, the Black Lives Matter movement.

So let’s drop the whole circus and lay the Peace Prize to rest. By all means, keep the rest – the medicine, chemistry, physics and literature awards, which offer an insight into pioneering work across those realms. But it’s not as if anyone will really miss the Peace Prize. Will they?

“I’m completely over the moon and so excited to support her leadership and support their vision for how we transform healthcare, as well as sexual reproductive healthcare,” she added. National pro-life leaders declared former President Donald Trump to be the most pro-life president in history, and Joe Biden and Harris to be the “most pro-abortion presidential ticket in history.”

Harris especially has held close ties to Planned Parenthood throughout her political career. It was Harris’s office that collaborated with Planned Parenthood to produce legislation that would criminalize the CMP undercover journalists for publishing and distributing recordings of private communications with abortion providers in California.

Planned Parenthood’s Johnson said she expects the Biden administration to be “pushing bold agenda items in the name of building back better,” using Biden’s campaign slogan. For example, Johnson not only wants Congress to reverse Trump’s Title X rule that blocks family planning funding to Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers who refer girls and women for abortions. She said she also will be asking Congress to increase funding for Title X and ensure “it’s inclusive of everyone, of all races and genders.”

Teachers are specifically informed that their “students need to see how problematic our binary notions of gender are.” With that in mind, students must reject what their doctor or parents say about their biological gender. Teachers are asked to read this to their captive students:

“If our doctor and our parents assign us a gender and it matches what we feel inside, then we can say we are cisgender. However, we may look like what society says a girl or boy should look like, but inside, we feel something different than just boy or just girl, we are somewhere in between, we can say that we are gender-expansive or transgender.”

Another document shared with area teachers gives an idea of the best way to present complex ideas to young students. “Everybody has the right to choose their own gender by listening to their own heart and mind,” Laleña Garcia writes in talking to young children about the Guiding Principles of the Movement for Black Lives. “Everyone gets to choose if they are a girl or a boy or both or neither or something else, and no one else gets to choose for them.” Imagine how confusing this might be to a kindergartner.

“Our constitution actually reflects a Greater China mentality and our so-called territory does not reflect our reality — that our jurisdiction only extends to Taiwan, Kinmen, Penghu and Matsu, but not China and even Mongolia,” DPP legislator Chen Ting-fei said.

DPP lawmakers on Monday also endorsed a proposal to change Taiwan’s national emblem and anthem, noting they are currently associated with Taiwan’s pro-China opposition party, Kuomintang (KMT). Beijing considers Taiwan to be a breakaway territory and has vowed to reunify the island with China by force. The Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has deployed fighter jets to conduct over 100 air sorties violating Taiwanese airspace since mid-September as part of a campaign of intimidation against the sovereign island, located off China’s southeastern coast.

“Taiwan is an inalienable part of the Chinese territory, and the Taiwan question falls under China’s internal affairs and brooks no interference from any external forces,” Wu said late last month.