News Round-Up: German Banktruptcies Go through the Roof, NY Introduces Congestion Pricing and US House Decides To Ban Transgenders from Girls’ Sports
Every week, the editorial team of Freedom Research compiles a round-up of news that caught our eye, or what felt like under-reported aspects of news deserving more attention.
Over the past week, the following topics attracted our attention:
‘Green Deal’: German economy hasn’t been that bad since 2009 crisis.
New York's congestion pricing: the most expensive US city to drive in.
US House decides to ban transgenders from girls’ sports.
Afghanistan's Taliban: women's rights have been completely eradicated in just a few years of its power.
China sentenced a film director for making a documentary about Covid protests.
‘Green Deal’: German economy has not been that bad since 2009 crisis
The German economy is in a situation last seen during the great financial crisis of 2009, with increased costs and a resulting loss of competitiveness due to the implementation of the so-called green transition, or in other words because of energy policy failures. Already 1,400 companies a month are facing insolvency and there are further fears of a sharp rise in bankruptcies.
The number of bankruptcies in Germany are expected to rise 25-30% compared to 2024, writes ReMix News. According to a gloomy economic forecast published in the German business daily Handelsblatt, difficulties are deepening in Germany's key industries as well as in the economy as a whole. Already today, German corporate insolvency figures are at the same level as during the financial crisis in 2009, when there was around 1,400 insolvent partnerships and corporations per month.
There has also been a sharp increase in the number of bankruptcies amongst the companies that form the backbone of the country’s economy. While in 2020, the first year of the Covid crisis, 292 companies with an annual turnover of more than €10 million went bankrupt, last year that number was 364, which already represents a 30% increase compared to 2023. And as pointed out – the number is expected to rise another 30% this year. The hardest hit sectors are the automotive industry, engineering, construction and healthcare.

The sector with the highest risk of insolvency in 2025 is again the automotive industry, with one in six major bankruptcies expected to come from there. Economists cite the switch to EVs, declining car production and shrinking demand in the Chinese market as the reasons for the automotive industry's woes. Experts also point to outdated business models and increasing competition.
According to Germany's statistics office, the national economy contracted by 0.3% in 2023 and 0.2% in 2024. By the end of last year, employment in Germany had fallen to its lowest level since 2020, meaning that all industries have laid off workers and not hired new ones.
According to the statistics office, cyclical and structural pressures, including increased competition in export sales markets, higher energy costs and interest rates, and general economic uncertainty, are hampering economic growth.
Higher costs and the country's economic difficulties are directly linked to Germany's energy policy in recent years. In particular, Germany has invested heavily in wind and solar farms under the banner of the 'green transition', while shutting down its nuclear plants. However, as wind and solar cannot provide a constant supply of energy due to the variability of weather conditions, this type of energy generation is uncertain and ultimately much more expensive than its alternatives in terms of their overall costs. Following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Germany has largely lost the availability of Russian gas on which its economy was built on and the results are as predicted.
New York's congestion pricing: the most expensive US city to drive in
Since the beginning of January, New York City's Manhattan business district has witnessed a congestion charge, a major measure introducted to make car ownership more inconvenient.
The congestion pricing in New York's Manhattan business district has been formally introduced to reduce congestion and travel time, improve safety and air and quality of life. The congestion pricing is levied once a day when entering or exiting the Manhattan business district. Traffic cameras record the vehicle's license plate number, after which a notice is sent to the vehicle's registration address or to the E-ZPass system, according to the New York City website.
The most expensive times for drivers to enter the designated zone are between 5 a.m. and 9 p.m. on weekdays and 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. on weekends. At that time, entering, exiting or passing through the zone, you will have to pay $9 (€8.7) for a car or van or $4.50 (€4.4) for a motorbike. At other times of the day, the charge is slightly lower. For taxis and app-based services such as Uber and Lyft, the congestion charge is payable for each journey. While taxis charge 75 cents (72 euro cents) of congestion surcharge per ride, app-based services will charge twice as much, at $1.50 (€1.45) per ride. However, these prices are so-called "discount fares" and only apply if the vehicle is registered in the E-ZPass system. Otherwise, the one-off charge is much higher.
The congestion pricing is expected to encourage people to make more use of public transport and also to raise money for public transport developments. Everyone needs to adapt, says the New York City Department of Transportation.
But the biggest losers from the congestion charge are the many local residents who have to pay the tax even if their home is not exactly in the designated zone. For example, a home or parking garage may be a block away, but because Manhattan has many one-way streets, there is often no way to avoid the toll roads when driving away from their home or parking garage, or back there. Many people are thus faced with a situation where leaving their home in a vehicle is always subject to a charge, and would they need to drive every workday, their monthly tax bill could reach up to $200 or more.
Many businesses have immediately relented to adding the cost of the tax to the customer's bill. The rescue and first aid workers' union has said the congestion pricing is slowing down their response time. It is also expected that many residents will start to park their vehicles in the nearby tax-free zone in the future, which could cause traffic problems in those areas.
London, Stockholm, Singapore are some of the earlier examples of cities where congestion charge has been introduced. We have also written at length about the UK's efforts to reduce car use here.
US House decides to ban transgenders from girls’ sports
The US House of Representatives passed a Republican bill this Tuesday, banning men who identify as transgender, or female, from competing in girls' sports. The bill to protect women's and girls' sports would amend the federal civil rights law, which prohibits sex discrimination in schools and education programs that receive government funding.
Should the US House of Representatives bill eventually become a law, it would be the first of its kind in view of banning so-called transgender people from participating in girls' and women's school sports and other activities for women or girls, reports The Hill.
According to Republican representative and bill sponsor Greg Steube, the bill aims to preserve the basic goal of the federal Civil Rights Act, which is to ensure equal opportunities for men and women. The new provisions would ensure fairness in women's sports and would also protect female athletes from injury. The law would also fulfill President Trump's campaign promise to keep men who identify as transgender out of women's sports.

The threats to women's sport posed by allowing male participation have been extensively discussed in a UN report, which found that women athletes have lost hundreds of medals to men who identify as women. The document also points out that biological males have gender-specific advantages, such as being stronger and having higher testosterone levels, even before the teenage years, which is an advantage in a number of sports. The bill notes these advantages cannot be reduced by testosterone suppressing drugs, as those would eliminate the advantages already gained.
The amendment proposed by the US Republicans defines human sex as 'based solely on a person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth'.
Although the bill was passed in the US House of Representatives, its future in the Senate is still unclear. However, senate Majority Leader John Thune has taken the first steps to process the bill in the future.
Afghanistan's Taliban: women's rights have been completely eradicated in just a few years of its power
The Taliban regained power in Afghanistan in August 2021, when the allies hastily withdrew from the country after decades of missions designed to establish democracy there. While at first the Taliban promised a somewhat changed, more moderate policy, the fact is that with each passing year, women's rights have been eroded from the ability to work to the newest rules that women are not allowed to talk to each other or have windows in their homes.
Taliban Islamists first came to power in Afghanistan in 1996. Taliban rule was overthrown in 2001 as a result of NATO military intervention. After two decades of conflict and attempts to establish democracy in the country, the Taliban regained control of the entire country in 2021. Since then, the Taliban has gradually added more restrictions and bans on women. One of the most recent decisions is to ban the possibility of seeing women through the windows. This is just one of many rules aimed at making women invisible and essentially excluding them from the public sphere of the society, writes France 24.
According to a statement made by a Taliban government spokesman at the end of December, from now on no new building will be allowed to have windows that allow women to be seen in courtyards, kitchens, wells and other places they would normally use. Taliban’s concern is that if women will be seen in these places, it could result in acts of lewdness. It is strictly forbidden to build new buildings where women's spaces are visible from the outside. The authorities will have to check windows etc. in old buildings, and if such a 'view' already exists in a building, the owner will be obliged to build a wall to hide it or obstruct the 'view' in some other way, so as ‘to avoid disturbing neighbours’.
However, the windows ruling is just a fragment of a package of measures against women. In three years, the Taliban has imposed more than 70 rules on women. Immediately after coming to power in August 2021, the Taliban banned women from working in government offices, but especially in leadership positions in any sector. Thereafter, women's rights have been reduced, tightened and, at the earliest opportunity, banned altogether with each passing year. Thus, Afghan women are not allowed to continue their studies after primary school, they are not allowed to go to the park, gym or beauty parlour, and they cannot leave home unaccompanied. Women are not allowed to work in NGOs or be teachers in private schools, and in some regions it is forbidden for them to drive a car.
In August last year, the so-called 'virtue minister' Mohammad Khalid Hanaf announced a ban on women singing or reciting poetry or the Koran. If a woman is allowed to go out of the house, she must cover herself from head to toe, including her face, and make sure no one can hear her. Otherwise she risks imprisonment. The prohibition on making herself heard applies in public as well as at home, even when women are amongst themselves. According to a few female medical workers still in the field, it is forbidden to meet and talk to female patients, which is why it is no longer possible to provide medical care to women.
The Taliban's decision to ban women from speaking has been criticised by activists, and some of the more courageous Afghan women have even sung openly in protest. They have posted clips of themselves singing or talking on social media, but in doing so they are breaking another Taliban rule – the ban on filming and photographing living creatures – in addition to the ban of talking or singing. By breaking any rule, even one, the Afghan women risk severe punishment and possibly losing their lives.
China sentenced a film director into prison for making a documentary about Covid protests
In the autumn of 2022, large-scale protests broke out in China, of people holding white sheets of paper. The protests were mainly directed against the inhumane Covid restrictions in the country, but there were also those calling for freedom of expression and democracy. For his documentary film on the protests, the Chinese Communist authorities have now sentenced 33-year-old film director Chen Pinlin to three and a half years of prison, writes Reuters.
The so-called white paper protests were the largest in China since the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations and unprecedented during President Xi Jinping's rule. Protests were staged in the streets of the major cities and top universities in most of the country. Although the protests were vigorously suppressed by the police, they helped speed up the end of the world's toughest Covid restrictions. In result, China's communist regime ended Covid restrictions rather abruptly at the end of 2022.
The protests erupted in the aftermath of an apartment block fire in Urumqi in November 2022, in which many people died as the Covid lockdown measures hampered rescue efforts. The incident sparked outrage amongst Chinese people against nearly three years of continous inhumane Covid restrictions. The Chinese communist regime is known to have taken very extreme measures, from locking people in their homes to compulsory testing. Throughout the Covid crisis, the Chinese Communist regime had claimed that such stringent measures were necessary to save lives and ensure health.
Chen's 77-minute film, titled "Urumqi Middle Road", was uploaded to YouTube and the social media platform X (both blocked in China) in November 2023 under his pseudonym Plato. Chen was then swiftly detained by Shanghai police in late 2023 and formally arrested in January 2024.
Chen Pinlin was sentenced in a three-hour closed trial for ‘picking quarrels and provoking trouble’, a common charge against dissidents and human rights activists in China. It carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison. Chen pleaded guilty but intends to appeal the sentence.
Following the news, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) called on the international community to step up pressure on the Chinese dictatorial regime to release Chen Pinlin and 123 other journalists who are in prison for doing their job.