News Round-Up

• “Boris Johnson steps in to save holidays on the Continent” – Reprieve for popular destinations as plans for controversial new ‘amber watchlist’ are shelved following backlash, reports the Telegraph.
• “Tourism bosses call on PM to scrap traffic light system to save summer” – In a letter to the Prime Minister, major airlines and tour operators said simplified rules would help the UK travel sector recover while protecting the country’s health needs, according to the Mail.
• “Amber list marks out border between Johnson and Sunak” – “Thank God for Rishi Sunak,” writes Stephen Glover in the Daily Mail. “I don’t know whether he will be, or should be, Prime Minister. I am just grateful that he displays a reassuringly analytical approach.”
• “Just how bad is the situation in Spain, Italy and Greece?” – Experts say is’s unlikely that the South African ‘Beta’ variant will be able to ‘outrun’ the more transmissible Indian ‘Delta’ strain which is dominant in Europe and the U.K., says MailOnline.
• “Obama’s birthday party sets a terrible example” – Piers Morgan lets fly against President Obama in the Daily Mail, who is planning to invite 500 people to his birthday bash.
• “One AstraZeneca dose gives 82% protection against beta variant hospitalisation or death” – New findings increase pressure on the Government to lift restrictions on people travelling to and from France, reports the Telegraph.
• “Could hidden viruses in your body be causing long Covid?” – A new picture is emerging that links the often debilitating illness to other post-viral syndromes, says the Telegraph.
• “What Were Lockdowners Thinking? A Review of Jeremy Farrar” – Jeffrey A. Tucker, writing for the Brownstone Institute, his new think tank, tries to understand the mind of Jeremy Farrar, who he says was an even more influential advocate for lockdown than Neil Ferguson.
• “Are booster shots necessary?” – Will Britain become the first country in the world to have a large section of its population immunised against COVID-19 three times over, asks Ross Clark in the Spectator. And will that be a worthwhile achievement?
• “Nothing unethical about covert psychological ‘nudges’, says the BPS” – After six months of evasion and obfuscation, the British Psychological Society (BPS) has made its position clear: it sees nothing ethically questionable about deploying covert psychological strategies (often referred to as ‘nudges’) on the British people as a means of increasing compliance with public health restrictions. Gary Sidley is suitably outraged on his blog.
• “As protests grow against health passes, are elites imposing the measures making the same disdainful mistakes Remain did in 2016?” – Right-wing parties have swung behind recent anti-vaxx demos sweeping Europe. It’s a high-risk strategy, but the establishment should not dismiss the protests out of hand, as it may come back to haunt them, as it did with Brexit, writes ex-UKIP leader Paul Nuttall.
• “Neil Oliver: For the sake of freedom – yours and mine – I will cheerfully risk catching COVID-19” – Neil Oliver on GB News says the vast majority of us have nothing to fear from the virus.
• “Twitter Suspends Science Writer After He Posts Results Of Pfizer Clinical Test” – Twitter has suspended ex-New York Times science reporter and anti-lockdown campaigner Alex Berenson.
• “The smear campaign against the Great Barrington Declaration” – Dominic Cummings, scientists and the media successfully demonised anyone who questioned the lockdown, write Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff in Spiked.
• “The rest of the world has shamed Britain’s blasé rejection of liberty” – Our national failure to confront the autocratic implications of Covid rules is a devastating failure, says Sherelle Jacobs in the Telegraph.
• “£100,000-a-year lawyer loses harassment case against boss” – A lawyer who filed 42 discrimination and harassment complaints to a Reading employment tribunal has lost her case, with the judge warning against “a culture of hyper-sensitivity”.
• “Over-75s have plenty of reasons to reject the BBC. Here are a few” – The Corporation faces a funding crisis, and pensioners won’t cough up – but are Britain’s poorest to blame, or the overpaid suits? Hard-hitting stuff from former BBC journalist Robin Aitken in the Telegraph.
• “People expect sensible debate about education – not inflammatory rows about ‘decolonising’ the curriculum” – We should perhaps avoid complaining that there are, for example, too many ‘dead white men’ in literature set-text lists – and instead focus on making the canon bigger and more inclusive, writes Ed Dorrell in the Independent.
• “Hungary, Poland and the EU’s ‘diversity’ problem” – For 20 years the EU’s slogan has been ‘Unity in diversity’. But can the bloc cope with Hungary and Poland becoming illiberal democracies, asks Katja Hoyer in the Spectator.
• “If all ‘problematic’ statues have to go, then that includes monuments to Gandhi, Marx, Engels and Che Guevara” – Now that both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson have been ignominiously defenestrated, it is clear that the iconoclasts really do mean business. But will left-wing icons be held to the same standards as everyone else, asks RT.
• “Destruction and Hope in Portland” – How calls for justice morphed into the violence that struck the city. A harrowing account by ex-Portland resident Nancy Rommelmann for Persuasian.
• “NHS lets trans sex offenders on female wards” – Sex offenders who were born male but identify as female can be placed on women-only NHS wards, according to guidance issued by hospital trusts. The Daily Mail isn’t impressed.
• “Olympic rules for allowing transgender women to compete to be changed” – The Intentional Olympic Committee (IOC) say it will set out a new policy for the participation of transgender women in Olympic sports, following an international outcry over a transwoman being allowed to compete against biological women in the women’s weightlifting at the Olympics.
• “Experts give their verdict on The Firm’s favoured alternative remedies” – Members of the Royal Family have reportedly used homeopathy for their ailments for years – but it’s not the only alternative remedy they’ve favoured. The Daily Mail has got some experts to sort the wheat from the chaff.