News Round-Up

• “End mass testing now and let us return to normality” – All the unnecessary Covid testing and self-isolation is resulting in too many people being deprived of livelihood, education and hope, writes Professor Sunetra Gupta in the Telegraph.
• “Almost 300,000 unable to see cancer specialist promptly from April to November” – The research from information in the House of Commons library found there were 290,428 breaches of a maximum two-week wait target over seven months, according to the Evening Standard.
• “Ottawa Residents, Trucker Convoy Protesters to Face Off in Court” – An Ontario court is to hear arguments in a $10 million lawsuit filed by an Ottawa resident against the truckers’ “Freedom Convoy” for damages allegedly caused by the honking of horns, reports the Epoch Times.
• “Big Tech vs the working class” – GoFundMe’s withholding of donations to the Canadian truckers is a foul, classist attack on democracy, writes Brendan O’Neill on Spiked.
• “Anti-lockdown protestors hold Edinburgh march in support of ‘Ottawa Freedom Convoy’” – Anti-lockdown protestors have held a rally in Edinburgh in solidarity Canadian truckers, reports the Herald.
• “Britain’s oldest pub which opened its doors in 793AD forced to close” – Christo Tofalli, who runs Ye Olde Fighting Cocks in St Albans, Hertfordshire, said he was “heartbroken” and had “tried everything” to keep it open but the pandemic had made it unviable, reports the Mail.
• “Omicron forces South Korea to end GPS monitoring, some checkups” – South Korea will no longer use GPS monitoring to enforce quarantines and will also end daily checkup calls to low-risk coronavirus patients as a fast-developing Omicron surge overwhelms health and Government workers, reports AP News.
• “Is the vaccine (or repeated doses) weakening our immune systems?” – Kathy Gyngell in TCW Defending Freedom reviews the recent worrying evidence of high infection rates in the vaccinated.
• “Man goes on hunger strike in New Zealand quarantine hotel” – A man who went on a hunger strike as he waited in New Zealand’s managed isolation and quarantine hotel will finally be released to see his terminally ill father, reports the Mail.
• “The Australian tyranny is just a test run” – James Delingpole in TCW Defending Freedom is alarmed by what the Australian pandemic experience may portend for the future.
• “The popular destinations where you could still be locked up in quarantine hell” – The worst-case scenario is still a possibility in these holiday hotspots if you return a positive test result whilst you’re there, writes Greg Dickinson in the Telegraph.
• “Why are triple vaxxed Joe and Jill still wearing their masks outside?” – The Bidens – who are booster vaccinated – covered their faces for no apparent reason as they crossed the White House grounds after disembarking Marine One, reports the Mail.
• “CDC Spreads Misinformation on Masking, Not Science” – The CDC’s advice on masks has completely bewildered the American people; if it continues down this road it will erode what little credibility it has left, write David Waugh and Amelia Janaskie in AIER.
• “Politicians who criticised AstraZeneca vaccine ‘probably killed hundreds of thousands’, says Oxford scientist” – French president Emmanuel Macron previously claimed the Covid jab did not “work as expected” in older age groups, and Professor Sir John Bell decided to lay at his and other politicians’ door the ‘hundreds of thousands’ of deaths he thinks the the AstraZeneca jab would have prevented, reports the Telegraph.
• “A Return To The Land Of Covidia” – What’s causing the rise in deaths from natural causes among young Americans, asks Willis Eschenbach in Watts Up With That?
• “‘It’s time to start living with the virus’: Germans from across divide march against Covid restrictions” – Far-Right violence has made the headlines but many of the now weekly demonstrations are peaceful, writes Justin Huggler in the Telegraph.
• “Don’t use black Americans to cancel Joe Rogan” – Campaigns that imply black Americans are incapable of objectivity and ignorant of context are insulting, writes Adam Coleman in UnHerd. “The outrage over Rogan isn’t coming from black people. It’s coming from members of the political and media establishment who have been trying to de-platform him for over a month. When warnings about ‘misinformation’ didn’t do the trick, they pivoted to racism.”
• “Joe Rogan vs the thoughtpolice” – Konstantin Kisin joins Fraser Myers and Ella Whelan on the Spiked podcast to discuss free speech, Munira Mirza and Canada’s Freedom Convoy.
• “Spotify boss denies ‘silencing’ Joe Rogan despite removing more than 100 podcasts” – Daniel Ek warns against “cancelling voices” amid backlash against its most popular host, reports the Telegraph.
• “Are electric cars the new ‘diesel scandal’ waiting to happen?” – Electric cars are not a goer for most people for a host of practical reasons, including their upfront cost, limited range, the time it takes to charge batteries, the new infrastructure needed for charging points and the extra power required to supply them, writes Bjorn Lomborg in the Mail. Worse, it’s estimated in a best-case scenario they would reduce global temperatures by just 0.0001°C.
• “Homes risk energy rating downgrade if they install a heat pump” – Ministers are to overhaul Energy Performance Certificate rules amid fears of a hit to house prices, reports the Telegraph.
• “The IPCC CO₂ Climate Narrative: A ‘Behemoth On Clay Feet’ … Ready To Collapse” – The Earth’s history provides the solid proof that acquits CO₂, and the IPCC’s claim of CO₂ being the dominant climate factor is a behemoth on clay feet, writes Fred F. Mueller in the No Tricks Zone.
• “A college campus where it’s cool for cats” – Bristol University, a member of the Russell Group, has just issued guidelines to staff on the correct pronouns to use when addressing those who define as ‘catgender’, writes Richard Littlejohn in the Mail.
• “Cambridge’s Jesus College is guilty of double standards” – If 17th century slavery was an abomination, what about 21st century slavery in China, asks Robert Tombs in the Spectator.
• “We need to recover our right to dissent” – Free speech has been one of the chief casualties of the pandemic, writes Alexander Adams in Spiked.
• “Why should we legislate against hurt feelings?” – The danger in broadening the definition of online crimes is that taking offence becomes incentivised and weaponised, writes Joanna Williams in the Times.
• “New Zealand’s Maori Party calls for Queen to be removed as head of state” – The Party said Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s statement in praise of the Queen on the occasion of her Platinum Jubilee was “incredibly insensitive”, the Telegraph reports, apparently with no sense of either irony or self-awareness.
• “Sajid Javid calls for public to cancel Jimmy Carr for ‘horrid’ Holocaust joke” – The comedian joked that people overlooked the murder of Gypsy and Roma people in the Holocaust because it was one its ‘positives’ – the joke being of course that people are still prejudiced against these people but shouldn’t be. The Health Secretary didn’t see the funny side of such a dark joke, however, and joined in the calls for Carr’s cancellation, reports the Telegraph.
• “Of course Jimmy Carr was joking” – The mad backlash to his Holocaust joke will only encourage more comics to self-censor, writes Leo Kearse in Spiked.
• “I think the natural human default position is to reject free speech” – Toby tells Nigel Farage on GB News that it takes an “enormous amount of work” for a society to protect free speech.

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