News Round-Up

• “Cabinet Office was warned parties were breaking law” – Sue Gray’s report into lockdown-breaking parties will expose emails revealing widespread “premeditation” by civil servants and Downing Street staff who knew they were breaking the law, reports the Times.
• “Show us the proof, Sir Keir: MPs demand evidence that Labour leader did not break Covid rules over ‘Beergate’ amid claims of big curry delivery and 10pm drinks… as he still insists it was a ‘break’ during work” – Keir Starmer was told on Sunday to provide evidence to back up his claims over Beergate as he insists he did not break Covid rules when he was caught on camera swigging beer with colleagues last year, the Mail reports.
• “Boris Johnson’s defence on Covid risk to care homes hit by new revelation” – The Prime Minister had broached the issue of asymptomatic transmission publicly with advisers long before testing rules were introduced, seemingly contradicting his defence, according to the Guardian.
• “Oprah says she will continue to wear a mask inside planes” – Revealing she spent 332 days without leaving her home during the peak of the pandemic, Oprah went on to tell the LA times she is not quite ready just yet to let go of precautions, reports the Mail.
• “The U.K. Covid Response: A Stool with Three Legs” – Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson write for the Brownstone Institute that they discovered U.K. public health bodies had 14 different ways of attributing the role of SARS-CoV-2 to a death.
• “Transcending Covid Tribalism: Will the Best Science Please Stand Up?” – What really drove the lockdowns and draconian mandates was the more than century-old germ theory – the simplistic view that disease automatically ensues when a virus enters any human body, write Brandon P. Reines and Mary D. Catlin in AIER.
• “Chinese medicine has blighted billions” – The first country to experience COVID-19, and the one that invented the defence strategy known as lockdown, is the only country still practising it – perhaps because its vulnerable elderly swear by the snake oil of Chinese traditional medicines, writes Dominic Lawson in the Times.
• “Chinese man seals himself inside his car to quarantine because he thinks he might have Covid – as millions suffer under the world’s strictest lockdown and residents stage mass pot-banging protest” – A man in Beijing, convinced he had Covid, stayed in his sealed car all day long with the windows shut, the Mail reports. Nearly 200 million people in China are in ultra-strict lockdowns as the state pursues ‘Zero Covid’ and some have started protesting by banging pots and pans – though Boris reassured the Government they were just praising the nation’s health service.
• “COVID-19 Vaccine Injury & Death Claims are Rising with No Compensation Remuneration in U.K. Yet” – TrialSite News reports that people injured by the COVID-19 vaccines in the U.K. are being let down with no payouts as of yet to families with loved ones who either experienced severe side effects or even died from the jab, despite over 1,200 claims having been submitted to the Vaccines Damages Payment Scheme.
• “Why are the police still allowing this criminal disruption?” – You would think by now the police should have early knowledge of Extinction Rebellion’s plans, says Kathy Gyngell in TCW Defending Freedom. So why aren’t they prepared? Why don’t they stop them on the spot?
• “Electric Bus Catches Fire After Battery Explosion” – It is frightening to think what would have happened with passengers on board, says Paul Homewood on Not a Lot of People Know That, after an electric bus battery explosion in Paris.
• “Northern Ireland faces loss of one million sheep and cattle to meet climate targets” – The Northern Ireland Assembly’s first climate act will require the farming sector to reach Net Zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050, reports the Guardian.
• “Nicola Sturgeon’s nanny-state ban on cheap alcohol has cost Scots £270m, made booze firms richer and had little effect on problem drinking, says think tank” – The Institute of Economic Affairs said the nanny state policy had little positive impact on employment, crime and health and warned policies like this often make the cost of living worse, reports the Mail.
• “Transgender women advised to call 999 if asked to leave female-only lavatories” – The advice from the extreme trans charity Mermaids comes amid lingering confusion over new guidance for providers of single-sex spaces, reports the Telegraph.
• “Mental illness doesn’t make you special” – Why do neurodiversity activists claim suffering is beautiful, asks Freddie deBoer in UnHerd.
• “Angela Rayner has made her defenders look like fools” – It is now abundantly clear that Ms. Rayner is not the target of outrageous misogyny that she had us believe, but the Tory sources who claimed she likes to emulate Sharon Stone to put Boris Johnson off his stride were only repeating what she has said herself, writes Isabel Oakeshott in the Spectator.
• “Accusations of ‘removing history’ after vote to remove ‘racist’ statue” – Mail report that the potential removal of the “racist” 250-year-old Blackboy clock statue in Stroud, Gloucestershire, comes after campaigners argued it was “traumatic for people of colour”.
• “Meghan Markle’s Netflix series gets dumped amid wave of cutbacks” – Netflix has dropped Meghan Markle’s animated series Pearl as part of a wave of cutbacks prompted by a drop in subscribers, reports the Mail.

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