News Round-Up

• “Covid hospital cases will rise warns Dame Jenny Harries as Health Security Agency chief says ‘latest Coronavirus wave hasn’t finished yet’” – The Mail reports that the UKHSA Chief Executive said: “It doesn’t look as though that wave has finished yet, so we would anticipate that hospital cases will rise.”
• “Benefit fraud during pandemic cost taxpayers an ‘eye-watering’ £10.1bn” – The amount lost to scammers during 2021 and 2022 was five times more than all other years put together, official figures show, according to the Telegraph.
• “‘Perfect storm’ of Covid cases and early flu wave could make clearing NHS backlog ‘very difficult’” – The Telegraph reports yet more doom and gloom from experts who say the ‘double-whammy’ could threaten the health service’s plan to tackle its ever-growing waiting lists.
• “Our obsession with Covid has allowed other diseases to thrive” – MP Esther McVey writes for the Telegraph that it is time we acknowledged that our response to the pandemic has been worse than the disease, especially for children.
• “U.K. polio outbreak ‘is our price for obsession with Covid’” – The Telegraph reports that MPs have warned that placing too much focus on the coronavirus vaccine for children led to other routine inoculations being de-prioritised.
• “The wrong kind of news” –  Tom Lennie writes for TCW Defending Freedom that it’s all too easy, as trusting citizens, to naively accept what we’re told by the media, yet we need always to be diligent and discerning, to search out news outlets we know to be reliable and check stories to see if they correspond with reality.
• “Why are thousands of people dying at home?” – Michael Simmons at the Spectator asks why more people are currently dying at home – though is quickly dismissive of the idea the vaccines could play a role.
• “NYC Mayor Eric Adams plans to mandate Covid vaccines for kids this fall” – Steve Kirsch reports on the disturbing news from New York of a vaccine mandate for all children.
• “Life Insurance CEO Reveals Deaths Are Up 40% Among Working People: “Just unheard of”” – Watch the report on Facts Matter with Roman Balmakov.
• “Boris Johnson took official jet home from weekend with family in Cornwall” – The Net-Zero fanatic PM spent the weekend before the Tiverton and Honiton byelection in the South-West and flew back on a Government plane, reports the Guardian.
• “June In Tokyo, Hachijojima Island Hasn’t Warmed In Decades” – However, the maximum daily temperatures show a clear urban heat island effect compared to rural Hachijojima Island, writes Pierre Gosselin in Watts Up With That?
• “Yes, You Can Blame Biden For High Energy Prices” – Michael Shellenberger says the war on fossil fuels is a political agenda driving high fuel costs.
• “What Caused The 2020 Homicide Spike?” – Astral Codex Ten sets out the case that the 2020 BLM riots and police pullback triggered a U.S. murder spike.
• “Identity politics is breathing new life into anti-Semitism” – Why did Germany, of all countries, sponsor an art exhibition that contained virulently anti-Semitic art, asks Daniel Ben-Ami in Spiked.
• “Trans people are not an oppressed minority” – They enjoy exactly the same rights as the rest of us, writes Jo Bartosch in Spiked.
• “Who is feminism for?” – Daniel Kodsi for the Critic praises Holly Lawford-Smith’s new book from Oxford University Press, Gender-Critical Feminism, as the inevitable calls for it to be banned appear from the militant trans lobby.
• “The Woke Inquisitors Have Come for the Freethinking Heretics” – Once governments normalise censorship and the punishment of points of view, free expression is firmly stamped with an expiration date, says J.B. Shurk at the Gatestone Institute. “Whenever censorship slithers back into polite society, it is always draped in the mantle of ‘good intentions’.”
• “Real American hero-ism” – John Ashmore writes for CapX that before this week few outside politics had heard of Tory MP Danny Kruger, but now, thanks to the venomous power of the internet, he has become an unlikely poster-boy for the groundless but popular idea that American abortion politics is heading to the U.K.
• “Suella Braverman: ‘People fear they will lose their job if they point out the basic facts of biology’” – The Attorney General tells the Telegraph she has had enough of the “collective frenzy” over some rights that sees the “basics of biology… turned upside down”.
• “Take it from a Russian – the alternative to Western democracy is far, far worse” – Douglas Murray writes in the Telegraph that in Konstantin Kisin’s excellent new book, the comedian and podcast host asks why people in the West so often spit on their luck.

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