News Round-Up

• “Covid infection rates in England plunge by another fifth” – Office for National Statistics figures show 2.1 million were getting infected on any given day in the week up to July 26th in England, down 20% on the 2.6 million the week before, as yet another Covid wave fizzles out without any Government intervention, reports the Mail.
• “LGBT groups demand more action on monkeypox” – BBC News reports that sexual health charities have called on the Government to take firmer action to control the outbreak.
• “New study: Monkeypox may be an STD” – Finn McRedmond writes for UnHerd that a new Lancet study suggests that monkeypox could be a sexually transmitted disease, after finding that semen collected from a patient in “acute phase of infection” might contain a virus that could replicate. This view is currently considered misinformation by many media outlets.
• “Growth in NHS recruits from abroad prompts concern about over-reliance” – BBC research shows one-in-three new doctors in England last year came from outside the U.K. and EU.
• “Covid face masks ‘devastating’ bird populations all over the world” – Researchers say that human debris impacting avian wildlife is a “global issue”, the Telegraph reports.
• “The Tyranny of Coronaphobia” – Ramesh Thakur writes for Brownstone that restrictions on everyday life have been far more draconian than anything previously done, even during World War II or the great 1918-19 flu.
• “Amnesty attacked for critical report on Ukraine” – James Billot in UnHerd says that Amnesty International has been roundly condemned by pro-Ukraine voices for a new report criticising Ukraine, which warns that Ukrainian forces were jeopardising the safety of civilians by establishing bases in populated residential areas, including schools and hospitals.
• “Britain is running out of water and power and it’s a national scandal” – Ben Marlow in the Telegraph says the public should not be expected to keep paying for the repeated failures of an entire industry.
• “Britain will pay a heavy price for falling into a Net Zero trance” – We all face an apocalyptic financial disaster paying for the Government’s green pursuit, according to Ben Wilkinson in the Telegraph.
• “Europe has lost the energy war” – The livelihoods of millions have already been sacrificed, argues Thomas Fazi in UnHerd.
• “No to neighbourhood ‘nudging’ – energy leaderboards are no solution to sky-high bills” – Laura Dodsworth in CapX says that energy leaderboards are pointless, distasteful and creepily authoritarian and that reducing energy is not like food waste but an immiserating race to the bottom.
• “Scotland has ‘whitewashed’ its slave trade role out of history exams to ‘vilify’ the English” – A leading historian said he asked the SNP to include Glasgow in a list of British ports “associated with slavery gains” but it refused, according to the Telegraph.
• “HMRC Spending Over £1 Million a Year on 16 Diversity & Inclusion Officers” – Guido exposes the huge waste of taxpayer funds splurged on woke non-jobs at the U.K. tax authority.
• “No, children aren’t being ‘ensnared’ by the far-Right” – Naama Kates in UnHerd says the Guardian keeps exaggerating the threat of online extremism.
• “What’s happening to blue-collar boys?” –  Matt Goodwin writes that for the first time in British history, a lower proportion of white pupils are going to the most highly selective universities than any other ethnic group in the country, confounding fashionable narratives of systemic racism.
• “Unlike the Left, the Right Still Believes in Debate” – The conservative reaction to George Soros’s recent Wall Street Journal op-ed defending his support for the BLM narrative exemplifies free-speech principles – in contrast with the behaviour of Left-wing papers like the New York Times, argues Heather Mac Donald in City Journal.
• “Pearson Textbooks Ditch Instruction for Propaganda” – Garion Frankel in Chalkboard Review writes that Pearson, one of America’s leading publishers of textbooks, assessments, and other instructional materials, has “refocused its curriculum development away from academic learning practices in pursuit of political narratives, gender theory, anti-racism, and progressive activism”.
• “Exposed: The charity you’ve never heard of turning U.K. universities woke” – A new video for the Telegraph from Cambridge’s Professor James Orr argues the solution to racial inequality will not be found by decolonising courses and suppressing freedom of speech.

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