News Round-Up

• “BT demands staff return to the office” – BT is demanding staff return to the office three days a week as it is “fundamental to the success of the business”, in the latest sign of a boardroom backlash against working from home, reports the Telegraph.
• “Bosses think workers do less from home, says Microsoft” – While 87% of workers felt they worked as, or more, efficiently from home, 80% of managers disagreed, reports BBC News.
• “Covid: Hong Kong to end controversial hotel quarantine policy” – Hong Kong’s Government says that from Monday people arriving in Hong Kong will no longer have to go into mandatory hotel quarantine, BBC News reports.
• “How the Federal Reserve Bought Support for Lockdowns” – Michael Senger asks if the Federal Reserve was under an unspoken mandate to keep the easy money going during Covid that overrode its mandate to keep inflation under control.
• “Jacinda and Justin finally relent – will Joe follow suit?” – The Health Advisory and Recovery Team (HART) notes that Canada and New Zealand have announced the end of restrictions on unvaccinated travellers, leaving the U.S. increasingly an outlier even among Covid extremists.
• “A (Possibly Unpopular) Null Hypothesis” – HART argues that SARS-CoV-2 was “nasty, but not unusually so, and certainly not particularly novel. The cure was worse than the disease”.
• “‘Eureka Day’ gives anti-vaxxers a voice” – Elizabeth Oldfield in UnHerd reviews Eureka Day, a play written by Jonathan Spector prior to Covid which handles anti-vaccine sentiment and vaccine injury with surprising sensitivity and fairness.
• “FDA to Vax Injured: We Got Nothin’” – Mary Beth Pfeiffer on TrialSite News says 20 people harmed by COVID-19 vaccines went to Washington D.C. this week seeking help from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and what they got was one hour with the top vaccine official in the United States in a Zoom call to their hotel conference room.
• “Covid vaccines for healthy 5-11-year-olds – a ‘one-off offer’” – HART with a round-up of evidence in connection with vaccinating children.
• “No Positive Trends In Extreme Weather Found” – The evidence isn’t there, says Paul Homewood.
• “50 Reasons to Re-Think Climate Policy” – Barry Brill in WUWT says climate policy is in crisis and lists 50 reasons why.
• “Onshore wind planning restrictions set for axe to ‘unlock its potential’” – The Tories ease rules preventing the blighting of the U.K. countryside with giant grey windmills, the Telegraph reports.
• “A Critical Assessment of Extreme Events Trends in Times of Global Warming” – WUWT with a new peer-reviewed study in the European Physical Journal Plus which finds that no indicators “show a clear positive trend of extreme events” and thus “on the basis of observational data, the climate crisis that according to many sources we are experiencing today, is not evident yet”.
• “As Putin escalates the war, can we afford to keep paying billions to arm Ukraine?” – Donald Forbes in TCW Defending Freedom with a balanced assessment of the current state of the war.
• “Church replaces Edward Colston stained glass window… with Jesus in a migrant boat” – The Telegraph reports on the replacement of a historic church window dedicated to slave trader Edward Colston with one that depicts Jesus, among other things, apparently making use of the services of people smugglers to join in the criminal exercise of gaining illegal entry to the country.
• “PayPal shuts accounts of more lockdown sceptics” – The Times reports that PayPal has been accused of “blatant” political discrimination after the accounts of two more Covid lockdown sceptics were closed.
• “PayPal is trying to silence us” – Molly Kinglsey from UsforThem speaks out against Big Tech censorship in Spiked.
• “PayPal’s war on dissent” – The Spiked team discusses the tyranny of Big Tech in its weekly podcast.
• “The Weaponisation of Money: We Are Fast Approaching The Camp” – A government that forces a payment service to close the accounts of legal charities has betrayed the foundations on which our society is based and has thus lost its legitimacy, writes Thorsteinn Siglaugsson.
• “Free Speech Union Vows to Change Law After PayPal Deplatforming” – Breitbart reports on PayPal’s purge of the dissenters.
• “What the PayPal saga tells us about free speech” – Patrick West in the Spectator says we live in a culture of fear and self-imposed silence where almost the only people who dare speak out on the forbidden subjects are journalists and celebrities too old and rich to care about the risks of cancellation.
• “Fact that the Health Minister thinks it’s ok for him to extend abnormal draconian emergency powers that allows him to then wish up legislation in the morning and enact in the afternoon, legislation that will have a massive impact on our lives without an assembly is mind boggling!” – Paul Frew tweets about the extension of the Coronavirus Act 2020 Order for Northern Ireland for a further six months.

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