News Round-Up

• “Care homes in England ‘risk being vilified’ if forced to allow visitors” – The Chair of the National Care Association has warned against giving residents the legal right to see guests due to staff and funding shortages, the Guardian reports.
• “Yet another wave: Japan’s past and future ’emergencies’” – So it’s official, says Guy Gin: “The eighth wave is coming! And with it comes the Government’s updated plans to request yet more ‘self-restraint’.”
• “What’s going on with births down under in Australia?” – Unacceptable Jessica says the data are quite stunning.
• “Is this the beginning of the end for Jacinda Ardern?” – For the first time, there is genuine speculation about how long Ardern will stay on as leader and Prime Minister, writes Nicholas Sheppard in the Spectator.
• “Are Lockdown Zealots Incapable of Introspection?” – Professing ignorance now cannot excuse the brutality and severity of pandemic measures, says Ramesh Thakur in the Brownstone Institute.
• “Bush and Obama will hold disinformation conferences next week” – Organisers said the conferences were not planned together, but will focus on the rising threats from authoritarianism and disinformation, the Mail reports. Um, they do realise that the war on ‘disinformation’ is authoritarian, right?
• “The Frank Report XLIV” – Frank Haviland’s column at the New Conservative comes this week from his sick bed as he has been struck down with a bad case of the Wu Flu.
• “How Britain’s electric car revolution took a wrong turn” – After decades of success, the U.K. risks losing its car industry to more muscular rivals, write Howard Mustoe and Matt Oliver in the Telegraph.
• “Rishi Sunak urged to get tough on China by ripping out smart meters” – On the eve of the G20 summit in Indonesia, the Prime Minister was urged to get tougher with China by potentially ripping out hundreds of thousands of ‘Chinese smart meters’ which could be allegedly used to shut down U.K. power supplies, reports the Mail.
• “Far-Left Durham University students use legal ruse in a new bid to ‘crush’ BBC presenter Jeremy Vine’s old student paper and torpedo press freedom” – Durham Students’ Union was lambasted for attempting to secretly seize control of the legal rights to use the name Palatinate – the title of the university’s award-winning student newspaper, reports the Mail.
• “Durham’s free speech crisis shows how far it has fallen” – Toby writes in the Mail that since he set up the Free Speech Union two and a half years ago, it’s received more cries for help from students and academics at Durham than from any other British university.
• “A gingerbread person? Morrisons takes the biscuit for wokery as the supermarket chain brings gingerbread men bang up to date after getting complaints from shoppers” – One Morrisons shopper quipped: “Maybe now it will have to be rewritten as ‘Run, run with maximum exertion! You can’t catch me. I’m the Gingerbread Person!”, according to a report in the Mail.
• “Twitter ‘blue tick’ scheme to return after platform flooded by impostor accounts” – Elon Musk says the $8 Twitter Blue verification is likely to relaunch “next week”, reports the Telegraph.
• “Europe has picked a side in the new Cold War – China” – Germany and France are growing closer to Beijing as tensions with the U.S. deepen, says Matthew Lynn in the Telegraph.
• “Stonewall urges employers to give trans staff two email addresses so they can swap gender identities” – The LGBT charity has drawn up new guidance for hundreds of organisations vying for spots on its “workplace equality index”, the Telegraph reports.

If you have any tips for inclusion in the round-up, email us here.