News Round-Up

• “The woke mob has come for the Christmas tree” – Galleries and museums used to delight us with their festive decorations. Now they prefer low-grade agitprop, writes Michael Mosbacher in the Telegraph.
• “Number of stay-at-home dads in U.K. up by a third since before pandemic” – Lockdown was “catalyst for change”, with men now spending more quality time with their children, says the Guardian, which regards this as a “silver lining”.
• “Senior Tories risk losing seats if Nigel Farage returns to politics, experts say” – If Farage comes out of retirement to galvanise the electoral prospects of Reform U.K. Iain Duncan Smith, Dominic Raab and Theresa Villiers could all lose their seats, says the Guardian.
• “Mask dependency among young Japanese” – Mask dependency in Japan predated Covid, but it’s now much, much worse, says Guy Gin in his Substack newsletter.
• “Labour MPs took £35,000 in gifts from striking unions” – Labour frontbenchers and MPs have accepted more than £35,000 in gifts and hospitality from striking unions over the past three years, according to a report in the Mail.
• “£3.2bn warship HMS Prince of Wales spends longer in dock than at sea” – HMS Prince of Wales, one of the U.K.’s two aircraft carriers, has now spent more time being repaired in docks than it has at sea, reports the Times.
• “AI cure for bed blocking can predict hospital stay” – Technology that accurately predicts when patients will be ready to leave hospital upon their arrival in A&E is being introduced to solve the NHS bed-blocking crisis, says the Times.
• “Harry Potter star fails to enchant villagers with ‘sweeteners’ as he plans eco-estate” – Rupert Grint is hoping to win planning consent for redevelopment of his £5.4million Hertfordshire ‘eco-estate’, but locals are unimpressed, reports the Telegraph.
• “A Tesla owner says his car wouldn‘t charge in freezing temperatures, leaving him stranded on Christmas Eve” – Domenick Nati tells Insider that the problem has forced him to cancel his Christmas plans as no Ubers are available where he lives in Virginia.
• “Dentist shortages signal ‘broken, underfunded system’ as 40% of patients would ‘do it themselves’” – 47 million dental appointments have been lost since the first lockdown, according to the Telegraph, as NHS dentists leave the profession in droves.
• “What really happens to your Christmas recycling” – The waste we all conscientiously sort into boxes and bins is not being reprocessed in the way we think, says the Telegraph.
• “California will enact series of woke new laws from January 1st” – Governor Gavin Newsom signed more than 1,000 bills into law this year, most of them inspired by wokery pokery, reports the Mail.
• “What a real inquiry into the response to Covid would look like” – Michael P. Senger takes the gloves off in a hard-hitting piece about what he’d like a Covid inquiry to look like.

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