News Round-Up

• “Not even Reverends like me are safe from the banks’ woke purge” – The Revd Richard Fothergill writes about being de-banked by the Yorkshire Building Society in the Telegraph.
• “De-banking furore grows as MPs start investigation” – According to the Times, MPs have expressed concerns that high street lenders are “freezing, withdrawing or withholding bank accounts” from businesses with “little or no explanation”.
• “The worst thing about the woke banking scandal is the hypocrisy of Nigel Farage’s foes” – Imagine banks were cancelling the accounts of progressive politicians. How do we think the Left would react, asks Michael Deacon in the Telegraph.
• “NatWest, Farage and the decline of corporate behaviour” – The story of NatWest Group’s rogue behaviour goes far deeper than Nigel Farage, says Justin Doherty in the Spectator.
• “‘Blacklist’ for Government critics is suspended in Whitehall” – Ministers have suspended Whitehall guidance that was used to bar guest speakers who had been critical of policies amid accusations of ‘blacklisting’, reports the Times.
• “Anthony Fauci behind Covid origins disinformation, evidence suggests” – Communications between scientists reveal that there was pressure from “higher ups” to dismiss the lab leak theory of Covid origins, says Public.
• “Did the New York Times just admit Covid deaths were overcounted?” – According to New York Times journallist David Leonhardt, there has been a big drop in official number of Covid deaths in the U.S., with a strong likelihood that the actual number is even lower, reports UnHerd.
• “Scientists call for Nature Medicine to retract paper denying Wuhan lab accident” – The number of virologists who’ve been lying to Congress continues to grow, says Paul D. Thacker.
• “Major data misinterpretations found in COVID-19 study” – Eyal Shahar scrutinises a COVID-19 study, revealing severe data misclassifications and biases that overestimated Covid mortality in Israel.
• “School closings spiked before official Covid” – At least 100 school systems or schools in at least 14 U.S. states closed for flu-like illnesses before a pandemic was declared, which provides more compelling evidence of “early spread”, says Bill Rice Jr.
• “‘Hypocritical’ BMA offers staff pay rise lower than deal it rejected” – The British Medical Association has been accused of “staggering hypocrisy” after offering its staff a 5.25% pay rise, which is lower than the “derisory” 6% offer it had previously rejected from the Government, reports the Telegraph.
• “Fury at Rhodes hysteria” – Just 20% of the Greek island Rhodes is affected by wildfires, despite alarmist warnings from many quarters not to travel, says the Mail.
• “Sunak will have to water down Net Zero sooner or later” – The Government seems to favour policies which will hit ordinary people while sparing the wealthy their private jets, says Ross Clark in the Spectator.
• “Lord Frost: Rising temperatures likely to be beneficial for Britain” – According to Lord Frost, rising temperatures “are likely to be beneficial” for Britain because seven times more people in the U.K. die from cold than heat, reports the Telegraph.
• “This graph shows cold kills way more for the entire world” – The co-founder of Greenpeace, Patrick Moore, says that many in the media are lying about ‘heat waves’ causing more deaths than cold weather. And he has a graph to prove it.
• “Global warming will save many lives… but we have to keep that quiet” – Watch Norman Fenton’s speech revealing academic fraud within the “climate cult community”.
• “Just Stop Oil have finally met their match” – The splendidly named counter-organisation ‘Just Stop Pissing People Off’ has pulled off two publicity coups in the last week, says Gareth Roberts in the Spectator.
• “Christmas market in jeopardy following row over cycle lane” – Oxford County Council has been accused of ruining the city’s Christmas market after it refused to temporarily close a cycle lane running straight through the middle of it, says the Mail.
• “Concordia, Antarctica hits -83.2°C, world’s provisional lowest temperature since 2017” – A weather station at the Concordia Research Station in Antarctica may have just registered the world’s lowest temperature in six years, reports Weatherzone.
• “Gove rows back on 2030 petrol car ban U-turn” – A U-turn on a U-turn? Steerpike in the Spectator has been watching the mess ministers have managed to get themselves into on plans to ban new diesel and petrol cars.
• “A look back from Canadian wildfires to Australian bushfires and floods” – Former UN Assistant Secretary-General Ramesh Thakur scrutinises climate alarmism for the Brownstone Institute.
• “Weather blether” – What we are witnessing is just ‘weather’; sometimes it’s cold and sometimes it’s hot, says Jack Watson in the New Conservative.
• “Solar panels are three times more carbon-intensive than IPCC claims” – Ecoinvent, the world’s largest database on the environmental impact of renewables, lacks any data from China, the major producer of solar panels worldwide, says Public.
• “British economy will outperform Germany this year, IMF admits” – Britain’s economy will outperform Germany’s this year, according to the International Monetary Fund, after its worst fears for the U.K. failed to materialise, reports the Telegraph.
• “Britain is a poor country determined to get even poorer” – The economic gap between Britain and America is wider than the gap between the U.K. and Romania, says Sam Ashworth-Hayes in the Telegraph.
• “The great flight from heterosexuality” – Brendan O’Neill in Spiked explains why so many young people, even straights, are calling themselves ‘queer’.
• “The backlash against ‘woke’ capitalism threatens to upend politics” – A lucrative new industry has formed around ‘liberal’ values, but it can only end in tears for big business, says Sherelle Jacobs in the Telegraph.
• “Republicans demand total ban on gender reassignment surgeries” – Republican Kat Cammack said the surgeries Democrats want to approve for children are like a “Frankenstein experiment”, reports the Mail.
• “Socialism or Barbie-ism” – Barbie’s nod to what makes a woman a woman is quietly subversive, says Nina Power in Compact.
• “Even Oppenheimer isn’t spared from America’s race politics” – Apparently, online critics are claiming that Oppenheimer is too white, says Samuel Rubinstein in UnHerd.
• “How Pixar infantilised the world” – For the past three decades, Pixar has convinced us that emotions are everything, says Darragh McManus in Spiked.
• “‘It read almost like a file put together by an East German policeman’” – In an interview on GB News, Benjamin Jones of the Free Speech Union discusses Coutts bank’s reasoning for ‘debanking’ Nigel Farage.

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