News Round-Up

• “Trick or treat” – Part one of a multi-part essay about the novelist and columnists Lionel Shriver by Robin Ashenden. Highly recommended.
• “Next pandemic is coming and it could kill millions more than Covid” – Kate Bingham, the vaccine tsarina, says we need to be better prepared for the next pandemic in an alarmist piece for the Mail.
• “What Lockdown Did to Africa” – Only debt forgiveness can bring the continent out of its lingering economic crisis, argues Toby Green in Persuasian.
• “More details on the very strange efforts of the German Health Ministry to hide internal details of the Covid response from a parliamentary investigative committee” – Eugyppius on the latest shenanigans of Germany’s Covidians.
• “The ‘urgent climate crisis’ is just a political fabrication” – Dr Alex Starling argues that the so-called climate crisis isn’t real.
• “Net Zero excess ruined landlords – the Tories will not be easily forgiven” – Rishi rowing back on some of our Net Zero commitments won’t undo the pain they’ve already caused, argues Ben Wilkinson in the Telegraph.
• “China climate envoy says phasing out fossil fuels ‘unrealistic’” – The complete phasing-out of fossil fuels is not realistic, says China’s top climate official, according to Reuters. Why are we bothering, then?
• “Weather kills fewer people than 30 years ago, new data show” – No, extreme weather isn’t killing more people than it was 20 years ago, reports the Telegraph. Winter deaths reached 15.6 per 100,000 in the 1990s and is now down to 6.8.
• “Rishi Sunak’s green policy shift is the beginning of the end for net zero” – It isn’t just in the U.K. that politicians are abandoning Net Zero. The policy is also unravelling across the world, says Charles Moore in the Telegraph.
• “Value of used electric cars drops by a fifth” – Dealers have warned that Electric Vehicles (EVs) are sitting on forecourts for “months on end while they haemorrhage value”, with some at risk of selling at a loss, reports the Mail.
• “NHS nurse sent messages saying ‘I’m going to kill bed five’” – Two nurses are on trial for alleged misconduct on the stroke unit at Blackpool Victoria Hospital, reports the Mail.
• “Police drop investigation into woman arrested for praying silently” – Isabel Vaughan-Spruce is no longer being investigated by the police for praying silently outside an abortion clinic, according to the Mail.
• “University ranked 814th globally ordered to drop ‘world-leading’ from advert” – Embarrassment for Ulster University as it’s forced to remove posters describing it as a “world leading university”, reports the Telegraph.
• “Barclays to close U.K. accounts of all British expats” – Barclays has told overseas customers to transfer funds to a global account – but they must maintain a £100k balance or pay £40 a month, reports the Telegraph.
• “Russell Brand breaks silence after being accused of rape” – Russell Brand has released another video, denying any of his relationships were non-consensual, says the Mail.
• “Cometh the Hour, Cometh the Woman” – Ramesh Thakur hails the bravery and leadership shown by Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, the Shadow Minister for Indigenous Australians, who has spoken in favour of voting ‘No’ in the forthcoming Australian referendum.
• “A Picture is worth a Thousand Words” – The Naked Emperor is understandably alarmed by a new chart showing how much more left-wing the British public has become in the last 15 years.
• “Schools should not support child wanting to change gender, NHS guides” – In a rare outbreak of common sense, the NHS says schools should not allow children to socially transition their gender without their parents’ consent, says the Mail.
• “Schools must provide changing rooms for pupils based on sex at birth” – Schools will no longer automatically be breaking the law if they refuse to refer to children by their chosen name or gender, Britain’s equalities watchdog has announced, according to the Times.
• “Marianna Spring: the BBC’s misinformation merchant” – Tom Slater, the Editor of Spiked, exposes the falsehoods of the BBC’s fact-checker-in-chief.

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