News Round-Up

• “Forgetting Ukraine and condemning Israel squander the West’s Cold War victory” – Having resisted Putin’s invasion at the start, our leaders are now failing to articulate what’s at stake if tyrants win in Ukraine and Israel, according to Charles Moore in the Telegraph.
• “Shocking moment man threatens to ‘kill’ Orthodox Jews in north London” – Police are appealing for help to track down the suspect, who was filmed threatening Jewish pedestrians in Stamford Hill at 7pm on Wednesday, according to the Mail.
• “Rishi Sunak clashes with Israeli ambassador over two-state solution” – In a rare public rebuke of an ally, Rishi Sunak and David Cameron unveil sanctions on those responsible for ‘settler violence’ in the West Bank, reports the Telegraph.
• “Why did Israel fail to heed advance warnings of the Hamas attack, stop the breach of their Iron Wall and immediately repel the invaders from the Gaza envelope?” – On Substack, Eugyppius pours scorns on the conspiracy theories surrounding Hamas’s attack on southern Israel on October 7th.
• “Inside the Hamas media operation” – Israel is losing the propaganda war, says David Patrikarakos in UnHerd.
• “Britain faces a catastrophic epidemic of Hamas-style Islamist terror” – If we cannot stem the tide of anti-Semitism on our streets, what hope do we have of stopping extremists from taking action? asks Camilla Tominey in the Telegraph.
• “Jewish sitcom ‘paused’ from airline’s inflight entertainment” – British Airways has said it doesn’t want a Jewish sitcom after all for fear it will appear to be “taking sides”, reports the Telegraph.
• “Why can’t some Londoners tolerate posters of kidnapped Israelis?” – The faces of the men, women and children seized by the antisemites of Hamas seem to elicit an almost reflexive rage in some passers-by, says Brendan O’Neill in the Spectator.
• “The five things the new BBC chairman must do to regain British Jews’ trust” – From deeply flawed Israel-Hamas war coverage to antisemitism within the corporation, Dr. Samir Shah has to make some much-needed changes, says Danny Cohen in the Telegraph.
• “Only 1% of small-boats migrants sent back since 2020” – More than half of the 1,182 illegal immigrants who’ve been sent back since 2020 are Albanians, due to the country being deemed safe in U.K. law, according to the Times.
• “Man jailed for Speakers’ Corner gun attack plot” – Edward Little planned to kill Christian preacher Hatun Tash, a regular speaker at Hyde Park Corner, says the BBC.
• “Covid and Death: Part 2 – Death Attribution and the Infection Fatality Ratio” – On Substack, Dr. Tom Jefferson and Prof. Carl Heneghan continue their latest series.
• “Good riddance to neoliberalism” – Rod Liddle sings the praises of Javier Milei, the new libertarian President of Argentina in the Spectator.
• “NatWest debanking findings ‘a work of fiction’, says Nigel Farage” – Farage dismisses the ‘independent review’ into debanking that found NatWest was completely innocent, reports the Telegraph.
• “Barclays debanks Methodist church” – In the latest debanking outrage, Barclays has debanked the Methodist church, reports the Telegraph.
• “SNP goes into meltdown over Humza Yousaf’s plan for new tax band” – The SNP is poised to use next week’s Budget to introduce a new 44% tax band north of the border from April, reports the Mail.
• “The huge cost of Scotland’s ‘free’ tuition fees” – “The rocks will melt with the sun before I allow tuition fees to be imposed on Scotland.” So read the words carved into a stone outside Heriot-Watt university in Edinburgh unveiled by Alex Salmond while he was first minister. But as the SNP’s education policy begins to unravel and the budgetary pressures build at Holyrood, the SNP may have a change of heart, says Ross Clark in the Spectator.
• “Tony Blair banned fox hunting after taking £1m donation, claims Lord Mandelson” – The Labour peer says the fox hunting debate got “pretty transactional” and an animal rights group insisted on the ban “in return” for a very sizeable amount of money, says the Telegraph.
• “The SNP is now Britain’s most pro-immigration party” – An independent Scotland would have no upper limit on inward migration, something most Scots would be appalled by, says Tom Harris in the Telegraph.
• “Biden’s ex-pandemic advisor called a Wuhan lab accident plausible, but can writers still say it’s ‘conspiracy theory’?” – A short look back at science writers promoting a conspiracy that never was from Paul D. Thacker at the Disinformation Chronicle.
• “Under-16s could face limits on social media” – Ministers are devising plans which could lead to young people being forced to get their parents’ permission to set up a social media account, reports the Telegraph.
• “Church lockdown closures ‘left worshippers out in the cold’, RC survey finds” – Worshippers believe the decision to close churches during the pandemic disregarded the importance of faith, a survey of Catholic church-goers has found, according to the Christian Institute.
• “Mother and son hospitalised after leaping from house to escape e-bike battery fire” – A blaze in a three-storey house in Hackney destroyed most of the property and forced residents to jump from the second floor, reports the Telegraph.
• “Censorship Industrial Complex leaders were also behind Trump-Russia collusion hoax” – Alex Gutentag in Public says he’s identified multiple connections between the people in government-funded censorship bodies and those who promoted counter-populist conspiracy theories.
• “Has wokery killed Doctor Who?” – The relaunch of Doctor Who with David Tennant returning in the lead role and Russell T. Davies (the man who brought the series back to our screens in 2005) back in charge as the showrunner has been a woke disaster, says Mark Littlewood in CapX.
• “Stop the UAE from wrecking this bastion of conservatism” – Sunak must force Lord Cameron to recuse himself from any discussion about the future of the Telegraph, says Nigel Farage in… the Telegraph.
• “Homeowners hit with £120 ‘boiler tax’ to pay for heat pump drive” – Companies increase prices of gas boilers to offset fines for missed heat pump sales targets, reports the Telegraph.
• “Prince Harry wouldn’t know truth if it slapped him around his California-tanned face” – The former Daily Mirror Editor responded to the High Court ruling that found Prince Harry was a victim of phone hacking in typically robust style, reports the Telegraph.
• “The healthcare system has a new mantra: Stay home, protect the NHS, die early” – We need to confront the uncomfortable possibility that waiting lists are falling because people are perishing before they can get treatment, writes Karol Sikora in the Telegraph.
• “Khan’s decision to block cars for Ukraine scheme ‘gobsmacking’” – Vitali Klitschko, the mayor of Kyiv, asked Sadiq Khan to send him vehicles destined for scrapheap – but Khan has said no, according to the Telegraph.
• “BBC colleagues call Gary Lineker the ‘Tucker Carlson of the U.K.’” – There’s growing resentment among staff over the Match of the Day presenter’s tweets about the Rwanda bill, reports the Times.
• “Alka Sehgal Cuthbert tells Jacob Rees-Mogg why Aviva’s CEP shoudn’t discriminate against white applicants” – On GB News, the Director of Don’t Divide Us says it’s “patronising” to black and brown applicants for jobs at Aviva to only vet white applicants.