News Round-Up

• “Australian medical regulator finally relaxes Covid gag order on doctors” – An Australian directive to health practitioners banning criticism of the Covid vaccines has finally been dropped, says Rebekah Barnett on Substack.
• “NY Times fact check fail on excess deaths” – On Substack, David Zweig continues to fact check the fact checkers, and things are even worse than they initially appeared.
• “The architecture of isolation: The French connection” – In their latest historical review of infectious disease management, Dr. Tom Jefferson and Prof. Carl Heneghan highlight the ‘Manual of Practical Hygiene’, underscoring the importance of hospital design in controlling infections.
• “Tory MPs terrified Farage could try to make a comeback in February by-election” – The Wellingborough by-election in February could provide an opportunity for Reform U.K. – and Nigel Farage – to make a political breakthrough, says the Express.
• “Keir Starmer found to have helped hate preacher Abu Qatada fight back against deportation” – Sir Kier Starmer has come under fire for representing a notorious hate preacher in court, according to GB News.
• “Scotland pioneers the 84.5% tax rate” – In the Spectator, Ross Clark draws parallels between Scotland’s new tax rates on high earners and the tax policies of Jim Callaghan’s Labour Government in the 1970s.
• “The SNP’s tax and spend delusion” – From next year, many teachers are to be classed as high earners, thanks to the Scottish Government’s latest stealth tax raid, says Iain Macwhirter in the Spectator.
• “Anti-snooping laws planned for Sunak’s Britcoin after major backlash” – Britons who use digital pounds issued by the Bank of England will have their privacy “guaranteed” under new laws designed to allay snooping fears, reports the Telegraph.
• “Britain’s declining birth rate is becoming a problem too big to ignore” – Worrying about Britain’s lower than replacement birth rate does not make you an ethnonationalist or a conspiracy theorist, argues Fraser Nelson in the Telegraph.
• “History weighs like a nightmare on the living if they are ignorant of basic facts” – Weaponising history has been made easier by the common ‘postmodern’ view that there are no objective historical truths only a cacophony of ‘narratives’, writes Robert Tombs in the Telegraph.
• “The boiler tax exposes the truth about heat pumps” – The U.K.’s boiler tax is a genuinely terrible idea – and MPs are quite right to revolt against it, says Matthew Lynn in the Telegraph.
• “Why the green elites hate Christmas” – Nothing horrifies plummy greens more than the thought of millions of plebs buying gifts, getting sloshed and eating dead birds, writes Brendan O’Neill in Spiked.
• “Why the law on assisted dying must change” – The law needs to change and acknowledge a person’s right to end their life, says Mary Dejevsky in the Spectator.
• “‘Assisted dying is a slippery slope – just look at the U.S., Canada and Holland’” – The Church of England has warned that in those countries where assisted dying is legal, such as Canada, stringent safeguards have been dropped over time, reports the Telegraph.
• “‘I was sacked as a teacher for standing up to gender ideology’” – In the Mail, Kevin Lister, who was sacked after 20 years as a teacher for standing up to gender ideology, gives his verdict on the Government’s new trans school guidance.
• “Why drag is not the same as pantomime” – The difference between drag and pantomime is that in pantomime people are pretending, says Charlie Bentley-Astor in the Critic.
• “French feminism is being corrupted” – American activism has seeped into French culture, laments Dora Mouton in UnHerd.
• “Australia’s eSafety Commissioner initiates civil penalty proceedings against X” – Just days after the EU initiated formal legal proceedings against social media company X, Australia has followed suit, writes Rebekah Barnett on Substack.
• “Harvard finds more instances of ‘duplicative language’ in president’s work” – Harvard University says it has found two additional instances of insufficient citation in the scholarly work of Claudine Gay, according to the New York Times.
• “It’s a Christmas nightmare for men who were friends with Jeffrey Epstein” – It’s a whole new kind of festive countdown as the world awaits the publication of a list of Jeffrey Epstein’s friends, says Helen Rumbelow in the Times.
• “Who lied about what? And why?” – On The Glenn Show, Glenn Loury and John McWhorter speak to the two people behind the new George Floyd documentary, The Fall of Minneapolis.

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