News Round-Up

• “Israeli minister threatens to topple Netanyahu if he does not invade Rafah” – Israel’s National Security Minister has threatened to topple Benjamin Netanyahu if he fails to order a ground invasion of the city of Rafah in southern Gaza, reports the Telegraph.
• “Police face furious backlash in row over swastika hate crime” – Police Scotland are embroiled in an extraordinary hate crime row amid claims a woman who reported an antisemitic Facebook post was told no charges would be brought because she was not Jewish, according to the Mail.
• “Hate Crime Act has united Scots against the SNP” – Humza Yousaf’s ill-conceived legislation seems to have fomented a generalised revolt against laws that penalise free speech, writes Iain Macwhirter in the Times.
• “Holyrood’s hate crime law puts devolution in the dock, charged with ignorance and incompetence” – The enforcement of the Hate Crime Act is demonstrating just how ignorant and incompetent too many of our politicians are in Holyrood, says Brian Monteith in the Scotsman.
• “Number of ‘honour-based’ crimes surges by more than 60%” – The number of honour-based crimes happening in Britain has surged by more than 60% in just two years, possibly because of the lockdown-caused backlog in Sharia courts reports the Mail.
• “How widespread is NHS qualifications fraud?” – A viral Twitter post raises uncomfortable questions about the level of training in British institutions, says Parliament Square in the Critic.
• “Who is afraid of Helen McArdle and James Jones?” – On Substack, Prof. Carl Heneghan and Dr. Tom Jefferson discuss the increase of Bell’s Palsy cases post-Covid vaccination.
• “Arch-Covidian Christina Berndt admits that press discussion of vaccines has been too one-sided, school closures ill-advised, but insists Germany should’ve locked down even harder” – On Substack, Eugyppius casts a critical ear over a recent podcast interview with Christina Berndt, everyone’s favourite German virus schoolmarm, discussing pandemic missteps after massive public uproar over the RKI protocols.
• “Avian flu and the experts who cried wolf” – If there’s another, more deadly pandemic and Americans don’t line up for jabs, the public-health establishment will only have itself to blame, writes Allysia Finley in the WSJ.
• “Heresy” – The excellent film Climate: The Movie is exactly what we have been waiting for, says Dr. Roger Watson in Country Squire.
• “Judy Murray backs J.K. Rowling after 709-word social media post” – Judy Murray, the mother of tennis star Andy Murray, has backed J.K. Rowling in an ongoing row over Scotland’s hate crime laws, reports the Mail.
• “Vatican declares sex-change surgery grave violations of human dignity” – The Vatican has repeated its rejection of the idea that one’s gender can be changed, says the Mail.
• “The trans fad” – Spiked’s Jo Bartosch on a new study showing that most gender-confused kids grow out of it.
• “Why are Foreign Office mandarins so ashamed of their own country?” – In the Spectator, Jawad Iqbal takes aim at a new report that suggests the Foreign Office should be abolished and replaced by a new Department for International Affairs with “fewer colonial era pictures on the wall”.
• “Paintings are not a threat to black students” – Oxford University’s transformation from iconic educational institution to adult crèche is well underway, writes Lauren Smith in Spiked.
• “BLM fraudster who used £70,000 of donations is ordered to pay just £1” – A fraudster who organised the Black Lives Matter protests that toppled the Colston statue stole £70,000 – but has been ordered to pay back just £1, reports the Mail.
• “Cancel culture breeds cowardice” – We must be braver to overcome the tyranny of self-censorship, says Patrick West in Spiked.
• “Ian Hislop’s elite blindspot” – Fundamentally, Ian Hislop is far more entangled with, and sympathetic to, our true elites than Nigel Farage, argues Niall Gooch in the Spectator.
• “Too much disinformation” – Mariana Spring is back, with another BBC series called Why Do You Hate Me? She might more profitably use her forensic skills to investigate the ‘disinformation’ in the building she calls home, writes Michael Henderson the Critic.
• “Elon Musk is all that stands in the way of totalitarianism” – Brazil has taken another step toward dictatorship, says Michael Shellenberger on the Public Substack.
• “Trumped-up charges” – In Taki’s Magazine, Theodore Dalrymple weighs in on Donald Trump’s latest politically motivated legal travails in New York City.
• “‘Is that a loophole?’” – In the Scottish Parliament, Humza Yousaf, as Justice Secretary, finds himself jumping through ‘loopholes’, explaining that the only way a woman is protected under the Hate Crime Act is if someone thinks she’s a transwoman.

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