News Round-Up

• “Trump hits UK with 10% ‘reciprocal’ tariffs as he unveils ‘Liberation Day’ onslaught including 25% on all foreign car imports – but Starmer won’t retaliate as EU faces 20%” – Donald Trump imposed 10% “reciprocal” tariffs on the UK last night – but hit the EU and rest of the world even harder as he vowed to stop the US being “pillaged”, the Mail reports.
• “Wall Street stocks drop like a stone” – Within minutes of Trump’s announcement, futures tracking America’s flagship S&P 500 fell 2%, while the Nasdaq dropped 3% — the kind of falls not seen since the start of the pandemic, reports the Mail.
• “Trump just proved Brexit was the best decision Britain ever made” – Britain will escape the punishing levies the US is imposing on imports from the EU, meaning Europe’s manufacturers may even decide to move to the UK, says Matthew Lynn in the Telegraph.
• “With tariffs, Trump wants to restore American industry destroyed by decades of unfair trade” – Michael Lind defends Trump’s tariff policy in the New York Post.
• “The EU’s fury at Trump’s tariffs is hypocritical insanity” – Instead of hitting out at Trump’s tariffs, the EU and its media allies should focus on Beijing’s attempt to take over world trade, argues Joel Kotkin in the Telegraph.
• “Trump’s about to bomb Iran” – In a few weeks’ time Trump will embark on a bombing campaign against Iran, says the Mail‘s Dan Hodges, citing “top Israeli sources”.
• “Musk and Trump humbled in first electoral test” – Despite the Tesla billionaire’s $21 million donation to the Republican candidate, voters elected a liberal judge to maintain their majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court in a blow to Trump and the MAGA movement, reports the Telegraph.
• “MPs will have chance to veto Chagos deal” – Parliament will scrutinise and vote on the bill to write the surrender treaty into law, a Minister has confirmed, according to the Telegraph.
• “Starmer claims Adolescence is a documentary – again” – Does Prime Minister Keir Starmer understand the difference between fact and fiction? The Spectator isn’t sure after the Labour leader referred to Adolescence as a documentary for a second time.
• “What really scares people about Adolescence” – Ed West masterfully lays out all that is wrong with Netflix’s tendentious new drama in the Spectator.
• “Labour’s welfare crackdown is a sham” – Under Rachel Reeves’s underwhelming welfare changes genuinely disabled people will be receiving less, but it is set to become even easier to claim enhanced Universal Credit if you are feeling a bit down in the dumps, says Ross Clark in the Spectator.
• “Criminals facing 12 months in prison should be spared jail, says Sentencing Council chief” – Lord Justice William Davis, the Chairman of the embattled Sentencing Council, has said courts must consider alternative community punishments for repeat offenders who face under a year in prison, the Telegraph reports.
• “Marine Le Pen is in a race against the clock” – Marine Le Pen has options and is fighting back but time is against her, says James Tidmarsh in the Spectator.
• “COVID-19 vaccine myocarditis paper raises questions about what earns post-publication peer review” – Retraction Watch reports on the highly selective use of ‘post-publication peer review’ that has targeted another vaccine paper that shows significant harm.
• “Crappy critique of my European excess deaths study” – Raphael Lataster continues to be shocked by the prevalence of what appears to be AI junk even in leading science journals as he defends his study on excess deaths and vaccines.
• “Journal Gatekeeping: Lost Faith in Science” – HART says the peer-review system for science and medical journals is broken and trust is gone.
• “We’re still suffering from social Long Covid” – In the Spectator, Luke Tryl says that since Covid people in his focus groups are telling him they have stopped socialising like they used to.
• “Government Seeks Advice on Crimes Against Thermodynamics” – David Turver reports on a new review on carbon capture and a consultation on power from hydrogen which appear to be trying to overcome the laws of thermodynamics.
• “‘Almost everyone is onboard with the green agenda’” – Dr Gary Sidley takes a look at ‘normative pressure’, a ‘nudge’ strategy that’s being widely deployed by governments to convince ordinary people that there’s a climate emergency.
• “The Elephant on Campus” – Dr David McGrogan diagnoses the problem of the university.
• “Glasgow Council faces £1.6 billion in debt while Chief Executive walks away with half a million pay package” – In the Telegraph‘s latest Waste Watch, Dia Chakravarty reports on the shocking case of Annemarie O’Donnel, outgoing Chief Executive of Glasgow City Council, who last year received a jaw-dropping £567,317 in total remuneration, including £209,472 in salary and a staggering £357,845 in pension contributions.
• “Fine, you don’t want to be a mummy. But don’t bring everyone else down” – Too many young people have been convinced that motherhood is a threat to their mental health, says Melanie McDonagh in the Telegraph.
• “The charts that show youngsters are rejecting the Left’s culture wars” – A survey shows that young people aren’t as focused on gender and climate change as you may think, says the Telegraph.
• “Gen Beta’s baby doomsday: Girls born today are set to have record low of just 1.46 children on average – not enough to sustain the population – as they wait until age 36 to start families” – Official projections show completed family sizes in England and Wales tumbling to a population-shrinking average of just 1.46 children per woman, reports the Mail.
• “Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre was charged by cops days before crash” – Sex trafficking victim and Prince Andrew’s accuser Virginia Giuffre was charged with breaching a family violence restraining order just days before the bus crash which she initially claimed had fatally injured her, reports the Mail.
• “The messages that ended with couple arrested amid school WhatsApp row” – In the Mail, read the text messages in a school parent WhatsApp group that led to six police officers raiding a couple’s home and arresting them.
• “Blame Birmingham’s absurd equal pay bill for this waste fiasco” – The root cause of the Birmingham bin strike debacle is that the council was bankrupted by an absurd £760 million legal bill for paying ‘male dominated’ areas of work more than ‘female’ ones, says Mark Littlewood in the Telegraph.
• “Hamas ‘has quietly dropped more than 3,000 deaths’ off its Gaza war toll – ‘including 1,080 children’” – Hamas has quietly dropped thousands of deaths from its count of the number of people killed by Israel in Gaza, US-based group Honest Reporting has said.
• “The nations richer than UK’s poorest borough that have had foreign aid” – Among the nations who benefited from Britain’s donations was China, which boasts one of the world’s most prosperous economies, according to an investigation by the Mail.
• “The shame of Sadiq Khan’s Eid message” – London’s Muslim Mayor Sadiq Khan published a video online earlier this week to mark Eid that quoted Hamas’s casualty figures as fact. It was an outright disgrace, says Jonathan Sacerdoti in the Spectator.
• “Dr Magnus Jones at PAU!” – Alain Wolf has published the final chapter of his Substack novel telling the story of Magnus Jones, an embattled academic in a campus university. Read the first chapter here.
• “Ex-BBC journalist helped asylum seeker avoid deportation over harsh prison conditions” – Former senior BBC correspondent Owen Bennett-Jones helped a Pakistani asylum seeker avoid deportation by supporting his human rights claim, reports the Telegraph.
• “Tories should let Reform win Runcorn by-election, says Esther McVey” – The Conservatives should let Reform win the by-election in Runcorn and Helsby next month as part of a wider electoral pact, former Cabinet minister Esther McVey has suggested, according to the Telegraph.
• “WHO proposing to cut jobs and slash budget by a fifth, memo shows” – The World Health Organisation is proposing to reduce staff numbers and the scale of its work as it slashes its budget by just over one fifth due to the impact of US funding cuts, according to an internal memo seen by Reuters.

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