News Round-Up

• “How China’s President Xi Jinping has been dogged by health rumours” – Social media erupted with speculation this week after rumours swirled that Xi Jinping suffered a stroke at a major summit and had to be rushed home, reports the Mail.
• “Cutting army training is ‘recipe for disaster’, Nato chief tells Burnham” – A senior Nato figure has warned that Andy Burnham’s decision to cut army training to save £30 million risks seriously harming Britain’s defence readiness, reports the Telegraph.
• “‘Blasé’ Burnham urged to wake up to Putin’s ‘plans to attack Europe’” – With Poland’s Donald Tusk warning that the Kremlin is targeting Nato states and Emmanuel Macron saying attacks are “intensifying”, critics are demanding Burnham take the Russian threat more seriously, says the Mail.
• “Putin preparing to escalate war against Ukraine” – European leaders fear Putin will mobilise more troops and intensify hybrid attacks on NATO following his latest moves, according to the Telegraph.
• “Imperial War Museum accused of treating the Armed Forces with disdain” – A retired soldier has revealed his shock at being told by a gift shop staff member at the Imperial War Museum that veterans “got what they deserved” in war, reports the Mail.
• “Generation Kneecap’s plan to break up Britain and reshape Ireland” – Young people in Northern Ireland are favouring reunification over remaining part of the UK for the first time, as so-called “ceasefire babies” reject their parents’ politics, notes the Telegraph.
• “Any faith I had in Burnham has evaporated” – A leaked No. 10 briefing compiled to keep Sir Keir Starmer in office has revealed details that have left even sympathetic observers deeply disillusioned with Andy Burnham, writes Tom Harris in the Telegraph.
• “Burnham to scrap plans for judge-only trials” – Plans to remove defendants’ right to choose a jury trial – touted as the most effective way to tackle court backlogs exceeding 80,000 cases – are set to be abandoned by the Government, according to the Telegraph.
• “Burnham’s Budget breathing space ‘shrinks by £15 billion’” – Rising borrowing costs have eaten into the Prime Minister’s fiscal headroom, leaving him with far less money to spend on his political pledges, reports the Telegraph.
• “Labour considers lowering mansion tax threshold to £1.5 million” – Plans under consideration would extend the mansion tax to properties worth more than £1.5 million, a move that would affect nearly 300,000 homes, says the Times.
• “Labour’s Islamophobia cover-up” – In the Critic, Nick Timothy says Labour is trying to cover up the extremist groups a working group on Islamophobia consulted with in the course of drawing up its controversial definition of ‘anti-Muslim hostility’.
• “Carer on student visa raped bedbound woman then claimed he was assaulted” – Fazli Qadeer, 25, has been jailed for 12 years after carrying out a sustained attack on an “extremely vulnerable” woman in her seventies before falsely claiming he was the one who had been sexually assaulted, reports the Times.
• “‘I am the victim here’: the full story of the migrant rapist who hunted women through Oxford” – Drawing on previously unpublished court transcripts and exclusive interviews with his victim and her father, Steven Edginton reveals the untold story of Khaliz Ali Alshimery on his Substack.
• “Air traffic control took hours to seek help over flight chaos glitch” – Britain’s air traffic control service waited almost three hours before seeking assistance to fix the software glitch that grounded more than 2,000 flights, reports the Telegraph.
• “The Right can and must unite, before it is too late” – Conservatives and Reform may not find cooperation congenial, but the case for Right-wing unity is now urgent, writes David Frost in the Telegraph.
• “Trump bans Politico, CNN and MSNOW from White House” – Donald Trump has banned Politico, CNN and MSNOW from attending White House press conferences citing what he called “constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS!”, according to the Telegraph.
• “Twenty women had mastectomies they didn’t need: NHS trust” – An NHS trust has admitted that 20 women underwent unnecessary mastectomies, leaving them with lasting psychological and physical harm, reveals the Mail.
• “US releases UFO files showing ‘flying saucers’ that baffled military” – The Pentagon’s sixth wave of declassified UFO files includes new footage of mysterious orbs swarming across the globe, says the Mail.
• “The cult of AI armageddon: who will save us from the EA doomers?” – In UnHerd, Kathleen Stock examines the apocalyptic AI doomsday cult and asks who, if anyone, can challenge the effective altruist driving it.
• “Beware of billionaires touting the apocalypse” – Wealthy prophets of doom have more in common with history’s great Cassandras than they might care to admit, writes Geoffrey Cain in the Spectator.
• “Chief Rabbi: ‘There’d be outcry if anyone else faced hostility like the Jews’” – Sir Ephraim Mirvis warns that Britain must confront antisemitism head-on, describing the Jewish community’s “very deep worry and concern” at the scale of hostility it continues to face, writes the Telegraph.
• “Britain’s Jews are right to fear the Green Party” – Many British Jews view the Green Party not merely as a party whose policies they dislike but as a political project fundamentally hostile to their community, according to the Telegraph.
• “Heatwaves helped high street claw back ground over summer” – Retail sales volumes rose 0.5% in August following a 0.5% drop in July thanks to the good weather, though shops are warning of looming inflation pain ahead, reports the Mail.
• “Giorgia Meloni scraps road tax for millions of Italians” – Italy’s Prime Minister is abolishing road tax for millions of drivers as her Government seeks to shore up support ahead of the 2027 national election, says the Mail.
• “We must use the remaining fossil fuels to build nuclear. Time is running out” – The case for an energy transition rests not on climate concerns but on the contracting supply of economic oil – and nuclear power built with remaining fossil fuels is the only credible answer, argues Richard Lyon in the Telegraph.
• “The backlash against the Bristol Greens’ advert bans” – Bristol has become the first British city to ban advertising of “fast fashion”, sparking a furious backlash against the local Green administration’s sweeping restrictions on free speech, reports the Telegraph.
• “Will the last millionaire to leave UK turn out the eco-lightbulbs” – As Greece undergoes a Thatcherite national rejuvenation, Britain’s wealthiest residents are fleeing a benefits behemoth that shows no sign of slimming down, writes Robert Hardman in the Mail.
• “The deluded Church of England prefers empty gestures to unpalatable truths” – The absurd Ashrafi case and the misguided Project Spire lay bare a Church of England so consumed by gesture politics that it can no longer face hard truths, writes Charles Moore in the Telegraph.
• “Earl Spencer: I am telling the truth about the King” – Diana’s brother doubles down on claims that the then Prince of Wales made disparaging remarks, insisting his account of events is accurate, reports the Telegraph.
• “HarperCollins severs all ties with David Walliams” – After nearly two decades together, HarperCollins UK has announced it will no longer represent David Walliams, bringing a notable publishing relationship to an abrupt end, according to the Times.
• “Moment balaclava-clad children as young as five steal from corner shop” – Shopkeeper Erdogan Yigitoglu, 52, has spent years capturing CCTV footage of shoplifters – including young children concealing their identities beneath balaclavas – and sharing the evidence in a bid to shame their parents, says the Mail.
• “Raging against outside scrutiny looks like academic self-interest” – On his Substack, Ian Pace argues that academics who resist external oversight are conflating professional expertise with an exclusive right to judge their own work, a privilege afforded to no other profession.
• “Rebecca Tuvel was cancelled – it was the best thing to ever happen to her” – The philosopher Rebecca Tuvel reflects on being publicly shamed for making an analogy between transgenderism and transracialism in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
• “There seem to be more and more videos emerging of police questioning people simply for preaching Christianity or reading from the Bible on Britain’s streets” – On X, Ben Graham posts a video of two WPCs harassing a Christian preacher.

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