Anti-Christian hate crimes in Europe have risen by 44 percent in just one year, with far-left groups behind a majority of the attacks, according to a shocking new report.
Published in October, the Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination Against Christians in Europe’s Annual Report detailed a wave of violent attacks, church arson, and rising extremism battering Europe’s historic Christian communities.
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Children under 12-years-old in the United Kingdom will no longer be offered COVID injections, except for those in clinical risk groups, the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) confirmed this week. The agency said the offer of COVID shots to healthy 5 to 11-year-olds was always meant to be temporary.
The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) said children who had not turned five by the end of last month would not be offered a vaccination, in line with advice published by the UK’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) in February 2022. UKHSA said the offer of Covid jabs to healthy five to 11-year-olds was always meant to be temporary.
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A member of parliament in the U.K. said Wednesday that a hospital told police an alleged rape could not have really occurred because the attacker was transgender, according to The Telegraph.
Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne, a member of parliament, told the House of Lords that it took a year for the hospital to acknowledge there was a male in the ward where the rape allegedly occurred. The victim reported the alleged rape more than a year ago, but hospital staff told police officers “that there was no male in the hospital, therefore the rape could not have happened,” the Telegraph reported.
Her comments came during a debate on a policy called Annex B, which allows patients to be placed in single-sex hospital wards based on self-identification of gender, according to the Telegraph.
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The U.K.’s domestic spy service, MI5, informed the House of Commons speaker that a woman is suspected to have been used by China to exert influence over British lawmakers, Agence France Presse (AFP) reported.
The suspect, Christine Lee, is a London-based solicitor who “knowingly engaged in political interference activities on behalf of the United Front Work Department of the Chinese Communist Party,” authorities said Thursday, AFP reported.
House of Commons Speaker Lindsay Hoyle confirmed to AFP he had informed lawmakers of the incident through an email, AFP reported. “The Speaker takes the security of members and the democratic process very seriously, which is why he issued this notice in consultation with the security services,” a spokesperson for Hoyle told the outlet.
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The 25-year-old knifeman who killed British MP Sir David Amess Friday is believed to be a “British Muslim of Somali descent,” according to the Daily Mail.
Earlier, Essex police announced they were keeping an open mind on whether the stabbing was a terror incident, but the investigation is now being run by counterterrorism police, according to British reports.
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Doctors can now prescribe puberty blocking medication to children under the age of 16 without a judge’s approval, Britain’s Court of Appeals ruled on Friday.
The decision reverses last year’s ruling that children seeking gender reassignment aren’t mature enough to give informed consent to take puberty blocking medicine, the Associated Press reported. The decision said that doctors should seek court approval before prescribing the medication because the drugs were still experimental.
The Tavistock and Portman National Health Service (NHS) trust, Britain’s only gender identity development service (GIDS) for children, appealed last year’s ruling, the AP reported. The Court of Appeal sided with the trust Friday, ruling it was “inappropriate” for the high courts to issue their guidance, and it was up to the doctors to “exercise their judgment” regarding patients’ consent.
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Pfizer said Wednesday that real-world data suggests its coronavirus vaccine is 94% effective in halting asymptomatic infections and effective against a highly transmissible variant first discovered in the United Kingdom.
Israeli analysis of vaccine distribution shows the vaccine being over 97% effective in preventing symptomatic cases and death, higher than the 90% efficiency that was reported in the vaccine’s Phase III trials, Pfizer said in a press release Thursday. Over 80% of the tested specimens were against the UK variant known as B.1.1.7.
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A top foreign policy think tank in Washington, D.C. rejected warnings from a Ukrainian anti-corruption activist against forming a partnership with Burisma Holdings, the energy firm linked to Hunter Biden that has faced allegations of corruption.
Daria Kaleniuk, the executive director of a Ukrainian group called the Anti-Corruption Action Centre (AntAC), contacted John Herbst, a director at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, on Jan. 20, 2017, and asked him to reconsider plans to work with Burisma, newly released State Department emails show.
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Prime minister Boris Johnson confirmed that the end of lockdown may be delayed beyond mid-February and would last until the end of March, telling MPs the government will be “extremely cautious” about lifting restrictions and reopening schools.
On Monday, Prime Minister Johnson plunged England into a third national coronavirus lockdown. The lockdown includes a strict stay at home orders and the closure of all schools. Mr Johnson resisted calls from Tory MPs to guarantee the rules will start to be eased after the first review on February 15, the prime minister made it clear that a successful roll-out of the vaccine programme to the most vulnerable will be key to determining when the lockdown measures can be lifted. Adding on a lag for achieving immunity after vaccination and relieving “the pressure on the NHS”, he then tacked on a further two or three weeks, saying “we should remain cautious of the timetable ahead”, Breitbart reported.
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The two coronavirus vaccines that have been approved for emergency use authorization in the U.S. will be able to combat a new, more contagious strain of the virus in the U.K., experts said Monday.
Vaccines made by pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and Moderna will be effective against the new strain, which is “very similar” to previous strains at the genetic level, University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation affiliate assistant professor Vin Gupta told CNBC. The Food and Drug Administration has approved both vaccines for emergency use authorization after large-scale human trials showed efficacy of more than 90%.
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The European Union and Britain said Friday that wide gaps remained in their fraught talks on a rudimentary trade agreement following the Brexit divorce and called for intensified negotiations before a deadline in a couple of weeks.
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Britain on Tuesday backtracked on plans to give Chinese telecommunications company Huawei a role in the U.K.’s new high-speed mobile phone network amid security concerns fueled by rising tensions between Beijing and Western powers.
Britain said it decided to prohibit Huawei from working on the so-called 5G system after U.S. sanctions made it impossible to ensure the security of equipment made by the Chinese company.
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It appears that social media is not the real world. Indeed, contrary to the predictions I read there, the most seismic election in British history was not even close.
Boris Johnson on Friday morning returned as Great Britain’s prime minister atop a landslide of voters whom the progressive Left abandoned long ago.
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In the United Kingdom’s general election, the Conservative Party has reclaimed a working majority by an even larger margin than most predictions and opinion polls expected, as reported by The Guardian.
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by Jamie Dettmer British officials are drawing up plans to target Iran with sanctions for its seizing of a British-flagged oil tanker in the Strait off Hormuz, and it may urge European Union countries to reimpose sanctions that were lifted in 2016 as part of Tehran’s agreement to curb its nuclear program. The British government is under strong pressure from lawmakers to act decisively in the sharply escalating diplomatic quarrel between the two countries, but there’s growing domestic criticism in the House of Commons about the lack of naval protection for British tankers in the Strait. The outgoing British Prime Minister, Theresa May, is being blamed by some parliamentarians and military officials for failing to agree to a system of joint naval patrols the U.S. was urging Britain and other European navies to establish with American forces. Downing Street took the view that if Britain joined an American-proposed “coalition off navies” it would be seen as endorsing President Donald Trump’s hard-line, sanctions-led approach to Iran, say British and U.S. officials. British defense minister Tobias Ellwood told British broadcasters Sunday that Downing Street is is looking at imposing sanctions against Iran over the seizing of the British-flagged and Swedish-owned Stena Impero and its…
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by Robert Romano While President Donald Trump continues to bring the pressure to China, so far with 10 percent tariffs on $200 billion of Chinese goods shipped to the U.S., rising to 25 percent in Jan. 2019, which comes atop another 25 percent tariff on $50 billion of goods from China, he is dialing up new trade deals with traditional U.S. allies. Trade agreements with South Korea, Mexico and Canada are already going to Congress, accounting for a combined $1.4 trillion in trade with the U.S. And now, Trump has notified Congress of his intent to negotiate deals with the UK, Europe and Japan, with whom the U.S. carried on a combined $1.7 trillion in trade. These were supposed to be mutually exclusive things, according to all the experts. Trump could either put up more trade barriers or lower them, but he could not do both. Instead, Trump is proving that the U.S. can walk and chew gum at the same time as it pursues the Trump trade agenda. If nations act fairly and reciprocally with the U.S. to lower trade barriers, they can get a good deal. If not, like China, then they face tariffs. “Under President Trump’s…
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A giant balloon (pictured) depicting President Trump as a screaming orange baby flew over London Friday as tens of thousands marched through the streets to protest the American leader’s visit to the U.K. The diaper-clad infant, with a quiff of hair and a mobile phone for tweeting, was the centerpiece of demonstrations protesting Trump’s policies on issues ranging from immigration and race relations to women and climate change. “Depicting Trump as a baby is a great way of targeting his fragile ego, and mocking him is our main motivation,” said Matthew Bonner, one of the organizers. “He doesn’t seem to be affected by the moral outrage that comes from his behavior and his policies. You can’t reason with him but you can ridicule him.” Anger over Trump’s visit has already had consequences. Just a week after Trump’s inauguration, Prime Minister Theresa May invited the president for a state visit, the type of event that normally includes glittering horse-drawn carriages and a state dinner hosted by the monarch. That morphed into this two-day “working visit” with much less pomp and circumstance amid concern about security and crowds in central London. Protest organizers say they plan to stage demonstrations in some 50…
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Vil Mirzayanov is a Russian emigre to the U.S. and chemical weapons specialist who helped develop the poison believed to have been used in the attack in Britain on Sergei Skripal, a former colonel in the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence, and his daughter Yulia. Mirzayanov spoke with VOA’s Russian service.
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A teacher who was fired for calling a transgender student by her biological gender hit back at the school with a lawsuit. After math teacher Joshua Sutcliffe, 27, said “well done girls” to two students at an Oxfordshire secondary school in England, the school suspended him and called for a disciplinary hearing. He apologized to the…
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