How many reboots can one vice president get? Over the last month, three major publications have all published iterations of the same theme: how to get Kamala Harris, Joe Biden’s wayward Vice President, back on track. 

Yesterday, the Financial Times announced another Harris “relaunch”, featuring interviews with dozens of US lawmakers and Democratic strategists about her value to the administration. Nearly all were in violent agreement that she was an asset: “If we want to win, she needs to be out there — and she needs to be speaking to groups of people who are willing to listen to her,” said one. “She can feel the threats to this democracy like nobody else can,” said another. “She speaks from the heart and the soul.” ...  Continue reading

Last year 4.1% of all deaths in Canada were due to MAiD (medical assistance in dying), according to the country’s health ministry. This amounts to a total of 13,241 people who died under Canada’s MAiD programme in 2022, marking a 31% rise on the previous year.

These findings provide succour to claims made by MAiD critics that the programme has become too permissive. Federal guidelines stipulate that clients must have a grievous and irremediable medical condition, make a voluntary request for medical assistance in dying that is not the result of outside pressure or influence, and give informed consent to receive medical assistance in dying.  ...  Continue reading

There has been an “an awful lot of nonsense” spoken about whether pro-Palestine supporters should be allowed to protest in the UK, former Justice of the Supreme Court Jonathan Sumption has warned. In his first public comments on the conflict, the former Supreme Court justice argued that it was “not illegal at all” to march in favour of Palestine, and that “people who should know better” had made “rather silly and ill-considered statements”. 

In remarks made exclusively to UnHerd, Lord Sumption singled out Home Secretary Suella Braverman, who told senior police officers that waving a Palestinian flag or singing a chant advocating freedom for Arabs may be a criminal offence. “A great many of the slogans, the demonstrations, and the flags that we’ve seen in the streets are not illegal at all,” Sumption said. “It is not illegal to say that Palestinians have a legitimate grievance.” ...  Continue reading

Just 9% of Labour voters are more sympathetic with Israel in the Israel-Palestine conflict, a new poll has found. 

According to research published by YouGov yesterday, Labour has the lowest percentage of those more sympathetic with Israel out of all three of the major parties, with 39% of Conservative voters and 14% of Liberal Democratic feeling primary sympathy for the Jewish state. Meanwhile, the Labour party has the largest percentage of those more sympathetic with Palestine (27% versus 6% and 7% respectively).

These findings draw a sharp contrast with Keir Starmer’s steadfast support of Israel. Shortly after Hamas’ attack on October 7th, the Labour leader posted on X, formerly Twitter, that “Labour and Britain must stand with Israel” before decrying Hamas’ actions as “terrorism”. Starmer then followed up this statement on LBC, stating that “Israel has the right to defend herself”, even condoning Israel’s move to cut water and electricity from the Strip. ...  Continue reading

Britain’s new free speech chief has promised a “broadly viewpoint-neutral approach” to speech rights on campus. In remarks delivered to King’s College London today, Arif Ahmed, now head of the Office for Students (OfS), said that his office would “protect the lawful speech rights of speakers at universities — students, staff, visiting speakers – independently of the viewpoint that they are expressing”.

 “You can argue that Britain is fundamentally racist — or that it never was,” he said. “You can speak or write as a Marxist, a postcolonial theorist, a gender-critical feminist, or anything else — if you do it within the law.”  ...  Continue reading

Ceding territory to Russia in exchange for Nato membership could be a solution to ending the war, the chief of staff for Nato’s Secretary-General has said.

At a panel debate in Arendal, Norway on Tuesday Stian Jenssen argued that it was important to discuss Ukraine’s security arrangements after the war ended. In comments reported by Norway’s most read newspaper, VG, Jenssen reiterated the official Nato line that it ultimately lay with Ukraine to decide when and how it would negotiate. But his proposal for territorial secession is beyond anything that his boss, Jens Stoltenberg, has discussed publicly. ...  Continue reading

Conservative academics are much more likely to self-censor than their liberal counterparts — but only in Western countries, a new paper has found. According to research by the Harvard Kennedy School, self-censorship is more evenly spread among conservative, moderate and liberal professors in conservative non-Western countries than it is in post-industrial Western countries, which have comparatively social liberal cultures.

In a survey based on over 100 countries, respondents were asked to classify themselves based on two ideological scales, with one ranging from socially or morally liberal to conservative and the other on economics. In non-Western countries such as China, Russia and Turkey, liberal academics represented the minority, but there was no meaningful difference in levels of self-censorship with their conservative counterparts. But, as the table below shows, in the West there is a notable 20-point jump in levels of self-censorship between socially liberal academics and socially conservative academics, who are the minority. ...  Continue reading

When the EU passed its landmark climate policy in April, it was heralded as the bloc’s most ambitious to date. Under the new terms, emissions are to be slashed by 62% from 2005 levels before 2030, paving the way for the EU to reach carbon neutrality by 2050.

But since the passage of that deal, cracks in the European alliance have started to emerge. In recent weeks, several countries and alliances have been calling for a pause, while others have been quietly abandoning climate targets altogether. In the past week alone, Austria’s federal environmental agency warned that the country’s climate target for 2030 would not be reached in time — just as leaked documents showed that Britain, a fellow traveller on green policy, dropped its flagship £11.6 billion climate pledge to developing countries (a week earlier, a separate report found that the government was set to miss the majority of its climate targets too).  ...  Continue reading