News Round-Up: Net Zero Push Triggers Economic Shock, Shakespeare To Be ‘Decolonised’, and China Deploys Robot Surveillance Dogs
Every week, the editorial team of Freedom Research compiles a round-up of news that caught our eye, or what felt like under-reported aspects of news deserving more attention.
Over the past week, the following topics attracted our attention:
UK government report: Net Zero push will trigger a great economic shock.
Total surveillance: new AI robot dogs deployed in Chinese ‘smart city’.
Shakespeare’s birthplace to be decolonised citing ‘white supremacy’ fears.
NYT’s op-ed admits scientists ‘badly misled’ public on Covid – readers say ‘five years too late’.
Relying on someone’s preferred gender identity hampers medical services, fight against crime – UK report.
UK government report: Net Zero push will trigger a great economic shock
Drive to Net Zero risks taking Britain back to the 1970s and could have the same effect as an ‘oil price shock’ on the economy, leaked documents reveal, according to The Telegraph. A report by the Department for Business and Trade (DBT) found that the transition to zero emissions by 2050 could have a significant impact on growth and could spur inflation. Officials warned that so-called green policies ‘could act like a supply side shock, with some similarities to a standard oil price shock’, like the global financial crisis caused by the 1973 oil embargo imposed by Arab states on Israel during the Yom Kippur War.
The document, written in November 2023, reveals significant scepticism about the Government’s Net Zero plans by civil service analysts. The report said that the shift could see a drop in private-sector consumption because companies will be forced to retire ‘stranded’ machinery and other goods earlier than planned. That will redirect money from spending into unplanned capital investment, which would pose a ‘particular challenge’ to the economy. “Estimates suggest that by 2030, 10 per cent of GDP will have been subtracted from consumption to turn unsustainable output into sustainable output,” the report said. “A decrease in consumption levels poses a particular challenge following a decade of relatively weak real wage growth and households facing an extended cost of living crisis due to high inflation.”
Total surveillance: new AI robot dogs deployed in Chinese ‘smart city’
China has deployed robot dogs and autonomous patrol vehicles in the tech area of Beijing for public security, showcasing its advances made in Artificial Intelligence tools. The Beijing Economic-Technological Development Area (BDA) has deployed new surveillance technology to boost urban security and governance, as stated in a press release.
Two grey-and-white ‘robot dogs’ labelled ‘Patrol, Publicity, and Prevention,’ along with a fleet of smart patrol vehicles, are now moving around in the area. The system includes 18 Level-4 autonomous vehicles, 15 manned patrol cars, and two industrial-grade robotic dogs.
Since the beginning of March, robot dogs have patrolled the streets of the district ‘enhancing surveillance capabilities beyond human potential.’
Beijing's robot dogs can analyse big data. The 65-kilogram dog has a battery life of 4 hours and can exchange data with L4 autonomous patrol vehicles via 5G networks. The explosion-proof, gas-detecting robotic dogs will also work in extreme weather conditions, such as heavy rain or heat.
Autonomous vehicles have been on the streets of the district since the beginning of January. Together with the dogs, they form an effective monitoring and control system. The role of the smart dogs will be more of a real-time, on-the-spot control, while unmanned vehicles will still have to deal with logistics and data exchange with the control centre. The artificial intelligence and big data system should detect all anomalies, from fire risks to all other potential threats.
Shakespeare’s birthplace to be decolonised citing ‘white supremacy’ fears
Willim Shakespeare’s birthplace is being “decolonised” following concerns about the playwright being used to promote ‘white supremacy’, The Telegraph writes.
Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust owns buildings linked to the Bard in his home town of Stratford-upon-Avon. The trust also owns archival material including parish records of the playwright’s birth and baptism.
The claims about ‘white supremacy’ were made in a 2022 collaborative research project between the trust and Dr Helen Hopkins, an academic at the University of Birmingham. The research took issue with the trust’s quaint Stratford attractions, comprising the supposed childhood homes and shared family home of Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway, his wife, because the Bard was presented as a “universal” genius. This idea of Shakespeare’s universal genius ‘benefits the ideology of white European supremacy’, it was claimed.
The concern was thus that European culture is presented as the world standard for high art, a standard which was pushed through ‘colonial inculcation’ and the use of Shakespeare as a symbol of ‘British cultural superiority’ and ‘Anglo-cultural supremacy’.
Veneration of Shakespeare is therefore part of a ‘white Anglo-centric, Eurocentric, and increasingly ‘West-centric’ worldviews that continue to do harm in the world today’.
The Shakespeare trust is therefore now ‘decolonising’ its vast collection to ‘create a more inclusive museum experience’.
This process includes exploring ‘the continued impact of Empire’ on the collection, the ‘impact of colonialism’ on world history, and how ‘Shakespeare’s work has played a part in this’. The trust has stated that some items in its collections and archives may contain ‘language or depictions that are racist, sexist, homophobic, or otherwise harmful’.
NYT’s op-ed admits scientists ‘badly misled’ public on Covid – readers say ‘five years too late’
The New York Times finally ran a column by a scientist who said the public was “badly misled” about the origins of Covid-19 – triggering backlash from readers who said the admission came five years too late, The New York Post writes.
In an opinion piece published last Sunday, Zeynep Tufecki, a sociology professor at Princeton University, argued that officials and scientists hid facts, misled a Times journalist and colluded on campaigns to bury the possibility of a research lab leak in Wuhan, China.
It has emerged that safety precautions at the Wuhan lab in question ‘might have been terrifyingly lax,’ Tufecki wrote in her column, titled “We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives.”
Social media users were quick to accuse the NYT of hypocrisy, circulating photos of a now-deleted 2021 post from Times journalist Apoorva Mandavilli that claimed the “lab leak theory” had “racist roots”.
“Five years too late,” one user wrote about Tufecki’s article in a post that garnered 10,000 likes. “Remember when the NYT would call you a misinformation spreader, and social media platforms would ban you for believing COVID-19 originated in a lab?”
Another user wrote: “Any so-called COVID reckoning from Times that fails to confront its own relentless lies isn’t a reckoning at all.”
Meanwhile, some loyal left-leaning Times subscribers slammed the broadsheet for backtracking on its earlier COVID-19 articles.
Relying on someone’s preferred gender identity hampers medical services, fight against crime – UK report
Cancer screenings have been missed and criminal convictions overlooked because of how data is collected about people's biological sex and gender identity, an independent review found, the BBC reports.
The review, led by Prof Alice Sullivan, a professor of sociology at University College London, outlined the risks of conflating biological sex and gender when it comes to clinical care.
Sullivan urged public bodies to collect data on both sex and gender identity by default ‘across the board’ to ensure it is accurate. “What I've argued in this report is that sex is really important, we should be recording it by default – transgender and gender diverse identities can also be recorded where that's appropriate,” she said. “There's no reason to see this as a trade-off between the two. They're two distinct variables.”
While people can legally change gender, they can't change biological sex. This means a woman who starts saying she is a man still needs cervical smears and men who claim to be women need prostate checks.
The report, commissioned by the previous Conservative government in February of last year, also raised concerns about policing as suspects do not have to tell officers that they have changed their name or gender. It is thus possible someone could be released from custody before their offending history is known about, the review said.
The report recommends that police forces record data on sex in their systems and stop allowing changes to be made to individual sex markers on the police national computer. It also said the new NHS numbers and changed gender markers should no longer be issued.