Yet the virtue-signalling madness continues here in the UK, where NHS staff have been told they must treat transgender colleagues with beards as women if they self-identify as female. Training materials for NHS Scotland workers asked them to consider the fictional case of “Lucy”, a 29-year-old trans nurse who had yet to formally change their name from Lee and “is still producing facial hair which is exposed”.

What should staff do if patients used male terms to describe the bearded nurse? The “cultural humility training” module initially stated that “discrimination against Lucy will not be tolerated” and the staff “have a duty (under equality law) to use the correct name and pronouns for Lucy”. I’m sorry, but if being told to call a bearded man named Lee a woman isn’t gaslighting, I don’t know what is.

Trans people surely cannot have it both ways. Their fiercest activists cannot argue that we must respect their self-identification and pronouns both if they have a Gender Recognition Certificate – and if they don’t. They cannot demand the freedom to live as they choose while restricting the rights of others to speak freely. If you’re bearded, then people would be perfectly justified in thinking you’re a man, or a trans woman.

The data backs this up. ADHD diagnoses doubled for boys and trebled for girls between 2000 and 2018. In the 1940s, autism was thought to affect one in 2,500 children, while today one in 100 has been diagnosed. Chronic conditions with no strict diagnostic criteria, such as chronic Lyme disease and long Covid, have also become a part of daily life.

Recently, I’ve been shaken by a couple of friends, who seemed in perfect health, being diagnosed with cancer after whole-body MRI scans, then undergoing invasive treatment. Alarmed, I was about to pay for my own scan, but now the NHS consultant neurologist Suzanne O’Sullivan tells me to do no such thing. It may lead to a cancer being detected that would never have grown, she says, but for which I’ll have unnecessary radiotherapy or chemotherapy.

We are living in an “age of overdiagnosis”, O’Sullivan says. “We’re turning people into patients, medicalising their lives, affecting their quality of their lives and causing undue anxiety with no benefit.” An esteemed doctor for nearly 35 years, O’Sullivan works at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in London and in a specialist unit at the Epilepsy Society.

Yet even that splurge could be dwarfed by a proposal to exempt military spending from the country’s constitutional lock on public borrowing. It is, in theory, a licence for an unlimited defence budget, constrained only by coalition politics and the whims of the bond markets. Announcing the package on Tuesday evening, Merz briefly switched from German to English in an effort to convey the scale of its ambition: “Whatever it takes.”

“It’s certainly a big deal, compared to anything in the past 20 years,” said Christian Eufinger, professor of finance at Navarra University’s IESE Business School. “If it goes through, it would probably change the dynamics not just in Germany but across the whole eurozone." The word “if”, however, is the operative term in that sentence. Merz now has only a fortnight to hammer the plan through a wall of resistance in the Bundestag.

In the new Bundestag, however, the hard left and the hard right will control more than a third of the seats. To get around this obstacle, Merz has resorted to an unprecedented gambit that pushes the boundaries of legality and political reality: trying to get the debt package through the old Bundestag, where the maths is more favourable but time is desperately short.

“Remember what Amalek did to you on your journey after you left Egypt and how, unmoved by fear of God, Amalek surprised you on the march. And when you were famished and weary, Amalek cut down all the stragglers in your rear. Therefore, when your God grants you safety from all your enemies around you in the land that He is giving you as a hereditary portion, you shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven. Do not forget!”

Amalek was believed to be a son of Esau’s son Eliphaz and ancestor of the Amalekites, a nomadic tribe that attacked the Israelites in the Sinai Desert. The Israelites were able to defend themselves. Haman, the villain of the Purim story, was a descendant of King Agag of the Amalek tribe. When the Israelites prepared to enter the Promised Land, Moses warned them and reminded them about the evil of Amalek.

Just as God is still performing miracles for Israel today through the dedicated and wonderful men and women of the IDF, we remember at Purim how genocide was averted in the Purim story by the skillful court manipulations of Mordechai and the brave Queen Esther, aided by the hidden hand of God. May all our captives be returned alive without delay. Am Yisrael Chai!

“If in fact Biden’s staffers were exploiting his mental decline, those orders are null and void,” he added. Who was making the decisions? Who was really running the country while Biden occupied the White House?

The Biden Autopen scandal is growing by the day. On Monday, the Oversight Project revealed six criminals were pardoned by Biden’s autopen on December 30, 2022 while Joe Biden was vacationing and golfing in St Croix. The autopen pardons were all signed “at the City of Washington” while Joe Biden was in the US Virgin Islands.

We have one of the lowest rates of real investment in the developed world. Moreover, our net debt costs us money, year after year – the outflow of interest payments, dividends and profit repatriations on the liabilities that we owe to foreigners. How did we get into this situation? The short answer is by running persistent current account deficits, that is to say, sustaining a level of imports in excess of exports and other sources of foreign income. We last ran a surplus on the current account in 1983.

The fundamental problem is that our macro economy is seriously unbalanced. Over recent years, things may not have been good but in fact the underlying position has been worse. We need to save more, invest more and export more. Despite the need to greatly increase defence spending, we must initiate substantial cuts in public spending, starting with the welfare bill.

While the EU states may not be preparing for a direct military confrontation with Russia, their entanglement in Ukraine and its reliance on a failing strategy could escalate tensions unpredictably. Many Western European politicians have staked their careers on the survival of the Kiev regime, making them willing to take extreme measures to justify their past decisions. This collective political egoism is now manifesting as an inability to acknowledge mistakes or alter course.

But incompetence does not preclude ambition. Ursula von der Leyen and Kaja Kallas exemplify this – leaders who, finding no avenues for career advancement back home, now seek to carve out their legacy through conflict with Russia. Since they have no real power within the EU, they latch onto the Ukraine crisis to justify their positions.

Constant war-mongering can have real consequences. The EU public is being conditioned to accept lower living standards and increased military spending under the guise of countering the “Russian threat.” The fact that this narrative is gaining traction among ordinary Europeans is a worrying development.

“They want our resources, our water, our land, our country... If they succeeded they would destroy our way of life,” Mr Carney said of the US, until recently one of Canada’s closest allies. He repeated the warning in both English and French.

Taking aim at Mr Trump’s repeated calls to absorb Canada as the US “51st state”, he vowed: “America is not Canada. And Canada never ever will be part of America in any way, shape or form.” He added: “These are dark days, dark days brought on by A COUNTRY WE CAN NO LONGER TRUST.”

A red heifer is an entirely red female cow with no more than one non-red hair on its entire body. In the language of the Bible, red is not exclusively what we know today as red. It also includes brown and other similar shades of red. This excludes black. All of the hairs on its body must be the same color. The animal must also be two years and one month old. There can be no blemish, no holes in the ear, and it may never have carried a burden. While all the cows were once entirely red and later grew non-white hairs, they are occasionally inspected to determine whether the non-white hairs remain.

“The question now is how to proceed. There are several essential questions that must be addressed regarding the cows themselves and other issues surrounding the issue of the Temple and the Temple service,” Rabbi Ariel said. “We are speaking with a wide range of rabbis and professionals about these issues we haven’t dealt with in over 2,000 years.”

Rabbi Ariel noted that Temple consciousness is strengthening in the public, and signs of this can be seen in the names of children named after places and individuals associated with the Temple and in the public discourse surrounding this issue. “Awareness of the Temple is even rising among Israel’s enemies." The rabbi noted that articles and videos concerning the red heifer were seen on Arabic media.

For the past ten months, Alun Ebenezer has been whipping a secondary school in Monmouthshire into shape. When he first arrived at Caldicot Comprehensive from Fulham Boys (the free school championed by Boris Johnson), his methods went down badly with pupils and parents alike. A group of parents staged a protest at the gates; people would regularly pitch up in reception demanding to speak to him. “The first few weeks were hard,” says Ebenezer. “The parents kept coming up here, shouting at us, threatening us. But you have to hold your ground.”

Asked by the local authority to take over Caldicot, a 1300-pupil state secondary, in May 2024, it sounds as if the school had become a battleground. Staff staged walkouts over what they considered to be a failure to address the students’ violent and abusive behaviour. Members of one union – the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers – refused to teach certain pupils whom they deemed to be a risk to staff. Students, he has since learned, felt unsafe too – one told him recently they’d long been frightened to go to the bathroom. “My job was to come in and sort all that out.”

He believes we have made a mistake with the way we raise and educate young people. Where we should have been teaching them “resilience”, we’ve told them the most important thing is to be happy. “We live in a day and age where we indulge young people. ‘Do whatever you want to be happy.’ ‘Be whatever you want to be happy.’ But it hasn’t made them happy. It’s made them the complete opposite.” By focusing on happiness, we’ve made them “really miserable”, he says. “When young people realise life is hard, it’s a game changer.” The pandemic “taught young people things they would never have learned through test tubes and textbooks”, he says. “They had to go through things. You can’t learn resilience from a textbook.”

Rather than deal with behaviour, we diagnose. “When I came here, you had literally 100 young people hiding behind issues they didn’t have. They’re just naughty.” While some young people have “genuine problems”, Ebenezer suspects plenty don’t. The problem, he says, is the way “we now hide behind labels”.

After 27 years in education, he says one of the biggest challenges facing young people today – alongside phones, which he considers “a huge problem” – is overdiagnosis. “When did ‘I’m a bit nervous’ become ‘I’ve got anxiety’? When did ‘I’m a bit fed up’ or ‘it’s a bit hard going’ become ‘I’ve got depression’? We have to distinguish between those things so that people who have got real anxiety and real depression get the help they need.”

The school environment should matter to everyone, from parents to politicians, he says. “We can have the next generation we want. We can have the society we want... We all want safe streets, well mannered young people. We want characteristics like effort, perseverance, can-do attitude, resilience. None of us have a magic wand to make it happen.” Discipline, he says, might be a good place to start.

It also had a map of the park with a red circle labelled 'This is not a cruising ground'. The poster encouraged dog walkers and residents to 'walk in the red area' and to 'take back West Heath'. The term refers to the practice where individuals, often in public spaces, seek out sexual encounters with others. Historically, men have been 'cruising' on the site since the 19th century and 200 years later it remains one of Europe's most notorious spots. It started as a response to sodomy and indecency laws.

Lucy Marsh, from the Family Education Trust, told MailOnline: 'Hampstead Heath is a much-loved public park and a green space that is enjoyed by families, especially those who don't have their own gardens. Parents should be able to enjoy a walk or a picnic without worrying about them seeing gay men having sex in a public place. It's not 'bigoted' to believe that people should not be engaging in sexual fetishes in public, especially in a park where children are likely to be present."

Reacting to the figures, Richard Tice, Deputy Leader of Reform, told The Telegraph: “Top tip if you want to earn more at the BBC: don’t be a straight, white male. Do something to change this. Be woke. People should be appointed and paid based on merit, not on their ethnicity or sexual preference.”

The BBC has committed to equal pay, but the figures have led some to question how equal the licence fee funded pay scales are in light of the details emerging. According to the 23/24 annual report, those who identify as LGBT earn 15.6% more than their straight colleagues. Similarly, senior members of staff from black, Asian, and other ethnic backgrounds (Bame) earn, on average, 12.6 percent more than their white counterparts.

Those with a recognised disability earn around 8% more than colleagues without one, whilst women earn 5% more than men. Auntie’s obsession with diversity, equality and inclusion has resulted in the very discrimination that it was supposed to protect against. The BBC needs to foster a culture of meritocracy, not one of virtue-signalling.

There is no doubt that European leaders feel extremely threatened by Russia fighting a war on the edge of the EU. Just the pictures of smashed Ukrainian cities, which besides the onion-dome churches could architecturally be practically anywhere in central Europe are enough to make us all nervous. Understandably: it conjures just too many bad memories.

A really effective military is the one that never has to fight any battles, it successfully deters all challengers. The ultimate deterrent is the nuclear bomb, so potent even a low dose is enough to convert one of the most fearsome empires in history into a nation of cartoon-loving celibates. Allegedly.

The question of the bomb is coming up with increasing frequency. Russia looms large. Can the West survive Moscow’s empire building? Perhaps more to the point, can civilisation survive a nuclear-armed Germany? Russian bombing of Ukrainian cities recalls terrible memories for Europeans, but so too does a rapidly rearming Berlin. Sorry, Germans. We love you really, but where’s the basis for trust?