News and Views: January 5, 2025

Biden Admin Knew Last Year, China Could Shut Down Our Infrastructure... And has done nothing   Chinese hackers had gained the ability to shut down dozens of U.S. ports, power grids and other infrastructure targets at will, Jake Sullivan told telecommunications and technology executives at a secret meeting at the White House in the fall of 2023, according to people familiar with it. The attack could threaten lives, and the government needed the companies’ help to root out the intruders.

     What no one at the briefing knew, including Sullivan: China’s hackers were already working their way deep inside U.S. telecom networks, too.  

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Leading cause of death worldwide revealed in new report 

Abortion was the leading cause of death worldwide in 2024, according to new data published by Worldometer, which shows there were 45.1 million abortions globally last year.

   This surpassed deaths caused by cancer (8.2 million), smoking (5 million), HIV/AIDS (1.7 million), traffic fatalities (1.35 million) and suicide (1.1 million), Breitbart noted, adding that the combined total of all non-abortion deaths was estimated at 62.5 million, so the procedures accounted for just over 42% of all human deaths in 2024.

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Britain’s Long-Overdue Reckoning With ‘Grooming Gangs’  But the scale of the response simply did not match up to the scale of the atrocities. Some of the rapists are already being released. Disgraced officials found cozy jobs elsewhere. No police officers faced serious consequences. Chillingly, files and laptops containing important evidence were stolen. The state avoided accountability while a cultural establishment that emphasized egalitarian and minoritarian narratives avoided the subject. When posts about the grooming gangs scandal went viral on X this week, there was widespread shock. People outside the UK hadn’t even heard about it—and many people within the UK hadn’t grasped its implications.

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The young men leaving traditional churches for 'masculine' Orthodox Christianity 

A 2023 survey by the Orthodox Studies Institute of Orthodox clergy in 20 parishes across 15 states found there had been a 80 per cent increase in the number of converts to the Orthodox church in 2022, compared with pre-pandemic levels in 2019.

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Homer's Iliad and Odyssey hit with trigger warnings by university for 'distressing' content  Reacting to news of the university’s warning, the former prime minister described the policy as “bonkers”, telling the paper: “Exeter University should withdraw its absurd warnings. Are they really saying that their students are so wet, so feeble-minded and so generally namby-pamby that they can’t enjoy Homer?

    “Is the faculty of Exeter University really saying that its students are the most quivering and pathetic in the entire 28 centuries of Homeric studies?”

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