UK - Administrators at the University of Reading in England recently cut several lines referring to domestic violence from a classic Greek poem to avoid offending students. The 2,000-year-old poem, Types of Women, by Semonides of Amorgos, is taught to first-year classics students at the school and makes reference to silencing women through violence. Documents obtained by The UK Daily Mail include a statement by school administrators: “The portion of the poem now omitted involved a brief reference to domestic violence,” read the statement. “That portion has subsequently been removed because, while the text as a whole is vitriolic, that part seemed unnecessarily unpleasant and (potentially) triggering.” According to the school, no student had complained about the poem. “This is beyond naive,” Jeremy Black, emeritus professor of history at the University of Exeter, told the Daily Mail. “It is positively ridiculous and has no place in academia. If we applied this same kind of censorship to the news we would end up with a most limited and ignorant view of the world,” said Black.

AFGHANISTAN - The Taliban has ordered clothes shops in Afghanistan’s Herat province to behead all mannequins because they are “idols,” according to media reports. According to The Times newspaper, the ruling was issued last week by the local office of the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, which is charged with enforcing the Taliban’s reading of Sharia Law in the western province. Officials initially wanted shopkeepers to remove the dummies altogether, describing them as “statues” that were being “worshiped.” However, store owners hit out at the idea, arguing that it would have an adverse effect on their already floundering business. The Taliban relented and settled for the mere beheading of mannequins instead, with severe punishment awaiting those who run foul of the new rule.

UK - How our Universe was born from nothing or if there was something that existed before it remains a mystery, but that is not stopping some physicists from trying to figure it out. The most we can say with confidence at this stage is that physics has so far found no confirmed instances of something arising from nothing. To truly answer the question of how something could arise from nothing, we would need to explain the quantum state of the entire Universe at the beginning of the Planck epoch. All attempts to do this remain highly speculative. Some of them appeal to supernatural forces like a designer. But other candidate explanations remain within the realm of physics – such as a multiverse, which contains an infinite number of parallel universes, or cyclical models of the Universe, being born and reborn again.

CHINA - Protesters gathered outside the offices of the sinking China Evergrande Group as investors fret over whether their returns will be lost to the company's dire financial situation. The crowd congregated outside the building in Guangzhou on Tuesday, anxious about the future of their investments with the company. Around 100 people surrounded the company’s offices to chant, “Evergrande, return our money!” This echoed the demands heard when the state of Evergrande’s affairs became known last year. Shares in Evergrande dropped by almost 90 percent last year as investors became increasingly worried about the security of their investments. Evergrande was heavily embedded in the Chinese economy - the world's second-largest economy. Onlookers worry that the effect of a collapse could be similar to that of the Lehman Brothers in the US, and have a ripple effect on the property and real estate sectors which account for up to 30 percent of China's GDP.

CHINA - The new RCEP trade agreement, spanning 15 countries and nearly one-third of the world’s population, gives Beijing huge advantages in its economic competition with America. With the coming of the new year, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) trade agreement came into force. Signed at the end of 2020, and ratified by at least 10 of its parties through 2021, the deal constitutes the largest free trade agreement in history, spanning 30% of the world’s GDP and bringing China, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) into one bloc, where members enjoy 90% of goods tariff free. It is not surprising that China has been quick to herald the deal as a massive win for itself, coming at a time when the United States is advocating ‘decoupling’ from Beijing and adopting a protectionist stance. China sees itself becoming more prominent in the global economy, trading more and using its giant market, while the US has decided to sit on the sidelines, engage in sabotage, cry foul, and still demand it should be able to dictate the flow of the game it refuses to play in. Who do you think is going to come out of all this best?

CHINA - After joining the world’s most powerful nations in pledging to work together on disarmament and avoid nuclear war, China is continuing to overhaul its stash of atomic weapons, and calling on others to reduce their stockpiles. "China has always adopted the no first use policy and we maintain our nuclear capabilities at the minimal level required for our national security,” Fu Cong, the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s top arms control director, told reporters on Tuesday, according to AFP. "China will continue to modernize its nuclear arsenal for reliability and safety issues," he added. Along with the US, UK, Russia, and France, China on Monday signed a statement declaring that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” The five nuclear powers also agreed to work together on “bilateral and multilateral non-proliferation, disarmament, and arms control agreements and commitments,” and not to leave their nuclear weapons targeted at each other.

SCOTLAND - Nearly 3,000 people were executed in Scotland between 1563 and 1736 after wrongly being accused of witchcraft. But a campaign to achieve pardons for them is gaining momentum – and making people reassess what they consider a witch. Margaret Atwood dedicated her epic ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ to one. Angelina Jolie and Nicole Kidman have portrayed them in Hollywood movies. And Hermione Granger from Harry Potter is a hero to millions. Witches have become a staple of modern culture, but there’s a more sinister side to their history, which a pair of campaigners are seeking to highlight. Claire Mitchell and Zoe Venditozzi are behind Witches of Scotland (WoS), a group which is seeking pardons, apologies, and a memorial for those accused and convicted under the country’s Witchcraft Act of 1563 to 1736. It’s not widely known, but Scotland executed five times more witches than anywhere else in Europe. According to WoS’ conservative estimates, nearly 4,000 people were accused of witchcraft and more than 2,500 convicted and burned. By way of comparison, the renowned Salem witch trials in colonial Massachusetts saw only 300 accused and 19 handed the death penalty.

GERMANY - A single German frigate is making the rounds of Asia. With the ship now halfway through its mission, Berlin has created more questions than it has answered with its first foray into the region in two decades. The German Navy’s deployment of the Brandenburg-class frigate Bayern, announced in January 2021 and dispatched that August, throws into relief Europe’s dilemma in the Indo-Pacific. Despite its public commitments to concepts such as human rights, democracy, and equality, Germany (like many others in Europe) is deeply dependent on China, a power that believes in none of these, for continued economic growth. While the European Union and China traded sanctions in a rare escalation of tensions last year, EU members are taking great pains to avoid being dragged along by Washington into a direct confrontation with Beijing. But the capitals of Europe are unable to agree on a unified approach.

JAPAN - In early November, the German Navy frigate Bayern docked in Japan after two days of exercises with the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force destroyer Samidare. No, it’s not the reestablishment of the Axis Powers, but it’s still significant. “The Indo-Pacific is today one of the strategically most important regions of the world,” General Eberhard Zorn, chief of Germany’s armed forces said at a Tokyo press conference. “Here, important decisions over freedom, peace and well-being in the world are being made. Deploying our frigate to the Indo-Pacific makes clear that Germany stands up for our common values.” In other words, the Germans are doing their part to contain China, just as the British, French and Dutch have done. And, of course, the Americans.

GERMANY - China, France, Russia, the UK and the US have agreed that a nuclear war "cannot be won and must never be fought. Five of the world's nuclear powers on Monday pledged to prevent the proliferation of nuclear arms and have also said that nuclear war is not an option. In a rare statement issued jointly, China, France, Russia, the UK and the US said: "We believe strongly that the further spread of such weapons must be prevented." The statement went on to say: "A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought." There was also affirmation that "nuclear weapons — for as long as they continue to exist — should serve defensive purposes, deter aggression, and prevent war."

CHINA - A nuclear fusion reactor in China has set a new record for sustained high temperatures after running five-times hotter than the Sun for more than 17 minutes, according to state media. The Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), known as an “artificial sun”, reached temperatures of 70 million degrees Celsius during the experiments, Xinhua News Agency reported.

USA - The world's population is set to grow to 8.5 billion people by 2030, much of it in the developing world. The existing petro-chemical based food production system, with its ever decreasing rates of return and eco-system damage, will destroy what is left of the world’s resources – unless a better way is found to grow food.

USA - The city of Philadelphia has set a record in 2021 with 559 murders committed, the most in its history since records began. It has outstripped more populous cities that have also seen rates spike, like New York and Los Angeles. The rate surged from last year’s 499 murders and represented a major increase from 2019’s 356 killings. Children have been among the worst impacted, with some 206 kids and teens hit by gunfire over the past year, 36 of them fatally. All told, about 2,200 Philadelphians were shot over the course of 2021. Soros-funded DAs tend to invite strong ‘Defund the Police’ movements, and Philadelphia’s Black Lives Matter chapter made its voice heard in 2020 loud enough to convince 14 of the city’s 17 City Council members not to support a proposed $14 million increase to the police budget. Last year, the city decreased the police budget by $33 million, a figure it has kept for 2022.

USA - What happens to democracy in the United States is likely to determine the fate of democracy around the world: whether this third wave of democratic reversals is turned back or gains horrific new momentum. Today, the United States confronts a growing antidemocratic movement, not just from the ranks of fringe extremists but also from a substantial group of officeholders — a movement that is challenging the very foundations of electoral democracy. Should this effort succeed, the United States could become the first ever advanced industrial democracy to fail — that is, to no longer meet the minimum conditions for free and fair elections as political scientists and other scholars of democracy define them.

USA - One of Facebook’s fact-checkers, tasked with deciding what users can and can’t see online, has confessed that they censor information they know to be factually accurate. Science Feedback, a third-party Facebook “fact checker”, admitted this week that it attempted to suppress and censor a Reason article that criticized mask mandates because the article in question didn’t fit into the leftist mainstream narrative preferred by Facebook. The article that caused Science Feedback to spring into action was published at the libertarian magazine Reason by Robby Soave, and was entitled “The Study That Convinced the CDC To Support Mask Mandates in Schools Is Junk Science.” The article quoted another piece from the left-wing Atlantic’s David Zweig — an article that Science Feedback decided not to fact-check. Breitbart.com reports: Science Feedback later admitted that their fact check was erroneous, and reversed course. “We have taken another look at the Reason article and confirm that the rating was applied in error to this article,” the fact-checkers told Reason. “The flag has been removed. We apologize for the mistake.”