EU 

Express
EUROPEAN Parliament bosses have been told to set an example and call off plans for their farcical travelling circus to return to Strasbourg.
MEPs are set to return to the Parliament’s French seat for the June plenary session after officials caved in to pressure from France to reinstate the venue despite the worrying epidemiological situation on the Continent. President Emmanuel Macron has long championed a return to Strasbourg, even claiming the EU would be “screwed” if the Parliament stopped meeting there. But with MEPs set to return to the £410million white elephant, some have called for come back to be postponed until the coronavirus pandemic is over.
In a letter to Parliament president David Sassoli, some politicians argued that it was “too hasty” to attempt to host the June session in the French city.
European staffers have been told they will have to attend the plenary despite the current rigamarole of international travel.
They will not be exempt from the special measures in place to curb the spread of the virus as they move between Brussels and Strasbourg for the week. 

Express
THE European Union has intensified its post-Brexit crackdown on investment banks operating out of the City of London.
Officials at the European Central Bank have ramped up their so-called “desk-mapping” scheme to ensure investment banks have moved sufficient staff and asset to the bloc. In the almost five years following the referendum on our EU membership, eurocrats have forced banks to move thousands of jobs and hundreds of billions of pounds in assets from the City to the Continent. While this hasn’t damaged London as an international finance hub, the EU hopes to force through a power shift in the coming years.
The ECB wants to stop the practice of “back-to-back booking” where banks serve clients in Europe while holding capital and management in the UK. 

Express
A FRENCH expert has mocked Britain’s post-Brexit trade deals, warning coming to agreements with countries outside the EU will be a “nightmare”.
International Trade Secretary Liz Truss has turned her attention on deals with countries outside the bloc, including Australia, New Zealand and India, since the UK fully cut ties with the EU last December. She said this week the UK has also set its sights on a post-Brexit deal with oil-rich Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. She told the Telegraph: “The Gulf is a definite target and we are working on the approach to the Gulf.”
However, Dr Elvire Fabry, a specialist researcher at the Institut Jacques Delors in France, ripped into Britain’s trading prospects.
She warned Britain may struggle with the logistics of trading with “far-off markets”. 

Times
It is the spring of 2022, and President Le Pen is settling into the Élysée palace while the world absorbs the shock of the arrival of a hard-right head of state and government in France.
Such a vision was implausible after the 2017 election, which ended with Emmanuel Macron thrashing Marine Le Pen by 32 percentage points in a run-off. Yet the possibility is haunting the mainstream political world because, less than a year from the next presidential election, the far-right family firm founded in 1972 by Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine’s antisemitic father, is within reach of the presidency. 

Immigration 

Breitbart
Over 3,000 illegal migrants have landed on British soil after crossing the English Channel so far this year, doubling last year’s record-setting levels, as criminal gangs continue to outwit the Home Office.
A report from the National Crime Agency (NCA) revealed that organised criminal gangs have been lured into the illegal migration trade along the Channel due to the “high success rate” and large profits.
The NCA claimed that illegal crossings increased amid the coronavirus crisis as a result of limits on normal means of travel as well as more stringent border controls on freight and rail entry into the UK.
So far this year, at least 3,100 boat migrants have landed in the UK, compared to 1,600 at this time last year, the Daily Telegraph reported. Should the pace of migration continue, the paper noted, around 15,000 would land by the end of the year, doubling last years’ record 8,713.
The increase would also represent a 500 per cent jump over 2019 and some 30 times more than the level seen in 2018, according to data compiled by the Migration Watch UK think tank.
The NCA also revealed that criminal gangs have begun using larger boats to ferry illegal migrants across the Channel and have “attempted to transport migrants into the UK using larger vessels landing at small ports away from the Dover Strait.”
“Migrants transported via this method have a higher chance of being exploited by UK-based criminals than those detected by law enforcement arriving by small boat,” the report added. 

Guardian
The number of EU citizens being prevented from entering the UK has soared over the past three months despite a massive reduction in travel because of Covid, according to Home Office figures.
A total of 3,294 EU citizens were prevented from entering the UK, even though post-Brexit rules mean they are allowed to visit the country without visas. That compares with 493 EU citizens in the first quarter of last year, when air traffic was 20 times higher.
Visitors, however, can be stopped or detained and expelled if they are suspected of travelling to Britain to work or settle without meeting the new visa requirements.
Passenger air traffic from the EU is expected to jump almost 20-fold again once Covid-19 restrictions are fully lifted, with experts warning that the number of expulsions and detainees will also grow as a result. 

Guardian
EU tourists coming to the UK have told of being fingerprinted, detained and treated like liars by border officials before trying to travel through the Channel tunnel or by ferry at Calais.
Sergio D’Alberti, a 51-year-old Italian hotel manager currently out of work due to the Covid pandemic, told the Guardian he was held for seven hours at the French port after UK Border Force officials concluded he would be a potential drain on the benefits system.
They said his €4,500 (£3,870) in funds was “not sufficient to cover all reasonable costs in relation to your being without working or accessing public funds” and that his lack of return ticket and job added to suspicion he was lying.
D’Alberti planned a road trip from his home in Côte d’Azur as a pleasant diversion during the pandemic on his way to Ireland to meet his wife’s family in Kerry. Instead, he said, he was held for hours, fingerprinted and photographed “like I was a criminal” as he had not booked every hotel for his trip after quarantine and he did not have a return ticket.
“It was horrible. I’m disgusted the way I have been treated. I have never been so humiliated in my life. I will never ever ever go to the UK again. To me the UK no longer exists. It is not in my vocabulary. After Calais it is the north pole,” he said. 

Covid 

Mail
Boris Johnson was warned last night not to ‘steal our summer’ after he admitted he might delay the end of lockdown.
With some scientists sounding the alarm over the rise of the Indian variant, business leaders, hospitality chiefs and senior MPs told the Prime Minister to stick to his Covid roadmap.
They warned that delaying the full lifting of restrictions on June 21 would be ‘devastating’ for the economy, just as consumer confidence was flooding back. 
And they said traders could go bust if social distancing or other curbs were kept for longer than necessary.
But Mr Johnson yesterday cautioned ‘we may need to wait’ even though he ‘didn’t see anything in the data’ to justify not sticking to June 21. 
His remarks came after experts said a rise in coronavirus cases meant the date was ‘in the balance’ and Matt Hancock revealed that up to 75 per cent of new infections were of the Indian strain.
The Health Secretary said levels were at their highest in weeks and it was ‘too early’ to say whether the country could take the final step on the path to freedom next month. 

Express
MATT HANCOCK has warned that up to 75 percent of UK COVID-19 cases could be the Indian variant.
During a Downing Street briefing, the Health Secretary said the Government had always expected cases to rise when lockdown restrictions were eased. However, he warned that it is “critical” to monitor the link between cases and hospitalisations. Public Health England data shows that cases of the Indian variant have risen by 3,535, to 6,959, since last week.
The B.1.617.2 variant, first identified in India, is believed to be more transmissible than the Kent strain which became dominant in the UK after Christmas.
The rise in cases of the Indian variant has resulted in surge testing and vaccinations in numerous areas.
Mr Hancock said: “The variant first identified in India, so-called B.1.617.2, is still spreading.
“And the latest estimates are that more than half and potentially as many as three quarters of all new cases are now of this variant. 

Telegraph
When the coronavirus pandemic first emerged in Wuhan in December 2019, conspiracy theorists quickly pointed out that it was close to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a leading world centre for research on coronaviruses. 
Of all the labs in all the cities in all the world, a deadly coronavirus had emerged at the spot where scientists were believed to be creating deadly coronaviruses. 
Yet within a matter of weeks, vocal members of the scientific community had roundly ridiculed the claims, criticising “shoddy” research that had spread on social media. It was far more likely, they insisted, that the virus had jumped from an animal and been picked up by a human in the Wuhan wet market. 
Early indicators showed that many of the people who became infected early on had links to the market, and by May last year scientists had found that the virus was 97.1 per cent similar to a disease found in bats in China’s Yunnan province. 

Breitbart 
Facebook announced Wednesday it will no longer remove claims addressing the possible origins of the coronavirus and whether it is man-made or manufactured.
The policy change came on the same day President Joe Biden ordered U.S. intelligence agencies to “redouble their efforts” to investigate the origin of the virus, despite ending a State Department investigation under former President Donald Trump seeking the same goal, as Breitbart News reported.
Facebook released a memo detailing its new stance, pointing to “ongoing investigations” as reason for its change of heart while adding the proviso other restrictions remain.
A spokesman for the company said: “In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made from our apps.
“We’re continuing to work with health experts to keep pace with the evolving nature of the pandemic and regularly update our policies as new facts and trends emerge. 

Guardian
Matt Hancock is under mounting pressure to explain why the government failed to protect care home residents at the outset of the Covid pandemic, as he sought to salvage his reputation after Dominic Cummings accused him of lying.
The health secretary claimed for the first time it “wasn’t possible” to test all care home residents for Covid before they were discharged from hospital last March, because the testing capacity was not yet available.
But the shadow social care minister, Liz Kendall, said that explanation “simply doesn’t stack up”.
“There were over 530,000 tests carried out in the UK by 20 April, yet they couldn’t test 25,000 people discharged from hospitals to care homes, after we saw it sweep through care homes in Italy, France and America?” she said. “The reality is, they wanted to free up the beds and they didn’t prioritise older people.”
She accused Hancock, who previously claimed to have thrown a “protective ring” around care homes, of changing his story to “wriggle out” of responsibility. 

Mail
The average age for someone testing positive for Covid is now the youngest yet recorded at just 29 years old. 
Britain’s campaign to vaccine the country, starting with the elderly and most vulnerable, has seemingly played a significant part in lowering the figure.
The median age stood at 29 for the week ending May 19 – down from 35 at the start of April and 41 at the beginning of the year.  
Compounding the apparent efficacy of the vaccine rollout, analysis now shows that two thirds of people admitted to hospital with the coronavirus are under 65, The Times reports.  
But despite Boris Johnson’s desire to announce an end to social distancing this week, this has been pushed back amid the ongoing threat of the Indian Covid variant.
The Prime Minister has said that he has not seen ‘anything currently in the data to suggest that we have to deviate from the road map’, but hinted that the government would wait until the June 14 deadline before announcing a relaxation.  

Russia 

Independent
Russia has refused to let two European commercial aircraft land in Moscow in what appears to be retaliation for a European ban on its own aeroplanes entering Belarusian airspace.
An Austrian Airlines plane from Vienna and an Air France flight from Paris were cancelled on Thursday because the Russian authorities did not grant them permission to fly around Belarus en route.
A Paris-Moscow Air France flight could not take off on Wednesday for the same reason.
The flights needed to avoid Belarusian airspace to comply with an EU order, which came in response to the “hijacking” of a passenger plane by the country’s autocratic leader Alexander Lukashenko on Sunday.
The Ryanair jet, which was flying from Athens to Vilnius, was forced to land in Minsk after it received reports of a bomb threat, which turned out to be false.
The Lukashenko regime had ordered a MiG-29 fighter plane to escort the passenger plane to ground, as it wanted to arrest two people on board. 

Driving 

Express
DRIVERS could be hit with a £300 fine and up to six penalty points on their licence when travelling long distances over the bank holiday weekend.
Experts at Veygo have warned drivers making their first long journey after lockdown could travel without the right insurance policy in place. Many drivers may have cancelled their agreements over lockdown to save money on vehicles they were not using.
However, with the distractions of the pandemic, road users could have forgotten to renew their cover leading to devastating consequences.
Gunnar Peters, CEO of Veygo has urged drivers to check their cover before heading out.
He said there is usually an “increase” in short-term policies taken over the Spring Bank Holiday as drivers desperately secure cover for their trips.
He said: “After spending months in lockdown, people will no doubt be looking forward to a weekend away or to visit friends and family to make the most of the bank holiday with lockdown restrictions easing. 

Mirror
Insurance firms will be banned from charging existing policyholders more than new customers under rules to protect them from the so-called ‘loyalty premium’.
City watchdog the Financial Conduct Authority today said the new rules will mean that renewal quotes for home and motor insurance consumers will not be more expensive than the ones offered to new customers.
It comes after an investigation in 2018 found 6million loyal policy holders would have saved £1.2billion had they paid the average price for their actual risk.
Many firms increase prices for existing customers each year at renewal – this is known as price walking.
This means that consumers have to shop around and switch every year to avoid paying higher prices for being loyal.
Many firms offer below-cost prices to attract new customers. They also use sophisticated processes to target the best deals at customers who they think will not switch in the future and will therefore pay more. 

Doctors 

Mail
Matt Hancock has pledged to improve access to GPs after family doctors complained they were being overwhelmed.
Doctors say they have been set an ‘undoable’ task by ministers, with pent-up demand from the pandemic creating a ‘tsunami’ of patients.
The numbers visiting GPs increased by 20 per cent last month, according to analysis of  NHS England figures by the Health Foundation.
In the first year of the pandemic, 31million fewer GP appointments were carried out than normal as patients put off seeing doctors over fears of catching Covid or burdening the NHS.
And since restrictions started to be eased on March 8, there has been a huge surge. That month there were 28.5million appointments at GP surgeries. Doctors saw the most patients since figures were first recorded.
Just 54 per cent of appointments are now in person, compared with 79 per cent two years ago. Campaigners say it is becoming harder to see a GP face to face, with older patients in particular missing out. 

BBC News
Surgeons are calling for specialist hubs in England to help tackle what they call a “colossal backlog” of non-urgent operations because of Covid-19.
The Royal College of Surgeons (RCS) wants a network of hospital sites focused on routine surgery, such as hip and knee replacements.
The government says it is working “to accelerate the recovery of services”.
In March, around five million patients were waiting for surgery – the highest number since modern records began.
More than 436,000 were waiting more than a year, NHS England figures show – compared with just 1,600 before the Covid crisis.
A similar proportion of the population is on waiting lists in Scotland and a higher percentage in Wales and Northern Ireland. 

Guardian
Surgical hubs should be created across England and the government should spend £1bn annually for the next five years to reduce the “colossal” backlog in non-urgent procedures, the Royal College of Surgeons has said.
The recommendations are two of a dozen suggestions made by the RCS designed to ensure planned surgery can continue safely if the country is hit again by another wave of coronavirus, a new variant or a severe winter/flu outbreak.
All elective or planned surgery, such as for knee and hip replacements, was cancelled in the first wave of the pandemic. The latest figures show that in March, 4.95 million people were waiting for hospital treatment in England – the largest figure on record – including 436,127 people waiting more than a year a year. 

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