Brexit 

Express
NEARLY half a year after Britain’s post-Brexit trade agreement with the EU kicked in new data shows Spain is becoming increasingly reliant on the UK as an export market.
Exports of fruit and vegetables from the Mediterranean country to Britain shot up by six percent in the first quarter, compared to the same period in 2020. The value of the Spanish produce imported into the UK reached €675million (£580million) from January to April. This data released by the Customs and Excise Department of the Spanish Tax Authority suggests Spanish exporters continue to look to the UK market after Britons opted to cut ties with EU member states.
Post-Brexit, the country remains Spain’s third-biggest buyer of fruit and veg, according to FEPEX, the Spanish Federation of Associations of Producers of Exporters of Fruits, Vegetables, Flowers and Live Plants. 

Telegraph
The UK must align itself with EU rules to escape many of the customs checks on British goods exported to Northern Ireland, the Irish foreign minister said on Thursday. 
Writing in the The Telegraph, Simon Coveney said following Brussels’s rules on food safety and animal health would make post-Brexit trade between Northern Ireland and Britain “as light as possible”. 
“The EU side is open to making it work,” Mr Coveney said ahead of negotiations next week over the Northern Ireland Protocol. 
“The years of Brexit negotiations and campaigning are over. Now is the moment for real political leadership.”
Lord Frost, the Cabinet minister handling talks with the EU, has ruled out any alignment. 
He warned on Thursday that Brussels would undermine the peace process unless it showed more “common sense” over the Protocol, which created a customs border in the Irish Sea after Brexit. 

Fisheries 

Express
BRITISH fishermen face a post-Brexit nightmare amid fears they could be attacked by EU boats.
Amid tense relations between the UK and EU, some Scottish fishermen revealed Spanish and French boats have put their trawlermen at risk amid clashes in the waters. Following an incident in the Outer Hebrides, UK fishermen fear a “boat will go down” as EU ships encroach on Britain’s waters. Ian Mackay, skipper of the Loch Inchard revealed he had feared an assault from Spanish and French vessels while out with his crew.
He said: “I thought when they were circling us, they would deploy a rope to try and foul the propeller.”
Indeed, tensions reached a boiling point when one EU trawler nearly rammed a UK boat in the Outer Hebrides last Friday.
Mr Mackay filmed the French vessel, the Sylvanna as it passed close to his 18-metre ship last week. 

Trade 

Telegraph
Britain is poised to strike a post-Brexit trade deal with Norway as soon as Friday, with further agreements with Iceland and Liechtenstein expected soon afterwards. 
The deal will boost the UK’s fish processing industry, sources said, as well as helping service exporters and securing access to agricultural markets.
It is also said to include a more ambitious tie-up on digital than the EU’s agreement with the three countries.
Norwegian media reported on Thursday that a deal had been done with Oslo and would be announced on Friday.
British sources said the agreement was likely to be clinched on Friday or Saturday.
A spokesperson for the Department of International Trade (DIT) said: “Talks are ongoing and remain positive. Both sides are committed to agreeing a new deal as soon as possible. We do not comment on the specifics of live negotiations.” 

Guardian
The UK has moved a step closer to strengthening trade links with Asia-Pacific nations after the 11 members of the region’s overarching trade treaty have agreed to start negotiations for Britain’s entry.
Joining the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, or CPTPP, an alliance of Pacific Ocean countries which spans a market of 500 million people, is a central plank of UK trade minister Liz Truss’s plan to refocus Britain’s trade relationships following Britain’s exit from the EU. 
Its existing members are Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam.
Truss has already begun direct trade talks with Australia and is hopeful that a broader agreement within the region would quickly follow. The UK also believes a deal will act as a counterweight to China – which it accuses of undermining trade and distorting markets with state subsidies. 

EU 

Express
URSULA VON DER LEYEN was condemned for a “disgusting” and “reprehensible” policy as she sought to create an office for “protecting our European way of life”.
The EU has reached a crucial moment in its history after Brexit and the coronavirus pandemic, highlighted during the bloc’s official summit last month. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen gave a speech at the event, in which she questioned what the European project would look like in the future, noting that present actions “will determine the answers that we will be looking for tomorrow”. She added: “The most beautiful profession a man can have is that of bringing men together. It’s up to us now to keep on doing that. Thank you. Long live Europe.”
But while Ms von der Leyen looks to secure the EU‘s future, whether the bloc has had full confidence in her has been questioned.
These doubts have simmered since the start of her tenure in 2019, when she was condemned for a “disgusting” and “reprehensible” move.
Ms von der Leyen was accused of creating a new position with a xenophobic message as she announced plans to create an office for “protecting our European way of life”.
The plan received widespread criticism from those in Europe. 

Lockdown 

Mail
Lockdowns are ‘awful’ and Britain must learn to live with Covid without restrictions, one of the country’s most senior scientists has warned.
Sir Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust and a member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), said the measures had had ‘very profound consequences’ on the nation’s mental health, education and jobs.
But he was hopeful that the Government would be able to open up on June 21 based on the data so far – but stressed the next few weeks would be ‘crucial.’
He pointed out that more than eight in ten adults would be vaccinated by then, adding that he was ‘very confident’ the jabs were working.
‘There is a danger of not opening up and this infection is now a human endemic infection. It’s not going away,’ he said. ‘Humanity will live with this virus now for ever. And there will be new variants. This year, next year, the year after, there will be new variants – and we will have to learn to cope with that.
‘Lockdowns are awful. They are a mark that you haven’t been able to control the virus in other ways. They have very profound consequences on mental health, on education, on job opportunities particularly affecting people on lower incomes.
‘Societies can’t stay in that mode for ever.’ 

Freedom Day 

Times
Moving too quickly to reopen society risks losing the gains made so far, experts have said, urging caution about the easing of restrictions on June 21.
Professor Robin Shattock, of Imperial College London, said he was concerned that not enough people were vaccinated, particularly in areas that have high levels of the Indian variant.
“We just need to be careful we don’t unlock too quickly and lose those gains that we’ve got,” he said yesterday at a Royal Society of Medicine webinar.
“If we are talking about a delay, we’re talking about a delay of weeks, not months any more. That could be very significant. I’m not so sure why everybody is absolutely obsessed by fixing it to a date. 

Scotland 

Express
NICOLA Sturgeon has been warned entire Scottish towns would be devastated if a tsunami the size of one that once lashed the country’s east coast, reaching almost 100 feet in height, was to strike again.
The Storegga tsunami, which occurred 8,200 years ago affecting 373 miles (600km) of coastline, was caused by the shifting of glacial and interglacial sediments on the coastal slopes at Storegga, along Norway’s continental shelf in the Norwegian sea, which in turn displaced water and triggered the event. Researchers have now modelled the inland impact of the ancient wave, considered the largest natural  catastrophe  to happen in the UK in the last 11,000 years.
Research indicates the wave, reaching up to 98ft (30m) in height, would have travelled up to 19 miles (30km) inland along the Scottish coast, devastated areas such as Montrose in Angus, a town of around 12,000 people with a coastal lagoon and nature reserve.
The study, published in the scientific journal Boreas, was led by researchers at the Universities of Sheffield, St Andrews and York.
Lead author Professor Mark Bateman, from the University of Sheffield’s Department of Geography, said: “Although the Storegga tsunami has been known about for years, this is the first time we have been able to model how far inland from Scotland’s coastline the tsunami wave travelled by analysing the soil deposits left by the wave over 8,000 years ago. 

Similar stories appeared in the Mail and the Morning Star 

Express
A SCOTTISH MSP has taken a swipe at the SNP amid plans to reform Education Scotland and the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA).
On Thursday, Scotland’s Education Secretary, Shirley-Anne Somerville, announced the two education authorities would be reformed following criticism of how exams are graded.
Commenting on a breaking news article written by the BBC, Jamie Greene, Shadow Justice Secretary for the Scottish Tories said the  reform was “long overdue”.
“This is only ‘breaking news’ because the SNP have finally caved,” he wrote.
“It’s clear to most folk that this u-turn is long overdue.
“The @ScotTories brought this to a vote in the last term of parliament and it was brushed under the carpet by ministers with their heads in the sand.”
The SQA, which helps deliver exams for older pupils in Scotland, has received the most backlash with some opposition politicians calling for it to be scrapped entirely. 

A similar story appeared in the Telegraph .

Wales 

Guardian
Up to 30 people will be able to meet outdoors and large outdoor activities can resume in Wales from Monday, the first minister, Mark Drakeford, has announced.
The size of extended households can be increased to up to three households and a further household with a single adult or single adult with caring responsibilities will also be able to join.
Drakeford said the move to alert level 1 would be phased, with outdoor events opening first. Ministers will review the public health situation again, before 21 June, to determine whether indoor events can restart.
Meanwhile, larger organised events, such as concerts, football matches and sporting activities, will resume for up to 4,000 people standing and 10,000 people seated.
The first minister said the two-stage approach would enable more people to be vaccinated – and complete their two-dose course – amid growing concerns about the spread of the Delta variant across the UK.
Of the 12,431 cases of the variant first detected in India thus far confirmed in the UK, 97 are in Wales, compared with 10,797 in England, 1,511 in Scotland and 26 in Northern Ireland. 

A similar story appeared in ITV News 

Covid 

Mail
A Chinese virologist who was among the first people to tout the Wuhan lab theory said the coronavirus is a bioweapon and Dr. Anthony Fauci was among the scientists and organizations who knew about it and tried to hide it. 
In a Wednesday night interview on Newsmax, Dr. Li-Meng Yan said  Fauci‘s emails, which were published by Buzzfeed and the Washington Post on Tuesday, proved he knew about the Chinese gain of function research before the pandemic started.
‘These people knew what happened, but they chose to hide for the Chinese Communist Party and their own benefits,’ Yan said. 
She published three reports – two last year and one this year – and she didn’t mince words in latest report – published March 31: ‘The causative agent of COVID-19, is not a naturally occurring pathogen but an Unrestricted Bioweapon.
‘It is a product of the bioweapons program of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) government, the network of which includes not only the CCP scientists but also certain overseas scientists and organizations.’ 
All three reports were published without peer review on Zenodo.    

Breitbart
A former head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), better known as MI6, has said it will be hard to prove China’s virology lab in Wuhan was responsible for the coronavirus pandemic because “a lot of data has probably been destroyed or made to disappear” and said the United Nations’ World Health Organization (WHO) appears to be “a lost cause”.
Sir Richard Dearlove, head of the British foreign intelligence service made famous by the James Bond novels and film franchise from 1999 to 2004, told Allison Pearson of The Telegraph that “it’s going to be difficult to prove definitely the case for a gain-of-function chimera being the cause of the pandemic” because of the likely erasure of evidence by the communist regime.
“The People’s Republic of China is a pretty terrifying regime and does some things we consider unacceptable, and extreme in silencing opposition to the official line of the government,” noted the former spook, known informally as ‘C’ during his years as Britain’s foreign spy chief, on the newspaper’s ‘Planet Normal’ podcast.
While Facebook suppressed claims the Wuhan virus may have been “man-made” under the Donald Trump administration, it has reversed its position now that his Democrat successor Joe Biden has indicated that it conducting serious investigations into whether COVID-19 did indeed come from virus laboratories in Wuhan.
“The whole argument has shifted and I’m pretty sure in my own mind that the U.S. must have material which has accelerated this development,” Sir Richard speculated. 

Education 

Guardian
Furious Conservative MPs have privately demanded a rethink of the watered down recovery plan for schools in England after the government’s education recovery chief resigned over the proposals.
A group of Tories held a meeting Thursday afternoon with the MP Alex Burghart, Boris Johnson’s parliamentary private secretary, and the education ministers Nick Gibb and Vicky Ford. Sources said the MPs made clear they thought the proposal was inadequate.
Burghart assured MPs that more money would be made available. “He was told there has been a big mess-up over the last few days for no reason,” one source said.
The government announcement of a £1.4bn catch-up fund for pupils’ education in England was thrown into chaos on Wednesday by the resignation of the recovery chief, Sir Kevan Collins.
Collins said the offer – the equivalent of just £22 per child in the average primary school – “betrayed an undervaluation of the importance of education” and was “too narrow, too small and will be delivered too slowly”. 

A similar report appeared in the Mail

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