Brexit

Observer
An extraordinary cross-party summit bringing together leading leavers and remainers – including Michael Gove and senior members of Keir Starmer’s shadow cabinet – has been held in high secrecy to address the failings of Brexit and how to remedy them in the national interest, the Observer can reveal.
The two-day gathering of some of the country’s most senior Labour and Tory politicians from both sides of the Brexit debate, together with diplomats, defence experts and the heads of some of the biggest businesses and banks, was held at the historic Ditchley Park retreat in Oxfordshire on Thursday afternoon and evening, and on Friday.
Documents from the meeting, obtained by the Observer, describe it as a “private discussion” under the title: “How can we make Brexit work better with our neighbours in Europe?”
Those in attendance from the pro-Brexit side included the former Tory party leader Michael Howard, former Tory chancellor Norman Lamont and former Labour Europe minister Gisela Stuart, one of the leading figures of the leave campaign.
Among the prominent remainer politicians present were shadow foreign secretary David Lammy, shadow defence secretary John Healey and the former European commissioner and Labour cabinet minister Peter Mandelson, who acted as chairman. From the Tory remainer camp, the ex-cabinet minister and long-serving minister for Europe, David Lidington, attended.

Illegal immigrants

Express
Albanian gangs in the UK are targeting deprived youths from their homeland to work in their criminal operations.
The UK is experiencing a “third wave” of migration from Albania, with established criminals recruiting foot soldiers from their former homeland, a lecturer has warned.
Second generation Albanian crime gangs based in the UK are returning to their parents’ country to lure desperate men into crime, Dr Andi Hoxhaj, a lecturer in law at University College London, told MPs.
In written evidence to a Home Affairs Select Committee inquiry into migration and asylum, Dr Hoxhaj said: “Organised crime networks of
Albanian origin based in the UK have exploded in rural areas of Albania, where there is extreme poverty and/or high unemployment, in order to lure young men.
“They offer a free ride to the UK in exchange for employment in cannabis farming or other criminal activities. There was a successful recruitment campaign in 2022 via social media in conjunction with low prices offered by small Channel-crossing boats.”

Telegraph
Police have arrested more than a dozen people, including a 13-year-old, after rioters set fire to a police van and hurled lit fireworks at officers during a far-Right protest against refugees.
Merseyside Police said thugs armed with hammers hijacked a “peaceful protest” outside the Suites Hotel in Knowsley, on the outskirts of the city, which is being used to house asylum seekers.
The gang, who were not part of the original protest in Knowsley on Friday, “were only interested in causing trouble through violence and intimidation”, the force’s chief constable said.
Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary, condemned the “appalling disorder” and thanked Merseyside Police officers for “keeping everyone safe”.
“The alleged behaviour of some asylum seekers is never an excuse for violence and intimidation,” she said.
Footage of the attacks posted on social media shows rioters cheering as they set fire to the police van. Two members of the public and one officer were injured.
A total of 13 men and two women, between the ages of 13 and 54, were arrested on suspicion of violent disorder, Merseyside Police said.

Reform UK

Mail
The Tory Party is considering a complaint to Commons Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle after MPs said they had been approached with a £400,000-plus ‘bribe’ to join Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party.
Sources said a number of Conservative MPs ‘have reported to senior party staff that they have been offered significant financial incentives to defect’.
They say the offers were based on an agreement that if they joined Reform UK – founded with support from Mr Farage in 2018 as the Brexit Party – they would be guaranteed to receive several years of their MP’s salary if they lost their seat after defecting.
From this April, MPs’ pay will rise to £86,584, or well over £400,000 for a full Parliament. Reform UK, of which Mr Farage is Honorary President, dismissed the incentives claim last night and accused the Tories of peddling ‘desperate nonsense’.
But senior Tory figures – who fear Reform will split the Right-wing vote in pivotal Red Wall seats of the North and Midlands – are taking legal advice over whether the Bribery Act might have been breached by an offer of money. A source told The Mail on Sunday: ‘We have been told that people representing Reform have offered MPs financial deals worth hundreds of thousands of pounds to defect to the party. This offer is that if they should do so and lose their seat at the next General Election, then Reform would pay them between three and five years’ worth of their MP’s salary.’

Covid

Telegraph
Almost £1 billion of taxpayers’ money has been wasted on an anti-Covid drug that does not work, The Telegraph can disclose.
Less than two per cent of the 2.23 million courses of the antiviral drug molnupiravir procured by the Department of Health have ever been prescribed to patients, analysis by The Telegraph shows.
The rest are unlikely to ever be used after research found the drug makes no difference to hospitalisation or death rates.
The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice), the UK drugs watchdog, recently said molnupiravir should not be routinely used. In November, the drug was added to its draft “not recommended” list for treatment of Covid.
The drug is far more costly than alternatives, at around £450 per course. It has been used so infrequently that it amounts to a cost of £30,000 per patient treated, The Telegraph investigation reveals.
In autumn 2021, Sajid Javid, then the health secretary, announced that the Government had bought 2.23 million courses of the “game-changing” antiviral in an attempt to reduce the impact of the omicron variant.

NHS

Observer
Some of the country’s most senior NHS clinicians are earning a lucrative sideline running private firms that offer to cut waiting lists at their own hospitals, the Observer can reveal.
Top consultants in Manchester, Sheffield and London are among directors of “insourcing” agencies that charge the health service to treat patients at weekends and evenings and have won millions of pounds of work.
Some hold leadership roles at NHS trusts that have awarded contracts to their own companies, raising concerns about potential conflicts of interest.
One deputy medical director jointly ran a firm that provided “insourcing” solutions to his own NHS trust before it was sold in a £13m deal last year. Other consultants have set up firms that they and their colleagues work shifts through themselves, often at rates above NHS price caps

Strikes

BBC News
Nurses from A&E, intensive care and cancer wards could strike in England, as a major nursing union considers escalating a dispute over pay.
The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) wants higher wages as the cost of living bites, but ministers argue that pay is set by an independent body.
The union is considering a continuous 48-hour strike, with walkouts through the night.
However, all staff would continue to meet minimum legal levels of care.
The union also said it may not make local agreements to help NHS managers during the strike periods, as it has done before.
In previous action, there were about 5,000 cases where the strike was not fully implemented which were decided through joint committees of NHS and RCN staff.
A Royal College of Nursing source said NHS leaders are “fearing this escalation” and “must bring pressure to bear on government to get it stopped”.
The union would have to give two weeks’ notice for any action.

Earthquake

Sun
HAUNTING images show mass graves with numbered headstones in Turkey as the death toll from the massive earthquake reaches 22,000.
The catastrophic quake caused thousands of buildings to collapse as rescuers continue their heroic efforts to find survivors trapped in the rubble.
Soul-crushing pictures show heartbroken families looking for their loved ones in the mass graves.
Dad Naser al-Wakaa sobbed as he sat on the pile of rubble that would have been his family home after he lost his wife and five children in the disaster.
The high number of casualties has overwhelmed morgues and cemeteries as in some areas bodies lie wrapped in blankets, rugs and tarps.
Meanwhile, in Kahramanmaras, a sports hall served as a makeshift morgue to accommodate and identify bodies.

Mail
A UN aid chief has said the death toll from catastrophic earthquakes which hit Turkey and Syria this week could double to more than 50,000 as he admitted ‘we haven’t really begun to count the dead’.
Five days on from the 7.8 and 7.7 magnitude earthquakes, it has been confirmed that at least 28,000 people have died with tens of thousands more injured.
UN emergency relief coordinator Martin Griffiths told Sky: ‘I think it is difficult to estimate precisely [how many have died] as we need to get under the rubble but I’m sure it will double or more.
‘That’s terrifying. This is nature striking back in a really harsh way.’
He added: ‘We haven’t really begun to count the number of dead.’
Almost 26 million people have been affected by the deadly earthquake that ravaged Turkey and Syria this week, the WHO said on Saturday, warning that dozens of hospitals had been damaged.

ITV News
Six members of the same family found huddled together and two frightened sisters who were comforted by a pop song as they waited to be freed from the rubble, are among the dramatic rescue stories still coming out of Turkey.
The rescues have offered fleeting moments of joy amid the catastrophe of Monday’s 7.8-magnitude earthquake that hit parts of Turkey and Syria, killing more than 28,000 people and leaving millions homeless.
Even though experts say trapped people can live for a week or more, the odds of finding more survivors are fading.
In Adiyaman, a hard-hit city of more than a quarter-million people, rescuers and onlookers suppressed their joy so as not to frighten four-year-old Yagiz Komsu as he emerged from the debris.
To distract him, rescuers offered Yagiz a jelly bean and teams later rescued his 27-year-old mother, Ayfer Komsu, who had a broken rib.

ITV News
A series of miraculous rescues in the aftermath of the catastrophic earthquake in Turkey and Syria have provided moments of joy amidst the tragedy of the disaster that has killed more than 23,000 people.
Before dawn in Gaziantep, a provincial Turkish capital about 20 miles from the epicentre, rescuers pulled Adnan Muhammed Korkut from the basement, where he had been trapped since the 7.8 magnitude quake struck on Monday.
The 17-year-old smiled at the crowd of friends and relatives who chanted “Adnan,” “Adnan,” clapping and crying tears of joy as he was carried out and put onto a stretcher.  “Thank God you arrived,” he said, embracing his mother and others who leaned down to kiss and hug him as he was being loaded into an ambulance. “Thank you everyone.”
Trapped for 94 hours, but not crushed, the teenager said he had been forced to drink his own urine to quench his thirst.

Sun
VIOLENT clashes and gunfire between “rival factions” have halted rescue efforts in quake-hit Turkey – as looters run amok in devastated cities.
Multiple aid organisations had to suspend operations due to security fears after gunfire was reported in the disaster zone.
German rescuers and the Austrian army reported clashes between unnamed armed factions, which are expected to become more violent as food supplies decrease in coming days.
Reports of mass arrests for looting in the aftermath of the disaster have made headlines, and several guns have been seized from criminals, according to local media.
Austrian Army Spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel Pierre Kugelweis told BBC News: “There is increasing aggression between factions in Turkey.
“The chances of saving a life bears no reasonable relation to the safety risk.
“There are increasing reports of clashes between different groups, and shots are said to have been fired.”

BBC

Mail
The BBC was last night accused of bias after an investigation uncovered numerous examples of it treating Conservative and Labour politicians accused of wrongdoing differently.
A snapshot of headlines on the BBC News website indicated that when Tory MPs were the subject of negative stories, their party was often mentioned in the headline.
Yet mention of Labour, when its MPs were accused of bad behaviour, featured far less prominently – and sometimes not at all.
All the MPs in question had lost the whip including Jared O’Mara, found guilty of fraud, Claudia Webbe, convicted of harassment, and Fiona Onasanya, jailed for perverting the course of justice.
A sample of BBC articles about these MPs was found to mention their previous party far down the piece, often accompanied by an explanation of how the party had removed the whip. One article about a bullying investigation involving Keith Vaz did not even mention that he was a Labour MP.
In contrast, several BBC articles about MPs who had been suspended or expelled by the Conservative Party made their party affiliation more prominent.

Woke-ness

Mail
A Christian nurse was left with ‘crippling anxiety’ after she was ‘bullied’ by ‘woke‘ NHS chiefs for saying that being white doesn’t make you racist.
Amy Gallagher, 34, a mental health nurse from Orpington, Kent, was on a forensic psychology course training to be a psychotherapist at the Portman clinic, which is part of The Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust.
In an exclusive interview with MailOnline Amy has revealed how NHS bosses caused her ‘crippling anxiety’ after she challenged their ‘racist’ and ‘offensive’ views in lectures she was forced to attend.
Lecturers at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust told her ‘whites don’t understand the world’ and ‘Christianity is responsible for racism because it’s European’ in a series of ‘politically biased’ talks.
One of the Tavistock’s seminars was even called ‘Whiteness — a problem for our time’ and included a description on the Trust’s website that ‘the problem of racism is a problem of whiteness’.

Telegraph
Corporate culture wars are making the public “hostile”, companies have been warned as a major piece of research is launched into the rise of “woke” in the workplace.
Britons are “cynical” and “tired” of attempts by big business to force political views on employees and customers, according to Policy Exchange.
New polling by the think-tank reveals that the majority of the public (58 per cent) reject the suggestion that companies should be able to demand that their employees declare gender pronouns.
Britain’s biggest employers are increasingly asking staff to use pronouns to reflect their gender identity, with the City making particular efforts to shake off its “pale, male and stale” image.
The use of “she/her/her”, “he/him/his” or “they/them/their” is fast becoming common on name badges or signatures at the end of work emails, as companies from banks to law firms embrace the trend.

Mail
Britain’s ‘woke‘ counter-terror strategy linked former Tory Cabinet Minister Jacob Rees-Mogg to extremists, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
The revelation comes days after a damning inquiry exposed how the Government’s Prevent programme was failing to tackle Islamist ideology, while at the same time treating mainstream views as extremism.
The inquiry, by former Charity Commission boss William Shawcross, last week disclosed how Prevent officials had claimed that a leading Conservative politician was associated with ‘far-Right sympathetic audiences’.
Mr Shawcross declined to name the individual but Prevent sources last night confirmed to the MoS that it was Mr Rees-Mogg, the former Business Secretary and leader of the House of Commons.
A stunned Mr Rees-Mogg described our revelation as ‘dangerously serious’ and said he believed he had been flagged because of his role as a leading Brexiteer.
‘Wasting effort on elected politicians scandalously diverted resources from evil-doers,’ he said.
‘The officials on the Prevent programme were clearly so infected by wokery and metropolitan political correctness that Brexit was considered an extreme far-Right idea.

Ukraine

Express
The Russian military is expected to launch a major offensive in the coming months.
The Russian military has amassed 2,000 tanks in preparation for a fresh assault on the eastern regions of Ukraine, intelligence in Kyiv has warned. Vladimir Putin has also gathered 300,000 men for the attack which is expected to target the Donbas region, an area that has seen intense fighting.
A Ukrainian military official told the Foreign Policy news website: “We expect in the next 10 days a new, huge invasion.”
Reports say the Russian forces have also readied 3,950 armoured vehicles, 2,700 artillery systems, 810 soviet-era multi-launch rocket systems, 400 fighter jets, and 300 helicopters.
The Ukrainian official added: “It’s much bigger than what took place in the first wave. They don’t pay attention to any casualties or losses on the [battlefield].”
This comes as Russia continues to hit Ukraine‘s infrastructure with relentless missile strikes.

Mirror
Vladimir Putin has ordered Russian intelligence agencies to step up its recruitment of “kamikaze” spies in Britain, it has been claimed.
Last year, we reported how at least 1,000 Russian spooks are hiding behind normal jobs from minicab drivers and baristas to university boffins.
One intelligence source said at the time that Russia had created “extensive and sophisticated networks” of moles operating in “all walks of life”.
The source added: “No one should think they are immune.
“I’m talking about students, trade unions, protest groups, teachers, Uber drivers as well as politicians, the civil service and the police.”
Now, a Russian intelligence source close to the Kremlin has suggested Moscow will “intensify undercover work with secret informants” across the UK, The Sun Online reports.

Express
President Volodymyr Zelensky asked his Western allies for more weapons and said “a Ukraine that is winning” its war with Russia should become a member of the European Union, arguing the bloc wouldn’t be complete without it.
At the close of a 16-hour summit that ended when Volodymyr Zelensky was already gone, EU leaders pledged they would do all it takes to back Ukraine but offered no firm timetable for membership talks to begin as the Ukrainian President had hoped. It comes after Zelensky said EU membership talks should start later this year. He said such a move would help motivate Ukrainian soldiers in their defence of the country.
Looking at EU Council President Charles Michel, he said: “Of course we need it this year.”
He insisted, tongue-in-cheek: “When I say this year, I mean this year. Two, zero, 23.”

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