Fisheries
Express
THE EU is deciding fish quotas in Norwegian waters that are beyond their territorial claims, and even allocating catch amounts for the UK.
The EU is reportedly allocating fishing quotas over a region that they don’t even own, the Svalbard Zone in the arctic circle. The bloc is even portioning cod quotas for the UK in this zone. Arne Byrkjeflot, a political adviser to No to the EU, an interest group against Norwegian membership of the European Union (EU) and a Trondheim regional politician said: “Norway Fisheries relies on the law of the sea and believes that either Svalbard has its own economic zone or the archipelago is an extension of Norway’s shelf.
“Svalbard is part of Norway and Norway decides.”
However, the political advisor warned that the EU “has never formally accepted this view, but has stated that it is Norway and Russia that set the total quotas and it is Norway that distributes the quotas”.
He added: “In order to preserve peace, Norway has granted quotas based on historic fishing, but never accepted that this means that other countries are entitled to free fishing.
“After Brexit, Norway has given the United Kingdom 5,500 tonnes and the EU 17,855 tonnes.
France
Express
A YELLOW Vest activist has put his hat in the ring to take on Emmanuel Macron in next year’s presidential elections and has promised an “electro-shock” to shatter the political status quo.
Fabrice Grimal, a leading organiser of the Gilet Jaunes and Le Gouv, has been chosen as the presidential candidate for a group of citizen associations known as La Concorde Citoyenne. He hopes his candidacy will help to revolutionise French politics by placing ordinary citizens at the heart of the the political system with real power to influence legislation and to make traditional parties obsolete. “I am for now the only citizen candidate as opposed to a professional politician,” he told Express.co.uk
“I am the first candidate coming from the citizens with a complete programme and I am a Yellow Vest and I am representing a large part of the Yellow Vests.”
He added: “I am a simple citizen running for presidency without a traditional political party.”
Illegal migrants
Telegraph
The Home Office is spending £2 million on a permanent migrant reception centre in Dover, as MPs said the money should be spent on stopping arrivals.
The centre is being developed at Dover docks to process hundreds of migrants crossing the Channel, after complaints that the current facility is not fit for purpose.
The purpose-built centre will enable Border Force and immigration officers to test, check and interview migrants as well as to feed them. It is expected to be run by more than 40 staff and cost an estimated £1.5 million a year.
MPs are, however, unhappy that it sends the wrong signal to migrants, people-smugglers and the French government in suggesting that illegal cross-Channel migration in small boats cannot be stopped.
Natalie Elphicke, the Conservative MP for Dover, said: “I would rather we focused our efforts on closing the small boats route than investing more and more millions of pounds in permanent structures.”
Pingdemic
Mail
Fears of a return to the disruptive Covid ‘pingdemic’ are mounting as union leaders back workers including doctors and railway staff to stay at home if they come into contact with a Covid case despite new rules allowing double-vaccinated people to return to their jobs.
Under government guidance published on Monday, people in England and Northern Ireland who have had two Covid vaccine doses will no longer have to self-isolate if they come into contact with someone who has tested positive.
Instead of undergoing 10 days of house-arrest, they are now advised to take a PCR test – though this is not compulsory. They are also advised to wear facemasks in enclosed spaces and to limit contact with others, particularly the clinically vulnerable. However, if they test positive for
Covid, they will be legally required to self-isolate.
Ministers relaxed the rules after more than 600,000 people were told to self-isolate for 10 days in a single week, threatening to bring key sectors of the UK economy to a screeching halt.
But Steve Hedley, the deputy general secretary of the Rail Maritime and Transport Union, slammed the change as ‘dangerous’ and ‘totally illogical’ and backed staff who refused to come back to the workplace if they run into someone infected by the virus.
He claimed ‘the evidence shows that the link between the virus and deaths has been weakened, but it hasn’t been broken’, adding: ‘Many workers will be concerned at spreading or catching Covid if people pinged by the app are allowed to come back to their jobs straight away. If they choose to stay at home, we would support them. No one should be forced to go back to work.’
Similar stories can be read in Telegraph, Guardian
Energy
Mail
Household energy bills are expected to rise amid plans to force homes into using hydrogen heating.
The starting gun for a new ‘dash for gas’ was fired yesterday as the Government launched its strategy for Britain to burn hydrogen and create a £900million industry in the next five years.
Energy Strategy Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng said that creating a UK hydrogen industry would lead to 9,000 jobs by 2030, by which time the sector’s economy would be worth £4billion. This would rise to 100,000 jobs and £13billion in economic benefits by 2050, he said.
But a government consultation admits that costs could be ‘passed on to consumers through energy bills’.
Energy minister Anne-Marie Trevelyan told The Times that despite it being too soon to say how much the switch to hydrogen would cost households, the sum will likely be ‘very small’.
Similar stories can be read in Telegraph, Guardian, Sun, Independent, Times, BBC News, iNews
NHS
Mail
A ‘mass casualty plan’ is in place amid fears NHS hospitals made out of a lightweight concrete could be on the brink of collapsing, leaked documents show.
The emergency scheme – known as Operation Rapture – would come into effect in the event of ‘significant hospital structural failure’ in the East of England.
It would see ambulances diverted to other nearby sites and non-urgent beds freed-up to house patients transferred from crumbling hospitals.
Concerns have been raised about hospitals built with a lightweight form of concrete planks that have deteriorated over time and become unstable.
Reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC) planks, widely used in construction in the 1960s and 1980s, are said to be much weaker than traditional concrete.
At least four hospitals in the region were built using the material — the West Suffolk, Hinchingbrooke Hospital, and the Queen Elizabeth and James Paget hospitals in Norfolk.
In 2020, the trusts participated in an exercise that simulated a scenario where part of a hospital collapsed due to RAAC plank failure, the BBC reports.
The risk has been deemed so likely the West Suffolk trust, based in Bury St Edmunds, commissioned a report into the odds of being charged with corporate manslaughter should there be a fatal roof collapse.
Documents revealing the report were leaked by a whistleblower who feared staff and patients were being kept in the dark about how serious the risk was.
Similar stories can be read in Guardian. Sun.
Climate change
Guardian
Three-quarters of people in the world’s wealthiest nations believe humanity is pushing the planet towards a dangerous tipping point and support a shift of priorities away from economic profit, according to a global survey.
The Ipsos Mori survey for the Global Commons Alliance (GCA) also found a majority (58%) were very concerned or extremely concerned about the state of the planet.
Four in five respondents said they were willing to step up and do more to regenerate the global commons.
The lead author of the report, Owen Gaffney of the GCA, said the results showed strong global support for urgent, decisive action on the climate and nature crises.
“The world is not sleepwalking towards catastrophe. People know we are taking colossal risks, they want to do more and they want their governments to do more,” he said.
“The findings should provide G20 leaders with the confidence to move faster to implement more ambitious policies to protect and regenerate our global commons.”
Similar stories can be read in the Independent
Unemployment
Sun
THE number of job vacancies surged past one million for the first time ever in July as the country came out of lockdown.
And there were no signs of an increase in redundancies as the furlough scheme began winding down, according to official jobs data released today.
The rate of unemployment stayed level at 4.7% in the three months to June, official jobs data from the Office for National Statistics shows.
Unemployment surged to a five year high of 5.1% in February, when the number of jobless Brits at 1.74million.
There were 182,000 Brits added to payrolls between June and July as the economy continues to recover from the coronavirus pandemic.
That brings the total number to 28.9milliuon which is still 201,000 lower than before the coronavirus pandemic.
Jonathan Athow , ONS deputy national statistician said: “The world of work continues to rebound robustly from the effects of the pandemic.
“The number of people on payroll was up again strongly and has now grown over half a million in the past three months, regaining about four-fifths of the fall seen at the start of the pandemic.”
“As large parts of the economy started to reopen in recent months, the number of hours worked went past one billion a week for the first time since the pandemic.”
Similar stories can be read in the Mirror. BBC News.
Afghanistan
Mail
Tens of thousands of Afghans could be granted asylum in Britain under emergency plans being drawn up by ministers.
As a furious row over the Government’s handling of the crisis continued, sources pledged the scheme would be ‘incredibly ambitious’ and ‘world-leading’.
Women and girls – whose rights are feared to be in severe peril under the new Taliban regime – will get special priority under the programme, it is understood.
The Afghan resettlement project is expected to be similar to one that has allowed more than 20,300 Syrians to flee to this country over the last seven years.
‘It’s in everyone’s interest not to let Afghanistan fail,’ a Downing Street spokesman said last night.
‘That means providing whatever support we can to the Afghan people who have worked so hard to make the country a better place over the last 20 years and who are now in need of our help.’
He added: ‘We’ll be speaking to other world leaders about how we can take a unified approach. I think it’s clear no one country has the capability to deal with this alone and we want to work together on that.’
Cabinet ministers including Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab and Home Secretary Priti Patel were last night finalising details of the scheme before handing them to Boris Johnson, who yesterday led the Cobra emergency committee as it held its third meeting in four days.
Similar stories can be read in the BBC News, Telegraph, Breitbart, Independent, Guardian, Sun, Mirror, Times, Evening Standard
China
Express
CHINA has sparked fresh war fears after it warned Taiwan the United States “fleeing action” is a forecast in an apparent reference to the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan.
The last few days have seen chaos ensue in Afghanistan as Western nations evacuated their soldiers and civilians amid the Taliban takeover of Kabul. In its latest reference to US President Joe Biden’s move, Beijing issued Taiwan a chilling warning regarding its push for independence.
Li Haidong, a professor at the Institute of International Relations of the China Foreign Affairs University, warned the US could “cast aside” Taiwan should it fight for its sovereignty.
He told the Global Times: “The US’ fleeing action is a warning to the Taiwan secessionists, or rather, a forecast.”
Jin Canrong, associate dean of the School of International Studies at the Renmin University of China, echoed Mr Li’s remarks.
He said the US would make an “empty promise” to Taipei as it did with Afghanistan.
Similar stories can be read in the Sun
The Con Party is disagreeing amongst itself on various matters but unfortunately it will not break up. That is because they all have different ideas how anything should be dealt with.
Meanwhile, on just about everything the Government follows the worst option.
Amidst all the doom ‘n’ gloom I found something that made me smile:-
https://www.breitbart.com/asia/2021/08/16/george-soros-xi-jinping-most-dangerous-enemy-free-world/
Some of the comments are quite “instructive”.
To digress, I opted out of NHS Data Scrape and Share over a month ago. I today received aq fob off letter telling me to do exactly what I have done already. Again.
Interesting links.
https://dailysceptic.org/20…
https://rairfoundation.com/…
‘Tens of thousands of Afghans’ given asylum. ‘Hundreds of thousands’ of Hong Kong chinese given right to live here and then apply for settled status. Thousands crossing Channel illegally with little chance of being returned with no resolution leading to more attempting the journey. Net migration running at circa 300,000 per year.
At this rate the Tories will take Tony Blair’s project of ‘changing the face of Britain’ across the demographic line of no return very soon indeed without one Tory MP being deselected by constituency members. What does this tell us about Tory party members? Through their membership is there any differece between the venality of the Party and themselves.
The problem is, there is no other party to vote for these days.
The best solution would be if the numerous small “right wing” parties would coalesce and provide a viable alternative.
Indeed Peter; their cooperation rather than standing against each other is essential. Too many egos to be massaged I’m afraid.
There is usually an independent/local candidate on ballot papers nowadays. Have you considered NOTA? Taking the latter option is NOT a wasted vote. Perhaps Peter, you, like so many, are afraid of ‘letting in’ the Tories or Labour thus voting for what you consider the least worst candidate/party. We will never, ever get ahead of the rigged establishment two-party game if we are not brave enough to refuse to play that game under any circumstances.
Join UKIP or some other challenger party that takes your fancy and get some skin in the game. They need our support to even get off the mark to effectively take on the money rich and career providing estblishment parties.
There has been some talk about English Dems and UKIP joining forces but I as a member of UKIP am hoping that its policies are good enough to address most of the issues of concern discussed in Independence Daily thus giving a home for centre Right voters.
Jake Bennett. I think in the UK NOTA votes are counted but discarded as invalid. So they will not affect the result of the election.
In that sense they are a wasted vote. Still, I can see your point that it is preferable to tactical voting from fear of letting the opposite party in.
As with so many other things, the critical mass of people voting NOTA would move mountains But they won’t do it.
However IMHO nothing is worse than voting for a party that has inflicted transgender etc “education” on children, thrown us to the globalist wolves, wrecked the economy and civil liberties, kicked us in the face, lied deceived and defrauded constantly, and numberless other crimes ; simply because “the other lot are worse.” I wouldn’t feel clean besides which it is maintaining the Party System which is the cause of our woes.
Besides. is it now too late to rescue the situation through elections?
Energy:
The change to natural gas years ago caused much disruption. Are we going to see the same with a change to hydrogen and what is the cost of producing it?
Illegal migrants: We need a fleet of privateers to turn them back at the sea border before they get anywhere near our coast. Perhaps the concerned people in coastal towns could also play their part in turning them away.
Agreed! Boris the moron must be driven from office by con/ mps or else must be the population stance!
No more refugees, asylum seekers, cooks, potwashers or translators. These mad liberals need stopping.
Indeed Matt; clearly we no longer have a government supporting the true British people. They are controlled by the globalist such as the UN.