Thomas Hawk posted a photo:
IPPR finds failure to align testing standards has forced companies to abandon exporting to EU and is costing costing 0.18% of national income
The UK is losing out on annual exports to the EU that could be worth as much as £6.5bn without a deal with Brussels that allows manufacturers to jettison duplicate product testing.
In the latest attempt to calculate the loss of trade with the EU after Brexit, the IPPR thinktank said many companies have given up selling goods to the EU or set up subsidiaries inside the trade bloc after successive governments failed to secure a mutual recognition agreement that would avoid the extra administration costs.
Motor vehicle and part exports would have been between £2.48bn and £3.42bn higher each year.
Electronic exports could have been between £1.17bn and £1.67bn higher.
Pharmaceutical exports would have had an estimated annual uplift of between £740m and £820m.
Continue reading...Furnace Brook in East Sussex was home to carp, tench, bream, roach and trout – and 15 trailer-loads had to be buried. The mystery led to a neighbouring farm, and a story of waste, pollution and dirty rivers that reveals a lot about Britain today
When Alistair and Diane Gould bought Furnace Brook in 2013, they had big plans. It was an idyllic spot: a stream-fed fishing lake nestled in a secluded valley in the High Weald, East Sussex, surrounded by woodland and fields. “People loved to come fishing here because it’s so beautiful,” says Diane. “Some of them had been coming for so many years that they got to know the individual fish.”
Diane moved here from Kent in 2000, when Furnace Brook was owned by a distant relative. Her two younger sons, then 10 and 14, flourished. They would chat to the anglers about the fish they were catching and throwing back in, and sell them bacon sandwiches. Her elder son, Simon, moved from London to join them in 2006 and became a keen angler himself, and then the fishing manager, or bailiff, looking after the fish and the landscape around the lake.
Continue reading...Die Linke candidate, a lawyer affected by her experiences as the child of political migrants from Turkey, poised to head Berlin coalition government
Elif Eralp launched her election bid last autumn with the blunt statement: “People like me are actually not supposed to become mayor in this country.” So the fact that the 45-year-old lawyer and daughter of political migrants from Turkey is on the verge of becoming Berlin’s next mayor and the capital’s first leader of Turkish origin is quite the moment in German politics.
After last weekend’s city state election, in which her far-left party, Die Linke, came first with more than a quarter of the votes, Eralp has become a household name.
Continue reading...The new prime minister has declared he wants to end 40 years of neoliberalism. But is he really prepared to be that radical?
In May 2025, when Keir Starmer was still prime minister, Labour politicians, campaigners and journalists gathered at the Ministry of Sound in London to watch a series of panel talks and presentations illuminated by the lucid glow of club lights. The day-long event was organised by a campaign group called Compass, and the subjects included child poverty, the Murdoch-owned media and the rise of the radical right.
“We felt as though the Labour government was failing, and needed to be pulled into the 21st century,” Neal Lawson, the founder of Compass, told me. The Starmer government’s support for the Conservatives’ two-child benefit cap, its equivocating stance on Gaza and its emulation of far-right rhetoric – crystallised in a speech on immigration, during which the prime minister suggested Britain risked becoming an “island of strangers” – were causing Labour supporters to rapidly desert their party. “The Starmer project was so obviously intellectually bankrupt. He was personally so disinterested in ideas and big thinking that I thought, this is never going to fly,” Lawson said.
Continue reading...A conflict that began with tanks and then artillery is now pivoting around a new generation of drones focused on military, industrial, economic and civilian targets
Finally, in the dead of night, the threat above has passed. The rain has eased and the Ukrainian drones are ready, prepared by a ground crew shrouded in hard-to-detect green and red lights. A small succession of Ukrainian Fire Point FP-2 craft, miniature monoplanes with a 6-metre wingspan and more than 100kg of explosive, line up for an attack mission into occupied Luhansk, over 200 miles away.
The drone’s main piston engine is a familiar scooter’s buzz, but its launch booster is something else. The jet sound reverberates, almost painfully. A burst of fire lurches into the distance, the last of which signifies it is time for Ukraine’s 413 Raid drone regiment to pack and go.
The launch of an FP-2 drone during the mission into occupied Luhansk
Continue reading...In the last 15 years, she has gone from respected actor to stratospheric, garlanded star. Now she is back on TV as a chic sleuth in a racy car – despite being terrible at guessing whodunnit
It is high summer and, while Lesley Manville may be suffering a bit with hay fever and the heat (“I’m so white, all I do is burn”), she doesn’t do wilting. Soon to head outside to tend to the ailing garden of her London home, she is enjoying a rare period of rest after six almost unbroken months of Oedipus on Broadway and then Les Liaisons Dangereuses at the National. She keeps, incidentally, the Tony she won for playing Jocasta in Oedipus on a shelf by the computer, “next to its friend, Larry Olivier” – an Olivier awarded for the same role.
“You don’t go into a job thinking about awards,” she says, before grinning conspiratorially. “Listen, you don’t say to an Olympian, ‘Oh, is it OK that you didn’t win?’ Yes, you like to win!”
Continue reading...This trip into the celeb couple’s Cheshire mansion is nowhere as real as they’d like you to believe. But their self-deprecation is hard not to enjoy
‘There are two obvious problems here, the first being that the Rooneys’ lives feel like fiction: he was a generational sporting talent, a one-in-a-million player whose success has bought him and Coleen a ridiculous Cheshire mansion with a cinema, indoor pool and adjacent football pitch. To get back to the road you have to drive over a bridge across a lake. As we join them, Coleen is working out how to capitalise on a recent appearance on I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!, while Wayne is plotting an uptick in his media appearances that he hopes will make him a regular on Match of the Day. Technically, the Rooneys exist on our Earth, but – as they both admit, recalling their working-class childhoods in Croxteth, Liverpool – they have left ordinary life behind.
Even if we accept that they are to some extent real people, the further problem is that if you want to get to know someone, watching a behind-the-scenes “at home with” reality show is not the way to do it. This is an established format that was initially shaped by the Kardashians and has now evolved to fit the specific needs of retired British sportsmen looking to relaunch themselves as media personalities. By design, the shows are anything but realistic, instead offering a carefully calibrated blend of fantastic luxury that viewers can escape into, and domestic rituals – breakfast, the school run – offered up in a half-hearted attempt to show that really, these famous folk are just like us.
Continue reading...
Hoogleraar plantenecologie Hans de Kroon heeft altijd met een bredere blik naar de natuur gekeken. Tijdens een wandeling bij Nijmegen toont hij zijn „liefde voor het landschap”.
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Wereldwijd gaan landen steeds meer schulden aan. Maar sinds deze zomer stijgen ook de rentes op die schulden.
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In San Francisco, de AI-hoofdstad van de wereld, dansen techondernemers op de vulkaan. Correspondent Milo van Bokkum ziet hoe het leven in San Francisco volledig wordt…
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Vandaag is een vriendelijke najaarsdag met flink wat zon en blijft het droog. De temperatuur stijgt naar ongeveer 19 graden en ligt daarmee iets lager dan gistermiddag. De wind is daarbij matig en komt uit het noordwesten.
Ars Technica reports:
Cities and counties around the U.S. are angry at the Trump administration over a proposal to override local rules that govern the deployment of wired broadband networks... The Federal Communications Commission [FCC] argues that too many local governments "excessively delay approvals and seek to extract exorbitant sums from providers, resulting in costs that render some deployments infeasible." The FCC plan is supported by broadband providers, but local governments told the FCC that it would override rules that protect public safety.
Local governments say the plan is illegal and that the FCC should instead focus on how Internet providers thwart competition with permit-hoarding and other tactics that prevent competitors from deploying networks... They object to FCC plans to impose a 120-day deadline for processing permits and to proposed limits on fees and compensation that local governments can require from providers... Another filing submitted by the League of California Cities said the FCC has no authority to adopt the proposal. "Federal preemption of traditional state and local authority over public property, construction, public safety, permitting, and rights-of-way management should rest on clear congressional authorization," the filing said. "The commission should not infer broad preemptive authority where Congress did not expressly provide it...."
A filing by Minnesota cities said the current FCC is making the same mistake it made during the first Trump administration, when its attempt to preempt state net neutrality laws was blocked in court... If the FCC finalizes its new preemption plan, city and state governments could sue and ask a court to rule that the agency exceeded its authority...
Democratic Commissioner Anna Gomez approved the step of asking the public for input but signaled she would vote against the final proposal. "I am dubious about the commission's authority under Section 253 to use rulemaking to preempt states and localities when it comes to their management of rights of way and fees charged to providers," she said.
Cities and counties around the U.S. are angry at the Trump administration over a proposal to override local rules that govern the deployment of wired broadband networks... The Federal Communications Commission [FCC] argues that too many local governments "excessively delay approvals and seek to extract exorbitant sums from providers, resulting in costs that render some deployments infeasible." The FCC plan is supported by broadband providers, but local governments told the FCC that it would override rules that protect public safety.
Local governments say the plan is illegal and that the FCC should instead focus on how Internet providers thwart competition with permit-hoarding and other tactics that prevent competitors from deploying networks... They object to FCC plans to impose a 120-day deadline for processing permits and to proposed limits on fees and compensation that local governments can require from providers... Another filing submitted by the League of California Cities said the FCC has no authority to adopt the proposal. "Federal preemption of traditional state and local authority over public property, construction, public safety, permitting, and rights-of-way management should rest on clear congressional authorization," the filing said. "The commission should not infer broad preemptive authority where Congress did not expressly provide it...."
A filing by Minnesota cities said the current FCC is making the same mistake it made during the first Trump administration, when its attempt to preempt state net neutrality laws was blocked in court... If the FCC finalizes its new preemption plan, city and state governments could sue and ask a court to rule that the agency exceeded its authority...
Democratic Commissioner Anna Gomez approved the step of asking the public for input but signaled she would vote against the final proposal. "I am dubious about the commission's authority under Section 253 to use rulemaking to preempt states and localities when it comes to their management of rights of way and fees charged to providers," she said.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
billy.reeder has added a photo to the pool:
DEN HAAG (ANP) - Baasjes van een bijtgrage hond moeten verplicht op een praktijkcursus. Dat wil staatssecretaris Silvio Erkens (Landbouw, VVD) regelen. Het gaat dan om honden die vaak worden geassocieerd met bijtincidenten.
"Ik vind dat houders van deze groep honden een extra verantwoordelijkheid hebben om hun hond veilig te houden." Welke rassen of kenmerken van honden daaronder zouden gaan vallen, moet Erkens nog onderzoeken. Voor alle nieuwe en huidige hondenbaasjes wil Erkens vanaf 2027 een "vrijwillige, laagdrempelige en aansprekende" theoriecursus in het leven roepen. Op deze manier moeten baasjes in ieder geval de basiskennis over hun huisdier hebben.
Verder wil Erkens een vervolg geven aan eerdere campagnes die mensen wijzen op de verplichtingen die een huisdier met zich meebrengt. Dit najaar komt er een nieuwe campagne, speciaal over welk type hond bij een toekomstig baasje past.
Voor katten komt er een plicht om ze te chippen, vanaf 2028. "Jaarlijks raken er namelijk tienduizenden katten vermist," aldus de staatssecretaris. Dat leed van zoekgeraakte katten hoopt hij te voorkomen met de registratieplicht. Voor honden bestaat al een plicht om het dier te chippen en te registreren. Dit staat ook in Europese regels over honden en katten, die Erkens grotendeels onverkort overneemt. De Europese regels gaan pas na 2030 in. Daarin staan bijvoorbeeld ook regels over de verkoop van dieren online.
Er komt in 2031 een Europese database met de registraties van honden en katten, zodat baasjes ook over de grens opgespoord kunnen worden.