"The social distancing rule will be scrapped but masks will remain under government plans for the final easing of restrictions on June 21, it has been claimed."
In what universe will people go back to crowded situations, but all masked? So irresponsible! dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9…
So far, the road out of lockdown has been stepped. Some steps may have felt too uncomfortably large, or not big enough, but there was a vague logic. But 21 June appears to be dive-off-a-cliff-and-hope.
Get it wrong, and tens or hundreds of thousands more will die.
On the plus side: the vaccine. And that's a huge plus.
On the minus side: Since the first lockdown, there hasn't been a single day of unsocially distanced "normal" life. And yet over 120,000 people still died despite varying levels of precaution. Add in stronger variants, and...
Anyway, it's probably all moot, because if the rumours are true and the Government say "hug away!" on 17 May, that's Game Over right there.
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And of course, although the offending article now seems to have been excised from Google, the internet never forgets. So his phone number is freely available here on Twitter, for example, thanks to people screenshotting the now deleted release.
Actually, the information is still available online as well. But it's a bit harder to find now than I suspect it was 24H ago. The press release itself is a PDF, and it looks like Google has de-indexed the text.
Why? Because no back door is 100% secure - especially one designed to potentially be used by tens of thousands of "authorised" people!
And if encrypted systems are forced to be much less secure by law, then banks, other payment systems and merchants won't dare shoulder the risk.
Imagine a bank vault which a very large number of people have been given a skeleton key to. (You have no idea *who* has been granted keys - and you'll never know - but you do know a *lot* of folk can get in.)
Would you dare leave anything of value in that vault?
Our police, viciously beating protesters. No sugar-coating possible. This is WRONG.
(The protest can also be wrong - it's not one or the other. But the hypothetical wrongness of the protest cannot possibly justify a wild beatdown with riot shields, and batons.)
In other words, strict restrictions on travel meant very few deaths, virtually no change to day to day life, and comparatively little economic damage. Simple.
Big news on the UK domain front. Nominet's years of commercial overreach have finally caught up with it. (It was at its best as a lean, mean organisation focused exclusively on running the UK namespace well.) Members had enough.
Five founding members of the original Nominet lend their weight to a letter calling for the appointment of specific interim directors (who were originally going to be the subject of a second EGM resolution, before Nominet refused.)
The pandemic is global. Brexit mainly affected our relationship with the EU (of course some third country trade deals were not rolled over, but most were).
Telling that food and drink trade with the EU fell 75.5% but with non-EU countries it only fell 11.1%.
The net effect is that the % of trade the UK does with non-EU countries has gone up and the % of trade it does with the EU has gone down, because that's just a matter of ratios.
However, the VALUE of the trade has fallen very substantially in both cases.
To expand on this...
As you can see, our non-EU trade in food and drink went up from 39% to 69% of all our trade, when comparing January 2021 to January 2020.
Our EU trade fell from 61% to 31% of all our trade.