'My exports halved after Brexit - I support new deal'
A Devon food producer has said the new UK-EU deal will reduce paperwork and the risks associated with exporting goods to the continent.
It comes after the UK and the EU reached a new agreement setting out post-Brexit relations on areas including fishing rights, trade and defence.
Newton Abbot's Westaway Sausages boss, Charles Baughan, said his export business halved after Brexit, with a typical consignment requiring 14 pages of paperwork and 49 signatures.
He said: "Everything's easier because it's not just easier for me, if you can think about the person in Malta who's importing it, who has a truck held up in Calais, that's a nightmare."
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"He's paying for the driver and so on and so forth, and really, it's going to be hugely helpful for them as well," he added.
The new deal has meant EU boats will have continued access to UK waters until 2038.
In return for extending current fishing rules, the UK has secured a deal to reduce checks on food exports to the EU.
This will also see the vast majority of routine border checks on animal and plant shipments to and from the EU dropped.
Food producers, like Mr Baughan, will be able to sell raw burgers and sausages back into the EU for the first time since Brexit - which is thanks to the new sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) agreement.
Under the deal, the UK will be expected to follow EU rules, which are overseen by the European Court of Justice.
The UK maintains the right to break away if it keeps similar standards and avoids harming EU trade.
UK food exports to the EU have fallen, – with volumes in 2024 down 34% compared with 2019 – and the industry blames this partly on the added red tape.
But the deal comes with conditions. The UK will need to follow future EU food standards – and accept that the European Court of Justice will have the final say in any disputes in this area.
The UK will be also required to make a financial contribution. However is it currently unknown how much the payment would be and when it would be required.
Follow BBC Devon on X, Facebook and Instagram. Send your story ideas to spotlight@bbc.co.uk.
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Yahoo
an hour ago
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I'm Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is (Again)
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. One hallmark of our current moment is that when an event happens, there is little collective agreement on even basic facts. This, despite there being more documentary evidence than ever before in history: Information is abundant, yet consensus is elusive. The ICE protests in Los Angeles over the past week offer an especially relevant example of this phenomenon. What has transpired is fairly clear: A series of ICE raids and arrests late last week prompted protests in select areas of the city, namely downtown, near a federal building where ICE has offices, and around City Hall and the Metropolitan Detention Center. There have been other protests south of there, around a Home Depot in Paramount, where Border Patrol agents gathered last week. The majority of these protests have been civil ('I mostly saw clergy sit-ins and Tejano bands,' The American Prospect's David Dayen wrote). There has been some looting and property destruction. 'One group of vandals summoned several Waymo self-driving cars to the street next to the plaza where the city was founded and set them ablaze,' my colleague Nick Miroff, who has been present at the demonstrations, wrote. [Read: Stephen Miller triggers Los Angeles] As is common in modern protests, there has also been ample viral footage from news organizations showing militarized police responding aggressively in encounters, sometimes without provocation. In one well-circulated clip, an officer in riot gear fires a nonlethal round directly at an Australian television correspondent carrying a microphone while on air; another piece of footage shot from above shows a police officer on horseback trampling a protester on the ground. All of these dynamics are familiar in the post-Ferguson era of protest. What you are witnessing is a news event distributed and consumed through a constellation of different still images and video clips, all filmed from different perspectives and presented by individuals and organizations with different agendas. It is a buffet of violence, celebration, confusion, and sensationalism. Consumed in aggregate, it might provide an accurate representation of the proceedings: a tense, potentially dangerous, but still contained response by a community to a brutal federal immigration crackdown. Unfortunately, very few people consume media this way. And so the protests follow the choose-your-own-adventure quality of a fractured media ecosystem, where, depending on the prism one chooses, what's happening in L.A. varies considerably. Anyone is capable of cherry-picking media to suit their arguments, of course, and social media has always narrowed the aperture of news events to fit particular viewpoints. Regardless of ideology, dramatic perspectives succeed on platforms. It is possible that one's impression of the protests would be incorrectly skewed if informed only by Bluesky commentators, MSNBC guests, or self-proclaimed rational centrists. The right, for example, has mocked the idea of 'mostly peaceful protests' as ludicrous when juxtaposed with video of what they see as evidence to the contrary. It's likely that my grasp of the events and their politics are shaped by decades of algorithmic social-media consumption. Yet the situation in L.A. only further clarifies the asymmetries among media ecosystems. This is not an even playing field. The right-wing media complex has a disproportionate presence and is populated by extreme personalities who have no problem embracing nonsense AI imagery and flagrantly untrue reporting that fits their agenda. Here you will find a loosely affiliated network of streamers, influencers, alternative social networks, extremely online vice presidents, and Fox News personalities who appear invested in portraying the L.A. protests as a full-blown insurrection. To follow these reports is to believe that people are not protesting but rioting throughout the city. In this alternate reality, the whole of Los Angeles is a bona fide war zone. (It is not, despite President Donald Trump's wildly disproportionate response, which includes deploying hundreds of U.S. Marines to the area and federalizing thousands of National Guard members.) I spent the better part of the week drinking from this particular firehose, reading X and Truth Social posts and watching videos from Rumble. On these platforms, the protests are less a news event than a justification for the authoritarian use of force. Nearly every image or video contains selectively chosen visuals of burning cars or Mexican flags unfurling in a smog of tear gas, and they're cycled on repeat to create a sense of overwhelming chaos. They have titles such as 'CIVIL WAR ALERT' and 'DEMOCRATS STOKE WW3!' All of this incendiary messaging is assisted by generative-AI images of postapocalyptic, smoldering city streets—pure propaganda to fill the gap between reality and the world as the MAGA faithful wish to see it. I've written before about how the internet has obliterated the monoculture, empowering individuals to cocoon themselves in alternate realities despite confounding evidence—it is a machine that justifies any belief. This is not a new phenomenon, but the problem is getting worse as media ecosystems mature and adjust to new technologies. On Tuesday, one of the top results for one user's TikTok search for Los Angeles curfew was an AI-generated video rotating through slop images of a looted city under lockdown. Even to the untrained eye, the images were easily identifiable as AI-rendered (the word curfew came out looking like ciuftew). Still, it's not clear that this matters to the people consuming and sharing the bogus footage. Even though such reality-fracturing has become a load-bearing feature of our information environment, the result is disturbing: Some percentage of Americans believes that one of the country's largest cities is now a hellscape, when, in fact, almost all residents of Los Angeles are going about their normal lives. On platforms such as Bluesky and Instagram, I've seen L.A. residents sharing pictures of themselves going about their day-to-day lives—taking out the trash, going to the farmers' market—and lots of pictures of the city's unmistakable skyline against the backdrop of a beautiful summer day. These are earnest efforts to show the city as it is (fine)—an attempt to wrest control of a narrative, albeit one that is actually based in truth. Yet it's hard to imagine any of this reaching the eyes of the people who participate in the opposing ecosystem, and even if it did, it's unclear whether it would matter. As I documented in October, after Hurricanes Helene and Milton destroyed parts of the United States, AI-generated images were used by Trump supporters 'to convey whatever partisan message suits the moment, regardless of truth.' [Read: I'm running out of ways to explain how bad this is] In the cinematic universe of right-wing media, the L.A. ICE protests are a sequel of sorts to the Black Lives Matter protests of the summer of 2020. It doesn't matter that the size and scope have been different in Los Angeles (at present, the L.A. protests do not, for instance, resemble the 100-plus nights of demonstrations and clashes between protesters and police that took place in Portland, Oregon, in 2020): Influencers and broadcasters on the right have seized on the association with those previous protests, insinuating that this next installment, like all sequels, will be a bigger and bolder spectacle. Politicians are running the sequel playbook—Senator Tom Cotton, who wrote a rightly criticized New York Times op-ed in 2020 urging Trump to 'Send in the Troops' to quash BLM demonstrations, wrote another op-ed, this time for The Wall Street Journal, with the headline 'Send in the Troops, for Real.' (For transparency's sake, I should note that I worked for the Times opinion desk when the Cotton op-ed was published and publicly objected to it at the time.) There is a sequel vibe to so much of the Trump administration's second term. The administration's policies are more extreme, and there's a brazenness to the whole affair—nobody's even trying to justify the plot (or, in this case, cover up the corruption and dubious legality of the government's deportation regime). All of us, Trump supporters very much included, are treated as a captive audience, forced to watch whether we like it or not. This feeling has naturally trickled down to much of the discourse and news around Trump's second presidency, which feels (and generally is) direr, angrier, more intractable. The distortions are everywhere: People mainlining fascistic AI slop are occupying an alternate reality. But even those of us who understand the complexity of the protests are forced to live in our own bifurcated reality, one where, even as the internet shows us fresh horrors every hour, life outside these feeds may be continuing in ways that feel familiar and boring. We are living through the regime of a budding authoritarian—the emergency is here, now—yet our cities are not yet on fire in the way that many shock jocks say they are. The only way out of this mess begins with resisting the distortions. In many cases, the first step is to state things plainly. Los Angeles is not a lawless, postapocalyptic war zone. The right to protest is constitutionally protected, and protests have the potential to become violent—consider how Trump is attempting to use the force of the state to silence dissent against his administration. There are thousands more peaceful demonstrations scheduled nationally this weekend. The tools that promised to empower us, connect us, and bring us closer to the truth are instead doing the opposite. A meaningful percentage of American citizens appears to have dissociated from reality. In fact, many of them seem to like it that way. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
3 hours ago
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The L.A. Distortion Effect
One hallmark of our current moment is that when an event happens, there is little collective agreement on even basic facts. This, despite there being more documentary evidence than ever before in history: Information is abundant, yet consensus is elusive. The ICE protests in Los Angeles over the past week offer an especially relevant example of this phenomenon. What has transpired is fairly clear: A series of ICE raids and arrests late last week prompted protests in select areas of the city, namely downtown, near a federal building where ICE has offices, and around City Hall and the Metropolitan Detention Center. There have been other protests south of there, around a Home Depot in Paramount, where Border Patrol agents gathered last week. The majority of these protests have been civil ('I mostly saw clergy sit-ins and Tejano bands,' The American Prospect 's David Dayen wrote). There has been some looting and property destruction. 'One group of vandals summoned several Waymo self-driving cars to the street next to the plaza where the city was founded and set them ablaze,' my colleague Nick Miroff, who has been present at the demonstrations, wrote. As is common in modern protests, there has also been ample viral footage from news organizations showing militarized police responding aggressively in encounters, sometimes without provocation. In one well-circulated clip, an officer in riot gear fires a nonlethal round directly at an Australian television correspondent carrying a microphone while on air; another piece of footage shot from above shows a police officer on horseback trampling a protester on the ground. All of these dynamics are familiar in the post-Ferguson era of protest. What you are witnessing is a news event distributed and consumed through a constellation of different still images and video clips, all filmed from different perspectives and presented by individuals and organizations with different agendas. It is a buffet of violence, celebration, confusion, and sensationalism. Consumed in aggregate, it might provide an accurate representation of the proceedings: a tense, potentially dangerous, but still contained response by a community to a brutal federal immigration crackdown. Unfortunately, very few people consume media this way. And so the protests follow the choose-your-own-adventure quality of a fractured media ecosystem, where, depending on the prism one chooses, what's happening in L.A. varies considerably. Anyone is capable of cherry-picking media to suit their arguments, of course, and social media has always narrowed the aperture of news events to fit particular viewpoints. Regardless of ideology, dramatic perspectives succeed on platforms. It is possible that one's impression of the protests would be incorrectly skewed if informed only by Bluesky commentators, MSNBC guests, or self-proclaimed rational centrists. The right, for example, has mocked the idea of 'mostly peaceful protests' as ludicrous when juxtaposed with video of what they see as evidence to the contrary. It's likely that my grasp of the events and their politics are shaped by decades of algorithmic social-media consumption. Yet the situation in L.A. only further clarifies the asymmetries among media ecosystems. This is not an even playing field. The right-wing media complex has a disproportionate presence and is populated by extreme personalities who have no problem embracing nonsense AI imagery and flagrantly untrue reporting that fits their agenda. Here you will find a loosely affiliated network of streamers, influencers, alternative social networks, extremely online vice presidents, and Fox News personalities who appear invested in portraying the L.A. protests as a full-blown insurrection. To follow these reports is to believe that people are not protesting but rioting throughout the city. In this alternate reality, the whole of Los Angeles is a bona fide war zone. (It is not, despite President Donald Trump's wildly disproportionate response, which includes deploying hundreds of U.S. Marines to the area and federalizing thousands of National Guard members.) I spent the better part of the week drinking from this particular firehose, reading X and Truth Social posts and watching videos from Rumble. On these platforms, the protests are less a news event than a justification for the authoritarian use of force. Nearly every image or video contains selectively chosen visuals of burning cars or Mexican flags unfurling in a smog of tear gas, and they're cycled on repeat to create a sense of overwhelming chaos. They have titles such as 'CIVIL WAR ALERT' and 'DEMOCRATS STOKE WW3!' All of this incendiary messaging is assisted by generative-AI images of postapocalyptic, smoldering city streets—pure propaganda to fill the gap between reality and the world as the MAGA faithful wish to see it. I've written before about how the internet has obliterated the monoculture, empowering individuals to cocoon themselves in alternate realities despite confounding evidence—it is a machine that justifies any belief. This is not a new phenomenon, but the problem is getting worse as media ecosystems mature and adjust to new technologies. On Tuesday, one of the top results for one user's TikTok search for Los Angeles curfew was an AI-generated video rotating through slop images of a looted city under lockdown. Even to the untrained eye, the images were easily identifiable as AI-rendered (the word curfew came out looking like ciuftew). Still, it's not clear that this matters to the people consuming and sharing the bogus footage. Even though such reality-fracturing has become a load-bearing feature of our information environment, the result is disturbing: Some percentage of Americans believes that one of the country's largest cities is now a hellscape, when, in fact, almost all residents of Los Angeles are going about their normal lives. On platforms such as Bluesky and Instagram, I've seen L.A. residents sharing pictures of themselves going about their day-to-day lives—taking out the trash, going to the farmers' market—and lots of pictures of the city's unmistakable skyline against the backdrop of a beautiful summer day. These are earnest efforts to show the city as it is (fine)—an attempt to wrest control of a narrative, albeit one that is actually based in truth. Yet it's hard to imagine any of this reaching the eyes of the people who participate in the opposing ecosystem, and even if it did, it's unclear whether it would matter. As I documented in October, after Hurricanes Helene and Milton destroyed parts of the United States, AI-generated images were used by Trump supporters 'to convey whatever partisan message suits the moment, regardless of truth.' In the cinematic universe of right-wing media, the L.A. ICE protests are a sequel of sorts to the Black Lives Matter protests of the summer of 2020. It doesn't matter that the size and scope have been different in Los Angeles (at present, the L.A. protests do not, for instance, resemble the 100-plus nights of demonstrations and clashes between protesters and police that took place in Portland, Oregon, in 2020): Influencers and broadcasters on the right have seized on the association with those previous protests, insinuating that this next installment, like all sequels, will be a bigger and bolder spectacle. Politicians are running the sequel playbook—Senator Tom Cotton, who wrote a rightly criticized New York Times op-ed in 2020 urging Trump to 'Send in the Troops' to quash BLM demonstrations, wrote another op-ed, this time for The Wall Street Journal, with the headline 'Send in the Troops, for Real.' (For transparency's sake, I should note that I worked for the Times opinion desk when the Cotton op-ed was published and publicly objected to it at the time.) There is a sequel vibe to so much of the Trump administration's second term. The administration's policies are more extreme, and there's a brazenness to the whole affair—nobody's even trying to justify the plot (or, in this case, cover up the corruption and dubious legality of the government's deportation regime). All of us, Trump supporters very much included, are treated as a captive audience, forced to watch whether we like it or not. This feeling has naturally trickled down to much of the discourse and news around Trump's second presidency, which feels (and generally is) direr, angrier, more intractable. The distortions are everywhere: People mainlining fascistic AI slop are occupying an alternate reality. But even those of us who understand the complexity of the protests are forced to live in our own bifurcated reality, one where, even as the internet shows us fresh horrors every hour, life outside these feeds may be continuing in ways that feel familiar and boring. We are living through the regime of a budding authoritarian—the emergency is here, now—yet our cities are not yet on fire in the way that many shock jocks say they are. The only way out of this mess begins with resisting the distortions. In many cases, the first step is to state things plainly. Los Angeles is not a lawless, postapocalyptic war zone. The right to protest is constitutionally protected, and protests have the potential to become violent—consider how Trump is attempting to use the force of the state to silence dissent against his administration. There are thousands more peaceful demonstrations scheduled nationally this weekend. The tools that promised to empower us, connect us, and bring us closer to the truth are instead doing the opposite. A meaningful percentage of American citizens appears to have dissociated from reality. In fact, many of them seem to like it that way.
Forbes
3 hours ago
- Forbes
US-China Trade Talks: The Limits Of Diplomacy
Delegations of China and the U.S. pose for a group photo prior to the first meeting of the ... More China-U.S. economic and trade consultation mechanism in London, Britain, June 9, 2025. The meeting opened here on Monday. Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng, also a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, attended the meeting with U.S. representatives. (Photo by Li Ying/Xinhua via Getty Images) In early June 2025, officials from the U.S. and China convened in an attempt to to prevent salvage economic ties from spiraling out of control and causing significant damage to both economies. Talks took place in London's historic Lancaster House, as they sought to rescue an earlier negotiated tariff truce and defuse escalating export controls. The negotiations aimed to extend the 90-day pause on punitive tariffs agreed in Geneva, revive cross-border trade flows, and hammer out a framework on rare-earth minerals and high-end technology exports. However, the talks ultimately accomplished few tangible benefits that President Trump sought to originally gain from the implementation of these tariffs, namely to stem the flow of fentanyl, motivate companies to reshore to the US, and close the trade deficit. Instead, he temporarily paused these measures by both sides and returned to the dynamics prior to his 'Liberation Day' and the imposition of tariffs globally. The June 9 to 10 London talks — led by U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and USTR Jamieson Greer from the U.S. and China's Vice Premier He Lifeng and Commerce Minister Wang Wentao — were convened against a backdrop of deep mutual distrust. Since 2018, the two sides have imposed tit-for-tat duties, with U.S. tariffs on Chinese exports staying around 19-21% from the end of Trump's first term until the beginning of his second, and Beijing following suit with…. After Liberation Day, US tariffs reached a high of 145% before decreasing to 30%, while Beijing imposed a retaliatory tariff of 125% before settling at its current level of 10%.These actions have stifled more than $600 billion in bilateral trade and rattled global markets. At the same time, The Trumps' administration's erratic and inconsistent messaging has also allowed for Wall Street to start pricing in volatility. Moreover a new TACO theory emerged, 'TACO or Trump Always Chickens Out.' This asserts that despite Trumps tough trade policy rhetoric, when markets become too volatile Trump will always reverse course. US Reliance on Critical Rare Earth Metals US Reliance on Rare Earth Imports from China In April 2025, China further escalated tensions by instituting a requirement of export licenses for critical rare-earth minerals, resulting in a 20% year-on-year decrease in shipments to the U.S. and Europe. Due to China's dominance in rare earth exports to the US, this triggered alarms in various industries, most notably in the electric vehicle and aerospace sector. Meanwhile, Washington broadened its export curbs on advanced semiconductors, chip-making equipment, and aerospace components, with a particular intensification after the two countries' Geneva talks, amplifying China's sense of economic siege. Despite the high stakes, negotiators emerged from London with only a modest 'interim framework' rather than a sweeping accord. However, Trump still claimed in a Truth Social post that 'the relationship is excellent.' The enthusiasm from the president is in large part due to China agreeing to temporarily grant export licenses for rare-earth magnets and related components, enabling U.S. automakers such as Ford, GM, and Stellantis to replenish inventories after April's curbs. At the same time, the U.S. stopped short of lifting its tech export restrictions on AI chips and aerospace tools. Commerce Secretary Lutnick characterized the outcome as 'putting meat on the bones' of the May Geneva deal, while Ministry of Commerce spokesperson He Yidong stated the two sides reached a consensus framework to 'implement the important understandings' reached during the June 5 phone call between Trump and Xi. From an economic perspective, the London agreement delivered a short-lived reprieve. Following reports of the rare-earth license concession, global equity markets ticked higher, echoing relief seen after the Geneva truce. Yet core barriers remain firmly in place: U.S. base tariffs on Chinese goods remain near 30%, China's on U.S. exports linger around 10%, and neither side agreed to roll back its export-control regimes. Without a detailed enforcement mechanism or significant new commitments, the framework may merely defer a return to pre-Geneva duties once the 90-day window lapses in August. Current versus pre-Geneva Tariff Levels Geopolitical undercurrents will also further limit any long-term détente. In Washington, a bipartisan consensus has emerged around the need to 'de‐risk' critical supply chains, not merely as a commercial maneuver but as a national security imperative. Policymakers and industry leaders alike fear that overdependence on China for semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, rare‐earth minerals, and even basic manufacturing capacity leaves the United States dangerously exposed to coercive economic pressure or abrupt supply shocks. This conviction has translated into a suite of domestic incentives—ranging from the CHIPS and Science Act to expanded Defense Production Act authorities—designed to shore up American production of key inputs and diversify procurement to 'trusted' partners. On the other side of the Pacific, Chinese leadership interprets these U.S. measures as part of a long-standing containment strategy. Official rhetoric in Beijing routinely casts de-risking initiatives as destabilizing 'decoupling' efforts that threaten China's development model and tarnish the mutually beneficial aspects of economic integration. State media and senior diplomats argue that a sovereign nation, particularly one bearing the mantle of a developing‐country status, must safeguard its industrial base against foreign interference. Despite the rhetoric on economic self-reliance, both the U.S. and China have much to lose from a prolonged trade war. According to the military think tank RAND, 'roughly 40 percent of China's exports to the United States fall into categories where China supplies more than half of America's total imports.' Meanwhile, China is eager to gain access to GPUs and CPUs from American companies like NVIDIA and AMD to power its growing AI infrastructure. Even knowing this, leaders on both sides remain committed to showing strength and independence. Trump administration officials are wary of ceding control to China, while Beijing officials do not want to appear weak on the global stage. The talks, while cordial, still have not permanently de-escalated the trade war, with 30% and 10% baseline tariffs remaining on the American and Chinese sides, respectively. Furthermore, China has only agreed to a six-month license for American companies seeking to import rare earth minerals and magnets. Beyond the economic impact, the visa statuses of Chinese students in US universities will continue to remain uncertain as long as the trade war remains unresolved. As the two economic superpowers prepare for the current deadline on a comprehensive trade deal by August 10, the London talks underscore both the value and the limits of diplomacy: they bought time, but a durable resolution remains elusive. Special thanks to Jonah Kim, and Nathaniel Schochet, for their exceptional thought leadership, research, and editorial contributions to this article. Special thanks to Hanah Kim and Artem Valyaev Kunisky for assisting in providing info-graphics.
