Sydney/Hong Kong (CNN Business) Australia and the United Kingdom announced a free trade agreement Tuesday as Britain begins to forge new economic relationships following its departure from the European Union . The main elements of the deal were agreed by UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison at a meeting in Downing Street on Monday night. The agreement in principle will be published in the coming days. It's the first major bilateral free trade agreement brokered by the United Kingdom since it left the European Union in January 2020. Britain has also struck deals with Japan and Norway, but they were based on existing agreements negotiated by the European Union. The United Kingdom's ability to negotiate its own trade policy has been billed by the government as a major benefit of Brexit. And it is moving ahead with the Australia deal despite opposition from UK farmers and other food and drink producers who are … [Read more...]

5 WASHINGTON - The rapid increase in coronavirus infections driven by the delta variant over the past month is turning the country's attention back to the pandemic and threatening to subsume President Joe Biden's agenda - just as the White House and its allies hoped to move on from the virus and focus on promoting the administration's other accomplishments. Inside the White House, top officials are growing increasingly anxious about the state of the pandemic and are gravely concerned about the situation spiraling out of control in some areas of the country with low vaccination rates, according to two people who work in the administration and two others in close touch with the White House. Biden's team had always expected to see additional coronavirus outbreaks, but the White House assumed the increases in infections would be "mounds" and not "peaks," according to one top administration official, who like others spoke on the condition of … [Read more...]

London (CNN Business) Just seven months after singing its praises , British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is attempting to rewrite the Brexit deal he signed with the European Union. It's a risky move that will undermine Britain's credibility as a trustworthy trading partner at the very moment that the UK government is seeking to forge economic alliances far beyond Europe to justify its "global Britain" sales pitch for Brexit, according to experts. EU officials have already rejected the UK call for a renegotiation , which trade experts say amounts to a brazen attempt to press the European Union to agree to demands that it already rejected during several rounds of talks. Other countries watching the drama unfold will proceed with caution when it comes to dealing with the United Kingdom, according to L. Alan Winters of the UK Trade Policy Observatory at the University of Sussex in England. "It certainly does raise questions about the … [Read more...]

Story and photographs by Kara Fox , CNN Updated 1357 GMT (2157 HKT) July 11, 2021 Belfast, Northern Ireland (CNN) Niamh Burns is organizing a special 20-year reunion for her schoolmates this year. But while the accomplishments of the "Courageous Classes of 2001" are worth celebrating, the date they are commemorating is not. Over the course of 12 weeks in 2001, Burns and the other pupils at north Belfast's Holy Cross Girls' primary were subjected to a barrage of abuse from a group of loyalist Protestants blocking their path to the school gate. The unrest, reported on globally at the time, began during the last week of the summer term, before violence exploded on the children's return to school in the fall. An angry mob threw urine-filled balloons and, eventually, a pipe bomb as children -- some as young as five -- ran the gauntlet each day to get to class. It had been three years since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, the landmark peace accord also called the … [Read more...]

(CNN) Cars set alight. Petrol bombs hurled at police and at peace walls. A double decker bus hijacked, and water cannons unleashed on protestors for the first time in six years. The disorder that has shaken parts of Northern Ireland over the last two weeks has highlighted the fragile peace that binds together the region's diverse community of loyalists and nationalists, more than 20 years after the Good Friday Agreement. Loyalists want Northern Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom, while nationalists would like to see Northern Ireland become part of the Republic of Ireland. The first few nights of violence began after youths in a loyalist pocket of Derry/Londonderry launched a petrol bomb at police officers who had tried to break up their gathering. The riots spread to four other towns and cities in Northern Ireland, reaching fever pitch in west Belfast last Wednesday, when some 600 people from neighboring loyalist and nationalist … [Read more...]

(CNN) The European Union launched legal proceedings against the United Kingdom on Monday over London's unilateral attempts to extend the Brexit grace period on food imports to Northern Ireland. The move comes after Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis announced on March 3 that the UK planned to continue to bypass bureaucratic requirements on those imports until October 1. A grace period on those checks is currently scheduled to expire at the end of March. This three-month extension from the end of the Brexit transition period on January 1 was an agreed goodwill measure to allow the affected food industries to adapt to the new trade barriers across the Irish Sea. A specific part of the Brexit withdrawal agreement, called the Northern Ireland Protocol, aims to eliminate the need for border controls between Northern Ireland (part of the UK) and the Republic of Ireland (an EU member). Read More The EU-UK trade deal, which went into … [Read more...]