There is no fixed deadline for a deal to be done but there is, in principle, a date upon which the UK will no longer be part of the EU. That date, however, is not actually as fixed as it might appear and there is authority for saying that the UK could press reset and start the whole negotiation period afresh when the UK and the EU have got their acts together.
The UK, for some reason, has decided to call this an "implementation" period." Essentially, it's a period during which the UK will wean itself off EU law and regulation.
Sir Ivan Rogers was a senior UK representative to the EU. There aren't many who know more about the relationships, legal and political between the various parts of the EU and the EU and non-members which, as he points out in this forthright lecture, the UK has decided to be.
Get a cup of coffee and a handful of biscuits and set aside around 45 minutes of uninterrupted time to read and think about this.
A lawyer has pleaded guilty to using his clients' account to launder the proceeds of a range of financial crimes in which he also took part. The case shows why Regulations limiting suspicious reporting requirements to "transactional lawyers" are a mistake.
The supposed anonymity of crypto-asset accounts, such as bitcoin wallets, depends on two things: first, the creation of accounts attached to fictitious or false identification information and the fact that there are so many that trying to identify one being used for criminal purposes is like trying to decide which drop in the ocean should be looked at first.
Today, World Money Laundering Report, part of The Anti Money Laundering Network announces the GlobalKYC Suspicious Crypto Asset Register, a crowd-sourced method of identifying those accounts that may be used by criminals for reasons of extortion.
First, the term "brexit" is not original. It was copied from a term "grexit" which was coined to refer to the possibility that Greece, in the throes of a financial crisis, might choose to leave, or be thrown out of, the Eurozone, i.e. that part of Europe which uses the Euro as a common currency. It is, simply, a contraction of the term "British Exit." Britain is not part of the Eurozone, which means that it is, theoretically, outside the influence of the European Central Bank, but Britain is part of all other EU institutions and does, in fact, have a place at the ECB table. A "hard brexit" means that the UK leaves Britain without...
The case of Laura Plummer, the British woman sentenced in Turkey to three years' jail for attempting to smuggle several hundred Tramadol tablets into Turkey, where they are illegal without a prescription, will be back in the headlines in a few days: in a week or so, it will be a year since she was sentenced. There is, in the UK, a vocal group trying to generate sympathy from both the government and the wider population, using both social media and a less than analytical general media to do so. They don't let the facts get in the way of a good story. Her local MP has been, seemingly, unable to utter a sentence without a tear-jerking adjective. Here are the facts without any emotion.
Sadly, RNLI is competing for donations with wall to wall T.V. advertising characterised by re-purposed voice over artists who usually sell insurance policies or funeral plans for pensioners and are now guilt-tripping an entire population by repeatedly showing e.g. images of a baby with tubes taped to its face to pay administrators salaries in the multi hundreds of thousands. There are dozens pleading for them and only the RNLI pointing out that its crews are volunteers and face death every time they go out. When you give this Christmas, choose carefully and don't be manipulated by sophisticated marketing.
This week, some Conservative Party MPs delivered, in sufficient number, a letter to the party's managing committee, the 1922 Committee. It expressed that they had no confidence in the Prime Minister and that the party should replace her. The timing, many have said, was a mistake, that those seeking her removal, should have waited until after the Brexit vote and attack her then, if she lost. That, it is here opined, would have defeated the purpose of this week's supposed rebellion.
The European Union (Exit) Act, as originally drawn, defined exit day as "such day as a Minister of the Crown may be regulations appoint" but that was later amended. But even now, it's not as fixed as it appears.
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