 10 May, 2021 In the headlines Boris Johnson is set to confirm a further relaxation of coronavirus restrictions in England from May 17. Groups of six will be able to meet indoors and hugging will be permitted. Labour leader Keir Starmer has reshuffled the shadow cabinet, with Rachel Reeves becoming shadow chancellor and Angela Rayner, removed as party chairman, getting a 24-word job title that her allies insist is a promotion. This "chaotic" process has done little besides damaging his authority, says Henry Zeffman in The Times. More than 180 people were injured yesterday after Israeli police stormed the sacred al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. The potential eviction of Palestinians from an East Jerusalem neighbourhood has led to days of unrest.
Comment of the day Let's be friendlier to the French Dispatching the Royal Navy to Jersey during the fishing dispute was pure "theatrics", says Fraser Nelson in The Daily Telegraph. "Nothing says 'vote Tory' like sending gunships to see off the French." But many Jersey fishermen have sympathy for their French counterparts, who have fallen through the "bureaucratic cracks" of the Brexit deal. One French skipper who has fished off Jersey for 40 years says his boat has now been given a licence to fish for just 11 hours a year. London and Paris need to sort out this "cack-handed" treatment, rather than "supercharge the military metaphors by sending in actual gunboats". Goodwill is needed elsewhere. Customs checks on goods crossing the Irish Sea are hugely divisive in Northern Ireland, and ludicrously stringent: there's an EU ban on importing some plants "because they might carry a few particles of Scottish soil". While it makes sense to address this by reforming the Northern Ireland protocol, we shouldn't play "hardball". Britain should be "the more generous party", which will mean making concessions. There's no point poisoning post-Brexit relations over inevitable, if unforeseen, problems. Before Boris Johnson had to change his phone number because the old one had been published online, he and Emmanuel Macron often "cooked up" initiatives by exchanging texts. Let's hope Macron gets Johnson's new number – and that he uses it. Read the full article here.
 Andrew Milligan/Pool/Getty Images Don't buy the SNP's referendum bluster After the SNP's fourth consecutive Scottish election win, Nicola Sturgeon will be talking a lot about her "mandate" for an independence referendum, says Euan McColm in The Scotsman. Only "the more gullible nationalists" should believe her. She can't hold a vote without the backing of the British government – and when that last happened in 2014, there were plenty of unionists who agreed the question should be asked. Many of them now have no wish to relive that "angry and unpleasant" campaign, and polls show a "substantial number" of nationalists don't consider it a priority either. The SNP's spin is that opposition to a second referendum is "a democratic outrage", but, tellingly, the party hasn't even begun to produce a plan for currency or border issues. In fact, the last few days of Sturgeon's election campaign turned away from independence to focus on her Covid leadership. She knows there's "only so much referendum talk Scots can bear". While the polls show Scotland is "perfectly divided" on independence, a vote is as risky for her as it is for Boris Johnson. We'll "have to content ourselves with a grinding phony war in which the Prime Minister refuses to grant a referendum that the First Minister doesn't actually want". Read the full article here.
Gone viral  Great white sharks have a reputation for attacking surfers, but sometimes, it seems, they just like surfing with them. Last week one was caught cruising off the coast of southern California by drone videographer Carlos Gauna, who filmed it passing directly underneath a surfer. "It's a sight I'm quickly becoming accustomed to seeing, but most of these surfers have no idea the sharks are there," Gauna told his YouTube followers.
Sport Footballers taking on Liverpool next season will be up against a supercomputer that can predict their passes before they make them, says Amit Katwala in Wired. DeepMind, the AI supercomputer owned by Google's parent company, Alphabet, will help the club's coaches process the vast amounts of data already available from motion sensors and GPS trackers. You can train the AI to predict how players will react in a particular situation, giving vital information to the manager in the dugout. "If only it could do the same for the owners."
Snapshot 
Noted To The Times:
Snapshot answer It's Lily James. She's playing Linda Radlett in The Pursuit of Love, which began on BBC1 yesterday. This rather different get-up is from Pam & Tommy, an upcoming TV series in which James stars as Pamela Anderson during her turbulent marriage to Mötley Crüe's drummer, Tommy Lee.
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May 10, 2021
Let’s be friendlier to the French
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