Britain’s chief financial watchdog has warned that contracts worth trillions of pounds between UK and European Union banks remain at risk of collapse following Brexit, after Brussels’ failure to implement protective legislation. In a warning to EU officials that time is running out before next March to devise rules for EU banks, the Bank of England’s financial policy committee (FPC) said £29tn worth of contracts could be declared void.
Derivatives contracts, which provide banks and corporations with protection from interest rate rises, could come to an end without fresh legislation from the UK and EU, the committee said in its latest quarterly health check on Britain’s financial services industry. The warning will be seen as a direct response to the European Banking Authority, which argued earlier this week that the UK was dragging its feet preparing for Brexit.(theguardian)…[+]

The lower house of the Polish parliament has voted to decriminalise the false attribution to Poland and Poles of crimes committed by Nazi Germany during the Holocaust, signalling a partial retreat on contentious legislation enacted earlier this year. During an emergency parliamentary session on Wednesday morning, the prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, of the ruling rightwing Law and Justice party, told MPs that the legislation had succeeded in its aim of raising international awareness of Poland’s role during the second world war.

“The purpose of this law was and still is one fundamental message: fight for the truth, fight for the truth of world war two and postwar times,” Morawiecki said.
“A publisher in the United States or in Germany will think twice before publishing today an article using the expression ‘Polish SS’, ‘Polish gestapo’ or ‘Polish concentration camps’ if he risks a lawsuit and a fine of 100m euros or dollars.”(theguardian)…[+]

Butchers in France have asked the government for police protection from animal rights activists, claiming their security was being threatened and that vegans were trying to impose a meat-free lifestyle on the nation. The French federation of butchers wrote to the interior minister saying shops had been sprinkled with fake blood and covered in graffiti. It claims that a growing media focus on veganism was threatening butchers’ safety.

The letter said France’s 18,000 butchers were worried about the consequences of “excessive media hype around vegan lifestyles”, and that vegans wanted to “impose their lifestyle on the immense majority of people”. “We count on your services and on the support of the entire government so that the physical, verbal and moral violence stops as soon as possible,” the federation wrote.

Seven butcher shops were vandalised and sprayed with fake blood in the Hauts-de-France region in the north of the country in April. Other incidents were reported in southern France. A butcher and a fishmonger in the north had seen windows broken, with the slogan “Stop speciesism” left behind in spray-paint by the vandals.

It is not only purveyors of meat who have faced the wrath of the animal rights activists: last year a cheesemonger in Lyon said his shop was painted with the words “milk is rape” and “milk is murder”. In March, a vegan cheesemaker was given a seven-month suspended jail sentence for condoning terrorism after she said on Facebook that she had no compassion for the supermarket butcher killed in a terrorist attack on a store in Trèbes and likened being a butcher to being a murderer.(theguardian)…[+]