Pridgin opened near Scranton (pop. 241) in August 2020. Youngest son David Pridgin Jr. Cheeks and Matthew J. 48643 Establishing a Plan for the Confederate Monuments in Forest Hill Cemetery. Sponsors: Paul R. Photograph: Brian Lawless/PAThe EU has behaved like an “absentee landlord” in relation to Northern Ireland, an expert on Brexit in the region has said, as a new report by the Institute for Government warned of more conflict across all issues “if the UK fails to manage the relationship” with Brussels.Under the Brexit trade deal more than 20 committees and bodies are supposed to be set up to cement a working post Brexit relationship on everything from fishing to energy supplies and aviation deals.A further dozen or so were due to be created following the signing of the Northern Ireland protocol a year ago, and it is the failure to set up these management structures that is being seen as the cause of rising tensions in the region that led to the withdrawal of Brexit staff at ports last week.”If the UK fails to manage the relationship well, it may find it ends up with more conflicts with the EU than if it had spent more time thinking in advance about the issue.”The protocol is not an easy thing to start up with a click of the fingers. But there has been this sense of an absentee landlord with all these rules coming into play and no one there to manage it,” said Katy Hayward, a professor of sociology at Queen’s University in Belfast and a former adviser to the government’s now defunct Brexit department.”The main concern of the European commission has been to demonstrate and prove to other member states that the single market is being protected,” she said, adding that such a one dimensional approach had been a misfit for Northern Ireland, a region still going through a post conflict peace process that the EU itself had put to the fore of negotiations.The report by the Institute for Government on managing the UK’s relationship with the EU makes a similar point on the wider Brexit relationship and says the structures for management need to be put in place urgently.Its report says “the government appears inclined at every turn to downplay the significance of the UK’s relationship with the EU and to have a preference for dealing bilaterally with individual member states rather than with the EU institutions.”It may also fear that creating an overelaborate bureaucracy to manage the EU relationship would produce a mindset where the EU looms larger in internal thinking than it needs to.”The government wanted a Canada style agreement with the EU but Brussels will never regard the UK as simply Toronto on Thames and if the UK fails to manage the relationship well it may find it ends up with more conflicts with the EU than if it had spent more time thinking in advance about the issue.”Under the Northern Ireland protocol a working consultative group was supposed to have been set up to feed into the UK EU joint committee overseeing the implementation of Brexit.But although the protocol was signed off more than a year ago it was never set up, leading to the rigorous application of it that has led to restrictions on food, pets and plants, all of which has been seized upon by loyalist communities and others as evidence of separation from Great Britain.But Hayward says there are solutions for Michael Gove and the European commission vice president, Maro efovi, who will meet next week, with part of the protocol explicitly allowing for an easing of controls at ports.Article 6.2 of the protocol states the committee shall regard Northern Ireland’s “integral place in the United Kingdom’s internal market” and make “best endeavours to facilitate trade between Northern Ireland and the other parts of the UK”.It adds that the ease of trade between Northern Ireland and the UK shall be kept under constant review and the committee can at any time make “appropriate recommendations with a view to avoiding controls at the ports and the airports of Northern Ireland to the extent possible”.Hayward said: “The hope would be that those EU observers could recognise the nature of the situation and would be able to see where there could be flexibility and pragmatism.”Former Iran detainee separates from husband after learning of alleged affair while she was in prisonA British Australian woman who spent nearly three years in solitary confinement in an Iranian prison has separated from her husband after hearing allegations he was having an affair with a colleague, according to media reports. Kylie Moore Gilbert, 33, has filed for divorce from Ruslan Hodorov, her Russian Israeli husband, according to the Herald Sun of Melbourne.