Ten Things You Need to Know Today: Thursday 14 Jun 2018

Six Labour MPs stepped down from frontbench roles to vote
against Jeremy Corbyn and in support of the Government yesterday.
They helped Theresa May to see off an amendment to her Brexit bill
suggested by the House of Lords which might have kept the UK in the
European Economic Area after it leaves the bloc, like Norway.

Donald Trump yesterday dismissed the death camps of North Korea,
mass starvation and other human rights abuses in Kim Jong Un’s
country by saying: “A lot of people have done bad things.” The US
President said the dictator was a “tough guy”, a “smart guy” and a
“great negotiator”. Trump has returned from his summit with
Kim.

The Government is to relax rules put in place by Theresa May
when she was home secretary, allowing more non-EU citizens to come
to the UK to work in the NHS. May’s visa cap was making it hard for
the service to recruit enough staff, NHS bosses say. It emerged on
Tuesday that 2,360 doctors had been refused entry in five
months.

The devastating fire at Grenfell Tower in west London was
commemorated early this morning, exactly one year after the first
999 call about the blaze was made. The remains of the council block
and 12 surrounding buildings were floodlit in green at 12.54am.
Sixty-eight families are still in emergency accommodation after the
fire.

Engineering firm Rolls-Royce has announced it will cut 4,600
jobs over the next two years as it attempts to grow its profits,
with the brunt of the sackings borne by middle managers and
back-office staff. The firm says around one third of the jobs will
go by the end of this year. By mid-2020, Rolls-Royce hopes to be
saving £400m a year.

An Australian court has drastically cut what would have been a
national record payment for defamation, to be made by Bauer Media
to the Hollywood actress Rebel Wilson. The publisher is judged to
have libelled Wilson as a serial liar and was to have paid her
A$4.5m (£2.7m) – but this has been reduced to A$600,000
(£338,000).

One of the country’s most senior police chiefs, assistant Met
commissioner Patricia Gallan, has said economic inequality lies
behind rising crime. She told The Guardian that poorer people are
left feeling that “they do not have a stake in society” and said
that police can deal with the “symptoms” of inequality but society
must tackle the cause.

Travel diaries kept by Albert Einstein have been published for
the first time – and in them the Nobel laureate makes sweeping and
negative comments about other races, despite the reputation he
later earned for fighting segregation and defending black people’s
rights in the US. The physicist calls the Chinese “spiritless and
obtuse” in one entry.

Californians will vote in November on splitting their state into
three smaller states, a plan proposed by billionaire venture
capitalist Tim Draper, who says it would lead to “better
infrastructure, better education and lower taxes”. There have been
200 attempts to subdivide California since it was founded in 1850,
and the plan is a long shot.

The world is still trying to make sense of the historic summit
between US President Donald Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un,
with Western media analysing everything from the two leaders’ body
language to the symbolism behind their signatures.

In North Korea, however, the conclusion was clear: the meeting
was a major diplomatic victory for Kim and for Pyongyang as a
whole.