What happened
Andy Burnham is preparing to announce three major agreements with the EU covering agricultural trade, carbon emissions and visas for young people as part of an effort to rebuild Britain’s relationship with the bloc.

The deals, expected to be unveiled at a Brussels summit on 20 November, could add £17 billion to the UK economy, according to the prime minister. Other measures would simplify travel with pets and allow those aged under 30 to live and work on either side of the Channel.

Who said what
Burnham told The Economist that the package could increase GDP by 0.4%, adding: “Now that is a number that you cannot ignore.”

The agreements “form one half of Burnham’s attempts to reset the British conversation over Europe”, said Kiran Stacey in The Guardian. The prime minister is “also planning a major announcement setting out his vision for how the UK could interact with the union in the future, including possible re-entry”.

What next?
Burnham is due to meet with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President António Costa this month. Negotiators are still resolving some of the finer details of the agreements, including visa quotas and carbon arrangements.

What happened
MI5 will not face legal action despite admitting that its officers gave false evidence to three courts in order to protect an informant accused of being a “misogynistic neo-Nazi who attacked his then girlfriend with a machete”, according to Sky News.

An investigation led by John Goldring concluded that evidence based on “lies” had helped win an injunction against a BBC documentary that would have identified “Agent X”.

However, a panel of three High Court judges said it “would not be in the public interest” to initiate contempt of court proceedings.

Who said what
The ruling “brings to an end a long-running legal battle that has proved deeply embarrassing for MI5”, said The Standard.

Goldring’s inquiry identified “serious and systemic failures in MI5’s conduct”, including an employee identified as “Officer 2” who falsely denied having revealed Agent X’s informant status to a BBC journalist. MI5 chief Ken McCallum (pictured above) acknowledged that the agency “fell badly short”.

What next?
Officer 2 resigned from MI5 last year, while Agent X’s partner settled a claim against the security service in March, with MI5 making no admission of liability.

A biotechnology firm, Warhound, wants to clone and genetically modify military dogs so that they can be used for tasks such as bomb detection, searches and policing. The company is working to ensure that the process is humane, although some experts are concerned.

Warhound will “find top dogs that have finished training and biobank their genetic material”, according to Fortune. Then, through genetic engineering, the company will “focus on eliminating common health conditions that impact these breeds”, said Wired. In the future more advanced changes might be made, like “incorporating olfactory receptor genes from wolves”. The company was created by Palmer Luckey, the founder of the military defence firm Anduril Industries, and Ben Lamm, co-founder of the genetic engineering outfit Colossal Biosciences.

The new startup will combine Colossal’s “breakthroughs in genetics, cloning and animal biology” with Anduril’s “advanced defence technology”, said a release by Warhound. Colossal Biosciences previously gained notoriety for its de-extinction efforts, like trying to bring back the dire wolf, dodo and wooly mammoth.

We “ask dogs to put their lives on the line to protect ours”, said Lamm. “Yet we are still relying on outdated approaches to breeding and training.”

While the “science the company proposes is possible”, it is “prone to error, inefficiencies and a slew of ethical concerns”, according to Scientific American. The process “requires a lot of dogs to have invasive things done to them and be killed in order to produce one cloned puppy”, Dr Lisa Moses, a veterinarian and bioethicist at Harvard University, told the magazine.