Home
David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said that, for the ‘coalition government with a full tank of gas, it’s full steam ahead’. He announced a ‘mid-term review’, but an audit that showed which pledges had not been met was held back. ‘We are married, not to each other,’ he said at a joint press conference with Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, ‘So, to me it’s not a marriage, it is, if you like, a Ronseal deal — it does what it says on the tin.’ He promised details in coming weeks on such things as ‘capping the potentially huge cost’ of social care, and extending the HS2 high-speed rail line from Birmingham to the north of England. He said he favoured televised debates between party leaders before the general election. Lord Strathclyde resigned as Leader of the Lords, after 25 years on the Conservative front bench. He was replaced with Lord Hill of Oareford. Lord Marland resigned as business minister to spend more time in business.
The government cut increases in benefits such as Jobseeker’s Allowance and Income Support by means of a parliamentary bill. Under earlier provisions, families with one parent earning more than £60,000 lost their child benefit, although families with two parents each earning £49,000 lost none. More than 500,000 who missed a deadline to opt out of receiving the benefit will have to fill in complicated self-assessment tax returns. Shares in international banks rose in response to laxer than expected global liquidity rules (the second plank of the Basel III reforms). Three fire crews succeeded in coaxing a squirrel from an island in a pond in Watford High Street.
In east Belfast, protests that had been going on since early December, against the reduction of days that the Union flag would be flown above the City Hall, turned into nightly riots. Cars were set alight and bricks, petrol bombs, fireworks, golfballs and bottles were thrown at police. Members of the loyalist paramilitary UVF, designated as a terrorist organisation, were blamed for encouraging young people engaged in ‘recreational rioting’. A Matisse stolen in Stockholm in 1987 was recovered after it was offered by a Polish collector to a dealer in Essex.
Abroad
In his first public address since June, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria called his opponents ‘enemies of God and puppets of the West’. The US state department called his speech an ‘attempt by the regime to cling to power’. The UN estimated that a total of more than 60,000 had been killed during the Syrian uprising since March 2011, and said that a million were going hungry because aid could not reach them. US drones killed at least ten in three Taleban compounds in South Waziristan in Pakistan’s tribal areas. In Libya, the Liberal National Forces Alliance, the biggest bloc in the national assembly, withdrew from its deliberations in protest against delays in drafting a constitution. Wildfires devastated areas of Tasmania and New South Wales, destroying more than 100 buildings.
In an advertisement in the Guardian and the Independent, President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner of Argentina called British occupation of the Malvinas (Falkland Islands) ‘a blatant exercise of 19th-century colonialism’. Argentina continued to engage in legal actions with hedge funds over its sovereign debt default of 2001. Journalists at a major Chinese paper, the Southern Weekly, went on strike in protest at a provincial propaganda chief writing praise for the Communist party into a New Year leading article. The BBC reported criticism on Twitter in Saudi Arabia of a man in his nineties who married a girl of 15, who ran away back to her parents. A winner of the title Miss Congeniality in Vancouver pleaded guilty to a charge of taking part in a riot in the city in June 2011.
President Barack Obama of the United States nominated Chuck Hagel, a Republican, to be his next defence secretary and John Brennan to head the CIA. President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela missed the date to be sworn in for his new term, as he was in Cuba recovering from cancer surgery. Unemployment in the eurozone reached 11.8 per cent, and 26.6 per cent in Spain. Gérard Depardieu, who had complained of high taxes in France, hugged President Vladimir Putin at the vulgar Black Sea resort of Sochi as the actor received a Russian passport. Wolf attacks on reindeer were met by a state of emergency in the Sakha Republic, in north-eastern Russia, where 3,000 wolves are to be shot in the next three months. –CSH
Comments