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Katia Zatuliveter, 25, a Russian working for Mike Hancock, a Liberal Democrat MP who sits on the House of Commons Defence Select Committee, was arrested. She appealed against a deportation order, made after an investigation by MI5, and denied alleged links to Russian intelligence services. John Varley, the chief executive of Barclays, told a seminar: ‘It is possible that free-if-in-credit banking is a structure that has outlived its time.’ After a 17-month investigation, the Financial Services Authority found that the Royal Bank of Scotland and its former chief executive Sir Fred Goodwin were not guilty of fraud, dishonesty or failure of governance before the government bought a 70 per cent stake to prevent its collapse. Susan Philipsz, an artist who works entirely with the sound of her own voice, won the Turner Prize.
Snow and freezing temperatures returned after a day’s thaw. In Scotland 2,000 drivers were stranded on the road overnight. Representatives of energy companies told the Commons Energy Committee that prices would rise by 15 to 25 per cent by 2020. The UK National Screening Committee said that universal screening for prostate cancer using a blood test called PSA was not advisable, because of over-diagnosis. A study published in the Lancet found that in middle age a daily dose of 75mg of aspirin taken for five years notably reduced the incidence of common cancers. On Radio 4’s Today, James Naughtie accidentally but clearly pronounced the surname of Jeremy Hunt, the Culture Secretary, with an initial C.
Liberal Democrats became agitated about how to vote on the raising of university tuition fees in the Commons this week: popular choices were: for, against and abstain. David Davis, a Conservative backbencher, decided to vote against. David Chaytor, a former Labour MP, pleaded guilty to charges of false accounting in relation to his parliamentary expenses, and will be sentenced early next year. Sarah Teather, the Children’s Minister, asked Reg Bailey, the chief executive of the Mothers’ Union, to conduct a review of clothes that sexualise little children. Reading standards in British secondary schools fell to 25th out of 65 countries surveyed by Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development; in 2006, the position had been 17th. Pagan prisoners were excused work duties for Imbolc, the festival of lactating sheep, next February, during which they would be free to fashion phallic wands in their cells.
Abroad
WikiLeaks, the online group, released United States diplomatic telegrams revealing that Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, had warned last year that donors in Saudi Arabia were the ‘most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide’. Another diplomatic telegram suggested that senior Chinese figures had been behind the hacking of Google earlier this year. Amazon withdrew use of its server facilities from WikiLeaks. The Swiss post office bank, PostFinance, froze the accounts of Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks. He was arrested by appointment at a London police station, and was remanded in custody until a hearing of an extradition application from Sweden on charges of sexual assault. A shark killed a 70-year-old German woman at Sharm el-Sheikh, the Egyptian Red Sea resort.
Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, dismissed two widely supported ideas for solving the eurozone crisis: increasing the size of the European Union’s rescue fund and creating a European bond, as proposed by Jean-Claude Juncker, the Prime Minister of Luxembourg. The Fédération Internationale de Football Association decided that the World Cup would be in Russia in 2018 and in Qatar in 2022, to the chagrin of David Cameron, the British Prime Minister, Prince William and David Beckham, who had gone to Switzerland to support England’s bid. The US Treasury was left with a pile of 1.1 billion $100 bills to sort through after a proportion were found to be printed with flaws; checking by hand could take 30 years.
In Egypt, President Hosni Mubarak’s party won 83 per cent of seats after the Muslim Brotherhood boycotted a second round of elections that it said were fraudulent. Both Laurent Gbagbo and Alassane Ouattara were sworn in as president after disputed elections in Ivory Coast. The Spanish government used a royal decree to bring in troops, if needed, to replace air-traffic controllers who went on strike; but they went back to work after annoying 250,000 travellers. Scientists found a bacterium that could build its DNA using arsenic instead of phosphorous, with implications for extraterrestrial life. CSH
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