Home
Moussa Koussa, the Libyan foreign minister who flew to Britain on 30 March, made a televised speech in Arabic, saying that Libya could be another Somalia if it was allowed to sink into civil war. He then flew to Doha, the capital of Qatar, for an international contact group meeting on Libya’s future. Officers from the Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary had an opportunity to interview him about the Lockerbie atrocity of 1988 before he left. ‘The UK has in the last week supplied additional aircraft for striking ground targets threatening the civilian population of Libya,’ William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, told a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Luxembourg. ‘It would be welcome if other countries also do the same.’ An able seaman was charged with the murder of an officer aboard HMS Astute, a nuclear submarine, during an incident when shots were fired.
Banks will have to ‘ring-fence’ their retail operations and increase capital reserves, according to the interim report of the Independent Commission on Banking under Sir John Vickers. In calling for more competition it singled out Lloyds, which would have to sell more than the 600 branches already agreed with European regulators. In response to a question from Robert Peston of the BBC, Sir John said: ‘I absolutely reject any notion that we bottled it.’ The Duke of Grafton died, aged 92.
The annual rate of inflation (measured by CPI) fell to 4 per cent in March from 4.4 per cent in February; by the RPI, the fall was from 5.5 to 5.3 per cent. Food and drink prices had gone down, against a rise a year earlier. The figures led to a fall in the pound against the dollar because investors believed that they made the Bank of England less likely to raise interest rates. Unemployment fell by 17,000 in the three months to the end of February to 2.48 million. Gillian Duffy, whom Gordon Brown had mistakenly referred to as a ‘bigoted woman’ before the election, met Nick Clegg on a visit to Rochdale. She asked: ‘Can you honestly look me in the eye and tell me you are happy with all these policies what have gone wrong for you?’
Abroad
Laurent Gbagbo, the former President of Ivory Coast, was captured by the forces of his rival Alassane Ouattara after French and UN helicopters fired rockets at his headquarters. More bodies were found at Duekoue in western Ivory Coast, which fell to forces loyal to President Ouattara at the beginning of April. An uncertain number of people were killed when security forces fired on protesters in Deraa, Beniyas and other places in Syria. President Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen rejected a plan by the Gulf Co-operation Council to have him step down in return for immunity from prosecution; hundreds were injured in continuing protests in Sanaa. The former Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, was arrested but taken to hospital in Sharm el-Sheikh when he suffered heart trouble during questioning. French police issued a ticket imposing a £132 fine on a woman in Mureaux, northwest of Paris, under a new law banning the full Islamic veil.
Uhuru Kenyatta, Kenya’s Deputy Prime Minister, appeared at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, accused of links to violence in which 1,000 died after elections in December 2007. Pakistan is asking more than 300 US personnel to leave and wants the United States to restrict its use of drones to kill people in north-west Pakistan, according to the New York Times. In Afghanistan, a drone was blamed for killing two US servicemen by mistake in Helmand. Police in Swaziland dispersed protesters calling for a constitutional monarchy. Police in South Korea found banknotes worth 11 billion won (£6.2 million) buried in a field of garlic.
The nuclear power station at Fukushima, ruined in the Japanese tsunami, was reclassified as a level-seven incident, a classification made before only for Chernobyl. Iceland voted in a fresh referendum against a plan to repay Britain and Holland the four billion euros they paid investors in the failed Landsbanki in 2008. The International Monetary Fund urged the United States to deal with its deficit, which has reached $1,400 billion this year. Allied Irish Banks is to cut more than 2,000 jobs in 2011 and 2012, after losing €10.2 billion in 2010. The EU brought in electronic reporting methods that it said would detect infringements of its fisheries policy ‘from net to plate’. A US Navy ship tested a high-energy laser and successfully set fire to the engines of a nearby small vessel. CSH
Comments