UK Financial Investments, which oversees the British government’s stake in RBS, Lloyds and Northern Rock, said it might be 2015 before taxpayers got back the £40 billion used to prop up failing banks.
UK Financial Investments, which oversees the British government’s stake in RBS, Lloyds and Northern Rock, said it might be 2015 before taxpayers got back the £40 billion used to prop up failing banks. Barclays’ profits increased to £11.6 billion in 2009, a rise of 92 per cent over the year before. Mr Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, said that the world’s leading economies were close to agreeing an international levy on banks. Twenty economists, including four former members of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee, said in a letter to the Sunday Times that there should be action to reduce ‘the structural budget deficit more quickly than set out in the 2009 Pre-Budget Report’. The rate of inflation rose to 3.5 per cent in January from 2.9 per cent the month before, as measured by the Consumer Prices Index. The Retail Prices Index, which includes housing costs, put inflation at 3.7 per cent, up from 2.4 per cent. Unemployment for the last quarter of 2009 remained little changed at 2.46 million, but the number claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance in January rose to 1.64 million, the highest since April 1997. A repair man from Cirencester won a £56 million lottery prize, which he said he intended to share with the woman he has lived with for eight years, their three children from previous marriages, and a spaniel. The General Synod of the Church of England voted to extend equal pension rights to the homosexual civil partners of deceased clergy. Mr Andy Powell was dropped from the Welsh Six Nations squad after being arrested in a golf buggy on the M4 at six o’clock on the morning following his team’s victory against Scotland, and charged with drink driving.
Mr Brown gave a lengthy, prerecorded television interview to Mr Piers Morgan in which he talked of family tragedies and his love for his wife, which, he said, blossomed on an aeroplane. ‘You didn’t join the mile high club, did you?’ chirped Mr Morgan. An independent report into the stranding of thousands of passengers in the Channel Tunnel for hours, in stifling darkness, before Christmas, after snow got into engines, criticised Eurostar for a lack of planning. The British National Party changed its constitution to let black and Asian people join; the Equality and Human Rights Commission had threatened it with court action. Cy Grant, who sang topical calypsos on television for Tonight in the 1950s, died, aged 90. Dick Francis, the late Queen Mother’s champion jockey and a thriller writer who sold 60 million, died, aged 89; in the 1956 Grand National, he had ridden Devon Loch, which mysteriously collapsed yards from the finish. Alexander McQueen, the fashion designer, died at home in London, aged 40, having apparently hanged himself on the eve of his mother’s funeral. Paul Mason, the world’s fattest man, who reached 70 stone, returned home to Ipswich, Suffolk, after an operation to reduce the size of his stomach.
Some 15,000 Nato and Afghan troops began operation Moshtarak (meaning ‘together’ in Dari), an offensive in central Helmand in Afghanistan. United States Marines moved on the Taleban stronghold around Marjah while British forces concentrated on Nad Ali, both a few miles further south in the irrigated valley of the Helmand river from the area on which operation Panther’s Claw focused last year. Of the area’s population of about 125,000, perhaps 1,000 were said to be Taleban fighters. Two American rockets hit a house in Marjah, and 12 civilians, including six children, were killed. The most senior Afghan Taleban commander, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, was captured in Pakistan, according to US officials. The United States is to build two nuclear power stations, in Georgia, the first since the Three Mile Island incident in 1979.
Finance ministers from the 16 eurozone countries told Greece that it must make further cuts to spending or face sterner action in a month’s time. The warning came after words of support for Greece from a summit of European Union national leaders led only to the fall of the euro against the dollar. Two commuter trains crashed head-on in Belgium, killing 18 and injuring 170. Six British and three Irish passports, said to have been used by suspects wanted by Dubai police for the murder of a leading Hamas official on 20 January, are fakes, according to the issuing authorities. Hamas blames Israel for the murder. A British man living in Israel whose identity was stolen in the crime said, ‘I am obviously angry, upset and scared.’ Dozens of North Africans smashed windows of shops belonging to South Americans in a suburb of Milan. Mr Ferran Adrià says his celebrated restaurant, El Bulli, in Catalonia, was struggling financially; it will be closed for replanning in 2012 and 2013. CSH
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