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Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, said that, to guarantee the security of Ukraine, he was ‘ready and willing’ to put ‘our own troops on the ground if necessary. I do not say that lightly’. Parliament would be allowed a vote on such a deployment, the government said. Earlier, Sir Keir took an unannounced telephone call from President Donald Trump of America about their forthcoming meeting. Afterwards, Mr Trump said: ‘We have a lot of good things going on. But he asked to come and see me and I just accepted his asking.’ The Chiltern Firehouse hotel in Marylebone burnt down.
The Lady Chief Justice, Baroness Carr of Walton-on-the-Hill, the most senior judge in England and Wales, said she was ‘deeply troubled’ by comments made by Sir Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch at Prime Minister’s Questions over a judge’s ruling in an immigration case, which allowed a Palestinian family into Britain though they had originally applied under an arrangement for Ukrainians. In the week to 17 February, 339 migrants arrived in small boats; one died in a swamped boat off Calais. Scottish jails began to release 390 prisoners early in the face of overcrowding. A 32-storey tower being built at 85 Gracechurch Street in the City of London will be modified to display underground remains of the Roman basilica discovered there.
The annual rate of inflation rose to 3 per cent in January, from 2.5 per cent a month earlier. The annual rate of pay rises in the last quarter of 2024 was 2.5 per cent, after inflation, according to the Office for National Statistics. Thames Water, which supplies about a quarter of the population of the United Kingdom, was offered loans of £3 billion at 9.75 per cent interest to allow it time for restructuring in the face of debts of £17 billion. The Duchess of Sussex announced a new name for her lifestyle brand of jam and things: As Ever. Joe Haines, Harold Wilson’s press secretary, died aged 97.
Abroad
The US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, and Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, held talks in Saudi Arabia about Ukraine. Ukraine was not invited and nor were European powers. Afterwards, Mr Trump said of Ukraine: ‘You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.’ Mr Lavrov said after the talks that Russia would not accept peacekeeping forces from Nato countries in Ukraine: ‘Any appearance by armed forces under some other flag does not change anything.’ The talks followed a telephone conversation between President Trump and President Vladimir Putin. Mr Trump spoke afterwards to President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, who said later: ‘We will never accept deals made behind our back without our involvement.’ At a summit of European leaders on Ukraine in Paris, Olaf Scholz, the Chancellor of Germany, said that discussing sending troops to Ukraine was ‘completely premature’. Earlier, at the Munich Security Conference, J.D. Vance, the Vice-President of America, had made a speech. He said: ‘The threat that I worry the most about vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China or any other external actor – what I worry about is the threat from within.’ He said that ‘our very dear friends, the United Kingdom’ had ‘placed the basic liberties of religious Britons, in particular, in the crosshairs’.
Hamas released another three Israeli hostages in exchange for 369 Palestinians held in Israeli jails. A woman of 37 and her two-year-old daughter died after a car was driven into a crowd in Munich, injuring at least 37 people; police arrested the driver, a 24-year-old Afghan asylum seeker. A 14-year-old boy was killed and five people seriously wounded in a knife attack in Austria; police arrested a 23-year-old Syrian asylum seeker. A British couple, Craig and Lindsay Foreman, whose arrest in Iran in January has only now come to light, were charged with espionage.
M23 rebels (backed by Rwanda) took Bukavu, the second-largest city in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo after Goma, which fell in January. The board of OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT, officially rejected Elon Musk’s offer of $97.4 billion. South Korea accused the new Chinese AI company DeepSeek of sharing users’ data with the owner of TikTok in China. Meta announced plans to build a 31,000-mile undersea cable round the world from the east coast of the United States via Brazil, South Africa, India and Australia to the west coast of the United States. An aeroplane carrying 80 people skidded at Toronto airport and turned over on to its roof; no one was killed. The Pope, in hospital, developed pneumonia in both lungs. CSH
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