The week: Royal Mail shares; American shutdown; Afghan cricket

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An issue of shares in Royal Mail was oversubscribed, pushing valuation well above initial forecasts of £3.3 billion. The IMF forecast British growth for 2013 to be 1.4 per cent; its estimate in July had been 0.9 per cent. The Commons Treasury select committee warned the Chancellor of the Exchequer that the government ‘Help to Buy’ scheme was likely to ‘raise house prices rather than stimulate new supply’. Peter Higgs, from Britain, and François Englert from Belgium, shared the Nobel prize for physics, for their work on the Higgs boson.

Publicising GCHQ information ‘hands the advantage to the terrorists. It is the gift they need to evade us and strike at will,’ said Andrew Parker, the chief of MI5, in a speech, clearly referring to Edward Snowden’s disclosures. ‘Not one person’ previously deported from Britain had been prevented from boarding a plane back again under the government’s e-borders scheme, according to a report by John Vine, the chief inspector of borders. Proposals by the press to set up a regulator under a royal charter were rejected by the sub-committee of the Privy Council which approves new royal charters. The Privy Council is to meet at the end of this month to consider government proposals. School leavers in England are worse at maths and English than their grandparents and rank 22nd for literacy and 21st for numeracy out of 24 developed nations, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The Director of Public Prosecutions said it was ‘right’ not to charge two doctors alleged to have offered abortions based on gender, because it would not be possible to prove that gender alone was the criterion. The number of dissolutions of civil partnerships in England and Wales rose from 663 in 2011 to 794 last year; 7,037 civil partnerships were contracted last year.