further seven years in jail, died in Belmarsh
prison aged 69. The trial of three former
Tesco executives charged with fraud and
false accounting was abandoned when one
of them, Carl Rogberg, had a heart attack.M
ichel Barnier, the EU’s chief
negotiator on Brexit, visited No. 10
Downing Street and said that ‘without
a customs union and outside the single
market, barriers to trade in goods and
services are unavoidable’. David Davis,
the Brexit secretary, said that Britain was
‘leaving the customs union’, but wanted
a free trade deal with the EU and also
the freedom to strike deals with other
countries. The British government’s Brexit
cabinet sub-committee met for two days,
to try to discover what it wanted after
Brexit. President Donald Trump tweeted
that ‘thousands of people are marching in
the UK because their U [niversal health]
system is going broke and not working’.
A man who parked at a bus stop on
Christmas Day, when there were no buses,
to give a homeless man food and clothing,
was fined £70 by Leicester City Council.Abroad
I
n the United States, the Dow Jones
Industrial Average index fell by 1,
points, or 4.6 per cent in a day, the largest,
as a percentage, since August 2011. Bitcoin,
which had reached a peak value of $19,
in November, fell below $6,000. A New
Hampshire woman who won $560 million
in a lottery went to law to keep her identity
secret. In Florida Elon Musk launched his
Falcon Heavy rocket capable of putting
a 64 -ton payload into low-Earth orbit.A French judge placed under criminal
investigation, on two charges of rape, Tariq
Ramadan, the professor of contemporary
Islamic studies at St Antony’s College,
Oxford, now remanded in custody in Paris.S
outh Africa’s parliament cancelled the
state of the nation address by President
Jacob Zuma, who was under pressure to
resign. Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of
Germany, said she was making ‘painful
compromises’ to form a coalition. Hong
Kong’s Court of Final Appeal quashed
prison sentences against three leaders of
the 2014 pro-democracy protests, convicted
of unlawful assembly. Pirates freed 22
Indian sailors aboard the oil tanker Marine
Express, captured then released in the Gulf
of Guinea off Benin. An earthquake struck
the Taiwanese city of Hualien. Moscow had
a month’s snow in 36 hours.A
Russian ground-attack aircraft was
shot down in a rebel-held area in the
Syrian province of Idlib, and Hayat Tahrir
al-Sham, jihadists related to al-Qa’eda,
said they had been responsible. The Syrian
government continued to bombard the
besieged rebel enclave of eastern Ghouta,
near Damascus. Five Turkish troops
died when their tank was attacked in the
Afrin region during an offensive against
the US-backed Kurdish YPG (People’s
Protection Units). Holland formally
withdrew its ambassador to Turkey and
said no new Turkish ambassador would be
accepted in the Hague. Banana farmers
feared that Panama disease, which has
devastated Asian plantations, had spread
to Queensland.
CSHHome
S
tagecoach and Virgin could only
manage to run the East Coast rail
franchise for a few more weeks, Chris
Grayling, the Transport Secretary, said,
because ‘Stagecoach got its numbers wrong.
It overbid.’ To cut 2,000 Royal Marines
and the Royal Navy’s two specialist
landing ships, a plan considered by the
Ministry of Defence, would be ‘militarily
illiterate’, the Commons Defence Select
Committee said. Northamptonshire
County Council gave notice that it would
undertake no new expenditure because it
expected to be overspent by £21.1 million
by the end of this tax year; last year it
opened a £53 million headquarters. The
government proposed changes in the law
that prevents heterosexual couples forming
civil partnerships. Twenty of the Queen’s
swans at Windsor have died of bird flu and
another 20 are dying.
A
man known only as ‘Nick’, who falsely
accused famous people of belonging
to a paedophile ring, has been charged with
possession of indecent images of children.
The extradition to the United States of
Lauri Love, a student aged 33, accused of
breaking into US government websites, was
prevented by the high court, which said that
‘Mr Love would probably be determined
to commit suicide, here or in America’.
Darren Osborne, aged 48, convicted
of driving a van into a crowd outside a
mosque in Finsbury Park, north London,
was sentenced to at least 43 years. Terry
Perkins, a ringleader of the Hatton Garden
safe deposit raid in 2015, who last week was
ordered to pay back £6,526,571 or face a