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The Appeal Court found that requiring Cait Reilly, 24, a graduate, to work for nothing at a Poundland store in order to claim benefit was unlawful; the government both appealed against the judgment and set about adjusting the relevant regulations. From 2019 or later, no one in England will have to pay more than £75,000 towards old-age care (not including food, heating and paying for a room) under plans announced by Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary; payment would cease once someone has less than £123,000 left. A quarter of home-care services for old people in England fail to meet proper standards of quality or safety, according to inspectors from the Care Quality Commission. In January, the rate of inflation measured by the CPI remained unchanged at 2.7 per cent for the fourth month in a row; as measured by the RPI it rose from 3.1 to 3.3 per cent. An air ambulance called to help an insensible woman in a locked car in Harwich found that it was a shop-window dummy.
Barclays said it would cut 3,700 of its 140,000 staff, 1,800 of them from its investment side, mostly in Asia. Up to two million households will lose television signals through interference from 4G mobile phones unless filters are fitted, Ofcom warned. Patricia Hughes, the former Radio 3 announcer, died, aged 90. A pub landlord fought off two attackers in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, trying to steal his mobile phone; he was stabbed in the chest but kept hold of the fish and chips he had bought for his dinner.
Pope Benedict XVI, aged 85, said that, because age had left him with an ‘incapacity to fulfil adequately the ministry entrusted to me’, he was resigning with effect from 28 February, after which a conclave will elect his successor. In France, the National Assembly voted by 329 to 229 in favour of a law allowing same-sex couples to marry and adopt children. In Spain parliament voted for bullfighting to be declared a protected national cultural pastime. The European Parliament voted to reform the EU Common Fisheries Policy, with measures to end the discarding of dead fish. Five crewmen died in an accident that saw a lifeboat fall 65ft during a drill on the Thomson cruise ship Majesty at La Palma, Canary Islands.
North Korea exploded a nuclear device underground, which it called a response to US ‘hostility’. The UN Security Council ‘strongly condemned’ the test. In his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama of the United States said that the task of this generation was ‘to reignite the true engine of America’s economic growth — a rising, thriving middle class’. He said that 34,000 of 66,000 US troops in Afghanistan would leave by early 2014. In a YouTube message, after a greeting in Swahili, Mr Obama urged the people of Kenya to avoid violence in elections next month. Venezuela devalued the bolivar from 4.3 to the US dollar to 6.3. Eighteen miners died in an explosion in a coalmine near Vorkuta in the Russian Arctic.
Thousands of people took to the streets of Tunis blaming Ennahda, the main Islamist party in the governing coalition, for the killing of the opposition politician Chokri Belaid. Malian troops fought running battles with Islamist militants in the northern town of Gao. In Syria dozens died each day in fighting. Rebels there were reported to have seized control of the country’s largest hydroelectric dam, on the Euphrates in the northern province of Raqa, and a military air base near the northern city of Aleppo. Wrestling is to be dropped from the 2020 Olympics. –CSH
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