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Teachers went on strike. Train drivers and railway workers went on strike for two days, with a day’s rest in between. Civil servants belonging to the Public and Commercial Services Union went on strike, including some who work for Border Force. Firemen voted to go on strike. Nurses and ambulance staff decided to go on strike next week. During a visit to Darlington, Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, told an audience of health workers: ‘I would love, nothing would give me more pleasure, than to wave a magic wand and have everyone, all of you, paid lots more.’ The Commons voted for a bill to impose minimum service levels in some kinds of work during strikes.

The International Monetary Fund said that the UK economy would contract by 0.6 per cent this year. The United Kingdom produced 775,014 cars last year, compared with 1.3 million a year before the pandemic, and fewer than in any year since 1956. Jeremy Hunt, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said: ‘It is unlikely that we would have the room for any significant tax cuts,’ in the Budget in March. House prices fell 0.6 per cent from December’s figure, the fifth monthly drop in a row, according to Nationwide. The annual rate of inflation for groceries, including dog food, rose to 16.7 per cent, according to the retail analysts Kantar. Tesco is to close its remaining delicatessen and food counters and cut the jobs of 1,750 team managers in favour of using 1,800 lower-paid workers. It also bought the Paperchase stationery brand, but not its 106 shops.

Nadhim Zahawi was sacked as Conservative party chairman by the Prime Minister, whose independent ethics adviser Sir Laurie Magnus found that he had breached the ministerial code seven times by failing to disclose that HM Revenue and Customs was investigating his tax affairs. Isla Bryson, a transgender woman found guilty of raping two women, was transferred from Scotland’s only women’s prison. The Home Office took back from the Royal Navy responsibility for dealing with small boats carrying migrants across the Channel. The British Trust for Ornithology found that it had been locked out of its Twitter account because it had used the word woodcock.

Abroad

Ukraine said that it needed jet fighters from its western allies to support the Abrams tanks promised by the United States in addition to tanks from Britain, Poland and Germany. In an interview with the BBC, Boris Johnson, the former prime minister of the UK, said of President Vladimir Putin, before the invasion of Ukraine: ‘He threatened me at one point, and he said “Boris, I don’t want to hurt you but, with a missile, it would only take a minute”, or something like that. Jolly.’ In France a million people demonstrated amid strikes against the government plan to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64. In Australia 648 people were charged in a four-day police crackdown on domestic violence. A pea-sized radioactive capsule was found among pebbles after falling from a vehicle on an 870-mile journey across Western Australia. More than 100 people were killed when a bomb was set off in a mosque in Peshawar, Pakistan, where many policemen were praying.

The Pope began a visit to the DRC and South Sudan. Seven people were shot dead at a synagogue in the settlement of Neve Yaakov in East Jerusalem. Ten Palestinians had been killed the day before in an Israeli military raid in Jenin. Antony Blinken, the US Secretary of State, on a visit to Jerusalem, said freedom and justice could best be achieved by ‘realising the vision of two states’ for Israelis and Palestinians. The US government was reported to have stopped approving licences for the export of items to the Chinese technology company Huawei. A Taiwanese man was sentenced to two months in prison and had to pay compensation equivalent to US $91,350 after his macaw startled a plastic surgeon out jogging, making him fall and break his hip.

Five black policemen were sacked and charged with murder after a black man, Tyre Nichols, 29, was shockingly beaten in Memphis, Tennessee. George Santos, the Republican congressman who was found to have given an account of his life that was untrue in many points, decided not to serve on any committees in the US House of Representatives. People in British Columbia were allowed to possess up to 2.5mg of cocaine, heroin or fentanyl after Canada’s federal government gave the province exemption from the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act.    CSH