UK: No public funding for new royal yacht. LONDON (AP) — What do you get for a monarch who has almost everything?
Not, apparently, a new yacht, at least not one paid for with taxpayer funds. That was the message Monday as a brief boomlet of support for the idea of providing Queen Elizabeth II with a new royal yacht to mark her Diamond Jubilee was quickly deflated by Prime Minister David Cameron. Water bills in England and Wales to rise 5.7% in April. 31 January 2012Last updated at 10:34 Ofwat's Regina Finn explains the reasons behind the rise Average water and sewerage bills in England and Wales will rise by 5.7% from April to about £376 per household.
The average figure disguises variations between water and sewerage firms, with customers at Southern seeing an 8.2% rise and those at Dwr Cymru 3.8%. In 2009 the industry regulator, Ofwat, announced a five-year plan of annual rises from 2010 to 2015 to help fund £22bn of investments. Ofwat said it understood that any rises in tough times were unwelcome. Undercover police had children with activists. Two undercover police officers secretly fathered children with political campaigners they had been sent to spy on and later disappeared completely from the lives of their offspring, the Guardian can reveal.
In both cases, the children have grown up not knowing that their biological fathers – whom they have not seen in decades – were police officers who had adopted fake identities to infiltrate activist groups. Both men have concealed their true identities from the children's mothers for many years. One of the spies was Bob Lambert, who has already admitted that he tricked a second woman into having a long-term relationship with him, as part of an intricate attempt to bolster his credibility as a committed campaigner. The second police spy followed the progress of his child and the child's mother by reading confidential police reports which tracked the mother's political activities and life.