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Theresa May, the Prime Minister, went off to Brussels again to talk about ‘alternative arrangements’, for which parliament had voted, to the Irish backstop in her EU withdrawal agreement, which parliament had rejected. First she gave a speech in Northern Ireland, saying: ‘There is no suggestion that we are not going to ensure in the future there is provision for this insurance policy… the backstop.’ Lord Trimble (once an Ulster Unionist, now Conservative), the winner of a Nobel Peace Prize, said he was ‘exploring’ the possibility of a legal challenge to May’s deal on the grounds that it undermines the Belfast Agreement of 1998. The coroner for Northern Ireland said deaths from counterfeit versions of Xanax, an anti-anxiety drug not prescribed in the NHS, had doubled from 26 in 2017; in Scotland deaths had risen from 24 in 2016 to 99 in 2017. The actor Liam Neeson, from Ballymena, said that, after a friend told him she had been raped by a black man, he went round with a cosh ‘hoping some “black bastard” would come out of a pub and have a go at me… so I could kill him.’
May was not planning an election for 6 June, Downing Street insisted. After Nissan announced it would not develop its future model the X-Trail 4×4 in Sunderland, someone leaked the letter that the government had secretly sent it, promising £61 million for research and development, if it was made in Britain. Ryanair posted a loss of £17.2 million for the last three months of 2018. The wreckage of the light aircraft lost on 21 January while carrying Emiliano Sala, the footballer, and a pilot, David Ibbotson, was found on the seabed near Guernsey
A single-night snapshot of rough-sleepers found 4,677 in England in autumn 2018, 1,283 of them in London; in autumn 2010 the estimate for England had been 1,768.

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