UK unemployment rate rises to 5.1%
The rate of unemployment in the UK rose to 5.1% in the three months to December, official figures showed.
The Office for National Statistics said 1.74 million people were unemployed in the October to December period, up 454,000 from the same quarter in 2019, BBC reported.
The figures show 726,000 fewer people are currently in payrolled employment than before the start of the pandemic.
Almost three-fifths of this fall, 425,000, has come from those aged under-25.
However, the ONS said that there were some “tentative early signs” of the labor market stabilizing. There was a small increase in the numbers of employees paid through payroll over the past couple of months.
In January 2021, 83,000 more people were in payrolled employment when compared with the previous month.
“Our survey shows that the unemployment rate has had the biggest annual rise since the financial crisis,” said Jonathan Athow, ONS deputy national statistician for economic statistics.
“However, the proportion of people who are neither working nor looking for work has stabilized after rising sharply at the start of the pandemic, with many people who lost their jobs early on having now started looking for work.”
Despite this, Athow told the BBC’S Today program that the true underlying picture was not yet clear due to the high number of people still on furlough.
He said figures from early February suggested that about six million people were currently furloughed, adding: “There is a huge amount of uncertainty about what will happen to them when that scheme ends.”
The Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak is preparing for next week’s budget, which is expected to set out further plans to help the labor market.
“I know how incredibly tough the past year has been for everyone, and every job lost is a personal tragedy,” Sunak said.
“At the Budget next week I will set out the next stage of our Plan for Jobs, and the support we’ll provide through the remainder of the pandemic and our recovery.”
The Bank of England expects the jobless rate to peak at 7.8% in the third quarter if the furlough program finishes as currently planned. That’s almost 2.7 million people, compared with 1.7 million the end of last year, according to Bloomberg.
The number of redundancies rose by 29,000 in the quarter to 343,000, marking the smallest increase since the second quarter of the year. Self employment accounted for all of the decline in the number of people in work.
Business lobbies want the government not only to extend furloughing, but also support for business struggling with mounting debts and negligible sales.
Mike Cherry, chairman of the Federation of Small Businesses, said the headline labor market figures conceal the “incredibly hard choices” that firms are having to make. He urged the government to cut employer national insurance contributions, a payroll tax, and reinstate bonuses for firms that retain workers.
“We’re looking ahead to our recovery,” said the government’s Employment Minister Mims Davies. “Our plan for jobs is creating new opportunities, boosting skills, and delivering a package of support for people of all ages, getting Brits back into work as we push to build back better.”
Average earnings growth accelerated more quickly than expected to 4.7% in the fourth quarter, the highest since 2008. The ONS said the figures were inflated by lower-paid jobs dropping out of the calculation. Underlying pay growth was just under 3%.
Freshwater fish are under threat, with as many as a third of global populations in danger of extinction, according to an assessment. Populations of migratory freshwater fish have plummeted by 76 percent since 1970, and large fish – those weighing more than 30kg – have been all but wiped out in most rivers. The global population of megafish down by 94 percent, and 16 freshwater fish species were declared extinct last year, the Guardian reported.
The report by 16 global conservation organizations, called The World’s Forgotten Fishes, said that global populations of freshwater fish were in freefall. The problems are diverse and include pollution, overfishing and destructive fishing practices, the introduction of invasive non-native species, climate change and the disruption of river ecologies. Most of the world’s rivers are now dammed in parts, have water extracted for irrigation or have their natural flows disrupted, making life difficult for freshwater fish.
The poor state of UK rivers means few support as many fish as would be possible if they were better protected, according to the WWF, one of the groups behind Tuesday’s report.
Environment Agency data showed last year that no English rivers met the highest chemical standards, and only 15 percent of UK rivers were rated as having good ecological status. Farm pollution and sewage outflows were among the leading causes of damage. Dave Tickner, WWF’S chief adviser on freshwater, said, “Freshwater habitats are some of the most vibrant on earth, but they are in catastrophic decline. The UK is no exception – wildlife struggles to survive, let alone thrive, in our polluted waters.”
Salmon, which spend part of their life cycle in freshwater ecosystems, have been in sharp decline in the UK since the 1960s, and the European eel is critically endangered. Burbot and sturgeon are extinct in UK waters.
The Guardian revealed the extent of sewage outflows into rivers last year. Water companies discharged sewage into rivers 200,000 times in England in 2019.
WWF called on the UK government to back an emergency recovery plan for rivers and waterways as part of its wider biodiversity and nature recovery targets. Governments around the world are meeting this year to discuss biodiversity, and halting the destruction of the earth’s natural habitats.
“If we are to take this government’s environmental promises seriously, it must get its act together, clean up our rivers and restore our freshwater habitats to good health,” said Tickner.
“That means proper enforcement of existing laws, strengthening protections in the environment bill to put UK nature on the path to recovery, and championing a strong set of global targets for recovery of nature, including rivers.”
The report found that biodiversity in freshwater ecosystems was being lost at twice the rate of oceans and forests. There are more than 18,000 species of freshwater fish known, and more are still being discovered.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which compiles the global red list of species in danger, has assessed more than 10,000 species and found that about 30 percent were at risk of extinction.
The 16 organizations behind the report were: Alliance for Freshwater Life, Alliance for Inland Fisheries, Conservation International, Fisheries Conservation Foundation, Freshwaters Illustrated, Global Wildlife Conservation, Infish, the IUCN, the Sustainable Seafood Coalition, Mahseer Trust, Shoal, Synchronicity Earth, the Nature Conservancy, World Fish Migration Foundation, the WWF and Zoological Society of London.
NASA on Monday released the first high-quality video of a spacecraft landing on Mars, a threeminute trailer showing the enormous orange and white parachute hurtling open and the red dust kicking up as rocket engines lowered the rover to the surface.
The footage was so good – and the images so breathtaking – that members of the rover team said they felt as if they were riding along, AP reported.
“It gives me goose bumps every time I see it, just amazing,” said Dave Gruel, head of the entry-and-descent camera team.
The Perseverance rover landed Thursday near an ancient river delta in Jezero Crater to search for signs of ancient microscopic life. After spending the weekend bingewatching the descent and landing video, the team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge shared the video at a news conference.
“These videos and these images are the stuff of our dreams,” said Al Chen, who was in charge of the landing team.
Six off-the-shelf color cameras were devoted to entry, descent and landing, looking up and down from different perspectives. All but one camera worked. The lone microphone turned on for landing failed, but NASA got some snippets of sound after touchdown: the whirring of the rover’s systems and wind gusts.
Flight controllers were thrilled with the thousands of images beamed back – and also with the remarkably good condition of NASA’S biggest and most capable rover yet. It will spend the next two years exploring the dry river delta and drilling into rocks that may hold evidence of life 3 billion to 4 billion years ago. The core samples will be set aside for return to Earth in a decade.
NASA’S Perseverance rover descends to the surface of Mars during the skycrane maneuver.
NASA added 25 cameras to the $3-billion mission — the most ever sent to Mars. The space agency’s previous rover, 2012’s Curiosity, managed only jerky, grainy stopmotion images, mostly of terrain. Curiosity is still working. So is NASA’S Insight lander, although it’s hampered by dusty solar panels.
They may have company in late spring, when China attempts
to land its own rover, which went into orbit around Mars two weeks ago.
Deputy project manager Matt Wallace said he was inspired several years ago to film Perseverance’s harrowing descent when his young gymnast daughter wore a camera while performing a backflip.
Some of the spacecraft systems – like the sky crane used to lower the rover onto the Martian surface – could not be tested on Earth.
“So this is the first time we’ve had a chance as engineers to actually see what we designed,” Wallace told reporters.
Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’S science mission chief, said the video and also the panoramic views following touchdown “are the closest you can get to landing on Mars without putting on a pressure suit.”
The images will help NASA prepare for astronaut flights to Mars in the decades ahead, according to the engineers. There’s a more immediate benefit. “I know it’s been a tough year for everybody,” said imaging scientist Justin Maki, “and we’re hoping that maybe these images will help brighten people’s days.”