The Mail on Sunday newspaper claimed the former Labour prime minister's team of bodyguards cost the taxpayer more than £250,000 per year on expenses alone. · An investigation by the paper revealed details on the cost of providing round-the-clock protection for Mr Blair as he took holidays and international business trips. · The paper reveals claims of more than £1,200-a-night for accommodation in hotels, limousine hire and thousands of pounds in cash for overseas trips. · The investigation lists a series of holidays including a two-week break Blair took in Borneo, where officers ran up a bill of more than £20,000

Honda Motor Co employees in China on Thursday threatened another strike over a salary dispute. The staff temporarily returned to work on Wednesday at the plant in Foshan, southern China, after a strike that had halted Honda production in the country.

Protesters angry at Ireland's multi-billion efforts to bail out its banks have tried to storm the entrance of the Irish parliament and several have been injured in scuffles with police.

A massive wildcat general strike of nearly 20,000 auto, steel, port and public health workers is in its twelth day and is spreading across Algeria, amid repeated pitched battles with thousands of cops and security forces. Workers are also defying the ban on public rallies and demonstrations, stemming from a “state of emergency” declared by the government in the early 1990s. Strikers are demanding a wage hike and changes in the minimum wage and tax laws. They’re also denouncing the sweetheart deal signed by their unions which raises the retirement age from 50 to 60 for workers doing difficult and dangerous work, some of whom began working at age 17.

The gap between Britain's richest and poorest is wider than ever before, according to the Hills report. · A detailed and startling analysis of how unequal Britain has become offers a snapshot of an increasingly divided nation where the richest 10% of the population are more than 100 times as wealthy as the poorest 10% of society. · The new findings show that the household wealth of the top 10% of the population stands at £853,000 and more – over 100 times higher than the wealth of the poorest 10%, which is £8,800 or below (a sum including cars and other possessions). · When the highest-paid workers, such as bankers and chief executives, are put into the equation, the division in wealth is even more stark, with individuals in the top 1% of the population each possessing total household wealth...

Up to 42,000 mail centre staff and network drivers launched a 24-hour strike, while 78,000 delivery and collection workers will walk out tomorrow. · CWU members voted by 3-1 in favour of a national strike in a ballot complaining that jobs were being axed, pay cut and working conditions made worse. · Union shows its true colours · "People are saying we are against modernisation as a union but we are not," he said. "Sixty-thousand jobs have gone from this business in the last five years in agreement with the union. That's not a union against modernisation. What we want to do is get Royal Mail fit for the 21st century, but it's got to be through agreement, not dictatorship or imposition.

America must brace itself for the dollar to be usurped as the world's reserve currency as US dominance wanes in the wake of the financial crisis, World Bank president Robert Zoellick warns today. · Speaking ahead of the World Bank/IMF annual meetings in Istanbul, Zoellick said that it was time for a "responsible globalisation", in which decision-making is more fairly shared between the old economic powers and fast-growing developing countries such as China and India. · Ever since the post-war Bretton Woods agreement, which cemented the dollar's ascendancy over sterling, Americans have been able to rely on borrowing cheaply from the rest of the world as governments banked on the dollar as a safe bet.

Mexico and Central America are said to be one of the regions most affeted by the crisis. The often illegal economic migration to the USA was traditionally a mitigating factor. A study prepared for the BBC by the Migration Policy Institute revealed that in the past three years the number of new migrants from Mexico to the United States fell considerably, dropping from 653,000 between March 2004 and March 2005 to only 175,000 in the same period in 2008 and 2009. · the following statistics are from BBC mundo · Mexico - 12.5 million work in informal sector. · ILO say 500 000 workers sacked in Central America. · 5 .1 million people in food poverty in Mexico. · 50% suffer chronic nutrition in Guatemala. · Half of population of El Salvador, Honduras y Nicaragua suffer malnutrition.

Not content with murdering miners, the chinese rich scum just have to rub it in.... · A millionaire in northern China paid four million yuan (600,000 dollars) for a dog and ordered 30 luxury cars to come to the airport to greet her and the animal, local media reported. · The woman and her new pet -- a black Tibetan Mastiff -- flew into Xi'an, capital of Shaanxi province, a report on popular news portal said. · A convoy of 30 black Mercedes-Benz cars, led by two sports utility vehicles, drove to the airport Wednesday to pick up the pair, who had arrived from the Tibetan-populated province of Qinghai in China's northwest. · Photos of the event posted with the report showed a committee of dog-lovers holding up a long red banner welcoming the mastiff to Xi'an.

The total number of unemployed people rose by about one million from a year earlier to 3.59 million as companies slashed costs to cope with the worst recession in decades. · Official figures last week showed the world's second largest economy grew in April-June for the first time in five quarters, limping out of recession, but many ordinary people say they are not feeling the recovery. · Japanese companies are also struggling. Toyota Motor said Friday it was abandoning a plant in California that it jointly owned with General Motors -- the first time the Japanese firm has ever pulled the plug on a factory. · "The overall economic picture in Japan remains weak," Societe Generale analysts wrote in a research note.

The rich /poor divide made the headlines again due to the publication of "Unleashing Aspiration; The final Report of The Panel on Fair Access to the Professions" · From the Guardian · Sometimes the obvious needs to be stated. Britain is an unequal society. The elite look after their own. Poverty traps people from one generation to another. Government action and huge expenditure have at best stopped social division worsening. Encouraging aspiration is hard. And these conclusions, from yesterday's excellent report on access to the professions, sit alongside some startling individual facts. · There are, it reveals, more students of black Caribbean origin at London Metropolitan University than in all the 20 Russell Group universities put together.

The economy shrank at its fastest rate for more than 50 years in the first quarter of 2009, with output down 2.4 per cent - much worse than estimated. Output had been estimated to fall to 1.9 per cent, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said. · The decline in the first three months of the year equals a 2.4 per cent slump seen in 1974 and is the worst since a 2.6 per cent fall seen in 1958. · The recession also began earlier than expected, with a 0.1 per cent decline seen between April and June last year compared with previous estimates of zero growth. · Following the revision - which also saw a deeper 1.8 per cent decline in the final quarter of 2008 - the UK's output is now 4.9 per cent below the level seen before the recession.

Contract workers across Britain are being urged to continue taking wildcat strike action as efforts to resolve a bitter jobs row continue. · Talks aimed at resolving the dispute following the sacking of almost 650 workers at Lindsey oil refinery in North Lincolnshire have been adjourned and will resume on Thursday. · Sources said some progress was made during the talks but there are still "significant barriers". · Unions are demanding the reinstatement of the sacked workers and guarantees of no victimisation of activists involved in sympathy strikes, as well as jobs for 51 employees laid off at Lindsey earlier this month.

French oil company Total said on Friday that 1,200 contractors have walked out on unofficial strike over planned redundancies at its British Lindsey refinery.