Italy goes to the polls on February 24 and 25, after Mario Monti, the country’s technocratic prime minister, announced his resignation in December. He is attempting to safeguard his legacy by standing as a campaigning politician, but Mr Monti faces strong competition.
This interactive graphic shows Italy’s economic standing and its regional disparities and what the newly elected government will have to grapple with once it comes to power. Read more
London has 73 fires each day – and 161 false alarms
The London Fire Brigade has published its incident data for the past four years in the London Data Store, the capital’s open data repository.
The data, originally obtained by the Financial Times under the Freedom of Information Act and published last week in our London Fire Brigade response times map, is being released as open data because of widespread interest in the potential impact of fire station closures.
The London Fire Authority is defying mayor Boris Johnson’s order to put the proposed cuts to public consultation. The £45m cut in the brigade’s budget over two years, would see 12 fire stations, 18 engines and 520 jobs go. Read more
Two Conservative-led London councils have joined opposition mayor Boris Johnson’s plan to close or shrink fire stations in their boroughs as part of £48m in budget cuts over two years.
This interactive map shows the speed with London Fire Brigade can currently respond to incidents at the most detailed level ever published.Using the Freedom of Information Act, the Financial Times obtained data on nearly 500,000 incidents that the London Fire Brigade has responded to since introducing its current incident management system in November 2008.
The UK census: mapping languages
By Martin Stabe and Callum Locke
The latest England and Wales census data throw a spotlight onto an increasingly multi-lingual population – at least where London is concerned. In the capital one in five households do not speak English as their main language. However, London is far from representative of the country as a whole.
You can use this interactive map to explore clusters of languages around the country. Choose the language in the drop down menu, then zoom into areas of interest.
One million households in England and Wales do not speak English as their main language with Polish the most common foreign tongue, new data from the 2011 census revealed on Wednesday.
The survey also showed married households were in a minority for the first time since records began and that the number of unrelated adults sharing houses has shot up 28 per cent over the decade.
London has by far the largest proportion of non-English speakers with almost one in four adults with a foreign language as their mother tongue. White ethnic Britons are now a minority in London, data released last month showed.All London boroughs apart from the City of London reported more than 100 primary languages.
Average incomes from pensions are highest in the Conservative heartlands of the South of Britain, so this is where the pain would be felt if winter fuel allowances, free bus passes and free TV licences for pensioners were means-tested.
In this interactive map, parliamentary constituencies are grouped according to the taxpayers’ mean income from pensions. The constituencies are pooled into five equally-sized groups with those with the richest pensioners shaded darkest, and the poorest pensioners lightest. These can be compared with the party of the current MP for each area.
| About this blog | Blog guide |
Kate Allen works in the editorial statistics team in London. She previously specialised in housing data reporting for a national trade magazine.
Chris Cook works in the FT's comment team. After joining the FT in 2008 as a Peter Martin Fellow, he worked for two years as a leader writer and then as education correspondent.
Emily Cadman joined the FT in 2010 and is head of the interactive desk.
Martin Stabe works on the FT's interactive team, specialising in databases for interactive graphics.
Keith Fray heads the editorial statistics team, providing data for articles and graphics. His background is in economics, studying at Birkbeck College, London.
Norma Cohen is the FT's Demography Correspondent.
Valentina Romei is a statistical researcher at the FT. She joined the FT in 2008 after working both as an academic and market researcher.
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