British Airways will face the renewed threat of strikes by its cabin crew tomorrow when the result of the latest ballot in a long-running dispute will be announced.

Telegraph Media Group (TMG), the company that publishes The Telegraph newspaper, score a profits rise of 11 per cent last year. The group filed its accounts with Companies House yesterday, which showed pre-tax profits rose from £53.1m in 2009 to £58.9m a year later.

The publishing group Mecom paid its former chief executive David Montgomery €1.5m (£1.3m) after he was ousted in January from the company he founded.

Northern Rock's executive chairman stoked expectations of an imminent move out of public ownership yesterday when he said the bank did not need to make a profit before returning to the private sector.

Bunzl

For Phyllida Lloyd, the decision must have been straightforward. Not only has she worked with Meryl Streep before, but she knows that – in casting the Oscar-winner as Margaret Thatcher in the forthcoming biopic Iron Lady – she is almost guaranteed a hit. Streep, after all, is both extremely famous and extremely bankable. Last year Forbes named her the seventh best value-for-money star in Hollywood. The third woman on the list, she was trumped only by Anne Hathaway and Jennifer Aniston. She is, at least on the face of things, a pretty sound bit of casting.

A quarter of the RAF's trainee pilots are to be sacked in the latest stage of the the Government's defence cuts, it was reported.

Police chiefs today defended cost-cutting plans which could see changes to the way checks are carried out on gun owners.

Corporate profits surged by up to a quarter last year, with 69 per cent of fourth-quarter results outstripping market expectations and companies increasingly optimistic about 2011, a survey from consultancy Deloitte says.

Ex-chief executive?

Yes, Mr Montgomery left the newspaper publisher yesterday – "with immediate effect" as Mecom put it.

The streets are littered with the remnants of Christmas – browning pine trees and binbags bursting with tinsel and shredded wrapping paper.

Outlook It may be the festive spirit, or the optimism with which many people look forward to the fresh start of a new year, but the final few weeks of December are very often marked by a decent run for the stock market. So it is proving in 2010: on Christmas Eve, the FTSE 100 Index closed back above the 6,000 mark for the first time in 30 months, and the market is holding on to the gains of the year.

British Airways cabin crew started voting today on whether to take fresh industrial action in their long-running dispute with the airline.

The union representing British Airways cabin crew today gave the airline formal seven days notice of its intention to hold a fresh strike ballot in its long-running dispute with the company.