Budget hotel chain Travelodge is to create 1,000 new jobs at 41 new hotels across the UK this year.

Hotel company Travelodge has joined supermarket chain Waitrose to develop three new hotel-and-retail sites, it was announced today.

Here's another example of market research that there was really no need to commission given the predictability of the results.

These youngsters are alienated, they do not feel they have a hope for a better life in our society, they do not want to improve their lives by "decent" means, they have given up hope of getting a job they can enjoy doing and earning a salary that would allow them to enjoy the goods they crave.

Yorkshire Building Society announced on Monday that it is taking over the Egg brand, as well as all the savings and mortgage customers of the online bank. It's a good move for the Yorkshire and a good move for the remaining customers of Egg who will become part of a mutual (the credit card users were sold off to Barclaycard earlier this year).

We hear one of the stumbling blocks to a deal between Nasdaq and the London Stock Exchange is the question of leadership – specifically whether the former's Bob Greifeld or the latter's Xavier Rolet would get the top job in the event of a merger. It's a curious debate – after all, the reason the LSE is in play is that Rolet, for all the good work he has done since taking over in London two years ago, made such a mess of the merger with Canada's TMX. Wouldn't it be a little peculiar to see him get a promotion off the back of that?

Summer half-term is once more upon us, and a perfect day at the beach beats Disneyland hands down – but do watch where you swim

Alleged hip-hop fan and Downing Street spin chief Craig Oliver doubtless enjoyed a few fist bumps with colleagues yesterday, following the televisual feast that was the No 10 barbecue. Oliver – a former BBC employee – is renowned primarily as a "pictures man", and a shirt-sleeved Dave and Barry serving burgers to servicemen was perhaps the most striking image he has generated since joining the PM's staff (or at least since his first day, when he graced the press corps with this classic, right). Yet the course of media handling never did run smooth and Oliver made at least one influential hack unhappy yesterday. Sky News political correspondent Glen Oglaza was giddy with excitement after being assigned the opening question of the post-BBQ press conference, only to have it snatched from him cruelly at the last moment by Oliver's shiny-domed BBC chum Nick Robinson.

Cheap, fun and easy to move, shipping containers are providing building blocks for everything from pop-up malls to prisons. By Victoria-Anne Bull

If his coyly beatific grin belonged to a figure gazing upon Jesus in a Renaissance painting, let no one blame Andrew Marr for that. Getting quality time alone with Barack Obama, as Andy did for the interview broadcast yesterday, isn't easy. Nick Clegg would tell you that. The snub for Nick, whose pleas for an audience during the state visit were rebuffed, must be excruciating. It is almost as if the White House concluded, in the worst foreign policy miscalculation since 'Nam, that our deputy PM isn't fantastically important. Andy, on the other hand, is. He recovered from recent embarrassments to score an interview that West Wing insiders are styling "The 'Ears? You call those weeny things ears?' Summit".

George Osborne couldn't resist the opportunity to get a cheap laugh out of the audience at the Google Zeitgeist conference yesterday, where he was the first speaker of the day. The reason the Chancellor was given the early slot was to allow him to get away in plenty of time for the European finance ministers' meeting in Brussels, an event that in the end was rather overshadowed by the arrest of the International Monetary Fund boss. "Not everyone is going to be there," Osborne observed tartly.

The UK hotel chain will be one of few low-cost options in cities such as Barcelona and Seville

The Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman is fighting back following an exchange between Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly, the right-wing shock jocks of American television. Describing Krugman as one of the "far left", O'Reilly said that he and the likes of "Soros and his merry men" were intent on destroying the American economy so that they would be free to "build up a socialist system". O'Reilly is on to something, confesses Krugman on his blog, adding "Luckily, he hasn't learned about our plan to steal his precious bodily fluids." It's hardly a fair fight, intellectually, this one.