Dow at 14,000; US jobs crisis hasn't gone away; Heavy loss for Deutsche Bank; In New Delhi, 95% women feel unsafe; Polish is now England's second language

1 Dow at 14,000: First time since 2007 (San Francisco Chronicle) The Dow closed above 14,000 on Friday for the first time in more than five years. It was just a number on a board, but it was enough to raise the hopes of some investors and cause others concern about an overheated market. And it brought reminders of a different era, back before the financial crisis rocked the world economy.

The Dow Jones industrial average, a stock market index that is traditionally considered a benchmark for how the entire market is faring, had been rising fairly steadily for about a month. On Friday, strong auto sales and optimism about US job growth pushed it over the mark. The Dow is now just 155 points away from its record close. "There's a newfound enthusiasm for the equity market," said Jim Russell, regional investment director at US Bank Wealth Management in Minneapolis.

But market watchers were divided over what the Dow milestone — or even what a potential new all-time high — really means. To some, it's an important booster to hearts and minds, making investors feel optimistic and thus more willing to bet on the market. To others, though, Dow 14,000 is nothing but a number, a sign more of how traders feel than of the economy. And it's not even the best number on the board, some traders say. Professional investors usually pay more heed to the Standard & Poor's main index, which tracks 500 companies compared to the Dow's 30. The Dow garners attention, they say, because it's more familiar to the general public.

2 The US jobs crisis hasn’t gone away (Heidi Moore in The Guardian) In the real economy, we still have a significant number of unemployed people – and more importantly, we have a core group of long-term unemployed people, who become more unemployable the longer they are out of work. There are another 2.4 million people who are "marginally attached", meaning they were "not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the four weeks preceding the survey."

If you add those marginally attached workers – those able-bodied, willing to work and unable to find jobs – to the number of unemployed, it gets closer to 15 million people out of work. That's a crisis. And even while the Dow Jones Industrial Average rises to new highs – it hit 14,000 just today – big companies are still making layoffs. This week alone, mass layoffs of more than 50 people and up to 1,000 were announced at Time Inc, Disney, BAE Systems, Harman International, Viking Range, Amgen and Boston Scientific.

What makes it a crisis is that we don't seem to have any ideas on how to employ the unemployed. There are few, if any, ideas coming out of Washington. Corporate America, which still considers itself reeling from the recession, seems disinclined to pitch in – except for a few outliers like Starbucks' "Create Jobs for USA" program. No major retraining programs have cropped up (even if the unemployed, with their pained finances, could afford them).

3 Heavy loss for Deutsche Bank (BBC) Deutsche Bank has reported a surprise loss of 2.2bn euros ($2.9bn) for the fourth quarter of 2012. It came after Germany's biggest bank chose to set aside 1bn euros to cover potential litigation costs and to write off 1.9bn euros in dud investments. The write-offs are the result of a restructuring that involves the hiving off of many non-essential businesses.The bank may face lawsuits related to the manipulation of Libor, as well as other recent scandals.

Anshu Jain - the Indian investment banking head who took over last year as joint chief executive with the German Juergen Fitschen - said that there had been informal discussions at Davos last week between Deutsche and other banks implicated in the Libor scandal over a possible industry-wide settlement of civil lawsuits against them. So far, Barclays and UBS have reached settlements with regulators over the manipulation of Libor - a benchmark interest rate used to calculate payments under trillions of dollars of contracts - and many other banks, including Deutsche and RBS, are expected to follow.

4 In New Delhi, 95% women feel unsafe (Johannesburg Times) Only 5% of women feel safe in public places in New Delhi, a women’s rights organization in the Indian capital said, citing a recent survey. The city recently witnessed unprecedented protests over the gang rape and killing of a 23-year student on a bus in December, with demonstrators demanding measures to make New Delhi safer for women.

The International Centre for Research on Women (ICRW) study interviewed 2,000 women and 1,000 men aged 16 to 49 between October and November. Half of the women respondents felt public places, including streets, markets, parks and bus-stops were unsafe "all the time," day or night, ICRW Asia regional director Ravi Verma said. "The sense of fear among women might have gone up post the gang rape incident," Verma said. Nine out of 10 women interviewed had experienced some kind of sexual harassment or violence, including lewd comments, obscene gestures, uninvited touching, flashing, and sexual assault.

The survey also found that 51 percent of the men reported having perpetrated sexual harassment and violence against women, Verma said. The survey report, which was submitted to the United Nations and to national ministries, found that although 78% of respondents reported having witnessed sexual violence, only 15% said they had intervened.

5 Polish is now England’s second language (The Guardian) Polish is now the main language spoken in England and Wales after English and Welsh, according to 2011 census data released by the Office of National Statistics (ONS). The language-speaking figures recorded for the first time from a survey of 56.1 million residents of England and Wales show 546,000 speak Polish. It is now the second main language in England. There are still slightly more Welsh speakers in Wales at 562,000.

The next biggest main languages are the south Asian languages of Punjabi, Urdu, Bengali and Gujarati, followed by Arabic, French, Chinese and Portuguese. The statisticians said they recorded over 100 different languages and 49 main languages with more than 15,000 users. English was the biggest of that group and Swedish the smallest.

Some of the languages are in a tiny minority. For example, there was only one person in Barnet who spoke Caribbean creole and one person in Bexley. Fifty-eight people speak Scottish Gaelic, 33 speak Manx Gaelic and 629 speak Romany. Ealing in west London is the nation’s hotspot for Polish speaking, the town of Slough for Punjabi/Urdu, the city of Leicester for Gujarati, Kensington in central London for French and Manchester for Cantonese and Mandarin. One million households have no residents with English as a main language, although most had some proficiency in English, the ONS said. Only 138,000 people could not speak English at all.