London - Unemployment in Britain has risen sharply to reach 1.79 million or 5.7 per cent of the workforce, its highest level since 1999, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said Wednesday.

The figures relate to the second quarter of this year, up to the end of August, a period during which unemployment increased by 164,000.

The rise - the biggest since 1991 - took the official unemployment rate to 5.7 per cent from 5.2 per cent in the previous quarter.

In September, the number of people claiming jobseeker's allowance increased by 31,800 to 939,900, the eighth consecutive monthly rise and the highest figure for almost two years.

Oslo/Reykjavik - Iceland should consider replacing its currency with that of neighbouring Norway, an Icelandic economics professor suggested in an interview published Wednesday.

The move was necessary since confidence in the Icelandic central bank has withered in the wake of the recent financial turmoil, Professor Thorolfur Matthiasson of the economics faculty at the University of Iceland told the Bergens Tidende newspaper.

"To get room to maneuver we need a plan A and a plan B," Matthiasson said, noting that one option was to consider joining the European Union and adopting the joint European currency, the euro.

"In the short-term, it may be more realistic to pursue a monetary union with Norway," he added.

Singapore - Singapore's Finance Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam assured the public Wednesday that the city state's banking system was not in trouble despite the current global financial crisis.

The city state's de facto central bank, the Monetary Authority of Singapore, has responded to the crisis in a measured way and as such there was no need to provide guarantees for local banks, he said.

He pointed out that confidence was still high in Singapore's financial system despite the global financial problems.

Sydney - Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd on Wednesday chided Wall Street investment banks for their "obscene failures" and promised to provide the world with a new set of rules for corporate governance.

"As a government and as a nation, we must respond to the twin evils which are at the root of this malaise - greed and fear," Rudd said.

He offered to draw up new banking regulations that could become "a template for the rest of the world" in dealing with what he called "extreme capitalism."

The prime minister also pledged to limit the pay of bank bosses.

Paris - The French Senate was due Wednesday to debate and vote on the government's 360-billion-euro (490-billion-dollar) bank rescue plan after the bill passed the lower National Assembly by a huge margin.

The bill passed its first hurdle late Tuesday when the National Assembly approved it by 224 to 23 votes, sending the plan for final approval in the Senate.

The plan, announced Monday by President Nicolas Sarkozy, will make available up to 320 billion euros to guarantee interbank loans and another 40 billion euros for the recapitalization of struggling banks.

Opposition Socialist lawmakers said they supported the plan but abstained from voting because they said it only addressed the financial crisis, not the economic crisis.

Hong Kong - Hong Kong's leader Wednesday announced the setting up of a task force to monitor the impact of the global economic crisis and find ways to tackle it.

Chief Executive Donald Tsang said the body, which he will chair, will comprise top government officials along with financial experts, economists and representatives of major industries.