FUMING homeowners say their millionaire neighbour is blocking them from using a public footpath and screams at them in the street.

Tempers have flared in the months-long neighbour row in Hove near Brighton – with residents saying it’s like living in a warzone.

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The spat began when a wall blew down in a storm last October, blocking a public footpath running between two £1.2m homes.

A 10ft wire fence was erected so the owners of the property could clear the path and carry out repairs.

But almost a year on nothing has been done to clear the rubble from the wall and the alleyway remains closed.

Residents have complained to the council – demanding repair work be carried out immediately to reopen the public right of way.

But they claimed they are being intimidated by the neighbour who lives on the other side of the footpath.

They said the neighbour is now opposing the reopening of the footpath.

At a public meeting outside the alley last Friday the man allegedly harangued councillors and neighbours – drowning out complaints.

Many residents say they are so fed up with the long-running conflict they are thinking of selling their homes.

One resident said: ‘This used to be a really lovely place to live and these are all very desirable properties.

“But it is like a war zone round here at the moment. People have been threatened.

“They have been intimidated and sworn at if they go anywhere near the fence. It’s been a total nightmare.”

Cops have been called to deal with the furore at least twice in the past 10 days.

Another resident said: “I’ve been screamed at in the street and verbally abused in front of my children.

“It’s absolutely shocking what has been going on and yet the police seem powerless to act.

“I am seriously thinking about whether I want to live in an area where there is so much conflict. It’s not healthy.”

A third local resident said: “I don’t want to put my head above the parapet.

“The threats and intimidation are too serious to take lightly. We’ve been in touch with the police about it.”

A local named Charles said: “It’s got out of hand and now one family is taking the law into its own hands.

“I think the police need to take action before the matter becomes more inflamed.”

The path is still blocked by rubble from a wall and storm-damaged fencing.

Councillor Trevor Muten said the council aimed to reopen the public footpath in days rather than weeks.

He said: “We now intend to issue a section 78 notice under the Building Act 1984.

“It gives us, as the local authority, the power to remove dangerous structures.

“This is the quickest, most practical solution to getting the footpath reopened as soon as possible following the legal process.”

Muten said that rather than the owner, the council would carry out the works.

He said the council would erect fencing on both sides of the footpath to cover any gaps and safety risks.

The councillor said: “We then intend to put up CCTV cameras to monitor the path and reinstate the public footpath signage.

“Any signs remaining that indicate the footpath is private are incorrect and will be removed.

“We will then reopen the path. We hope all this can be done in days, rather than weeks.

“We accept we should have acted sooner but we have now made this a priority.

“We are working to get this path opened as soon as possible. This is a much-loved footpath.

“It is there to be used and enjoyed by local residents and I’m determined this is done quickly.”

The occupants of the house were approached for comment but declined to comment.

Sussex Police said: “We are investigating a report of threats made outside an address in Hove, at about 5.30pm on September 13.

“Witnesses or anyone with any information or footage is asked to contact police online or call 101 quoting serial 117 of 14/09.”

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A gas explosion at a coal mine in southeastern Iran has killed at least 33 people and about 20 others are believed to be trapped underground, state media reported on Sunday.

The death toll could be higher as local media, including the semi-official Tasnim news agency which is affiliated with the elite Revolutionary Guards, have reported a figure of 51 killed.

The blast, thought to have been caused by a sudden release of methane gas that then triggered a chain reaction, occurred on Saturday evening in one of the mine’s tunnels.

The incident happened as 69 miners were working in two sections of the privately owned mine operated by Madanjoo company in Tabas, a desert town about 540km south-east of Tehran.

Rescue efforts have been hampered by dangerously high levels of methane gas, with emergency services struggling to reach affected areas almost 500 metres underground. The concentration of methane remains a critical obstacle, preventing further entry into the mine, state television reported.

Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian, before he departed for the UN General Assembly in New York, ordered ministries to dispatch additional rescue teams to the site. Iran’s judiciary has also launched a full investigation into the incident, vowing to hold those responsible accountable.

The Tabas mine is one of the largest coal mining operations in Iran, a country rich in natural resources but whose mining sector has been stunted by a lack of foreign investment, largely due to US-imposed sanctions.

Saeed Samadi, secretary of the country’s coal association, told local media that coal mines generally suffered from inadequate equipment and he criticised the government for not allocating any budget for mine safety since last year.

However, he added that the Tabas mine had high compliance with technical and safety standards, having received no safety warnings in the past 20 years and importing top-quality equipment.

“It is too early to draw conclusions about the incident, but my 30 years of experience suggest that a sudden gas explosion is likely the cause of this large-scale incident,” he said.

“The Tabas mine accident appears to have occurred above the workers in one of the workshops and the explosion was so extensive that it resulted in a high number of fatalities, including the death of the mine’s safety manager.”

Previous major mining incidents in Iran include a similar coal mine explosion in 2017 that claimed the lives of at least 42 people.

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All foreign policy is in part economic. Most economic policy is also of geostrategic import. These basic facts are well appreciated in Washington and Beijing. Not so in the capitals of Europe.

That is why, of the numerous thoughtful proposals in Mario Draghi’s report on European productivity, none is as intriguing or potentially far reaching as his call for a European “foreign economic policy”. The very realisation that none exists is a step forward.

What would it mean for the EU to have one? Most obviously, that even domestic economic policy would be made in light of geostrategic goals. Draghi explains such policy as “statecraft . . . to co-ordinate preferential trade agreements and direct investment with resource-rich nations, build up stockpiles in selected critical areas, and create industrial partnerships to secure the supply chain of key technologies”.

The need for such statecraft goes much further than Draghi’s focus on securing critical resources, to green industrial policies broadly and beyond.

For example, the EU’s new carbon tariffs have incentivised other jurisdictions to adopt carbon-pricing schemes of their own. Yet this effect, very much in the EU’s interest, is an afterthought rather than the policy’s principal purpose. (That was to prevent green European industry from being undercut by carbon-intensive imports.) It was more happy coincidence than statecraft.

New EU rulemaking on supply-chain sustainability (over deforestation, for example) has caused diplomatic frictions, with trade partners seeing it as protectionist. This caught Europeans unawares — something a foreign policy perspective could have avoided.

The point is not that such a perspective would or should have tempered the pursuit of domestic goals. On the contrary, placing geostrategic considerations at the centre of domestic economic decision-making would more often than not raise the level of ambition.

Take the European Central Bank’s work on a digital euro. It has largely focused on effects on the Eurozone’s domestic monetary system — which has led to a consensus on tight limits on the digital euro amounts anyone could hold to protect legacy banks’ business models. A foreign policy perspective would lift the euro’s international role and the strategic advantages it could bring. It would thus emphasise that letting foreign users hold ample digital euros easily would encourage euro invoicing in international trade, and tie other economies more strongly to the EU’s.

Similarly, a foreign policy perspective would inject much-needed urgency into the projects to unify EU banking and financial markets. National divisions sap Europe’s collective economic strength and increase its dependencies on other countries.

The issue of decarbonising Europe’s car fleet is where an EU foreign economic policy approach is most starkly needed. It should be obvious that EU countries need both a larger inflow of Chinese electric vehicles in the cheaper segment and also a sufficiently large domestic market for EU carmakers to confidently make the investments necessary to ramp up their own EV production capacity.

This requires a combination of policies: a managed openness to Chinese imports, a much stronger tilt of consumer subsidy and procurement policies towards EU-produced EVs, and an overall quantitative judgment of how much of each is optimal. Crucially, that judgment must be explicitly calibrated against what Beijing is willing to do in return. The obvious asks are for China to use more of its soaring EV production capacity itself and reduce its complicity in Russia’s egregious violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty.

Such joined-up policymaking is only possible if foreign policy and domestic economic and industrial policy are made as one. Simply put, that means Kaja Kallas — the EU’s incoming top foreign policy official — must be involved in decisions about taxation of corporate vehicles, and decision-making on EU’s capital markets and banking union must keep foreign ministers in the loop.

The structure of the EU discourages that. Commission president Ursula von der Leyen has tried to overcome this through an extreme centralisation of decision-making, but that is politically unsustainable outside the most acute crises. The make-up of her new commission suggests a welcome attempt to institutionalise joined-up thinking.

But that leaves national leaders who ultimately hold the most power in the EU. Realising an EU foreign economic policy requires enough national leaders to jointly make economic policy with collective strategic goals in mind. Europe will become strong in national capitals or not at all.

martin.sandbu@ft.com

The Hezbollah militia reported launching an attack on an industrial complex and an Israeli military base near the port city of Haifa in northern Israel early on Sunday, while the Israeli army said it launched attacks on Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon.

Hezbollah described its attack as retaliation for Israel’s “brutal massacre” last week, in which coordinated blasts involving electronic devices across Lebanon caused death and injury.

The Iran-backed militia also said it had attacked the Israel Defence Forces’ (IDF) Ramat David airbase near Haifa in response to “repeated Israeli aggression in various regions in Lebanon.”

It did not mention the name of Ibrahim Akil, the senior Hezbollah commander killed in an Israeli attack on a Beirut suburb on Friday.

The death toll from Friday’s Israeli attack on Beirut’s southern suburbs, a hotbed of the Hezbollah movement, rose to 45, the Lebanese Health Ministry said on Sunday.

Meanwhile, the IDF reported on Sunday that Hezbollah had launched around 115 attacks on civilian targets in northern Israel.

IDF forces were on high alert in the region to ward off the attacks and to “intensify” attacks on Hezbollah, it said. The attacks penetrated further south than previously.

Air raid sirens were also heard to the south-west of Nazareth, which lies inland from Haifa.

Lebanese authorities described the Israeli air attacks as the heaviest since the start of the war in the Gaza Strip on October 7 last year. Some 70 targets had been attacked within 20 minutes, they said.

Hospitals in northern Israel to move patients to bunker

Amid increased cross-border rocket attacks from Lebanon, hospitals in northern Israel have been instructed to move patients to shelters, Isreali media reported on Sunday.

Rambam Hospital in Haifa, the region’s largest, announced it would begin relocating patients to its underground emergency facility at midday, following army directives.

Rambam’s so-called “bunker hospital,” built in 2014 and located more than 16 metres underground, can accommodate up to 1,400 patients, both soldiers and civilians, according to its website.

Normally used as a car park, the facility is also fortified against biological and chemical attacks.

Since the war began in the Gaza Strip on October 7 last year between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist Hamas movement, which is allied with Hezbollah, there have been almost daily military confrontations between the Israeli army and Hezbollah in the border area between the two countries.

There have been deaths on both sides, most of them members of the Lebanese Hezbollah militia. Hezbollah says it is acting in solidarity with Hamas.

Concerns are rising that the IDF could launch a ground offensive into southern Lebanon to force Hezbollah units back from the border in order to allow thousands of Israeli civilians to return to their homes in the region.

UN warns of ‘imminentcatastrophe’ in the Middle East

The United Nations special coordinator for Lebanon, Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, has warned that the Middle East is facing a catastrophic situation, stating that the region is “on the brink of an imminent catastrophe.”

She said: “It cannot be overstated enough: there is no military solution that will make either side safer.”

Hennis-Plasschaert’s remarks referred to the ongoing exchanges between Israel’s army and Hezbollah in Lebanon, which continued through the night.

Both sides have engaged in some of the most intense exchanges since their renewed confrontations began nearly a year ago.

The UN observer mission UNIFIL has been monitoring the Israel-Lebanon border since 1978. Last month, three UNIFIL soldiers were slightly injured by an explosion near their vehicle in southern Lebanon.

The mission currently involves around 10,000 troops and 800 civilians. Since its inception nearly 50 years ago, more than 300 UN peacekeepers have lost their lives.

US calls on citizens to leave Lebanon

Meanwhile, in view of the escalation, the United States is calling on its citizens to leave Lebanon.

“Due to the unpredictable nature of ongoing conflict between [Hezbollah] and Israel and recent explosions throughout Lebanon including the capital Beirut,” the US Embassy is advising its citizens to leave Lebanon while commercial options are still available, the US State Department said in a statement.

At this time, flights are still available, but with reduced capacity, it added.

US banks made a $1tn windfall from the Federal Reserve’s two-and-a-half-year era of high interest rates, an analysis of official data by the Financial Times has found.

Lenders got higher yields for their deposits at the Fed but kept rates lower for many savers, the review of Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation data showed. The boost to the US’s more than 4,000 banks has helped pad out profit margins.

While rates on some savings accounts were raised in line with the Fed’s target of more than 5 per cent, the vast majority of depositors, especially those at the largest banks, such as JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, got far less.

At the end of the second quarter, the average US bank was paying its depositors interest at the annual rate of just 2.2 per cent, according to regulatory data that includes accounts that do not pay interest at all. This is higher than the 0.2 per cent they paid two years ago but far lower than the Fed’s 5.5 per cent overnight rate that the banks themselves can get.

At JPMorgan and Bank of America, annual deposit costs were 1.5 per cent and 1.7 per cent, respectively, according to this data.

Those lower payments to depositors generated $1.1tn in excess interest revenue for the banks, or about half of the total dollars banks brought in during that time, according to the FT’s calculations.

This is in sharp contrast to Europe, where some governments imposed windfall taxes on banks which benefited from higher interest rates.

The Fed tightened its main policy rate this week, cutting by half a percentage point. Some US banks sought to pass the cuts on to depositors as quickly as possible, a move that would shore up their margins.

Hours before the Fed rate cut on Wednesday, Citi told its employees at its private bank, whose wealthy clients typically receive preferential rates, that if the US central bank were to cut rates by half a percentage point the bank would do the same to its rate on accounts paying 5 per cent or more, according to a person familiar with the matter.

At JPMorgan, bankers have been told that clients with $10mn in cash or above would see their savings rates cut by 50bp and future cuts would move in lockstep with the Fed’s actions, people familiar with the matter said.

Because of the Fed’s rate cut, banks will “certainly” have “the ability to reduce deposit costs”, said Chris McGratty, head of US bank research at KBW. “The degree of aggressiveness will, I think, vary bank to bank.”

JPMorgan said the bank aimed to ensure a fair and competitive rate. Citi declined to comment. Bank of America declined to comment.

A report earlier this year from the Risk Management Association compared banks to petrol stations, which are typically quick to raise prices and slow to cut them. Banks, by contrast, are slow to raise the rates they offer on deposits and savings accounts but quick to cut them.

When the Fed began to tighten monetary policy in March 2022 many analysts predicted that competition from new financial technology companies and the growing ease with which consumers can move cash would force banks to dole out a greater share of the higher rates to their depositors.

But the FT’s calculations show that they were able to hold on to much of the benefit — although slightly less than in previous Fed tightening cycles.

The failure of Silicon Valley Bank and others in early 2023 forced many mid-sized and smaller banks to raise their rates in order to keep depositors from fleeing. Larger banks saw an influx of cash during the flight for safety, allowing them to delay the need to match higher rates elsewhere.

Overall US banks captured about two-thirds of the benefit of the Fed’s higher interest rates from March 2022 until the middle of this year, according to the FT’s calculations based on the latest data available. They paid depositors nearly $600bn in interest.

The last time the Fed raised interest rates, from early 2016 to until early 2019, US banks captured 77 per cent of the benefit.

Although the Fed has now begun to loosen monetary policy, bank stocks reacted positively on Thursday as investors bet that lower rates and a relatively healthy economy would create more demand for borrowing and boost investment banking dealmaking activity.

Nonetheless, the highest interest rates in more than a generation have pushed more money than ever, nearly $3tn, into certificates of deposit, which typically pay the highest rate of any bank deposits and also cannot be changed overnight.

As that money becomes unlocked, banks will be able to adjust their rates down, but not before, analysts said.

“It will be a slow grind down,” said Scott Hildenbrand, chief balance sheet strategist at Piper Sandler.