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Shabana Mahmood, the Home Secretary, proposed that refugees would only be granted a temporary right to stay and would be sent home if officials deemed their country safe to return to. They would not qualify for British citizenship for 20 years. To avoid drawn-out appeals, a new appeals body would be created. Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which protects migrants’ ‘right to family life’, would somehow be weakened. Digital ID was invoked for the enforcement of checks on status. Opponents seized upon the possibility that, to pay for accommodation, migrants’ jewellery would be confiscated. Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, offered her party’s support if the government encountered a backbench rebellion against the plans, outlined in a government policy statement, Restoring Order and Control. According to the Office for National Statistics, the number of British nationals leaving the country last year was three times the previous estimate: 257,000, not 77,000. Luke Littler, 18, became the Professional Darts Corporation world number one.
Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, let it be known that she had dropped her plan to raise income tax at the Budget on 26 November, having spent weeks persuading voters and the markets that she had no alternative. Jaguar Land Rover reported a loss of £485 million, against a profit of £398 million a year ago, before it suffered a cyber attack. Resident doctors in England downed stethoscopes for five days, their 13th strike since March 2023. Lilliput Church of England Infant School in Poole, Dorset, asked parents to encourage their children not to sing songs at school from the film KPop Demon Hunters.
The US private equity firm RedBird dropped its £500 million bid to buy the Telegraph. Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the Speaker, circulated an MI5 warning of the risk to parliament from Chinese spies. Britain lacks a plan to defend itself from a military attack, a report by the Commons defence committee found. Monmouth was badly flooded. Agency workers brought in to cover for dustmen on strike in Birmingham since March themselves voted to strike.
Abroad
President Donald Trump of the United States said he would sue the BBC for between ‘$1 billion and $5 billion’; it had apologised over misleadingly editing footage to make it seem that he had encouraged the storming of the Capitol in 2021, but it paid no compensation. Trump turned against Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Republican Congresswoman who had called for the release of files on Jeffrey Epstein; he called her wacky, a lunatic and a traitor to the party. Then he suddenly declared: ‘House Republicans should vote to release the Epstein files, because we have nothing to hide.’ The House voted 427-1 to compel the Justice Department to publish them. At a press conference with Mohammed bin Salman, Trump said the Saudi ruler ‘knew nothing’ about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, which a US intelligence report in 2021 said he had approved.
Germany will require all 18-year-old men to fill in a questionnaire on their suitability to serve militarily. Anti-corruption officials in Ukraine reported embezzlement of £76 million in the energy sector; President Volodymyr Zelensky promised to overhaul its management. He visited Greece, which agreed to supply liquefied natural gas originating from the United States to counter Russian attacks. A liquid petroleum gas tanker was set on fire by a Russian drone strike on the Ukrainian port of Izmail on the Danube. Donald Tusk, the Prime Minister of Poland, called an explosion 60 miles from Warsaw on a railway line leading to the Ukraine border ‘an unprecedented act of sabotage’. Ukraine will receive up to 100 Rafale F4 fighter jets from France. China urged its citizens not to travel to Japan, whose new Prime Minister, Sanae Takaichi, said that her country could respond with its own forces if China attacked Taiwan. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps seized a tanker in the Strait of Hormuz; it was bound for Singapore from the United Arab Emirates.
Sheikh Hasina, the former prime minister of Bangladesh, was sentenced to death in absentia, being held responsible for the death of hundreds of protestors. The United States was to designate as a terrorist organisation the drug Cartel de los Soles, which it alleges is led by President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela. Wilmer ‘Pipo’ Chavarría, the head of the 8,000-strong drug gang Los Lobos in Ecuador, was arrested in Malaga, Spain; his family had claimed that he had died of a heart attack in 2021. CSH
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