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David Cameron, the Prime Minister, visited China with four Cabinet ministers and 43 business leaders. He said he hoped for ‘greater political opening’ in the country. A £750 million order for Rolls-Royce engines and a £45 million order for pigs were announced during the trip. A Special Immigration Appeals Commission upheld an appeal by Abu Hamza, who is in jail, against an attempt to remove his British citizenship. There were three nights of rioting at Moorland prison, south Yorkshire. The bishops of Fulham, Ebbsfleet and Richborough, and two retired bishops, announced that they were joining the Catholic Church as members of an ordinariate allowing the use of ‘liturgical books proper to the Anglican tradition’. Twinings, the tea blenders, is to close its factory in North Shields and open one in Poland, with a €12 million EU grant.
Two High Court judges sitting as an election court, the first for 99 years, declared the election (by 103 votes) of Phil Woolas, the Labour candidate, as MP for Oldham East and Saddleworth was void, because of false statements in his election leaflets, and they ordered a fresh election. Mr Woolas was barred from Parliament for three years, and dropped like a hot brick by the Labour party, but the Speaker decided against a by-election until legal proceedings are completed. The Supreme Court ruled that the Labour ex-MPs David Chaytor, Elliot Morley and Jim Devine must stand trial in a Crown court, not in Parliament, on charges regarding expenses.
BBC journalists struck for two days over pensions, depriving the middle classes of the Today programme over breakfast. Mark Thompson, the director-general of the BBC, apologised for signing a letter opposing Rupert Murdoch’s planned buyout of BSkyB. The Commons’ Public Accounts Committee said that overcrowding on trains will get much worse in the next four years despite fare rises. Ed Davey, the Postal Affairs Minister, said that Post Office services would be offered at shop tills, rather than a separate counter, allowing longer opening hours. Marc Bolland, the new chief executive of Marks & Spencer’s, said it would cut its range of non-M&S branded foodstuffs from 400 lines to 100. Thousands queued to buy Call of Duty: Black Ops, a war video game with a betting feature. A gigantic effigy of Wayne Rooney, the Manchester United footballer, was burnt at the bonfire night celebrations at Edenbridge, Kent.
Abroad
President Barack Obama and his wife stayed at the Taj Mahal Palace hotel in Bombay, where most of the 174 deaths occurred in the 2008 terrorist attacks on the city, at the beginning of his ten-day tour of Asia, taking in a G20 summit of global economic powers in Seoul and the sealing of trade and security ties with Indonesia. Mr Obama said Burma’s first elections for 20 years would be anything but free and fair; they were boycotted by the main opposition party, led by Aung San Suu Kyi, and in the event the main military-backed party won 80 per cent of the vote. On the Indonesian island of Java, 300,000 fled and 151 died as the volcano Mount Merapi continued an eruption that began on 25 October.
George W. Bush, the former President of the United States, said in his memoirs, Decision Points, that interrogating three suspects using waterboarding had helped to stop terrorist plots to attack Heathrow airport and Canary Wharf. Five Somali men accused of firing at a US Navy ship off the coast of Africa are to be tried for piracy at Norfolk, Virginia, the first such trial for a century. Other Somali pirates were thought to have been paid £7.5 million ransom for a South Korean tanker and a Singaporean ship. Six Christian areas in Baghdad were attacked in 12 bombings. Edison Peña, one of the 33 Chilean miners rescued last month, completed the New York City Marathon.
Qantas grounded its six Airbus A380 aeroplanes after the Rolls-Royce engine on one began to break up before an emergency landing at Singapore. Hurricane Tomas brought floods to Haiti, already struggling with 8,000 cases of cholera. Mo Shaoping, the Chinese lawyer who represents the jailed Nobel Peace laureate Liu Xiaobo, was prevented from leaving China lest he collect his client’s prize. Supporters of the artist Ai Weiwei (whose 100 million ceramic sunflower seeds are on show at Tate Modern, and who has been under house arrest in Beijing), held a party at his studio in Shanghai, which the authorities said must be demolished. Pope Benedict consecrated the basilica of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. CSH
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