Portrait of the week | 29 November 2012

Home

Rotherham Borough Council took away three children from foster parents because they belonged to the UK Independence Party. ‘If the party mantra is, for example, ending the active promotion of multiculturalism I have to think about that,’ said Joyce Thacker, Rotherham’s Strategic Director of Children and Young People’s Services. Rochdale Council said that 12 of its workers were being investigated following the conviction last May of nine men who ran a child sex ring. Greater Manchester Police said that boys ‘were victims of physical and sexual abuse’ by the late Sir Cyril Smith, the MP for Rochdale, in the 1960s. Boris Johnson was mistaken for Boris Becker in Delhi on a tour promoting London business.

Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of Canada, was named by George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, as the Governor of the Bank of England from 1 July in succession to Sir Mervyn King. The Financial Services Authority fined the Swiss bank UBS £29.7 million for failings that led to the jailed trader Kweku Adoboli losing it £1.4 billion. David Cameron, the Prime Minister, after returning from a stymied EU budget summit, told the House of Commons that a deal was ‘still doable’. Lord Justice Leveson published a long report on press standards. Dinah Sheridan, who starred in Genevieve, died, aged 92. Firemen removed part of the roof of a house in St Albans, Hertfordshire, and rescued a man still impaled on the leg of a table in the loft; he recovered in hospital.

Hundred of houses were flooded after days of rain. The Exe swept over the railway at Exeter. The Avon flooded Marlborough, Wiltshire. The Elwy flooded St Asaph, Denbighshire. At Kempsey, Worcestershire, pumps failed that formed part of a new £1.5