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A bomb was found at East Midlands airport.
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A bomb was found at East Midlands airport. It was in a parcelled computer toner cartridge filled with pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN), the high explosive found in the underpants of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab on a flight to Detroit last Christmas day. A similar parcel was found in Dubai. Both parcels were sent from Sanaa, the capital of Yemen, and addressed to synagogues in Chicago, though British authorities said the bomb discovered in the East Midlands was intended to explode in the air. Both bombs had spent some time in the holds of passenger planes. Theresa May, the Home Secretary, said the bombs had been made by the organisation known as al-Qa’eda in the Arabian Peninsula. Unaccompanied air freight to Britain from Somalia as well as Yemen was banned.
David Cameron, the Prime Minister, met President Nicolas Sarkozy of France in London to sign a defence treaty with provisions to share nuclear technology and testing and to establish a joint army expeditionary force. General Sir David Richards had taken up his role as chief of the defence staff four days earlier. Police investigated whether a car in which a pipe bomb was discovered at Belfast airport might have been parked there since 2009. Fifteen people stranded in the dark in a train for half an hour managed to walk to nearby Foxton station, but a railway official succeeded in locking 360 others on board for another two hours until they were taken six miles to Royston.
At a summit in Brussels, Mr Cameron agreed to a 2.9 per cent rise in the EU budget and said: ‘We’ve prevented a crazy 6 per cent rise.’ Lord Tebbit called it a ‘Vichy-style’ betrayal. Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, responded to cuts in housing benefit by saying: ‘We will not accept any kind of Kosovo-style social cleansing of London.’ The London Underground went on strike again. Serco, a group that carries out government service contracts, asked its suppliers to pay it a 2.5 per cent rebate, but then decided to ‘apologise unreservedly’ for doing so. The government ceded voting rights to convicted prisoners. A firearms officer was said to have inserted song titles, including ‘F— My Old Boots’, a 1988 track by the Membranes, into the phrasing of his evidence to the inquest into the death of the barrister Mark Saunders. Universities are to be allowed to charge up to £9,000 in tuition fees. The Department for Work and Pensions said that £25 million a year in winter fuel allowance is being paid to the dead. Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust paid £1,029,000 to the families of patients who had suffered ‘poor nursing and dignity issues’ at Stafford hospital. Lady Thatcher returned home after a fortnight in hospital.
Abroad
Gunmen aligned with al-Qa’eda killed 58 at the Chaldean Catholic church of Our Lady of Salvation in Baghdad. Two days later concerted bombs in Shia areas of Baghdad killed more than 60. Earlier, a suicide bomber had killed 25 in the town of Balad Ruz, north-west of Baghdad. A suicide bomber set off his bomb after trying to board a police bus in Taksim Square, Istanbul, wounding 15. President Sarkozy and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany were among the intended recipients of parcel bombs posted in Athens, the suspected work of the Conspiracy of the Cells of Fire revolutionary group.
The Republicans in the United States took control of the House of Representatives in the mid-term elections and made gains in the Senate, reflecting discontent with the economy and with President Barack Obama. The Federal Reserve announced more quantitative easing. Mr Obama flew off for a four-day trip to India. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia invited leaders of Iraq’s political alliances to Riyadh after the Hajj in a fortnight’s time, to end the impasse in forming a government, which has continued since March. Silvio Berlusconi, the Prime Minister of Italy, dismissed calls to resign over a friendship with a teenage belly-dancer, saying it was ‘better to like beautiful girls than to be gay’.
Dilma Rousseff, of the governing Workers’ Party, was elected to succeed President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil from 1 January. President Dmitry Medvedev of Russia visited the Kuril Islands, annoying Japan, which also claims them. The cost of borrowing increased sharply for Ireland and Portugal following an EU agreement to Franco-German proposals for averting future sovereign debt crises. In Paris, an 18-month-old girl survived a fall from a sixth-floor flat unhurt after bouncing off a café awning into the arms of a passing doctor. CSH
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