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Three Police Federation representatives accused of giving misleading accounts of a meeting with Andrew Mitchell over the Plebgate scandal are to undergo a second investigation by the Independent Police Complaints Commission. Mohammed Ahmed Mohamed, 27, whose movements are restricted under a Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measure (known as a T-Pim) went missing after changing into a burka at a mosque in Acton, west London. Paul Gambaccini, the BBC broadcaster, was arrested on suspicion of historical sexual offences unconnected with Jimmy Savile’s crimes. An eight-year-old boy shot and wounded a five-year-old at Wickford, Essex.
London Gateway, a container port capable of taking the biggest ships, opened just west of Canvey Island, Essex. Shipbuilding is to end at Portsmouth with the closure of the BAE yard. The cost of two new aircraft carriers under construction rose to £6.2 billion, compared with £3.65 billion six years ago, when the contract was approved. Stephen Deans, the Unite union official who resigned his job at the Grangemouth petrochemical plant last week, is not to stand for re-election as chairman of Falkirk Labour party. Johann Lamont, the leader of the Scottish Labour party, said that an inquiry into the selection of a candidate for Falkirk for election to Parliament in Westminster might have to be reopened. The badger cull in Somerset killed 940, an estimated 65 per cent of those there and 5 per cent short of the target.
David Cameron, the Prime Minister, told the annual conference of the CBI: ‘The current consent for remaining inside the European Union is wafer thin. We haven’t made the argument enough about why it matters.’ Royal Bank of Scotland decided not to split itself into so-called good and bad banks, but to create an internal bad bank holding £38 billion of useless assets. RBS made a loss of £634 million in the third quarter of the year. RBS and Barclays suspended a few traders as part of an investigation into suggestions that currency markets could have been rigged. The troubled Co-op Bank is to close 50 of its 324 branches and end up with only a 30 per cent stake in its own business, as part of a rescue plan. A wild boar in Alderney was thought to have swum there from France.
Abroad
Hakimullah Mehsud, the leader of the Taleban in Pakistan, was killed by an American drone in a village in North Waziristan. North Korea admitted that one of its warships sank in October, killing a number of sailors. An explosion in a fireworks factory at Cenxi in the Chinese region of Guangxi killed 11 people. India launched a spacecraft to Mars. The Indian stockmarket index Sensex reached a record high of 21,293. The European Court of Auditors found that 4.8 per cent of the European Union’s budget of €138.6 billion in 2012 was spent in error. Granma, the official newspaper of the Cuban Communist party, carried a government decree closing privately run cinemas.
All the equipment declared by Syria that was capable of producing chemical weapons has been destroyed, according to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Israeli aircraft carried out a strike on Russian-made missiles intended for the Lebanese group Hezbollah near the Syrian coastal city of Latakia. An Israeli mini-drone came down over Gaza. John Kerry, the US Secretary of State, made an unannounced visit to Egypt to re-establish relations with the government after the overthrow of President Mohammed Morsi. Mr Morsi’s trial began and he told the court: ‘I am the president, you have no right to conduct a trial.’ It was adjourned until January. Bill de Blasio, a Democrat, was elected mayor of New York. Mayor Rob Ford, the mayor of Toronto, admitted smoking crack cocaine, but only in a ‘drunken stupor’.
The M23 rebel group in the Democratic Republic of Congo said it was ending its 20-month insurgency, during which 800,000 had fled their homes. The bodies were found of more migrants from a group that died of thirst in the Sahara on the way to Tamanrasset, bringing the number of deaths to 92, of which 52 were children and 33 women. About 5,000 were said to be stranded in illegal camps at Agadez in Niger, prey to traffickers. Some 1,400 works of art confiscated by the Nazis, including items by Matisse, Picasso and Chagall, some unknown, were found in a Munich flat. Germany passed a law allowing parents unsure of a baby’s sex to leave a blank on birth certificates. CSH
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