Portrait of the week: a Liverpool terror attack, the end of COP26 and the Belarus migrant crisis

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The UK terror threat level was raised to severe after a taxi exploded and burst into flames just before 11 a.m. on Remembrance Sunday outside Liverpool Women’s Hospital, killing the passenger. He was Emad Al Swealmeen, 32, a failed asylum-seeker from the Middle East, who had converted from Islam, and was confirmed in 2017 at Liverpool Anglican Cathedral nearby. He had previously been sectioned for six months under the Mental Health Act because of his behaviour with a knife. The detonator seemed to have gone off but not the bomb. The taxi driver, whose wounds required hospital treatment, was praised for his courage. The Countess of Avon, widow of the former prime minister Anthony Eden, died aged 101.

In the seven days up to the beginning of this week, 1,092 people had died with coronavirus, bringing the total of deaths (within 28 days of testing positive) to 142,835. (In the previous week deaths had numbered 1,185.) Numbers remaining in hospital fell from more than 9,000 to about 8,600. By the beginning of the week the percentage of people in the United Kingdom to have had a first vaccination was 87.9, two doses 80, three 21.9. The number of obese children had increased from 10 per cent to 14 per cent after a year of lockdown. Commenting on a rise in Covid cases on the Continent, Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, said: ‘We don’t yet know the extent to which this new wave will wash up on our shores.’ On one day, about 1,185 migrants crossed the Channel in small boats, the highest number yet; the total this year reached 23,500, compared with 8,400 in 2020. France dismantled a camp near Dunkirk occupied by 1,500 migrants and arrested 35 people-smugglers.

India and China reduced the effect of the COP26 meeting in Glasgow by changing an agreement to ‘phase out’ coal to ‘phase down’ coal.