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An Iranian man who arrived on a small boat and was deported to France on 19 September under the one in, one out scheme returned to England on another small boat. Hadush Kebatu, the migrant whose arrest for sexual assault sparked weeks of protests outside the Bell hotel in Epping where he was living, was freed by mistake from Chelmsford prison; he was arrested two days later and given £500 to be deported to Ethiopia. The Home Office ‘squandered’ billions on a ‘failed, chaotic and expensive’ system of asylum accommodation, a Commons home affairs committee report found. Some 900 of the 32,000 asylum-seekers in hotels might be rehoused in military bases. A former member of the Parachute Regiment, ‘Soldier F’, was found not guilty of murdering two men in Londonderry on Bloody Sunday in 1972. Sarah Pochin, a Reform MP, said: ‘It drives me mad when I see adverts full of black people, full of Asian people. It doesn’t reflect our society’; she then apologised.
Lucy Powell, sacked as a cabinet minister in September, was elected deputy leader of the Labour party by its members. The Office for Budget Responsibility’s draft forecast for productivity suggested there would be a £20 billion hole in the Budget. The King gave an audience to President Volodymyr Zelensky as the ‘coalition of the willing’ met to discuss support for Ukraine. Mohammed Umar Khan, 15, who murdered Harvey Willgoose at All Saints Catholic High School in Sheffield in February, was sentenced to at least 16 years in prison. Sheffield Wednesday went into administration. Prunella Scales, the Fawlty Towers actress, died aged 93.
Plaid Cymru won the Senedd by-election in Caerphilly with 15,961 votes; Reform came second with 12,113; Labour was beaten into third place with 3,713. A YouGov poll put Labour at a record low of 17 per cent and Reform on 27 per cent. The national grooming gang inquiry seemed unlikely to find a chairman this year after retired policeman Jim Gamble withdrew his name. Five members of a Romanian gang were jailed for raping and sexually abusing ten women in flats in Dundee. Richmond-upon-Thames council retracted a £150 penalty given to a woman who poured the remains of a cup of coffee down a drain at a bus stop; Section 33 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990 forbids depositing controlled waste in or on any land. Transport for London spent £113,000 in three months on a security firm to prevent rough sleepers returning to Park Lane.
Abroad
US President Donald Trump said sanctions would be imposed on two major Russian oil companies, Rosneft and Lukoil. At a summit in Brussels, the EU found it could not quite break free from trading in Russian gas and oil nor use frozen Russian assets to fund Ukraine’s war effort. Volunteers rescued 48 children from a burning nursery in Kharkiv hit by a Russian drone. Lithuania will shoot down balloons used to smuggle cigarettes from neighbouring Belarus. Three Chinese citizens were arrested in Georgia after attempting to buy 2kg of uranium illegally. ‘I’d like China to help us out with Russia,’ Trump said on Air Force One on the way to Asia, where he would meet Xi Jinping, the ruler of China, in South Korea. Russia tested a nuclear-powered cruise missile.
In Cameroon, the 92-year-old incumbent, Paul Biya, won an eighth consecutive term as President. In Ivory Coast, President Alassane Ouattara, 83, won a fourth term. Catherine Connolly, 68, a left-wing independent, was elected President of Ireland. President Javier Milei of Argentina led his party to a convincing victory in midterm elections after two years of free-market reforms. The Sudanese city of el-Fasher fell to the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. Israel launched strikes on Gaza. The category five Hurricane Melissa battered Jamaica before sweeping into Cuba. Two men were arrested in connection with the theft of eight of France’s crown jewels from the Louvre. Ten people went on trial in Paris accused of cyber-bullying and spreading unsubstantiated claims over Brigitte Macron’s gender and sexuality.
The world’s largest warship, the USS Gerald R. Ford, was sent to the Caribbean as President Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela accused the United States of ‘fabricating a war’. Mexico handed over an alleged Chinese fentanyl kingpin, Zhi Dong Zhang, known as Brother Wang, to the US. A consignment of 234 mobile phones was blamed for exacerbating a fire on a bus in southern India that killed 20. CSH
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