Home
Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, announced that Britain had recognised a Palestinian state. France, Portugal, Canada and Australia did likewise. Before President Donald Trump of the United States was sent safely home, the government said it had secured £150 billion worth of US investment. Baroness Berger succeeded in establishing a select committee to examine the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, after it passed its second reading in the Lords. The Ethiopian asylum seeker whose arrest for sexually assaulting a woman and a 14-year-old girl provoked protests outside a migrant hotel in Epping was jailed for 12 months. The Home Office was looking into hundreds of thousands of pounds spent on sending asylum seekers to see doctors by taxi. An Indian, an Eritrean and an Iranian, who had each reached England in small boats, were sent back to France in return for other asylum applicants. In one day, 1,072 more migrants arrived by small boat. Reform said it would abolish indefinite leave to remain and replace it with a five-year qualifying work visa.
Labour and the Conservatives tied at 16 per cent and Reform was on 34 per cent in a voting intention poll of 4,795 adults by Find Out Now. Zarah Sultana sent out emails inviting people to join the new political party she started with Jeremy Corbyn, but he said the ‘unauthorised’ email should be ignored. The Crown Prosecution Service dropped charges against Christopher Berry and Christopher Cash, accused of spying for China; Sir Lindsay Hoyle, Speaker of the House of Commons, said: ‘I believe this leaves the door open to foreign actors trying to spy on the House.’ Field Marshal Lord Guthrie of Craigiebank, former chief of the general staff, died aged 86. The cricket umpire Dickie Bird died aged 92.
The government gave permission for a second runway at Gatwick. A cyber-attack on Collins Aerospace, the software provider for check-ins at Heathrow and other European airports, caused cancellations and delays. Jaguar Land Rover extended its shutdown after a cyber-attack into October. Public borrowing hit £18 billion in August. Seven charities dropped the Duchess of York after an email she sent to Jeffrey Epstein in 2011 was made public: ‘You have always been a steadfast, generous and supreme friend to me and my family.’
Abroad
Estonia requested a consultation with other Nato members, under Article 4of the Nato treaty, after three Russian MiG-31 fighter jets violated its airspace for 12 minutes. Two RAF planes joined Nato aircraft on patrol above Poland. In a speech to the United Nations, Mr Trump said immigration and green energy policies ‘will be the death of western Europe’ and criticised European countries that had ‘not cut off’ Russian oil, thereby ‘funding the war against themselves’. After meeting President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, he posted a remark: ‘Ukraine, with the support of the European Union, is in a position to fight and win all of Ukraine back in its original form.’ Earlier he had called the conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who was shot dead at a university two weeks ago, a ‘martyr’ in a speech to almost 100,000 at a memorial service in an Arizona stadium. Mr Kirk’s widow said she had forgiven her husband’s killer, but Mr Trump said: ‘I hate my opponents and I don’t want the best for them.’ Mr Trump and his health secretary Robert F. Kennedy linked autism to the use of painkillers such as Tylenol during pregnancy. (Tylenol is an American name for paracetamol.) The US company Nvidia will invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. Nasa plans to send astronauts round the moon as soon as February.
Flights to and from Copenhagen, Denmark’s largest airport, were suspended after drones were sighted. President Emmanuel Macron of France and his wife, Brigitte, will present photographic evidence to an American court to prove she is a woman, their lawyer said, in their defamation case against the right-wing commentator Candace Owens. Peter Reynolds, 80, and his wife Barbie, 76, imprisoned by the Taliban since 1 February, were released through Qatari mediation.
The former Philippine president, Rodrigo Duterte, was charged by the International Criminal Court with crimes against humanity relating to his ‘war on drugs’. Violent anti-immigrant demonstrations were held in the Hague. Thousands took to the streets in Italy in a day of protests co-ordinated by trade unions in solidarity with Palestinians. Eighty buffaloes fell off a cliff and drowned in the Chobe river in Namibia. CSH
Comments