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Dozens of armed police in London laid down their guns after a Metropolitan Police officer was charged with the murder of Chris Kaba, 24, shot in Streatham Hill last year. The army stood by, but enough policemen returned to armed duties to make Military Aid to the Civil Authorities unnecessary. Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, backed some sort of review of armed policing guidelines ordered by Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary, which Downing Street said was expected to conclude by the end of the year. Mrs Braverman warned separately that as many as 780 million people will be eligible to claim asylum without radical reform of rules based on the UN Refugee Convention; ‘Simply being gay, a woman or fearful of discrimination’ was now effectively enough to qualify for protection, she said.

Regulators approved the exploitation of the Rosebank oilfield, 80 miles west of Shetland, estimated to contain 500 million barrels of oil. The costs of the HS2 railway project had been getting ‘totally out of control’, Jeremy Hunt, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said; Mr Sunak was said to be alarmed at the cost rising above £100 billion. But Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Greater Manchester, said that scrapping the legs north of Birmingham was ‘a recipe for the north-south divide to become a north-south chasm’. Through a computer bungle, Newcastle Hospitals failed to send out 24,000 letters from senior doctors to patients and their GPs, some detailing necessary care. More than a million NHS treatments and appointments had been cancelled in England due to strikes, NHS England announced. British workers took an average of 7.8 sick days in the past year, compared with 5.8 before the Covid pandemic; the Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development, which commissioned the study, said that some people took sick leave through worry about not having enough money to pay the bills.

Rupert Murdoch, aged 92, said he was to resign as chairman of News Corp and Fox, while remaining chairman emeritus; his son Lachlan is to head both companies. The average two-year fixed mortgage rate fell slightly to 6.56 per cent from 6.58 per cent a day after the Bank of England left interest rates unchanged at 5.25 per cent. The Liberal Democrats dropped plans to raise income tax by a penny in the pound, their policy since 1992.

Abroad

Ukraine said that a missile strike on the headquarters in Sevastopol of Russia’s Black Sea fleet was timed to coincide with a meeting of naval officials; the attack was carried out by Storm Shadow missiles, which are supplied by Britain and France. Within a week of Azerbaijan seizing Nagorno-Karabakh, the enclave of 120,000 ethnic Armenians, 40,000 refugees had arrived in Armenia. The spacecraft OSIRIS-REx dropped off a capsule in Utah containing half a pound of samples from Bennu, a carbonaceous asteroid, which it left in 2020, and swung off into space to visit another asteroid which it will reach in 2029. India’s lander Vikram proved reluctant to reawaken after a 14-day lunar night near the moon’s south pole.

Police in Almendralejo, Extremadura, investigated a dozen boys aged 12 to 14 suspected of generating, through AI, unclothed images of local girls aged 11 to 17. Abdulmenam al-Ghaithi, the mayor of Derna in Libya, where thousands were killed by intense flooding, was arrested by the government. President Emmanuel Macron said France would withdraw its ambassador to Niger and the 1,500 troops helping to fight Islamist militants, following the coup in July. More than five million quelea birds eating rice crops were killed with poison sprayed by drones in Tanzania.

A New York judge ruled that Donald Trump, the former American president, had committed fraud by misrepresenting his wealth by hundreds of millions of dollars. The Writers Guild of America ended its five-month strike. Professor Rahile Dawut, a prominent Uighur academic, was reportedly jailed for life by China after appealing against a 2018 sentence at a secret trial for ‘splittism’, regarded as a danger to state security. Hengda Real Estate, the mainland unit of China’s Evergrande property developer, defaulted on a debt of four billion yuan (£449 million). The Philippines removed a floating barrier it accused China of installing to stop fishing boats entering a lagoon in the disputed territory of Scarborough Shoal. A pair of dress circle tickets for the night Abraham Lincoln was shot dead in the third act of Our American Cousin were sold for $262,500.              CSH