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Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, said, ‘We can now move on to the next phase of our economic plan and turn our attention to cutting taxes,’ having seen a reduction in inflation. Jeremy Hunt, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, followed suit in the Autumn Statement, cutting personal taxes. The government was to make changes to long-term benefits. The minimum wage, known officially as the National Living Wage, currently £10.42 an hour for those over the age of 23, will rise to £11.44 an hour for those over 21 from next April. The government also drew attention to £8.3 billion allocated to mending potholes, money purportedly saved from the curtailment of the HS2 project. Households living close to new pylons would receive compensation. Nigel Farage took part in I’m a Celebrity… for a fee of £1.5 million.

In the wake of the Supreme Court judgment that the government’s plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda was unlawful, Sunak said: ‘I am prepared to do what is necessary to get flights off.’ He did not say what was necessary, but offered an emergency Bill and perhaps a treaty with Rwanda. Ten Labour frontbenchers resigned their positions in order to vote for an SNP amendment calling for an immediate ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war. David Cameron, the Foreign Secretary, was introduced to the House of Lords as Baron Cameron of Chipping Norton, of Chipping Norton in the County of Oxfordshire. North Hertfordshire Museum, which possesses a coin from the reign of the Roman Emperor Elagabalus, concluded that he was a trans woman and will refer to him as ‘she’ and ‘her’.

The British Library’s book-ordering, website and even telephones continued to be largely out of operation because of a ransomware cyber attack on 31 October. The BBC said that Top Gear would not return to television ‘for the foreseeable future’. Police found the bodies of four missing teenage boys in a partly submerged car near Tremadog, Gwynedd. A.S. Byatt, the novelist, died aged 87. Joss Ackland, the actor, died aged 95.

Abroad

In the war between Israel and Hamas an agreement was reached for Hamas to release around 12 hostages a day in return for a four-day ceasefire and the release of 150 Palestinian prisoners. The United States and Qatar had helped negotiate the agreement. Hundreds of thousands of people in Gaza had moved this way and that to avoid bombing and conflict. Israel produced a video of a 55-metre Hamas concrete tunnel that it said was found underneath the Al-Shifa hospital, which it had occupied. The patients were slowly evacuated. A group of 28 premature babies were taken from the hospital to Egypt. Israeli forces moved in on the Indonesian hospital in northern Gaza. ‘Killings of so many in schools-turned-shelters, amid fleeing of hundreds from Al-Shifa Hospital and ongoing displacement in southern Gaza, are actions which fly in the face of the basic protections civilians must be afforded under international law,’ said Volker Türk, the UN high commissioner for human rights. France dispatched a helicopter-carrier to Egypt as a floating hospital for Palestinian civilians in Gaza. The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza said 14,000 people have been killed in the territory since Israel responded to the Hamas attack.

A delegation of Arab and Islamic foreign ministers visited China, whose foreign minister Wang Yi said it ‘fully supports’ a two-state solution in Gaza. A Japanese-operated cargo ship was hijacked in the Red Sea by Iran-backed Houthi rebels, who said the ship was Israeli. Ukraine sacked two top cyber defence officials, Yurii Shchyhol and Victor Zhora, charged with embezzlement. President Volodymyr Zelensky also sacked major general Tetiana Ostashchenko, commander of Ukraine’s medical forces. More than 200 defendants convicted in a mafia trial at Lamezia Terme in the Calabria region of Italy were sentenced to a total of more than 2,200 years in jail. Food was sent and images retrieved through a pipeline nine days after 41 workers were trapped in a tunnel in India’s Uttarakhand state.

Sam Altman, who had helped launch OpenAI, was dismissed as its chief executive by the board; four days later he was brought back to run OpenAI. Javier ‘El Loco’ Milei, 53, was elected President of Argentina. The Colombian pop singer Shakira agreed to pay a €7.5 million fine on the brink of a trial in Spain in which prosecutors had sought to jail her for eight years. Equinox, the world’s highest-rated horse, prepared for the Japan Cup.          CSH