The Philae lander has landed
After 10 years of hard work, £1bn, and a 6bn km journey, the Rosetta spacecraft successfully sent its Philae lander down to land on comet 67P. Mission control at the European Space Agency in the German city of Darmstadt waited seven hours after the lander separated from the spacecraft before they re-established contact and heard that the landing had been a success.
Philae is currently sitting in a shadow and so is unlikely to get enough energy from sunlight to keep it operational past Saturday. The hope is that the lander’s drill and onboard laboratories can analyse enough of the comet’s surface to offer some insights.
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Rosetta: what went right with Philae, what went wrong and how it can be fixed
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Rosetta mission lands Philae spacecraft on comet – in pictures
Ed Miliband’s leadership is in trouble
It has been a bad seven days for Ed Miliband. At the end of last week a series of anonymous complaints about his leadership were channelled through David Watts, chair of the parliamentary Labour party. On Sunday, Labour MPs told the Observer that at least 20 shadow ministers were on the brink of calling for him to stand down and that they would go public with their demand if the former home secretary Alan Johnson was prepared to run. On Monday, Johnson wrote in the Guardian in unequivocal terms that he would not be standing against the Labour leader.
To date the story has provoked countless column inches and yet no Labour MP has gone on the record with their complaints. The problem is that there is no clear alternative leader to Miliband and polls suggest that Labour would fare no better with anyone else.
- Polly Toynbee: Panic over the Labour leadership serves no purpose – stop it, now
- Peter Kellner: Labour’s problem isn’t Ed Miliband, it’s Labour
Experimental Ebola drug trials will go ahead in west Africa
Three unprecedented Ebola drugs trials will start next month at medical centres run by Médecins sans Frontières in west Africa. Trials like these have never been held during an epidemic and they are controversial because the drugs have not been subject to the usual process of testing on animals and healthy humans before being given to the sick. The trials have been set up with what the Guardian health editor Sarah Boseley describes as “extraordinary speed” in the hope that they will slash the 70% death rate from the disease. The death toll from the current outbreak of Ebola has now surpassed 5,000.
Jihadis who travel to Syria could be barred from the UK
David Cameron has announced plans to prevent suspected jihadis who travel to Syria from returning to the UK for two years. If they wish to return they could be forced to agree to face trial or be subject to home detention and police monitoring or go on a deradicalisation course. The plans have been cleared by government law officers to tackle claims that the moves breach human rights laws.
Cameron promised MPs that he would introduce new anti-terror laws after the beheading of the US journalist James Foley and the raising of the UK’s terror threat level in September. The government is aiming to introduce the new counter-terror bill this month and push it through parliament by January.
Banks have been fined £2.6bn for market rigging
Regulators announced on Wednesday that they were fining six major banks £2.6bn for rigging foreign exchange markets. An investigation into the practice by the Financial Conduct Authority found a “free-for-all culture” on trading floors, which they said had allowed the markets to be rigged between January 2008 and October 2013. The fines were the highest ever handed out by the authority and were imposed on Royal Bank of Scotland, HSBC, Citibank, JP Morgan and UBS. The settlement did not include Barclays, which is still in negotiation with regulators.
Channel 4 News’s economics editor, Paul Mason, was so enraged to be reporting from outside RBS HQ in the City of London yet again that he went on a rant to camera: “We really deserve a better banking system because everybody on this street who doesn’t work in it is also reliant on it.”
The US and China have agreed a climate deal
In a rare show of cooperation the world’s two biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, the United States and China, have negotiated a deal to reduce their greenhouse gas output. The Chinese president, Xi Jinping, and US president, Barack Obama, announced the secretly negotiated deal at a joint press conference in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Wednesday.
In an unprecedented move, China, the world’s biggest polluter, agreed to cap its output by 2030 or sooner and to increase its use of energy from zero-emission sources to 20% by 2030. The US pledged to cut its emissions to 26-28% below 2005 levels by 2025.
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A step forward for green power relations
- The US-China climate deal is a model for world diplomacy: too small to fail
- The Guardian view on the climate change deal: two cheers
Jessica Ennis-Hill could ask for her name to be removed from football stand
The Olympic gold medallist Jessica Ennis-Hill says she will ask Sheffield United football club to remove her name from a stand of their stadium if the convicted rapist Ched Evans is allowed to return to play for the club. Ennis-Hill is a lifelong supporter of Sheffield United and the stand at Bramall Lane was named after her when she won Olympic gold in 2012. In a statement Ennis-Hill said: “I believe being a role model to young people is a huge honour and those in positions of influence in communities should respect the role they play in young people’s lives and set a good example.”
Evans, who was released from prison last month, served half of a five-year sentence for raping a 19-year-old woman in a hotel room in 2011.
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Tony Needham: I don’t want Ched Evans playing for my football club
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Hadley Freeman: Pity poor Oscar Pistorius and Ched Evans – their CVs ruined, for ever
Ukip has a 12-point lead over the Tories in Rochester
The byelection in Rochester is drawing near and all the evidence suggests the UK Independence party may be about to gain its second seat in parliament. The Conservative party MPs Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless defected to Ukip in August and September this year. Carswell became Ukip’s first MP when he successfully ran in his old constituency of Clacton in October, and a poll from the Tory peer Lord Ashcroft suggests Reckless will become the second on 20 November. The poll puts Reckless on 44% of the vote, the Conservatives’ Kelly Tolhurst on 32% and the Labour candidate Naushabah Khan on 17%. The Liberal Democrats have just 2% of the support.
This is what Mazher Mahmood, the ‘fake sheikh’, looks like
After a last-minute cancellation on Monday, the long-awaited Panorama documentary exposing the investigative journalist Mazher Mahmood’s alleged stings was aired on Wednesday night and watched by 2.5 million people. The so-called fake sheikh, who has been responsible for a huge range of scoops at the various papers he has worked at, including the now-closed News of the World, brought legal action against the BBC arguing that revealing his appearance would breach his human rights and expose him to danger, a claim that was thrown out by the courts. After the show aired, six other possible victims of Mahmood contacted lawyers.
- Roy Greenslade: Time for an investigation into the fake sheikh
- BBC hopes ‘textbook’ investigation into ‘fake sheikh’ heralds fresh start
Twitter has been given a junk credit rating
A year after Twitter floated on the stock market, Standard & Poor’s credit rating agency has given the company a BB- corporate credit rating, which is junk-grade. Twitter’s shares fell 5.7% to $40.12 on Thursday, meaning they have lost more than a third of their value since a peak of $73.31 at the end of December last year, a month after a disastrous IPO.
The ratings agency’s forecast wasn’t all gloom for the San-Francisco-based social network. It described Twitter as having strong growth prospects and a stable outlook. The company’s heavy investment in growth means it might not have positive cash flow before it sees the benefits.
