The police watchdog will review how Metropolitan Police officers handled allegations of sexual misconduct against former Harrods owner Mohamed Al Fayed.
The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) will review two cases the Met Police investigated in 2008 and 2013 after the force referred itself.
Hundreds of women have alleged the billionaire, who died last year aged 94, raped or sexually assaulted them.
Police are looking into some claims and Harrods is also settling hundreds of claims.
In a documentary which aired in September, the BBC revealed Al Fayed was accused by 21 women of sexual offences while he was alive.
Since the documentary aired, more than 400 alleged victims have come forward with allegations of assault, harassment and rape over a period of more than 30 years when they were his employees.
However, questions have been raised around the Met's investigations.
Of the 21 women who made allegations before September this year, the Met did not pass full files of evidence to prosecutors on 19 of the women who approached them.
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The UK could face a £22bn hit to its exports if Donald Trump imposes a blanket 20% tariff on all imports into the US, according to a new analysis.
UK exports to the world could fall more than 2.6% due to lower trade with the US and knock-on effects globally, economists at the University of Sussex's Centre for Inclusive Trade Policy (CITP) said.
This fall could happen if the President-elect went through with his repeated campaign promise to levy a 20% tax on all imports, and a 60% tariff on Chinese imports.
The decline in trade would be the equivalent of an annual hit to UK economic output of 0.8%.
Although Trump's aggressive pledges could be a negotiating tactic, the "possibility of these tariffs being imposed is certainly there", researcher Nicolo Tamberi said in a blog post.
The main UK sectors likely to be hit would be fishing, petroleum, and mining, which could see exports fall by around a fifth.
The pharmaceutical and electrical sectors would also be hit.
Even businesses that are not exporters themselves could be affected.
For example, firms supplying transportation services, which rely on strong trade flows, would take a hit.
Insurance and finance services also support the underlying goods trade.
However, some sectors could benefit from reduced China exports to the US.
Textiles and clothing could see gains due to reduced competition, if Chinese exports were hit by much higher Trump tariffs.
Just how sharp the increase in border taxes under Donald Trump might be remains unclear. Some diplomats have pointed to more pragmatic suggestions about lighter tariffs for US allies.
But Trump's top adviser on trade, former Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, is a strong supporter of the tactic.
The Foreign Secretary David Lammy recently told the BBC's Newscast podcast: “We will seek to ensure and to get across to the United States – and I believe that they would understand this – that hurting your closest allies cannot be in your medium or long-term interests, whatever the pursuit of public policy in relation to some of the problems posed by China."
But the British ambassador in the US under Trump's previous administration, Lord Darroch, has warned the UK should not underestimate the risks.
"I’m a pessimist," he told BBC Newsnight on Thursday. "Trump did tariffs in his first term on steel and aluminium. He wants to go much bigger this time. He believes in it - it’s not a bluff. I think he will do it."
Chancellor Rachel Reeves and Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey have both said they will continue to make the argument for free trade.
The UK might be in a position to have to choose whether to try to cut a side deal with the Trump White House to avoid tariffs.
Alternatively the UK could join with other Western and European allies to send a clear message to Trump and the US Congress that American exporters would also be badly hit by such policies.
The CITP numbers only assume that the US sets tariffs on the world, and do not assume a likely trade retaliation from Europe or Asia.
The IMF recently warned that a large scale trade war would drive up inflation and lead to the world economy shrinking 7%, effectively the size of the French and German economies combined.
Global leaders will meet at COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan from November 11-22, 2024, to address climate change challenges
World leaders are set to arrive at a big annual UN climate meeting hoping to rein in rising global temperatures, which are making deadly events like the recent floods in Spain far worse.
A key aim at this year's meeting in Azerbaijan is agreeing on how to get more cash to poorer countries to help them curb their planet-warming gases and to help them cope with the growing impacts of climate change.
But the US election victory of Donald Trump - a known climate sceptic - as well as wars and cost of living crises are proving a distraction, and some important leaders are not attending.
Hosts Azerbaijan are also under intense scrutiny over their human rights record, as well as accusations they are using the meeting to line up fossil fuel deals.
People are evacuated as wildfires sweep across Rhodes, Greece in July 2023
What is COP29 and where is it?
COP29 is the world's most important meeting on climate change. It is led by the UN, and this year's event, the 29th such gathering, will run from 11-22 November. It is being held in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, a central Asian country located between Russia and Iran.
What does COP stand for?
Reuters
COP stands for “Conference of the Parties”, and in this case, the parties are the countries that have ratified a treaty called the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change).
That document was signed back in 1992, by almost 200 countries. The COP is the decision-making body of that agreement and representatives of these countries meet every year to negotiate the best approaches to tackling the root causes of climate change.
Who will go to COP29?
Presidents and prime ministers normally attend these conferences at the start to provide impetus. But this year the leaders of some of the biggest economies and biggest carbon emitters are notably absent. US President Joe Biden, China's leader Xi Jinping and France's President Emmanuel Macron will be absent, as will European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Germany’s Olaf Schulz and India’s Narendra Modi.
They are staying away for a range of reasons, but it won't help the conference get off to a strong start. Leaders who do attend will also have lots of other issues on their minds, including two expensive and difficult wars in the Middle East and in Ukraine, and global financial problems.
"No world leader is arriving with climate change at the number one spot in their inbox," Prof Thomas Hale at Oxford university explains.
There’s also an underlying feeling that Azerbaijan doesn’t have the diplomatic or financial clout to secure a significant agreement in Baku.
Many leaders are taking the view that progress is more likely at next year’s COP30 in Brazil.
Under the Paris agreement signed in 2015, world leaders pledged to try to prevent global temperatures rising by more than 1.5C. For that to happen countries need to ramp up their efforts to cut warming gases.
As part of the agreement, countries committed to develop a new cash target for developing nations by 2025. This money would be used to help emerging economies cut their carbon and adapt to the worst impacts of rising temperatures.
Getting agreement on a new finance target is seen as a critical step in building trust between rich and poor nations as, so far, the track record hasn’t been great.
African countries and small island states want to see climate finance in total reach over a $1tn a year by 2030.
Up to now countries like China and the Gulf States have been classified as developing economies and been exempt from contributing.
According to the EU and other wealthy countries, that must change if the overall amount of cash is to be increased.
Governments’ plans for tackling climate change in their own countries could also be a tricky issue. They must update their action plans every five years (the next deadline is February.)
Some countries will release their strategies at this COP, but if they’re weak and look unlikely to stop global warming rising beyond 1.5C, then it could cause problems with countries on the front lines of climate change.
And are the fossil fuel agreements passed at the last climate talks still standing? There were signs in the G20 talks this year that some countries wanted to roll back on promises to move away from burning oil, coal and gas.
You don’t need to look far to see trouble brewing. Major UN talks on protecting nature collapsed two weeks ago in Colombia when nations couldn’t agree key goals.
Why is holding COP29 in Azerbaijan controversial?
Azerbaijan has big plans to expand gas production, by up to a third, over the next decade. Some observers worry that a country with that goal is in charge of a conference that aims to transition away from fossil fuels.
These fuels are one of the main causes of climate change because they release planet-warming greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide when burned for energy.
There are also deep reservations about holding this key event in a country with a poor human rights record, where political opposition isn’t tolerated.
How will Donald Trump's election impact COP29?
Getty Images
Donald Trump attends the 2019 G20 summit in Osaka, Japan, during his first presidency
He won’t actually be at COP29, and President Biden’s team will push for progress, but they know that anything they agree to will not bind the new administration.
With Trump's election the US will likely withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement and from providing finance.
However it’s also possible that Trump’s re-election might drive a new sense of unity, even building a coalition who might agree a major step on money for poorer countries.
Experts argue that the climate crisis, and our collective response to it, will outlast a second Trump term.
What's going on with the world's climate this year?
Getty Images
Firefighters battle flames as they work to contain a wildfire near a village in northern Spain
The warning alarms from the climate could not be stronger this year.
It is now "virtually certain" that 2024 - a year punctuated by intense heatwaves and deadly storms - will be the world's warmest on record, according to projections by the European climate service.
And we’ve seen the impacts of warmer oceans with very powerful hurricanes Helene and Milton slamming into the US in the summer. The devastating flooding that killed at least 200 people in Spain in October was also fuelled by higher sea temperatures in the Mediterranean.
“Climate change is a cumulative problem. That means that with every year of delay, there is additional warming that we commit our planet to. Now is the time that we need to take action,” explains Prof Joeri Rogelj at Imperial College London.
How could these talks impact me?
In the short-term, agreements at COP can change how nations build their economies, like pushing the development of green power. That can affect where we get our energy from and how much we pay for it in our bills.
It can also commit countries to paying large sums of money into funds for poorer countries. In the UK this currently comes from aid budgets paid for by tax-payers, although private financial institutions are expected to contribute significantly.
In the long-term, the talks aim to build a safer, cleaner world for everyone and prevent the worst of climate change.
Authorities across the US are investigating after reports of text messages sent to black Americans with references to “slave catchers”, plantations and picking cotton.
In a statement the FBI said it is “aware of the offensive and racist text messages sent to individuals around the country and is in contact with the Justice Department and other federal authorities on the matter.”
The source of the messages and the total number sent are unclear, however, there are reports that they were received in at least 15 states and Washington DC.
Some of the messages mentioned the Trump campaign – which strongly denied any connection.
Steven Cheung, a campaign spokesman, said: “The campaign has absolutely nothing to do with these text messages.”
According to examples posted online and cited in news reports,the wording of the messages varied but generally instructed recipients to report to a “plantation” or wait to be picked up in a van, and referred to “slave” labour.
The messages appear to have started on Wednesday, the day after election day. Among the recipients were college students and children.
In a statement Derrick Johnson, head of the civil rights group NAACP, said: “These actions are not normal.”
“These messages represent an alarming increase in vile and abhorrent rhetoric from racist groups across the country, who now feel emboldened to spread hate and stoke the flames of fear that many of us are feeling after Tuesday's election results,” Johnson said.
Jessica Rosenworcel, chairwoman of the Federal Communications Commission, which is also investigating the messages, said: "These messages are unacceptable. We take this type of targeting very seriously.”
The messages were reportedly received across southern states, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Ohio, California, Washington DC and others, US media say.
“At first I thought it was a joke, but everyone else was getting them. People were texting, posting on their stories, saying they got them,” Ms Welch told The Crimson White. “I was just stressed out, and I was scared because I didn’t know what was happening.”
In several states, top law enforcement officials said they were aware of the messages and encouraged residents to report them to the authorities if they received them.
The office of Nevada’s attorney general said it was working to “probe into the source of what appear to be robotext messages”.
The office of Louisiana's attorney general said it had discovered that some of the messages could be traced back to a VPN in Poland, but that "no original source" had been found so far.
Authorities across the US are investigating after reports of text messages sent to black Americans with references to “slave catchers”, plantations and picking cotton.
In a statement the FBI said it is “aware of the offensive and racist text messages sent to individuals around the country and is in contact with the Justice Department and other federal authorities on the matter.”
The source of the messages and the total number sent are unclear, however, there are reports that they were received in at least 15 states and Washington DC.
Some of the messages mentioned the Trump campaign – which strongly denied any connection.
Steven Cheung, a campaign spokesman, said: “The campaign has absolutely nothing to do with these text messages.”
According to examples posted online and cited in news reports,the wording of the messages varied but generally instructed recipients to report to a “plantation” or wait to be picked up in a van, and referred to “slave” labour.
The messages appear to have started on Wednesday, the day after election day. Among the recipients were college students and children.
In a statement Derrick Johnson, head of the civil rights group NAACP, said: “These actions are not normal.”
“These messages represent an alarming increase in vile and abhorrent rhetoric from racist groups across the country, who now feel emboldened to spread hate and stoke the flames of fear that many of us are feeling after Tuesday's election results,” Johnson said.
Jessica Rosenworcel, chairwoman of the Federal Communications Commission, which is also investigating the messages, said: "These messages are unacceptable. We take this type of targeting very seriously.”
The messages were reportedly received across southern states, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Ohio, California, Washington DC and others, US media say.
“At first I thought it was a joke, but everyone else was getting them. People were texting, posting on their stories, saying they got them,” Ms Welch told The Crimson White. “I was just stressed out, and I was scared because I didn’t know what was happening.”
In several states, top law enforcement officials said they were aware of the messages and encouraged residents to report them to the authorities if they received them.
The office of Nevada’s attorney general said it was working to “probe into the source of what appear to be robotext messages”.
The office of Louisiana's attorney general said it had discovered that some of the messages could be traced back to a VPN in Poland, but that "no original source" had been found so far.
President-elect Donald Trump’s win, coupled with a quarter-point interest rate cut from the Federal Reserve, pushed major stock indexes into record territory.
President-elect Donald J. Trump’s transition team for climate and the environment is considering relocating the E.P.A. out of Washington and other drastic changes.
David Bernhardt, who was the interior secretary during the first Trump administration, is playing a lead role in the transition team’s energy and environment agenda.
Donald Trump pledged in one of his final campaign speeches to work with Democratic mayors and governors if reelected. But just hours after the former president was projected to win back the White House, some blue-state leaders were actively plotting against him.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom, one of Trump’s fiercest critics, on Thursday called a special legislative session to funnel more resources toward the state’s legal defenses to preemptively combat Republican policies around immigration, the environment, LGBTQ+ rights and reproductive care.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and Attorney General Letitia James — one of Trump’s most aggressive first-term adversaries — pledged to beef up coordination between their offices to “protect New Yorkers’ fundamental freedoms from any potential threats.”
And attorneys general across blue states are prepared to take Trump to court — just as their predecessors did hundreds of times during his first administration.
If Trump’s reelection represented a realignment in American politics, blue-state leaders are choosing to confront it with a return to form, resuming the counterweight roles they played during his first administration as their party reckons with a nationwide repudiation.
“We've been talking for months with attorneys general throughout the nation, preparing, planning, strategizing for the possibility of this day,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said at a press conference in San Francisco on Thursday.
Trump’s two-year campaign to retake the White House — and polls that for months showed he could succeed — gave Democrats the lead time they lacked in 2016 to shore up their defenses against conservative policies. And they are using as a guide his campaign-trail calls for mass deportations and regulatory rollbacks, as well as Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for a Republican administration that Trump has distanced himself from but that dozens of his former administration officials had a hand in crafting.
Governors and lawmakers in several blue states have already passed laws bolstering reproductive rights since the fall of Roe and stockpiled the abortion pill mifepristone in response to further legal threats to reproductive care. While Trump has vowed to veto a national abortion ban, that’s hardly alleviated Democrats’ fears. And as he barreled toward a second term, they raced to address other areas of concern, pushing ballot measures to protect same-sex marriage, labor rights and other liberal causes.
Even as he briefly pledged in the closing days of his campaign to work across the aisle, Trump has also vowed to punish his political opponents — and many blue-state leaders are at the top of his list of adversaries. On Friday, the president-elect tore into Newsom for calling a special legislative session.
“Governor Gavin Newscum is trying to KILL our Nation’s beautiful California,” Trump said Friday in a post on Truth Social, using his derisive nickname for the governor. “He is using the term ‘Trump-Proof’ as a way of stopping all of the GREAT things that can be done to ‘Make California Great Again.’”
And so Democratic governors and attorneys general who have spent months strategizing on how to protect their states’ progressive policies from a possible second Trump term are kicking those efforts into higher gear.
Some governors are discussing how to ensure that federal funding for state projects makes it to their coffers before Trump takes power, potentially with total Republican control of Congress, said one person who works in a Democratic governor’s office, granted anonymity to disclose private conversations. The discussions convey the concerns among some Democrats that Republicans could pause disbursements from, or even repeal, President Joe Biden’s signature programs, such as the CHIPS and Inflation Reduction acts.
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker also said Thursday that he has spoken with other Democratic governors since the election about how to best Trump-proof their states.
“There are many people whose lives and livelihoods are at risk, and there are many people who cried at the [election] result because they know what impact it may have on their families,” Pritzker said at a press conference Thursday.
“The freedoms we hold dear in California are under attack,” Newsom declared in a statement. “And we won’t sit idle.”
In New York, Hochul and James created the Empire State Freedom Initiative, a program that is meant to address “policy and regulatory threats” from the incoming Trump administration, including against reproductive and LGBTQ+ rights, as well as gun safety and environmental justice. The New York governor also signaled she will propose legislation as well as take executive action in response to Trump’s victory, but did not provide specifics.
“New York will remain a bastion for freedom and rule of law,” Hochul said. “I'll do everything in my power to ensure that New York remains a bastion from efforts where those rights are being denied in other states.”
James could have an outsize impact on how Trump’s policies trickle down to New York. The Democrat, who was first elected in 2018, sued Trump’s real estate business for fraud. She won a $450 million judgment, which is being appealed.
Meanwhile, state prosecutors who often served as the first line of defense against Trump’s most controversial executive orders in his last term — banding together to try to block his travel restrictions from some Muslim-majority countries, challenge his plans to roll back vehicle emissions standards, and more — have long been preparing to again serve as a legal bulwark.
In California, state lawyers have meticulously prepared for Trump’s return — down to crafting draft briefings, weighing specific legal arguments and debating favorable litigation venues, Bonta, the attorney general, told POLITICO.
“If he comes into office and he follows the law and he doesn't violate the constitution and he doesn't violate other important laws, like the Administrative Procedure Act he violated all the time last time, then there's nothing for us to do,” Bonta said. “But if he violates the law, as he has said he would, as Project 2025 says he will, then we are ready. … We have gone down to the detail of: What court do we file in?”
In New Jersey, state Attorney General Matt Platkin cited mass deportations, an “aggressive reading of the Comstock Act” to potentially impose an abortion ban and "gutting clean water protection" as potential sources of litigation.
“If you look at the things that have been said by the president and his associates during the campaign, … if you read Project 2025, there are proposals that are clearly unlawful and that would undermine the rights of our residents,” Platkin said in an interview.
And in Massachusetts, first-term Attorney General Andrea Campbell’s office has been preparing to act against threats to reproductive, LGBTQ+ and immigrants' rights and student loan-forgiveness programs, among other areas.
In response to a request for comment, Trump’s team said in a statement: “The American people re-elected President Trump by a resounding margin giving him a mandate to implement the promises he made on the campaign trail. He will deliver.”
Democrats’ rush to reform their resistance to Trump is partly self-serving. Governors and state prosecutors who took on Trump during his first term burnished their national profiles in the process.
In some cases they were able to parlay their opposition into higher office: Massachusetts’ Maura Healey leveraged her lawsuits against Trump as attorney general to help win the governorship in 2022; California’s Xavier Becerra, the former state attorney general, is now the Biden administration’s Health and Human Services secretary and is eyeing a run for governor. And for Democrats who’ve been chafing for a chance to get off the party’s deep bench, a second Trump term presents a fresh opportunity for a potentially star-making turn ahead of an open 2028 presidential primary.
That jockeying has in some ways already begun. Several blue-state leaders held press conferences on Wednesday and Thursday to reassure anxious constituents that doubled as ways to establish themselves as leaders in the anti-Trump fight. On Wednesday, Healey was on MSNBC vowing that state police would not be involved in carrying out the mass deportations Trump has promised, seizing a national platform in a way she rarely has since challenging Trump in the courtroom as attorney general.
But there was some acknowledgment among top city and state Democrats that they would have to find ways to work with Trump, too — mainly on infrastructure projects which are often reliant on massive amounts of federal funding.
“If it's contrary to our values, we will fight to the death,” New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy said during a Wednesday press conference about the election results. “If there’s an opportunity for common ground, we will seize that as fast as anybody.”
New York City Mayor Eric Adams similarly pledged to find ways to partner with the incoming administration, naming infrastructure as a target area for future collaboration.
“I communicated with the president yesterday to state that there are many issues here in the city that we want to work together with the administration to address,” Adams said during a news conference Thursday. “The city must move forward.”
Holly Otterbein, Melanie Mason, Nick Reisman, Daniel Han, Maya Kaufman, Shia Kapos and Kelly Garrity contributed to this report.
The National Weather Service said snowfall accumulations from Friday into Saturday morning could be significant, with 12 to 20 inches expected south of Denver.
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