Afternoon summary
Rishi Sunak returned to London from Dorset by helicopter on Wednesday evening and flew back to south-west England by jet the next morning, Downing Street has said, in the latest example of the prime minister’s fondness for short-distance air travel.
Elections for the Northern Ireland assembly are to be delayed again, with a new deadline of 18 January next year for the Democratic Unionist party to return to power-sharing, the UK government has announced.
Rishi Sunak has rebuked Lee Anderson just 48 hours into Anderson’s career as Conservative party vice-chair after he said he supported the death penalty because “nobody has ever committed a crime after being executed”.
Kemi Badenoch, the business secretary, appointed an equalities commissioner who had previously donated to her leadership campaign, the Guardian can reveal.
The former Labour MP Jared O’Mara has been sentenced to four years in prison after abusing his elected position to make fraudulent expense claims to fund his cocaine and alcohol habits.
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The government has published two consultation documents setting out how minimum service levels could operate under its strikes bill in two sectors. The ambulance service one is here and the fire and rescue services one is here.
This is what the ambulance service one says about the minimum services that ambulance staff would have to provide during an ambulance strike under the government’s plan:
Our proposed approach is that the minimum service level would mean that the employer responsible for running an ambulance service would be required to ensure the resources required to respond appropriately to life-threatening and emergency incidents are in place. By the term ‘life-threatening and emergency incidents’ in England and their equivalent in Wales and Scotland, we mean calls that could include stroke, chest pain, loss of consciousness, breathing difficulties, major lacerations, compound fractures, sepsis and major burns, among other incidents of similar severity.
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