Cancelled departure
Rishi Sunak, Britain’s prime minister, announced that the leg of a high-speed rail project connecting Birmingham to Manchester will be scrapped. The cost of HS2 soared from an initial £37.5bn in 2009 (then $62bn) to an estimated £100bn. Mr Sunak thinks the money could be better spent on transport links between northern cities.
Serbia said it had pulled back some of the troops it had sent to the border with Kosovo after tensions rose between the two countries following a shootout at a monastery involving ethnic Serbs and Kosovan police. America had described Serbia’s military build-up as “very destabilising”.
In Spain Pedro Sánchez’s Socialist party was tasked by the king with trying to form a new government, following the failure of Alberto Núñez Feijóo, leader of the conservative People’s Party, to cobble a coalition together. Mr Sánchez, the prime minister, staged an inconclusive election in July, in which the PP got the most seats but fell far short of a majority. He will need the support of the far left and Basque and Catalan nationalist parties if he is to govern again.
Turkey carried out air strikes on Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq and arrested dozens of suspected Kurdistan Workers’ Party activists, after a suicide-bomber attacked the interior ministry in Ankara. Police shot dead a second attacker, but the incident caused no other fatalities.
Protesters blocked roads in Guatemala over the attorneygeneral’s seizure of voting tallies from the electoral authorities, the latest move against president-elect, Bernardo Arévalo. Since the victory in August’s election of Mr Arévalo, an anti-corruption crusader, a group of elites have tried to dissolve his party to prevent him taking power in January.
After a year of wrangling, the UN Security Council voted to back sending a Kenyan-led multinational armed force to Haiti for a year. Kenya will send 1,000 troops and other countries have pledged people and funds. Russia and China abstained from the vote. Past deployments to the Caribbean island have not always been welcomed by locals, but gang violence in the country has reached a desperate state.
Two suicide-bomb attacks on mosques in Pakistan killed 59 people. No group claimed responsibility, but the Pakistani government ordered all illegal migrants, namely 1.7m Afghans, to leave the country by November 1st. (Some 4.4m Afghan refugees also live there.) The government said Afghans had carried out 14 of the 24 suicide-bombings in Pakistan this year and accuses Afghanistan of harbouring the groups responsible.
India reportedly ordered Canada to remove 41 of its 62 diplomats from the country, in a continuing row over Canada’s claim that India killed a Sikh separatist in Vancouver. Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister, said “We’re going through an extremely challenging time with India right now.”