Two escaped Pentonville prisoners left dummies in their beds

Two prisoners have escaped from Pentonville prison in north London, the Ministry of Justice has confirmed.

They were discovered missing on Monday morning when jail staff found mannequins in their beds. 

It is believed the pair used diamond-tipped cutting equipment to break through cell bars before scaling the perimeter wall. 

A manhunt is now underway for James Whitlock, aged 31, and 28-year-old Matthew Baker. 

Police have warned the public not to approach the two convicts as they could become violent, but to call 999 if they see either of them. 

Baker was on remand awaiting sentencing after being found guilty two weeks ago of the attempted murder of a man at a flat in Dagenham.

He was due to be sentenced on Friday.

Image Caption:The entrance to Pentonville Prison in north London

Whitlock, who has the word 'Tracy' tattooed on his body, was also on remand after being charged with conspiracy to burgle more than 19 ATMs between December 2015 and August 2016.

Mike Rolfe, from the Prison Officers' Association, told Sky News the escapees would have had help from outside, and equipment may have been sent in by drone. 

The Metropolitan Police said it was called to Pentonville in Islington at 11.44am on Monday. 

A spokeswoman from the Prison Service said: "Public protection is our top priority and we take escapes from custody extremely seriously. 

"We are working closely with the police and are urgently investigating the matter." 

Last month a 21-year-old inmate, Jamal Mahmoud, died after being stabbed in Pentonville, while two others were injured in the same attack.

A convicted murderer, John Massey, escaped the north London jail in 2012 after managing to climb a wall using a rope made out of bed sheets, before being recaptured after 48 hours on the run. 

Image Caption:Pentonville is a Victorian jail that opened in 1842

The category B Victorian prison, which opened in 1842, holds more than 1,200 men.

The former Justice Secretary, Michael Gove, described Pentonville last year as "the most dramatic example of failure" within the prisons estate. 

Shadow justice minister Yasmin Qureshi said: "The past 24 hours have provided yet more evidence of the crisis in our prison estate which has developed under this Tory government.

"The government must act immediately to make sure our prisons are safe and secure." 

Last week, Justice Secretary Liz Truss disclosed a package of  measures aimed at reforming prisons. 

:: Probe into HMP Bedford 'riot involving 200 inmates'

The strategy includes employing 2,500 new prison officers and "no fly zones" to stop drones dropping drugs and other contraband into prisons.

Figures show in 2015-16 there were two escapes from prisons, neither of which were still at large. 

A report by the Ministry of Justice earlier this year said escapes are "rare" and "taken very seriously". 

Hillary Clinton cleared over emails - but what is the damage?

James Comey has effectively said "nothing to see here" - but 12 days ago he made the world watch as he reignited the Hillary Clinton email story, dropping a political hand grenade into the closing weeks of this election. 

The headlines were explosive - the emails it would seem are not. But the director of the FBI changed the way the race was run.

The Democrats were caught off guard.

Instead of ending her campaign with a positive message of how she wanted to lead the country and who she would help, Mrs Clinton, under pressure in the polls, focused on her opponent's weaknesses as her surrogates waged war on Mr Comey.

:: Latest US election polling

It was a turbulent few days that dominated the political conversation.

Image Caption:The letter from James Comey confirming no criminal case against Clinton

Donald Trump was given a lifeline, his team rejoicing in their 11th-hour gift.

It gave them fuel to focus his message. 

There was already a deep well of suspicion around Mrs Clinton's trustworthiness. Now he had a closing argument.

He's lost that weapon, but the FBI investigation may have already inflicted serious harm on his opponent.

The Democrats' nominee made no mention of the news after it broke. At a rally in Cleveland, she tried to reshape her closing pitch, moving away from slamming her rival and towards focusing on her vision for America.

But Mr Trump refused to let go. In Sterling Heights, Michigan, he swiftly poured doubt on the conclusion, telling the crowd: "You can't review 650,000 emails in eight days."

That number was in fact never confirmed and the speed of the review suggests there were far fewer. But his claims of a "rigged system" have caught fire among his followers. 

:: Parties battle for Latino vote

The fact that the FBI has found no case to answer will likely only drive more claims of a conspiracy - and the dust is unlikely to settle by 8 November. 

If Mr Trump wins, some Democrats will hold Mr Comey responsible. If Mrs Clinton clinches it, she may always blame him for how close she came to a political disaster. 

A vague letter made a dirty race a lot darker. That race will soon be over. The fallout from this saga may take a lot longer. 

Hillary Clinton emails: How FBI verdict affects US election

It was much ado about nothing, but it certainly amounted to something. 

While FBI Director James Comey, in effect, said "never mind" with regards to Hillary Clinton's emails, for the past two weeks the story has dominated the political conversation, and Democrats have paid a price. 

While Mrs Clinton's standings in the polls have stabilised a bit, talk of a possible Clinton rout are a distant memory and many of Democrats running on the ballot alongside Mrs Clinton have seen their standing diminished.

As the campaign comes to a close, the Clinton campaign will likely tout these results and try to focus back on its closing message. Chances are Donald Trump will continue to accuse Mrs Clinton of corruption, and he has already started once again alleging that the FBI is rigging the system to cover up for the former secretary of state.

With only two days until voting, it's more than likely that the dust kicked up by this story won't have fully settled by the time Americans head to the polls.

When determining the political fallout of this latest development, it's worth remembering that the race between Mr Trump and Mrs Clinton was already tightening in the days leading up to the first Comey letter. Surveys taken after the revelation indicated that few Americans considered the story grounds for changing their vote. The divide between the two candidates is simply too great to allow much ticket-switching at this point.

What the story did do was knock Mr Trump out of the headlines for over a week, giving him space to bring disaffected Republicans back into the fold. It also prevented Mrs Clinton from ending the campaign on a positive message and increased negative perceptions of her, which will make it harder for her to govern if she is elected.

Once this election is in the rear-view mirror, there will have to be a lot of soul-searching within the FBI and the media about how this story has played out and been covered. Following Mr Comey's original letter, the nation's top law-enforcement became a constant source of leaks, as internal factions and disputes spilled into public view. 

Many pundits and analysts speculated that there would be no way Mr Comey would release the letter so close to the election unless Mrs Clinton's situation was truly dire. Those conclusions proved unfounded. 

If Mr Trump wins, many will attribute it to Mr Comey's actions and subject him to withering criticism. They will point to the fact that he disregarded longstanding Justice Department policy of restraint when it comes with the release of possibly inflammatory information in the months before a general election.

If Mrs Clinton prevails, she likely will bear a grudge that is difficult to let go. The Clintons have long memories. If the tensions between the Obama Justice Department and the FBI have been high, they will only get higher. 

Either way the FBI director will have quite a mess to clean up.

Outages Hit Wikileaks, Twitter

Twitter's website briefly went down early Monday morning, shortly after Wikileaks reported a cyber attack on its email publication servers.

Twitter has not confirmed the outage, but websites that track its servers' activity said that an outage hit the social media website and lasted for a few minutes ending around 1:30 a.m. Monday.

Wikileaks posted a message to its Facebook account claiming an ongoing denial-of-service attack on its servers.

"We are still under a DoS attack on our e-mail publication servers and it appears that Twitter is down as well, we are unable to confirm if this is an attack on twitter at this time," the post read.

Egypt's economy: 'People are tired'

Egypt has raised energy prices by nearly 50%. It comes a day after floating the country's currency as part of austerity measures aimed at securing a $12bn IMF loan. 

The government says it is needed for long-term economic growth, but the moves have caused heightened anxiety among ordinary people.

Here Egyptians explain how they are affected by the measures.

Clinton Foundation admits $1 million Qatar gift

The Clinton Foundation has said it accepted a $1 million gift from the Qatari government without notifying the State Department that it had done so, an apparent violation of an ethics agreement Hillary Clinton signed when she became Secretary of State in 2009.

Under the terms of the agreement, Clinton promised the foundation would notify the State Department's ethics official if a new foreign government wished to donate or if a current foreign donor wished to "increase materially" its contributions.

PODESTA RELATIVE EARNED SIX-FIGURE FEES LOBBYING CLINTON'S STATE DEPARTMENT DURING HIS TENURE THERE

Qatari officials pledged the money in 2011 to mark former President Bill Clinton's 65th birthday. The following April, Amitabh Desai, the Clinton Foundation's foreign policy director, emailed several of his colleagues to say that the Qataris wanted to meet Bill Clinton "'for five minutes' in NYC to present [the] check." Hillary Clinton served as secretary of state until Feb. 1, 2013.

When contacted by Reuters, which first reported on the deal's ethical ramifications, Clinton Foundation spokesman Brian Cookstra said the $1 million gift did not constitute a "material increase" in the Middle Eastern nation's contributions.

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Reuters, citing the foundation's own website, reported that Qatar's own government has directly given a total of between $1 million and $5 million over the years.

The State Department told the news agency it had no record of the Qatar donation and said it was up to the foundation to submit it for review.

The number of foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation has opened the Democratic nominee up to conflict-of-interest accusations and raises the possibility that donors gave money with the expectation of receiving political favors in return.

Republican nominee Donald Trump has repeatedly called for Clinton to return donations from countries like Qatar, which has a questionable human rights record.

Last year, the Foundation admitted that no complete list of donors to its health program, the Clinton Health Access Initiative, had been published since 2010, despite promises from Clinton two years earlier that such a list would be produced annually.

The email from Desai was part of a trove of hacked messages from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta's account that were published by Wikileaks last month.

Alex Goodwin: Police help boy's music video cancer appeal

Hundreds of police officers from across the country are to appear in a charity music video for a child suffering from a rare form of cancer.

Alex Goodwin was diagnosed with Ewing Sarcoma, a bone cancer which fewer than 30 children in the UK develop each year, in his right thigh.

The nine-year-old's family has launched a bid to crowdfund more than £120,000 for treatment, including proton beam therapy outside the UK.

Alex's father, PC Jeff Goodwin, and other Warwickshire police officers will appear in a music video for a charity song that is to be released in aid of the campaign.

Video:Alex Goodwin gives an update on his music video appeal

They were joined by hundreds of uniformed officers from more than 30 forces across the country as filming took place outside Warwickshire Police Headquarters in Leek Wootton, near Warwick.

Fire and ambulance officers will also appear in the music video for Horizon On My Mind, which was written and produced by Warwickshire Police inspector Dave Jones.

Prior to the shoot, Alex shared details of the crowdfunding campaign with thousands of his followers on Twitter.

In a video message, he said: "I'm still in hospital as you see but after I have a bit of medicine and have seen my doctor we are going to my daddy's police headquarters to see lots of policemen, fire and ambulance people for my Horizon On My Mind.

"We're finishing it today so that's great."

Alex's family, from Dunton Bassett in Leicestershire, say he has struggled with "constant pain and discomfort" since Christmas 2015 and now needs to use a wheelchair to get around.

On a fundraising page, they added: "Time is of the essence and we cannot afford any further delays so we must do whatever we can to speed things up and obtain the best treatment and this will cost money."