Mr Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, said during his speech at the Lord Mayor’s banquet that he wanted a meeting of allies in London in January about Afghanistan, to set a timetable and ‘identify a process for transferring district by district to full Afghan control’.
Mr Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, said during his speech at the Lord Mayor’s banquet that he wanted a meeting of allies in London in January about Afghanistan, to set a timetable and ‘identify a process for transferring district by district to full Afghan control’. Mr Brown also decided that next year would be a good time to apologise for the deportation in past decades of 130,000 orphans to Australia. In the Queen’s speech at the opening of Parliament, the government announced a Bill to allow the Financial Services Authority to nullify bankers’ contracts if it judged their bonuses excessive. Other Bills obliged children to be well educated, old people to be cared for, the budget deficit to halve and floods to abate. Few of the 15 Bills will have time to pass into law. British Airways agreed to merge with Iberia, with the holding company to be incorporated in Spain and to have headquarters in London. BA will control 55 per cent. O2, owned by Spain’s Telefonica, became the biggest British telephone provider. The East Coast mainline franchise reverted to government control after National Express failed to make it pay; its fares will rise 5 per cent next year, compared with a 1.1 per cent average nationally. Thousands of nematode worms, originating from a Bristol rubbish dump, were sent into space for study at the orbiting Japanese Kibo laboratory.
In the Glasgow North East by-election, precipitated by the resignation as Speaker of Mr Michael Martin, now Lord Martin of Springburn, the Labour candidate gained 12,231 votes, 59 per cent of those cast, with the Scottish Nationalist candidate second with 4,120; the turnout was only 33 per cent. Refurbishment of the Speaker’s House for his successor, Mr John Bercow, has cost £45,000. In an email to officials, Mrs Bercow wrote: ‘A wipeable paint strikes me as the best option in here as there may well be lots of sticky fingers.’ The Consumer Price Index rate of inflation rose from 1.1 to 1.5 per cent. Forty-seven per cent of British employers plan to freeze pay for a second year, according to a survey by the Confederation of British Industry. More abortions were carried out in Britain in 2007 than in any other European country: 219,336 (one in five of all conceptions), compared with 209,699 in France, the next worst. Mr David Dimbleby, the television presenter, was knocked out by an unruly bullock and missed chairing an edition of Question Time.
At a meeting with students in Shanghai, during his tour of Asia, President Barack Obama of the United States said: ‘Freedoms of expression and worship — of access to information and political participation — we believe are universal rights.’ He praised open access to the internet, which China does not enjoy. Earlier, in a speech in Tokyo, he said: ‘The rise of a strong, prosperous China can be a source of strength for the community of nations.’ Mr Obama said he supported early resumption of dialogue between Beijing and representatives of the Dalai Lama. At Singapore he met Mr Dmitry Medvedev, the nominal president of Russia, to announce joint economic pressure on Iran to agree to international measures to process its nuclear fuel. The United States government decided to put on trial in New York five suspects, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, accused of conspiring to direct the 19 hijackers who committed the outrages of September 11, 2001. Mrs Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, said that President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan must ‘do better’ in reducing corruption. The British Ministry of Defence admitted that the abduction of Paul and Rachel Chandler by Somali pirates on 23 October had been witnessed by the Royal Navy fast fleet tanker Wave Knight, but the crew had not intervened lest the captives be harmed. America’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration announced that the amount of water thrown up by the crashing of two satellites into the Moon last month amounted to about 12 buckets full.
The economy of the eurozone grew by 0.4 per cent in the third quarter of the year, although the economies of Greece and Spain fell by 0.3 per cent. Teofilo Serrano, the head of Renfe, the Spanish rail monopoly, acknowledged that EU competition laws obliged it to open up to competition, but said delay was necessary. President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, who claims to have lost almost 20lb recently, observed that there were ‘a lot of fat people’ in his country. President Gaddafi of Libya, in Rome for a UN food conference, lectured 200 young women, recruited through a hostess agency, on the advantages of Islam, noting that Jesus had not died on the cross, but that ‘they crucified someone who looked like him’. CSH
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