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Ed Miliband, the leader of the Labour party, asked its conference: ‘Are you on the side of the wealth creators or the asset strippers?’ He criticised ‘predatory’ companies, and said that when it came to social housing we should not ‘treat the person who contributes to their community the same as the person who doesn’t’. Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, sketched a five-point plan to invigorate the economy: to repeat the bank bonus tax; to undertake infrastructure projects; to reduce VAT; to reduce to 5 per cent VAT on home improvements; and to remove National Insurance for a year from new posts appointed by small businesses. He also apologised, rather narrowly, for ‘what we failed around the world to see’ before the economic crisis, and that ‘we didn’t spend every pound of public money well’. The wreck of the SS Gairsoppa, a British cargo ship sunk in 1941, was found 300 miles off Ireland, and plans were made to salvage its 200 tons of silver, worth £150 million, from 15,000ft beneath the sea.
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George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said that European leaders had ‘weeks not months’ to sort out the crisis in the eurozone. A miner died when a roof collapsed 2,600ft underground at Kellingley colliery, Yorkshire. Six men from Birmingham appeared in court charged with terrorism offences including a suspected suicide bombing campaign. Sikhs protested in London at being asked to remove their turbans at airports even after passing through security scanners.
BAE Systems cut nearly 3,000 jobs, mainly at factories in Lancashire and East Yorkshire. A man accused of contaminating packs of Nurofen Plus painkiller with powerful anti-psychotic drugs was remanded in custody by West London Magistrates’ Court. David Croft, the co-writer of Dad’s Army, died, aged 89. Gusty Spence, the founding father of the modern Ulster Volunteer Force terrorist group, who later renounced the armed struggle, died, aged 78. Carlos Tevez refused to come on as a second-half substitute for Manchester City; Bayern Munich won the game 2-0. Shelley College, a secondary school in Huddersfield, took down mirrors in the girls’ lavatories in an attempt to stop the use of make-up.
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Abroad
Institutions that lent to Greece might get back only half of their money, suggested some at the International Monetary Fund meeting in Washington, which also proposed increasing the capitalisation of European banks exposed to losses on Greek debt and increasing the European Financial Stability Facility available to bail out nations in trouble, from €440 billion to perhaps €2,000 billion. Deliberations remained secret until the German parliament could vote on a previous tranche of bailout money. After successful vetting, Liang Wengen, the richest man in China, was expected to be appointed to the Central Committee of its Communist Party. Zhao Zhipei, an innocent tourist from Henan, was mistaken by a security firm for a petitioner of the authorities in Beijing and left, beaten unconscious, on the road.
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Civilians streamed out of Sirte as the forces of the National Transitional Council attacked the last big stronghold of forces loyal to Colonel Gaddafi, the deposed ruler of Libya. Syrian government tanks attacked the town of al-Rastan in the central province of Homs. ‘Turkey has arrested a ship flying the Syrian flag and carrying weapons,’ Recep Tayyip Erdoga, the Prime Minister of Turkey, said. President Ali Abdullah Saleh returned to Yemen after three months of treatment in Saudi Arabia for wounds from an attempt to assassinate him, and violence continued between government forces and protesters. King Abdallah of Saudi Arabia announced plans to grant women the vote and the right to stand in municipal elections; a woman convicted of driving a car was sentenced to ten lashes.
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Alexei Kudrin resigned as the finance minister of Russia after opposing plans for President Dmitry Medvedev and Vladimir Putin, the Prime Minister, to swap roles again. Oswald Gruebel resigned as chief executive of UBS, after losses of £1.5 billion, which it blamed on a rogue trader. More than two million people were affected by floods in India. The last bullfight in Catalonia took place in Barcelona before a law against the practice came into force. Diana Nyad, aged 62, abandoned a swim from Cuba to Florida without a shark-cage after being stung by a Portuguese man-of-war.
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