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Six men from the West Midlands — Omar Khan, Jewel Uddin, Mohammed Hasseen, Mohammed Saud, Zohaib Ahmed and Anzal Hussain — were jailed for 18 or 19 years on terrorism charges after planning to bomb an English Defence League rally in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, last year. After a fire caused minor damage at the Darul Uloom Islamic boarding school in Chislehurst, Kent, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, said: ‘We should not allow the murder of Lee Rigby to come between Londoners.’ Police clashed with protesters against the G8 summit who had taken possession of a house in Soho. A temporary custody centre for those arrested during the summit was built at Omagh, Co. Tyrone. The Public Record Office admitted that records of the first census in Northern Ireland, in 1926, had been lost.
Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, made another attempt to reform GCSEs from autumn 2015. The Conservative MP Tim Yeo excused himself from his duties as chairman of the Commons energy and climate change committee while a report by the Sunday Times was investigated. Secret filming seemed to show Mr Yeo saying that he had told a businessman what to say when appearing before the committee. Sir Henry Cecil, the racehorse trainer, died, aged 70. Iain Banks, the novelist, died, aged 59. The Duke of Edinburgh underwent exploratory abdominal surgery and spent his 92nd birthday in hospital. Production of Harris tweed doubled between 2009 and 2012. According to the National Farmers’ Union, the wheat harvest was expected to be 30 per cent smaller than last year.
Unemployment fell by an unexpected 5,000 in the three months to April. The Treasury considered selling a 10 per cent slice of Lloyds Banking Group before the end of the year. Ofgem, the energy regulator, said it would ‘break the stranglehold of the big six energy suppliers’. Network Rail was told by the rail regulator to find savings of £2 billion over the next five years and to improve punctuality. David Cameron, the Prime Minister, visited a new deep-water container port and distribution centre called London Gateway, near Thurrock, Essex. Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, gave permission for a £1.5 billion development at Silvertown Quays in east London. The Competition Commission provisionally approved a merger between Britvic, which make Robinsons Barley Water, and AG Barr, which makes Irn Bru.
Abroad
Barack Obama, the President of the United States, spent the weekend in California with Xi Jinping, the ruler of China. Edward Snowden, a man working for the US National Security Agency, leaked documents intending to show the extent to which an American system called Prism monitored online information through such companies as Google and Facebook. He gave a press conference in Hong Kong then disappeared. William Hague, the British Foreign Secretary told the House of Commons that it was baseless to suggest that Britain’s GCHQ used US intelligence to get round the law. Jiroemon Kimura, now recognised as the oldest man ever recorded, died in Kyoto, aged 116.
Syrian government forces prepared an attack on Aleppo to retake it from rebels. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees appealed for funds to help the 1.5 million refugees who had fled Syria and the millions still in Syria affected by the war. In Libya, a confrontation between protesters and militias in Benghazi left at least 31 dead. Turkish riot police repeatedly clashed with anti-government demonstrators in Taksim Square in Istanbul, which they had been occupying for 13 days. ‘If you call this roughness,’ said the Turkish prime minister in a televised speech, ‘I’m sorry, but this Tayyip Erdogan won’t change.’ Greece suspended broadcasting by its state television and radio station to save money. Vladimir and Lyudmila Putin announced on state television that were to divorce. Nelson Mandela, aged 94, was taken to hospital with a recurrent lung infection.
The US department of energy estimated that shale-oil represented 10 per cent of total world supplies, with Russia holding the most, 100 times more than Britain. China launched a space mission with three astronauts spending a fortnight at an orbiting laboratory. French air-traffic controllers went on strike in protest against the formation of the EU’s ‘Single European Sky’; the European Commission threatened to take legal action against all 27 member states in order to push the plan through. In Sweden, the Arriva railway company ended a ban on drivers wearing shorts when they began to wear skirts in protest. CSH
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