Mrs Anne Milton, the Health Minister, tried to abolish free milk for children under five in nurseries, as it costs £50 million a year and ‘there is no evidence that it improves the health of very young children’, but Downing Street said that Mr David Cameron, the Prime Minister ‘did not like the idea’, so it would not go ahead.
Mrs Anne Milton, the Health Minister, tried to abolish free milk for children under five in nurseries, as it costs £50 million a year and ‘there is no evidence that it improves the health of very young children’, but Downing Street said that Mr David Cameron, the Prime Minister ‘did not like the idea’, so it would not go ahead. Mr Cameron said that credit rating firms could ‘go after’ people fraudulently claiming benefits; one firm, Experian, said it might receive a ‘bounty’ for exposing frauds. A memorandum from Ms Ann Beasley, the director of finance at the Ministry of Justice, warned staff of £2 billion cuts out of a budget of £9 billion, so ‘there will have to be less of us’. Mr Sion Jenkins, cleared of murdering his foster daughter, was refused compensation his time in jail; a spokesman for the Ministry of Justice said that, for compensation, ‘the applicant must be shown to be “clearly innocent”.’ Mr Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrat Energy Secretary said: ‘We are on course to make sure that the first new nuclear power station opens on time in 2018.’ The British group International Power is to merge with the French utility company GDF Suez. Unemployment fell by 49,000 to 2.46 million in the three months to June. Lord Sassoon, a Treasury spokesman, said that Britain opposed direct taxes by the European Union, for which its budget commissioner, Mr Janusz Lewandowski, is to propose plans in September.
Barnardo’s said that proceedings in family courts took an average of 45 weeks; at the beginning of 2009, 8,677 care cases were in court, and by the end of 2009, the number had risen to 12,994. The Metropolitan Police dropped the imposition of fixed penalties for crimes such as drunk and disorderly behaviour or retail theft, in Westminster, Lambeth and Southwark; of 45,616 such notices issued in England and Wales last year only 20,903 were settled. A bomb was found under a car at the home of a serving Catholic police officer at Kilkeel, County Down. A shoe was thrown at President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan during a rally by his Pakistan People’s Party in Birmingham. He was criticised for visiting England while Pakistan faced floods. Jimmy Reid, the union leader who led a work-in at the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders in 1971, died, aged 78. Professor Phil Craig had a parasite that lives in the guts of voles in Mongolia named after him: Heligmosomoides craigi.
In Pakistan, more than 14 million people were affected by monsoon floods. In Russia, 557 wildfires continued to burn, 25 of them underground peat fires. Mr Vladimir Putin, the Prime Minister, said that a ban on grain exports could be extended beyond 2010. About 1,500 were dead or missing in mudslides in Zhouqu county, Gansu province, in north-west China. In Rwanda, President Paul Kagame was re-elected, with more than 90 per cent of the vote. Naomi Campbell, the model, appeared as a witness for the prosecution at the war-crimes trial of Charles Taylor, the former President of Liberia, at the Special Court for Sierra Leone at the Hague; evidence turned on whether she had been given diamonds by him after a dinner he attended. Mr Omar Khadr, now 23, a Canadian citizen, went on trial at Guantanamo Bay, the US base in Cuba, accused of throwing a grenade that killed a US soldier in Afghanistan when he was 15. In his first government act in four years, Mr Fidel Castro, 84 this week, spoke for ten minutes to the Cuban parliament. Spain, which planned to sell 2,000 electric cars by the end of 2010, has so far sold 16. The annual World Sauna Championships in Finland ended with the death of one of the finalists, who had spent six minutes in a temperature of 110˚C.
Ten medical aid workers were murdered in north-eastern Afghanistan; the International Assistance Mission, for whom they were working, said that it did not proselytise for Christianity. A Japanese-owned tanker carrying 270,204 tons of oil was damaged by terrorist explosives in the Strait of Hormuz. Mr Abu Bakar Ba’asyir, aged 71, a Muslim cleric, was charged with terrorism offences in Indonesia; he had previously spent 26 months in jail before being found not guilty of involvement with Jemaah Islamiah, the group behind the attacks in Bali in 2002. Morocco said it would close 1,256 mosques and rebuild 500 others, prompted by the collapse of a mosque at Meknes in February that killed 41. Saudi Arabia gave a reprieve to BlackBerry mobile phones. Sudan halted BBC Arabic broadcasts in northern cities, including Khartoum. Six months before a referendum on independence, Southern Sudan sought a national anthem. In Bangladesh, the High Court ruled that the use of the national anthem as a ring tone was illegal. CSH
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