Home
The government accepted the recommendations of the NHS Future Forum, which had spent two months reviewing the government’s plans for reforming the National Health Service. The Health Secretary is to remain responsible for the service; private companies are to be prevented from cherry-picking; the regulator, Monitor, will not be required to promote competition; hospital doctors and nurses will be included in the task of commissioning and the 2013 deadline for GPs to form consortiums will be dropped. Southern Cross, the financially beleaguered company that runs homes for 31,000 old people, met the many landlords of the properties it leases in an attempt to carry on. After a summit in London, Britain pledged £814 million to vaccinate children in poor countries against diseases causing pneumonia and diarrhoea; among other pledges, Bill Gates gave $1 billion and Norway $677 million. A 56-year-old woman from Nottingham decided to donate her womb for transplant into her daughter.
Leaked documents published by the Daily Telegraph showed the involvement of Ed Balls and Ed Miliband in a plot to overthrow Tony Blair as leader of the Labour party soon after the 2005 general election, in favour of Gordon Brown. The documents gave a different account from those given publicly by Mr Balls, who last year dismissed claims he was disloyal to Mr Blair as ‘balderdash’. In a speech on future policy, Ed Miliband said that those who work should be given priority for council houses. Trains from Marylebone were delayed after one hit a cow near High Wycombe.
George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, outlined in his Mansion House speech plans to separate banks’ retail business from their riskier investment arms. Schoolteachers are to strike on 30 June. Government attempts to force weekly collections from dustbins were dropped. A juror was convicted for contacting a defendant on Facebook. The dead body of a 95-year-old woman was kept in a room in a house in the Wirral while her daughter continued to claim her benefits. Tom MacMaster, a US student at the University of Edinburgh, admitted to being the author of a blog called A Gay Girl in Damascus, which had gained a worldwide following, with its content relayed by the BBC.
Abroad
Most of the 40,000 inhabitants, fearing a massacre, fled Jisr al-Shughour, where 120 Syrian soldiers had been killed a few days earlier, as the Syrian army moved in with tanks and burned crops. Thousands crossed the border into nearby Turkey. Aid workers in Sudan spoke of ethnic cleansing after 100,000 southerners fled fighting at Abyei and 40,000 the neighbouring region in northern Sudan near its southern border; South Sudan is due to gain independence in July. The eruption of a volcano in Eritrea caused Mrs Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, to cut short a tour of Africa.
Sir Mark Stanhope, Britain’s First Sea Lord, warned that the Royal Navy would not be able to sustain its operations in Libya for another three months without making cuts elsewhere. Germany joined a dozen states in recognising the Libyan rebels based in Benghazi as the legitimate government. Arms were said to be being smuggled to the rebels through Tunisia. A man shot after refusing to stop at a road-block in Mogadishu, Somalia, turned out to be Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, the al-Qa’eda leader suspected of bomb attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania which killed 224 people in 1998. In Pakistan two bombs killed 34 in a Peshawar market. Pakistan began arresting people suspected of giving away Osama bin Laden’s hideout to the CIA. A series of earthquakes left 50,000 in Christchurch, New Zealand, without electricity, four months after an earthquake that killed 181.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan won a third term as the Prime Minister of Turkey after his Justice and Development party won about half the votes in a general election. In a referendum Italians rejected plans by Silvio Berlusconi, the Prime Minister, for re-opening of nuclear power stations, as well as rejecting immunity from prosecution for government ministers. Deaths in Germany’s Escherichia coli outbreak among consumers of bean-sprouts rose to 35. Hackers aligned to the group Anonymous brought down the website of the Spanish national police force for an hour. After public protests, Austria withdrew from on sale two 8,500ft peaks in the Tyrol that had been offered for £107,000. CSH
Comments