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Teachers went on strike for a day. The National Association of Head Teachers strongly advised heads not to allow parent volunteers to keep schools open. Public-sector workers chose the same day to strike, also in a dispute over pensions. The UK Border Agency advised against flying that day. Ed Miliband, the leader of the Labour party, said he wanted to choose members of the shadow cabinet instead of being bound by elections by the party conference. All but Habitat’s three central London shops went into administration. Thorntons decided to close at least 120 of its sweet shops, transferring many to franchisees. The average person has to use ten personal identification numbers or computer passwords every day, researchers found.
Liam Fox, the Defence Secretary, accepted recommendations of a report by Lord Levene intended to reduce inter-service rivalry and to redress a preponderance of senior officers. David Willetts, the universities minister, proposed in a White Paper that universities should publish information about the jobs their graduates obtained. Christopher Shale, the chairman of the Conservative Association of West Oxfordshire, where David Cameron is MP, was found dead in a portable lavatory at the Glastonbury festival. The weather was hot in south-eastern England for two days, and hundreds of trains were cancelled because of expansion of rails and overhead wires. Stolen Victorian postboxes were found to be selling in the United States at £5,000 each.
Abroad
Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier, visited Britain. He responded to previous expressions of concern by David Cameron about human rights in China by saying that China and Britain should ‘engage in more co-operation than finger wagging’. He toured the Longbridge factory where MG cars are made from Chinese parts, and signed trade agreements worth £1.4 billion. Mr Wen then flew off to Germany and signed deals worth £10 billion. Complaints about NHS services increased by 13 per cent to 101,077 last year, of which the Health Service Ombudsman investigated 346. Tax paid by the Prince of Wales rose by more than a quarter to £4.4 million; he received £2 million from the public purse.
Greek trade unions held a 48-hour general strike, protesting violently, as MPs were asked to back an austerity plan to allow the release of 12 billion euros in loans from the European Union and International Monetary Fund. France encouraged creditors to extend loans to Greece by converting them into 30-year bonds; BNP Paribas, the biggest bank in France holds five billion euros of Greek debt. Christine Lagarde, the French finance minister, was made head of the IMF. Rod Blagojevich, the former Governor of Illinois, was found guilty of trying to sell the Senate seat that had been held by President Barack Obama. China tested a train that will cover the 820 miles from Beijing to Shanghai in four hours 48 minutes. Alstom, the French engineers, agreed to build a high-speed rail network in Iraq, linking Baghdad, Karbala and Basra.
The International Criminal Court issued a warrant for the arrest of Colonel Gaddafi, the ruler of Libya, on charges of crimes against humanity. Nato forces completed their 100th day of warfare against his regime. Moussa Koussa, the former Libyan foreign minister, was found to be staying at the Four Seasons hotel, Doha, Qatar, enjoying the £35-a-head all-you-can-eat buffet. President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan, for whose arrest the ICC had also issued a warrant, flew to China for talks with the president. The RSPB attempted to kill all the rats on Henderson Island, near Pitcairn, to stop them eating 25,000 chicks a year of the Henderson petrel, which nests there alone.
Islamist militants on motorcycles threw bombs into three beer gardens in Maiduguri, northern Nigeria, killing 25. A vehicle bomb blew up outside a maternity hospital 25 miles east of Kabul, killing 35. Nato forces ended a siege by terrorists of the Intercontinental Hotel, Kabul, in which 10 civilians were killed. Abdul Qadeer Fitrat, the governor of Afghanistan’s central bank, fled for his life to America after prominent public figures were named as beneficiaries of a financial scandal. Thousands of Somalis continued to flee drought and warfare, seeking refuge in Kenya and Ethiopia. A wildfire in New Mexico consumed 49,000 acres and breached the boundary of Los Alamos nuclear weapons research laboratory. CSH
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