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Ten men were arrested in connection with the public, daylight murder of Drummer Lee Rigby near his barracks in Woolwich. The two chief suspects, Michael Adebolajo, 28, and Michael Adebowale, 22, Britons of Nigerian descent and converts to Islam, had waited in the street after the hacking to death of the soldier until armed police arrived, and were then shot. Adebolajo had made some statements recorded on a mobile phone. The two men were taken to different hospitals with wounds said not to be life-threatening, and Adebowale was discharged into police custody after six days. MI5 was said to have previously attempted to recruit Adebolajo, who was found to have been arrested in Kenya in 2010. Theresa May, the Home Secretary, asked whether people with extreme views should be allowed to talk on television; she also said she wanted to press ahead with a communications data bill — called by some a ‘snooper’s charter’. A prison officer at Full Sutton prison was taken captive for four hours by three prisoners and suffered a broken cheekbone. Two men were arrested after a Pakistan International Airline plane was diverted to Stansted under the escort of an RAF Typhoon jet. When half a dozen protesters from the English Defence League arrived at the Bull Lane mosque in York they were invited in for tea and biscuits.
George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, boasted that he had reached agreement with seven Whitehall departments, including Justice, Energy and Communities, on government savings he wants made in 2015. The BBC dropped a project to digitise its production systems after spending £98.4 million; Tony Hall, the new director-general, said it had ‘wasted a huge amount of licence-fee payers’ money’. A dog killed a pensioner in Liverpool. A tiger killed a zookeeper at Dalton in Furness, Cumbria.
The High Court ruled that a tweet about Lord McAlpine published by Sally Bercow, the wife of the Speaker of the House of Commons, was libellous, amounting to a false claim that he was a ‘paedophile who was guilty of sexually abusing boys living in care’; after the judgment she sought a settlement with the peer’s lawyers. At Westminster magistrates’ court, Max Clifford, the public-relations consultant, pleaded not guilty to 11 charges of indecent assault, relating to seven different women and girls aged from 14 to 19, allegedly committed between 1966 and 1985. Britain admitted it was holding captive 80 to 90 Afghans at Camp Bastion. This year’s cold weather had given a remarkable boost to sales of slippers, according to the British Retail Consortium.
Abroad
France and Britain succeeded in bringing to an end an EU arms embargo that had prevented opposition forces in Syria from being supplied. But William Hague, the British Foreign Secretary, said that Britain had no active plans to send such arms. Russia said it would deliver S-300 anti-aircraft missiles to the Syrian government, and this would help deter foreign intervention, according to Sergei Ryabkov, the deputy foreign minister. Reports of a massacre of 200 men, women and children at al-Bayda and Baniyas in western Syria in early May were given support by more eyewitnesses. Fighting continued around the strategic town of Qusair. In Shia-majority areas of Baghdad, 66 people were killed on one day by car bombs.
Stockholm experienced a week of rioting, with cars set alight in suburbs inhabited largely by immigrants. A French soldier on patrol in the Paris district of La Défense was left wounded when he was stabbed in the neck from behind with a small-bladed knife. In France, a patient who had been travelling in Dubai died from the so-called novel coronavirus. In China a newborn baby was rescued from a sewage pipe and taken to hospital. Chile and Argentina ordered the evacuation of 3,000 people within 15 miles of the Copahue volcano on their shared border, which began to spew out gases.
President Obama defended the use of drones to kill enemies of the United States, and outlined principles for their continued use, including the ‘near certainty’ of no civilian casualties and the absence of other reasonable alternatives. Eric Holder, the US Attorney General, defended the intentional killing by a drone in 2011 of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen, in Yemen. Designs for combat aircraft, ships and missile defences were among two dozen US weapons systems for which Chinese hackers have accessed designs, according to the Washington Post. CSH
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