Mr David Cameron, the Prime Minister, visited India, and on the way said he was ‘angry’ that negotiations for Turkey to join the European Union were so slow.
Mr David Cameron, the Prime Minister, visited India, and on the way said he was ‘angry’ that negotiations for Turkey to join the European Union were so slow. While Mr Cameron was abroad earlier in America, Mr Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, had spoken in the Commons of the ‘illegal invasion of Iraq’. Four in ten people who said they had voted Lib-Dem would not have done had they known the party would enter a coalition with the Tories, a poll of 1,009 people for Newsnight said; but 86 per cent of Conservative voters said they would have done if they had known. BP announced a quarterly loss of £11 billion, having set aside £20 billion to repair damage from its oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. Mr Tony Hayward is to retire in October as its chief executive, a post he had held since May 2007, and will be succeeded by BP’s managing director Mr Bob Dudley, an American. British Gas increased its profits for the first half of the year to £585 million. Britain’s gross domestic product was found to have grown by 1.1 per cent in the second quarter of this year, twice as much as expected; construction grew by 6.6 per cent, following six months of decline. One pound coin in every 36 was found to be fake.
Mrs Theresa May, the Home Secretary, announced that Police Authorities would be replaced by elected commissioners with powers to appoint and dismiss chief constables, and that the Serious Organised Crime Agency would be replaced by a National Crime Agency, which would include the control of borders in its task. The Crown Prosecution Service said that no one would be charged over the death of Ian Tomlinson, hit with a truncheon by a policeman and then pushed over during the G20 protest in London in April 2009; Mr Keir Starmer, the Director of Public Prosecutions said that the evidence was insufficient to make a conviction likely. Jon Venables, aged 27, one of the murderers of two-year-old James Bulger in 1993, was convicted of downloading and distributing child pornography, and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment; the court ordered that his new identity must not be disclosed. Mr Richard Desmond, the former publisher of Asian Babes and The Very Best of Mega Boobs, and the current owner of the Daily Express and Daily Star, bought the group that runs Channel Five for £104 million. Alex Higgins, twice the world snooker champion, died of throat cancer, aged 61. Harbinger won the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes at Ascot by 11 lengths.
The WikiLeaks website published 75,000 classified US military documents about the war in Afghanistan, dating from 2004 to 2009. The documents suggest support by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency for the Taleban, and that Iran helped finance and arm the Taleban. They enumerate incidents of civilians killed by Taleban roadside bombs, of ‘friendly fire’ and of the mistaken or collateral killing of civilians, and give evidence of the use by the Taleban of heat-seeking missiles against helicopters. Nineteen were killed and 500 injured in a crush at the Love Parade techno music festival in Duisburg, Germany. President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, aged 82, did not attend the African Union summit in Uganda. Fidel Castro, aged 83, made several public appearances, but his brother, President Raúl Castro, aged 79, made no speech on Cuba’s Revolution Day. Archbishop Desmond Tutu of Cape Town, aged 78, announced he was to withdraw from public life. The Revd Marguerite Rea gave Holy Communion to a German Shepherd-Rhodesian Ridgeback cross called Trapper, aged four, at St Peter’s Anglican church, Toronto.
Seven of the 91 European banks subjected to ‘stress tests’ failed the test, according to the Committee of European Banking Supervisors; five were Spanish (Diada, Espiga, Banca Civica, Unnim and Cajasur), one German (Hypo Real Estate) and one Greek (ATEbank), and it would take £3 billion in new capital for them all to meet the standard. China struggled to clear up an oil spill from a pipeline explosion covering 165 square miles near Dalian. Kaing Guek Eav, aged 67, the former Khmer Rouge prison chief known as Duch, who oversaw the torture and murder of thousands, was sentenced by Cambodia’s UN-backed war crimes tribunal to 35 years in prison. Eleven Somali pirates were sentenced to ten years in prison in the Seychelles for attempting to seize a coastguard boat. Michel Germaneau, a French volunteer aid worker kidnapped in Niger in April, was murdered by members of the group called al-Qa’eda in the Islamic Maghreb. The gunmen who murdered 17 people at a party in Torreon, northern Mexico, in July were said by state prosecutors to have been let out of Gomez Palacio prison to carry out the attack. Moscow was covered by smog from nearby forest fires. CSH
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