Mr Tony Blair, the former prime minister, published his political memoir, A Journey, in which he said that Mr Gordon Brown drove him to drink, but not an ‘excessively excessive’ amount: ‘The curse of Gordon was to make these people co-conspirators, not free-range thinkers.
Mr Tony Blair, the former prime minister, published his political memoir, A Journey, in which he said that Mr Gordon Brown drove him to drink, but not an ‘excessively excessive’ amount: ‘The curse of Gordon was to make these people co-conspirators, not free-range thinkers. He and Ed Balls and others … it was more like a cult than a kirk.’ He did not sack Mr Brown lest he became ‘the figurehead of a far more damaging force well to the left’. Mr Blair said that he and Diana, Princess of Wales, were ‘both in our own ways manipulators’, and that he found the Queen haughty. Mr Nick Clegg, the deputy Prime Minister, visited Helmand in Afghanistan and said: ‘Are we turning a corner? I think we are militarily.’ The British Chambers of Commerce forecast that GDP would grow by 1.7 per cent this year and by 2.2 per cent in 2011. The National Housing Federation said the price of the average house in England of £216,800 in 2007 would not be recovered before 2014. Mr Philip Hammond, the Transport Secretary, was said to have marked the £16 billion Crossrail project in London as of the highest priority. The government is to abolish the NHS Direct telephone helpline. The number of people undergoing NHS surgery for obesity was found to have risen from 480 in 2003-04 to 4,246 in 2008-09.
The News of the World alleged that some Pakistan players had been bribed to bowl three no-balls at predetermined times during the fourth Test against England at Lord’s to facilitate betting coups. It filmed a ‘middle man’ accepting £150,000 in cash from an undercover reporter. The man was arrested and released on bail. Salman Butt, the Pakistan captain, Mohammad Amir and Mohammad Asif were questioned by police. The General Medical Council ruled that Dr Wendy Chapman, suspended in 2009 after cutting the lip of a Harlequins rugby player to cover up a bogus blood injury, could practise again. The body of Gareth Williams, 30, on secondment to MI6 from his post as a communications officer at GCHQ, was found in pieces in a holdall in the bath of his home in Pimlico, eight days after he was last seen. Asil Nadir returned to Britain from North Cyprus, to which he fled in 1993, to answer charges of false accounting at the Old Bailey. Net immigration figures rose to 196,000 for 2009 from 163,000 in 2008. Fourteen were arrested when the English Defence League and Unite Against Fascism held demonstrations a few hundred strong half a mile apart in Bradford. There were only two stabbings at the Notting Hill Carnival, on Children’s Day.
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change needs ‘fundamental’ reforms according to an international review overseen by the Inter-Academy Council. Flood waters in Pakistan began to recede but six million remained homeless. The 33 miners trapped 2,300ft underground in Chile spoke to their families briefly via a telephone line; a shaft to rescue them may be completed in three or four months. Thousands fled as the volcano Mount Sinabung, on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, erupted for the first time since 1600. Two Yemenis who arrived in Amsterdam on a flight from America were held on suspicion of conspiracy to commit a terrorist act. More than 30 men linked with al-Qa’eda, including 13 suicide bombers, were killed in an attack on two Nato bases in the Khost province of Afghanistan. The electoral council of Haiti ruled that Mr Wyclef Jean, a hip-hop singer, was ineligible to stand for president as he has not been resident in the country for five years.
Gross Domestic Product in the United States grew in the quarter to June at a rate equivalent to 2.4 per cent annually; US GDP accounts for 22.99 per cent of the world economy. US unemployment remained at 9.5 per cent but house sales fell to their lowest level in ten years. Crowds put by the organisers at half a million and by CBS at 87,000 rallied to a Restoring Honour rally in Washington called by Mr Glenn Beck, a Fox TV talk-show host. President Barack Obama of the United States had the Oval Office redecorated, with a quotation from Martin Luther King woven into a carpet of recycled wool. Talks began in Washington between Israel and the Palestinians. Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the spiritual leader of the Shas party in Israel, named Mahmoud Abbas, the President of the Palestinian Authority, among the people he wished to ‘vanish from the world’. The Mexican federal police said it had sacked 3,200 of its 34,500 officers this year for corruption or incompetence. A man in Jining, in the Shandong province of China, bought a van for 100,000 yuan, paying in bundles of notes he had saved, none worth more than one yuan. CSH
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