Mr Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, announced that Britain would send an extra 500 troops to Afghanistan, bringing its strength there to 10,000. Earlier he had criticised Pakistan for not making ‘more progress in taking out’ the leader of al-Qa’eda: ‘We have got to ask ourselves why, eight years after September 11, nobody has been able to spot or detain or get close to Osama bin Laden.’ The High Court ruled that two men in prison accused of being al-Qa’eda terrorists, who cannot be named, have the right to hear the secret evidence against them or be released. Lady Warsi, the opposition spokesman on community cohesion, was pelted with eggs by Muslim protesters when she visited Luton.
English Heritage refused an application to put up a blue plaque in London to L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology. The Rt Revd Eric Kemp, Bishop of Chichester from 1974 to 2001, died, aged 94. The Yorkshire and the Chelsea building societies announced plans to merge. Miss Susan Boyle, a 48-year-old woman from Blackburn, West Lothian, exposed to public curiosity on television talent shows, sold 411,820 copies of her CD in Britain in a week, an unprecedented number.
Twelve NHS hospital trusts in England are ‘significantly underperforming’, according to the annual Dr Foster Hospital Guide, although the Care Quality Commission had a month earlier given nine of them ‘good’ or ‘excellent’ ratings for their overall performance. Basildon University Hospital had the worst patient death rate in the country for the second year running. Social workers would one day need licences to work and a National College of Social Work would be established, the Department for Children and the Department of Health announced. Mr Ed Balls, the Secretary of State for Children, said he would push for the college to be given royal status as quickly as possible. The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh visited Bermuda, where they heard a 105-year-old woman play ‘God Save the Queen’ on the piano, then flew to Trinidad. Rwanda was accepted as the 54th member of the Commonwealth.
President Barack Obama of the United States, after deliberating for 92 days, announced that he would send an extra 30,000 troops to Afghanistan. He hoped troops would be able to withdraw again from 2011. The Senate foreign relations committee declared that Osama bin Laden had been within the grasp of US forces in Afghanistan but, at the end of 2001, had ‘walked unmolested out of Tora Bora and disappeared into Pakistan’s unregulated tribal area’. The United States said that it would reduce emissions ‘in the range of’ 17 per cent below 2005 levels in the coming decade. Next day, China said its own reduction of ‘carbon intensity’ would be 40 to 45 per cent.
Mr Tareq Salahi and his wife Michaele gatecrashed the White House reception for the President of India and shook hands with Mr Obama, despite careful security plans. Four policemen were killed by a gunman at the Forza coffee shop at Parkland, near the McChord Air Force base, in Washington state. Two days later police in nearby Seattle shot dead a man suspected of the murder, Mark Clemmons, who had served 11 years in jail for armed robbery and was under the impression that he was the Messiah. Mr Eldrick ‘Tiger’ Woods, the golfing champion, was given a $164 penalty for careless driving after crashing his car into a fire hydrant and a tree outside his house at 2.30 a.m.; police said they had been told that Mrs Woods had smashed a window of the car with a golf club to free him after hearing the crash.
Dubai World, the emirate’s investment company, provoked market alarm by announcing that it would reschedule payment of $26 billion of debt out of the $80 billion it owed. Iran said it would build 10 large-scale uranium enrichment facilities, in defiance of international attempts to persuade it not to develop nuclear weapons. Israel said in response that it had not ruled out military strikes against such sites. Iran detained for a week five British yachtsmen who had drifted into its waters.
A bomb derailed the Nevsky Express to St Petersburg about 200 miles northwest of Moscow, killing 26 and injuring scores of people; Russian prosecutors had accused Chechen terrorists of detonating a bomb in 2006 on the same train service. John Demjanjuk, aged 89, a Ukrainian-born retired car-worker from Ohio, was wheeled into a courtroom in Munich to begin his trial on charges of being an accessory to the murder of 27,900 people in the Nazi camp at Sobibor in occupied Poland. Switzerland, which has 200 mosques with four minarets between them, voted in a referendum to ban the building of any more minarets. CSH
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