Mr Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, called a meeting in London on Yemen at the end of the month after al-Qa’eda claimed that it was responsible for the attempted destruction of an airliner approaching Detroit on Christmas Day.
Mr Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, called a meeting in London on Yemen at the end of the month after al-Qa’eda claimed that it was responsible for the attempted destruction of an airliner approaching Detroit on Christmas Day. Charges were brought against Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian who had taken his degree at University College London and later spent a few months in Yemen allegedly learning how to set off a bomb hidden in his underpants. Full-body scanners are to be introduced at British airports, Mr Alan Johnson, the Home Secretary said, with the first reaching Heathrow in three weeks. Both Britain and the United States closed their embassies in Yemen for a couple of days, lest staff be attacked. Mr Brown had already convened a meeting at the end of the month about Afghanistan, inviting Mrs Hillary Clinton, the American Secretary of State, and President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan. Last year 108 British servicemen died in Afghanistan.
Mr Peter Moore, a computer specialist abducted in Iraq in May 2007, flew back to Britain after being released; three of his bodyguards abducted at the same time were killed and a fourth is presumed dead. General David Petraeus, the former US commander in Iraq, said that Mr Moore had certainly spent part of his captivity in Iran. In China a British citizen, Akmal Shaikh, was executed by injection for smuggling 9lb of heroin, the first Western European to be executed there since 1951; his family said he was mentally ill.
The Conservative party put up 1,000 posters with a picture of Mr David Cameron not wearing a tie and the slogan: ‘We can’t go on like this. I’ll cut the deficit, not the NHS.’ Mr Brown again called Mr Cameron a ‘toff’ while saying he was only joking. He also said: ‘Everything I have ever won in my life I have had to fight for.’ ‘I have never inherited anything or been given anything in my life,’ said Mr William Hague, the shadow foreign secretary, sadly. Mr Alistair Darling, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, showed off a 150-page book that he had asked Treasury civil servants to compile, which he said proved that the Tories had a £34 billion hole in their financial plans.
Mr Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, said that all children would have a chance to learn Mandarin, though not perhaps in every school. Trains fares went up, and although season-ticket holders were protected by the regulator, a second-class return ticket to Manchester rose to £262. About 10.4 million tuned in to see Mr David Tennant, who appears on television several times a day, in his last performance in Dr Who. Snow swept the country.
A 23-year-old Somali wielding an axe and said to be shouting ‘Revenge! Blood!’ in broken Danish broke into the house of Mr Kurt Westergaard, a cartoonist whose not very funny drawing of Mohammed with a fizzing bomb as a turban had been published in 2005. The man was shot and wounded by police, and was said to have connections with al-Shabab, a Somali terror group, and with al-Qa’eda. Yemeni forces shot dead two men said to be the son and nephew of an al-Qa’eda leader they were seeking. President Barack Obama of the United States said that Yemeni prisoners from Guantanamo Bay (of whom 92 remain) will not be sent back to Yemen. A group purporting to speak for al-Qa’eda in Iraq said it was behind a suicide bomb at Ramadi that killed 24 and injured the governor of Anbar province, where tribal leaders have turned against al-Qa’eda. The world’s tallest building was opened, the 2,683ft Burj Dubai, with a swimming pool on the 123rd floor. In Tajikistan an earthquake in the Pamir mountains left 20,000 homeless. A 36-stone bluefin tuna sold for £136,000 at a Tokyo market.
President Olafur Ragnar Grimsson of Iceland refused to sign into law a bill to repay £3 billion to Britain and Holland, which had compensated savers with failed Icesave accounts; he said a referendum would be held about it. Pimco, the big American-based bond fund, said it was cutting back its holdings of British gilts. Pope Benedict XVI sent his private secretary to visit a woman who leapt at him at the beginning of Christmas Midnight Mass, for the second year running, and brought him to the ground. She was given a rosary and the Pope’s forgiveness. Services in Harare’s Anglican cathedral were broken up by police siding with the Rt Revd Nolbert Kunonga, a former bishop of Harare excommunicated in 2008; ‘We are being prevented from worshipping,’ said the Rt Revd Chad Gandiya, installed last July as bishop of Harare. Shelf-stackers unloading boxes of plantain for Lidl outlets in Madrid found 25 kilograms of heroin. CSH
Comments