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A private investigator working for the News of the World allegedly hacked into the voicemail of the murdered girl Milly Dowler while she was missing, deleting messages when the box was full to make room for new messages; this might have given the impression that the girl was still alive. David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said he found it was ‘quite shocking — that someone could do this’. An emergency debate was held on the matter in the Commons. There were questions about hacking into the telephones of the families of the girls murdered at Soham in 2002, and those killed in the bombings of 7 July 2005. A bronze statue of Ronald Reagan was erected in Grosvenor Square, London, on the centenary of his birth.
In a speech in Madrid, Iain Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary, said: ‘As we work hard to break welfare dependency and get young people ready for the labour market, we need businesses to give them a chance, and not just fall back on labour from abroad.’ Bombardier said it would cut 1,400 jobs after losing a £1.4 billion contract bidder to build 1,200 carriages for the route between Bedford and Brighton to the German group Siemens. Shropshire dismissed all 6,500 council staff, who would be rehired if they agreed to a 5.4 per cent pay cut. The Serb Novak Djokovic beat the Spaniard Rafael Nadal to win the men’s title at Wimbledon; the Czech Petra Kvitova beat the Russian Maria Sharapova in the women’s final.
In a report on social care, principally for the old, Andrew Dilnot suggested that a maximum of £35,000 should be payable by beneficiaries and that the maximum level of assets allowed before social care is given free should rise from £23,250 to £100,000. Labour won the Inverclyde by-election with a majority reduced from 14,416 to 5,838. Lord Hanningfield, 70, formerly a Conservative, was jailed for nine months on six counts of false accounting over £14,000 of expenses claims. Francis King, the novelist, died, aged 88. Anna Massey, the actress, died, aged 73. An opera, Beached, written by Lee Hall, the creator of Billy Elliot, was cancelled after a primary school withdrew from its staging after objecting to line such as: ‘Of course I’m queer/ That’s why I left here.’ A Lincolnshire couple sued neighbours in the High Court, claiming that the noise from wind turbines was a nuisance.
Abroad
In Ottawa, 350,000 people came out to see the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge on Canada Day during their nine-day tour of the country. Syria saw the largest demonstrations yet against the rule of Bashar al-Assad. In Hama, where thousands had been massacred by the government in 1982, the governor was dismissed after weekend demonstrations. The army encircled the city and reports emerged of 20 or so people killed. President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela returned after nearly a month in Cuba, where he has undergone surgery for cancer.
Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund, was released from house arrest by a New York judge after doubts about the reliability of the witness to his alleged attempted rape of a chambermaid at his hotel. The European Food Safety Authority banned the import of Egyptian fenugreek seeds, lest they carry Escherichia coli germs. Prince Albert of Monaco married Charlene Wittstock, a South African former swimmer. Sonya Thomas, 42 years old and seven-and-a-half stone, won the first women’s hot-dog eating competition, at Coney Island, New York, by consuming 40 in ten minutes.
A severe drought brought famine to parts of Somalia, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Kenya, affecting 10 million people; Britain pledged food aid of £38 million. About 200 died off Sudan after a boat full of migrants caught fire and sank in the Red Sea. David Cameron visited Afghanistan on a day when a British soldier went missing and was found shot dead. A double bomb killed 27 in a car-park at Taji, 12 miles from Baghdad. Yingluck Shinawatra became the first woman prime minister of Thailand; her brother Thaksin’s career as prime minister had been ended by a coup in 2006. South Korea said its schools would replace all textbooks and jotters with tablet computers by 2015. A study by a Boston scientist attributed a lull in global warming from 1998 to 2008 to smog from coal burnt in China. CSH
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