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The day after the coronation, 20,000 attended a concert in Windsor Castle, including the King and Queen. ‘As my grandmother said when she was crowned, coronations are a declaration of our hopes for the future,’ said the Prince of Wales in a speech to the crowd. ‘And I know she’s up there, fondly keeping an eye on us. She would be a proud mother.’ His brother, the Duke of Sussex, had witnessed the coronation from the third row, and left for his family in America immediately after. On television, 20.4 million had seen the King crowned. The Metropolitan Police arrested 64 people, 13 to ‘prevent a breach of the peace’, charging four, two of them for the possession of Class A drugs. The Met said a review found no proof for police suspicions that six protestors arrested were planning to use ‘lock-on’ devices prohibited under the new Public Order Act. But the King and Queen’s carriage had passed yellow placards outside Horse Guards in Whitehall declaring ‘Not my king’.
The government devised a new cadre of barefoot doctors who would be allowed to start practising without a degree; pharmacists in chemists’ shops would also be able to prescribe drugs for earache, sore throats, sinusitis, impetigo, shingles, infected insect bites and some urinary tract infections. It also hatched a plan to make consultations with GPs easier to book, earmarking £240 million for practices to replace old telephones, as though that were the problem. Lawyers in Scotland boycotted a pilot scheme for rape trials with no juries. A barge, the Bibby Stockholm, was towed from Genoa to Falmouth, bound for Portland, Dorset, where the government plans to accommodate 506 asylum seekers in the vessel’s 222 bedrooms.
In the local elections, Labour increased its councillors in the contested councils by 536 to 2,674, bringing 71 councils under its control, an increase of 22; the Conservatives lost 1,061 councillors, leaving 2,296, with councils in its control reduced to 33, a decrease of 48. The Lib Dems gained 1,628 councillors, an increase of 407. Ukip lost all its 25 seats in contested councils but the Yorkshire party increased its councillors by one, to three. In Leicester, torn by intra-party and religious divisions, Labour went from 53 seats (of 54) to 31 seats, with 17 won by Conservatives. An opinion poll three days after the elections gave Labour 41 per cent, the Tories 29 per cent and the Lib Dems 16 per cent. Police shot dead two dogs and tasered a man beside the Limehouse Cut in Poplar, east London.
Abroad
‘A real war has again been unleashed against our Motherland,’ President Vladimir Putin of Russia said in a Victory Day speech. ‘We will protect the inhabitants of the Donbas and we will protect our country.’ The Moscow parade involved 10,000 troops but only one tank. Russia launched attacks on Ukrainian cities with missiles and Iranian-made Shahed kamikaze drones. Kyiv saw the fifth such attack in ten days. Ukraine’s Red Cross said its food-aid supplies warehouse was destroyed.
Donald Trump, the former US president, was ordered by a New York jury to pay $5 million in damages to E. Jean Carroll, a magazine writer, for sexual battery and defamation; he was found not to have raped her. Janet Yellen, the US Treasury Secretary, warned that a failure by Congress to raise the amount that America could borrow would bring a ‘constitutional crisis’ and an economic and financial catastrophe. Mauricio Garcia, 33, was shot dead by police after shooting dead eight people, including three children, at a Dallas shopping mall.
Imran Khan, the former prime minister of Pakistan, was arrested by paramilitary police outside the high court in Islamabad, where he was to appear on charges of corruption. At least 15 Palestinians, including three commanders of Islamic Jihad, were killed in Israeli air strikes on the Gaza Strip. As 700,000 fled their homes and thousands sought to leave Sudan, where fighting continued in Khartoum and Darfur, talks began in Jeddah, with American encouragement, between the factions of General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the army leader, and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, commonly known as Hemedti, the leader of the Rapid Support Forces. Dozens were killed in the Indian state of Manipur in clashes involving the Meitei, who follow their own religion and Hinduism, and the Kuki, largely Christians with a minority believing themselves descendants of the Jewish tribe of Manasseh. Lillian Ip, aged 48, survived five days stranded in the Australian bush on some sweets and a bottle of wine. CSH
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