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Emergency measures, known as Operation Early Dawn, were brought in to ease prison overcrowding. Defendants would be summoned to a magistrates’ court only when a space in prison was ready for them, the government said, and would be kept in police holding cells or released on bail while they awaited trial. The measures at first affected the north and the Midlands. By the beginning of the week, 472 people had been charged with offences arising from the recent public disorder; 300 had appeared in court in the preceding week. Donna Conniff, aged 40, the mother of six children, was jailed for two years for throwing a brick at police during a disturbance in Hartlepool. Dean Groenewald, 32, of no fixed address, who had 30 previous convictions, was jailed for two years and two months for throwing a bit of paving at police in Sunderland. Pakistani authorities charged with cyber-terrorism a man accused of spreading disinformation thought to have fuelled unrest in Britain.
Aslef members employed by LNER, a train operator run by the Department for Transport, will strike every weekend. As many as 74,000 people prosecuted for alleged rail fare evasion in England and Wales will have their convictions annulled because the cases were wrongly heard under the single justice procedure, which allows a magistrate to sit behind closed doors; but offences under the Regulation of Railways Act 1889 are not eligible for the procedure. A man was drowned and Mike Lynch, aged 59, a British tech entrepreneur, was among six missing after a yacht, the Bayesian, sank off Sicily. Stephen Chamberlain, his co-defendant in a fraud trial in the United States, in which both were acquitted, died two days earlier after being hit by a car in Cambridgeshire. In the seven days to 19 August, 827 migrants arrived in England by small boat.
A household using a typical amount of gas and electricity would pay £1,714 a year from October, a 9 per cent rise, according to Cornwall Insight, a reliable forecaster. Government borrowing rose to £3.1 billion last month, £1.1 billion higher than generally expected, thanks to the cost of public services and benefits. The number of people dying from drug misuse in Scotland rose by 12 per cent to 1,172, the highest proportion of any country in Europe. Ted Baker, the clothes chain, closed the remaining 31 of its 46 shops in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Four hundred people were evacuated for three days when a 1,100lb bomb from the second world war was found in Newtownards, Co. Down. A fire damaged the roof in the west wing of Somerset House, London, but did not harm the Courtauld Gallery.
Abroad
Ukraine destroyed three bridges across the River Seym in Russia’s Kursk region, used by Russia to supply its forces. In Ukraine’s Donetsk region, families with children were evacuated from the town of Pokrovsk as Russian forces approached. President Volodymyr Zelensky complained that Britain was not allowing Ukraine to use Storm Shadow missiles in Russia: ‘If our partners lifted all the current restrictions on the use of weapons on Russian territory, we would not need to enter physically, particularly the Kursk region,’ he said.
Antony Blinken, the US Secretary of State, visited the Middle East for the ninth time since the attack on Israel on 7 October, meeting President Isaac Herzog of Israel and the Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. The bodies of six hostages were retrieved from an ‘underground tunnel route’ after prolonged combat in Khan Younis in Gaza, Israel’s military said. Libya’s central bank suspended operations after Musab Msallem, its information technology director, was abducted, and opened again when he was freed a day later.
The World Health Organisation declared a public health emergency of international concern, its highest level of alert, because of a new variant of mpox, formerly monkeypox. China and Vietnam signed an agreement on crocodile imports. Panama began repatriating undocumented migrants on flights financed by the United States. The Coalicion Canaria regional party called on the Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sanchez, to take ‘two hours out of his holidays to address the migration emergency’, after the Canary Islands received almost 6,000 unaccompanied minors among 22,304 irregular migrants between January and mid-August. Thirty-six flights were cancelled at Hokkaido’s New Chitose airport in Japan until a pair of scissors that had gone missing were found. Alain Delon, the actor, died aged 88. CSH
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