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The Queen visited Ireland, the first monarch to do so since George V in 1911, and the first ever to the Irish Republic. Irish terrorists sent a coded bomb threat to London in a telephone call, and a pipe bomb was found on a bus bound for Dublin the day before her arrival. She laid a wreath at the Garden of Remembrance. The annual rate of inflation (by CPI) rose to 4.5 per cent from 4 per cent in March, but the rate according to RPI fell a touch to 5.2 per cent from 5.3. For the 16th month in a row the figure was at least one percentage point above the Bank of England’s target of 2 per cent. Avram Grant was sacked as manager of West Ham after it lost 3-2 against Wigan.
Dr Liam Fox, the Defence Secretary, said in a letter to the Prime Minister, leaked to the Times, that he could ‘not support’ a statutory requirement for Britain to spend 0.7 per cent of its gross national income on overseas aid. General Sir David Richards, the Chief of the Defence Staff, said that Nato should consider attacking infrastructure targets in Libya. The government said that the principles of the ‘military covenant’ would be incorporated in law. Among other benefits, wives of soldiers with severe genital injuries would be entitled to three cycles of in vitro fertilisation treatment. The Ministry of Defence said it was seeking more savings from the armed forces budget in the next financial year.
Abroad
Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the International Monetary Fund and a likely candidate for the French presidency next year, was charged in New York with attempted rape, and was denied bail, after a complaint by a chambermaid at his hotel. The UN’s International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda sentenced General Augustin Bizimungu to 30 years in prison for his part in the genocide of 1994. The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, sought the arrest of Colonel Gaddafi, the ruler of Libya, on charges of crimes against humanity. Nato bombed Tripoli. Anti-government forces in Libya claimed a more secure position in the port city of Misrata, where government forces had been pushed back from the airport. Libya’s oil minister left the country for Tunisia. Farmers in the Jiangsu province of China were perplexed to find a large proportion of their watermelons exploding.
Government repression of protests continued in Syria. The border town of Talkalakh was shelled. Residents said that they had found a mass grave at Deraa. Deaths in Syrian unrest of the past nine weeks have been put at 700. Thousands of Palestinians and their supporters tried to walk over the border with Israel and 12 were shot dead by Israeli soldiers. After a meeting in Washington with King Abdullah of Jordan, President Barack Obama of the United States said it is ‘more vital than ever’ for Israelis and Palestinians to restart peace negotiations; he had a separately scheduled meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel. A couple in Israel, inspired by a tag on Facebook, named their baby daughter Like.
Thousands living between 12 and 20 miles from the ruined Fukushima nuclear power station were evacuated because of radioactivity. Bangladeshi companies signed leases on 75,000 acres of land in Tanzania on which to grow rice. On the day that, for fear of a decades-old prediction of an earthquake, hundreds of people fled Rome, an earthquake struck Lorca in southern Spain, killing nine. A British woman was stabbed and beheaded in a supermarket in Los Cristianos, Tenerife. Police in Mexico found 500 migrants from Latin America and Asia crammed into two lorries bound for the United States. All 7,000 people of Slave Lake in Alberta, Canada, were evacuated as wildfires burnt a third of the town. CSH
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