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A serviceman near RAF Marham in Norfolk was threatened with a knife by two men ‘of Middle Eastern appearance’ who tried to bundle him into a car but were fought off; police suspect an attempted abduction. Openreach, responsible for Britain’s broadband infrastructure, should become a distinct company in the BT group, but need not be sold off, decided Sharon White, the chief executive of Ofcom. Hundreds of office workers in the City of London were evacuated during a gas leak in London Wall.
Traffic queues for the ferry port of Dover were held up for 14 hours because too few people were on duty at border control booths in the town, staffed by French officials. At one stage only one French official was there to inspect the documents of passengers in hundreds of coaches. Chris Froome won the Tour de France for the third time. England beat Pakistan in the second Test at Old Trafford by 330 runs, with Joe Root scoring 254 and 71 not out, taking four catches and claiming a wicket in his only over. A man who’d spent £620 on 1,764lb of bargain basmati rice was stopped on his way home to Luton by police, and fined £300 for overloading his car.
Fr Jacques Hamel, aged 85, had his throat cut during Mass in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray, a suburb of Rouen, by two men supporting the Islamic State who took several people hostage before being shot dead by police. President François Hollande of France said: ‘Daesh has declared war on us.’ Archbishop Dominique Lebrun of Rouen said: ‘The Catholic church can take up no other weapons but prayer and fraternity between men.’ Two days earlier, a Syrian facing deportation to Bulgaria blew himself up in the name of the Islamic State in the Bavarian town of Ansbach, wounding 15 other people. Two days before that, Ali David Sonboly, 18, whose parents had come to Germany as asylum seekers from Iran, shot dead nine people in Munich. ‘Islamic terrorism has arrived in Germany and the people are rightly expecting us to stand up to this courageously,’ said Horst Seehofer, the governor of Bavaria. Islamic State said it was behind an attack by two men who blew themselves up, killing 80 people and wounding 230, at a protest march about electricity supplies by members of the Shia Muslim Hazara minority in Kabul.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey said that the European Union had not been ‘sincere’ over a deal to stem the influx of refugees from Syria into Europe, not having paid enough of a promised €3 billion. Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, said accession talks with the EU would stop immediately if Turkey reintroduced the death penalty. In the fortnight after an attempted coup, Turkey had suspended 45,000 civil servants. In Japan, a man who had worked in a home for disabled people at Sagamihara killed 19 of them with knives and wounded 26 others; he had been detained at a mental hospital in February after sending a letter to parliament saying: ‘I envisage a world where a person with multiple disabilities can be euthanised.’
The International Olympic Committee rejected calls from the World Anti-Doping Agency for Russia to be banned from the Rio Olympics after the independent McLaren report’s findings of state-sponsored doping of Russian athletes at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. Nigeria opened a 150-mile rail link from Abuja to Kaduna. Verizon, the American telecoms company, agreed to buy Yahoo for $4.8 billion, far less than the $44 billion that Microsoft offered for it in 2008. Malik Obama, the half-Kenyan Muslim half-brother of President Barack Obama, said he would vote for Donald Trump as president because he ‘comes across as a straightforward guy’. CSH
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