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Virgin Trains released videos showing that there were seats available when Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour party, was filmed sitting on the floor of a railway carriage saying: ‘This is a problem that many passengers face every day, commuters and long-distance travellers. Today this train is completely ram-packed.’ He then continued his journey in a seat. The RMT union called two more days of strikes for guards on Southern. Sir Antony Jay, the co-writer of the series Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister, died, aged 86.
British competitors returned from the Olympic Games in Rio with 67 medals, of which 27 were gold, beating their performance in the London games of 2012 and coming second in the medal table between the United States and China. Celebratory parades were announced for Manchester and London in October. Persimmon the housebuilders reported a 29 per cent increase in profits for the first half of the year, with ‘robust’ customer interest since the EU referendum. Drones were intercepted by police over Pentonville prison carrying drugs and mobile phones. After losing £50,000 worth of York stone in a year, Leeds set about spraying its paving with traceable SmartWater.
A jury in Manchester heard that Jalal Uddin, aged 71, was murdered in February by two supporters of the Islamic State because he practised a form of Islamic healing called Ruqya. David Hoare resigned as chairman of Ofsted, the education regulator, after having said of the Isle of Wight that people ‘think of it as holiday land. But it is shocking. It’s a ghetto; there has been inbreeding.’ Tesco removed the flag of Scotland from strawberries grown there and replaced it with a Union flag. Six people died in five incidents during high seas on British coasts. A 17,000-ton oil rig was towed off rocks at Dalmore on the Isle of Lewis, on which it had been aground for a fortnight.
Abroad
Video footage of five-year-old Omran Daqneesh covered in ashen dust and fresh blood, sitting silent on a seat in an ambulance in Aleppo after an airstrike, moved western audiences, but led to no definite action. An Islamic State suicide bombing of a Kurdish wedding at Gaziantep in Turkey near the Syrian border killed 54 people. Turkish tanks moved over the border into Syria after Turkish forces had bombarded Islamic State targets in Jarablus in Syria and at the same time bombarded Syrian Kurdish forces nearby, apparently to stop them from taking Jarablus themselves. In Iraq, pro-government forces launched an attack intended to regain Qayyarah, 40 miles south of Mosul, from the Islamic State. Iraq hanged 36 men convicted of involvement in the massacre of hundreds of soldiers near Tikrit when it was overrun by Islamic State in 2014. The Nigerian military said it had killed several commanders of the Islamist group Boko Haram in an airstrike. Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi, a member of Ansar Dine, an Islamist group, pleaded guilty at the International Criminal Court in the Hague to destroying cultural sites in Timbuktu, Mali, in 2012.
Many were killed by an earthquake with a magnitude of 6.2, with an epicentre six miles beneath Accumoli, 60 miles north-east of Rome. The German government considered a leaked civil defence plan calling on all citizens to store enough food to last ten days in case of terrorist action. A woman paddling at Cannes in a tunic and hijab said she was fined by police because she had contravened a decree by the mayor saying: ‘Access to beaches and for swimming is banned to any person wearing improper clothes that are not respectful of good morals and secularism [laïcité].’ Smugglers drove lorries with hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth of EU fruit into Russia from Belarus. The deputy chief of police for Manila issued a memorandum forbidding policemen from picking their noses.
Johannesburg council elected Herman Mashaba from the opposition Democratic Alliance as mayor, breaking the 20-year control of the city by the ANC. The Court of Arbitration for Sport upheld the International Paralympic Committee’s ban on all Russian competitors taking part in the Rio games in September. Sponsors dropped the US Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte after he was found to have lied about being robbed at gunpoint by a policeman after a night out in Rio. China opened a 1,400ft long glass-bottomed footbridge 1,000ft above a gorge at Zhangjiajie, in Hunan province. A man in Amritsar who complained of stomach pains was found to have swallowed 42 knives. CSH
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