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AstraZeneca’s board rejected an increased takeover bid of £63 billion by Pfizer. Commenting on the bid in Parliament, Vince Cable, the Lib Dem Business Secretary, said: ‘We see the future of the UK as a knowledge economy, not as a tax haven.’ A second strike by RMT union members on the London Underground was suspended after talks. Jeremy Paxman is to leave Newsnight next month after 25 years. Jeremy Clarkson was given a warning by the BBC for mumbling the counting-out rhyme, ‘Eeny, meeny, miney, mo. Catch a nigger by his toe’, in footage never broadcast. Harriet Harman, the deputy Labour leader, tweeted: ‘Anybody who uses the N-word in public or private in whatever context has no place in the British Broadcasting Corporation.’ Lord Patten resigned as chairman of the BBC Trust after major heart surgery. A man meant to undergo minor urological surgery at Royal Liverpool Hospital was given a vasectomy by mistake.
Gerry Adams, the president of the Sinn Féin, was questioned for four days by police investigating the murder in 1972 of Jean McConville, a widow and mother of ten children abducted in Belfast in front of her family after wrongly being denounced as an informer for the British Army.
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