The G8 leaders (of the United States, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, Canada and Russia) assembled in Gleneagles to discuss Africa, climate change and that sort of thing. The Live 8 concert for 200,000 in Hyde Park, intended to attract attention to poverty in Africa, passed off without incident. About 225,000 people walked through Edinburgh in a similar cause. The next day police arrested 100 in violent clashes with anarchists. Around Gleneagles 3,000 police, some from England, gathered; there was fighting in Stirling and nearby Auchterarder was overwhelmed. London was chosen as the venue for the Olympic Games in 2012. The government admitted that about half a million illegal immigrants lived in Britain, quite apart from the hundreds of thousands whose applications for asylum had been rejected, but who had not been expelled. Public support for identity cards has fallen to 45 per cent, according to an internet opinion poll by YouGov for the Daily Telegraph. Mr David Blunkett, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, opened a special labour exchange to recruit 9,000 workers for the redevelopment of the derelict Battersea Power Station. The income of dry-cleaners has shrunk by 10 per cent since 1999, and their number has dwindled from 5,300 to 4,500. Christopher Fry, the author of The Lady’s Not For Burning and other plays, died, aged 97. Documents found in the National Archives, purporting to show that Richard Ingrams’s father was asked to assassinate Himmler, were found to be forgeries. Prince William of Wales laid a wreath in New Zealand for the dead of the second world war. Roger Federer won the men’s singles title at Wimbledon and Venus Williams the women’s. More restrictions on water use were imposed. Brushes and combs were removed from MPs’ washrooms in the Palace of Westminster lest they spread human immunodeficiency virus.
President Jacques Chirac of France made a series of jokes at the expense of Britain at a café in Kaliningrad, Russia, over coffee with President Vladimir Putin of Russia and Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany.
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