platform at Tate Modern on to a fifth-floor
roof, surviving with a broken spine and
bleeding on the brain.T
he government said it was putting
an extra £1.8 billion or so into
capital projects in the National Health
Service, some of the 20 projects being in
predominantly pro-Leave areas of Norfolk,
Lincolnshire, Cornwall and Stoke-on-Trent.
More than 1,500 people were evacuated
from Whaley Bridge, Derbyshire, when
water overtopping the Toddbrook reservoir
displaced concrete cladding. Australia beat
England by 251 runs in the first Ashes Test,
at Edgbaston. A man who was mistakenly
circumcised at Leicester Royal Infirmary
was awarded £20,000 compensation.Abroad
A
21-year-old man was charged with
capital murder after 22 people were
shot dead and 26 wounded at a Walmart in
El Paso, Texas; he was believed to be the
author of a message on the internet saying:
‘This attack is a response to the Hispanic
invasion of Texas.’ Later that day, in Dayton,
Ohio, nine were shot dead by 24-year-old
Connor Betts, himself shot dead by police
at the door of Ned Peppers nightclub; he
had used an assault rifle with high-capacity
magazines ordered legally from Texas.
President Donald Trump said: ‘In one voice,
our nation must condemn racism, bigotry
and white supremacy.’ The novelist Toni
Morrison, who won the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1993, died aged 88. The US
Federal Reserve, under its chairman Jerome
Powell, cut interest rates for the first timesince the end of 2008, by a quarter of
a percentage point, to a range of between
2 and 2.25 per cent. President Trump
tweeted: ‘As usual, Powell let us down, but
at least he is ending quantitative tightening.’C
hinese authorities said that they would
fight Mr Trump’s decision to impose
10 per cent tariffs on $300 billion of
Chinese imports. In a new turn in the
economic war with America, China
allowed the yuan to fall below the value
of seven to a dollar for the first time since- Police in Hong Kong fought running
battles with protesters during a ninth
week of demonstrations against Chinese
oppression. Shamans from as far away as
Poland beat drums to quell fires that have
destroyed an area of Siberia the size of
Belgium. A woman who lost control of
her car and drove into a ditch near Liège,
Belgium, spent six days in the wreckage
before being rescued.
T
he Indian government said that it was
changing the constitution to remove
the special status of Jammu and Kashmir,
which has a largely Muslim population
and disputed areas controlled by Pakistan.
At least 42 people were killed in Murzuq
in south-western Libya in a drone strike
by the forces of the rebel General Khalifa
Haftar, based in eastern Libya. Robert
Mugabe, aged 95, the former president
of Zimbabwe, has been in hospital in
Singapore since April, according to
his successor, Emmerson Mnangagwa.
Astronomers from Warsaw University
found that the spiral disc of our galaxy, the
Milky Way, was not flat but bent. CSHHome
I
f the government lost a confidence
motion when parliament sits again in
September, it could call an election for
after 31 October, by which time Britain
would have left the European Union,
according to a briefing attributed to
Dominic Cummings, the special adviser
to Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister.
Opposition MPs plotted to prevent this.
Diplomats from the other 27 EU member
states were told by EU officials that the
United Kingdom wanted to avoid a no-deal
Brexit by their agreeing to substantial
changes to the draft withdrawal agreement;
the officials told them that there was no
basis for ‘meaningful discussions’ with
Britain. Michael Gove said he was ‘deeply
saddened’ by the EU stance. A strike
at Heathrow was called off, but British
Airways passengers encountered
a computer failure instead.
J
ohn McDonnell, the shadow chancellor,
said that Labour would ‘not block’
another Scottish independence
referendum. Harland and Wolff, the
Belfast shipyard, went into administration.
Average retail sales in the year to July
rose by only 0.5 per cent. McDonald’s
told staff to put paper straws (1.8 million
of which it uses daily) in with general
rubbish instead of recycling them; the
paper straws replaced plastic straws which
were recyclable, and the makers of the
paper straws said they were recyclable
too. A 17-year-old boy was charged with
attempted murder after a six-year-old
French boy fell from the 10th-floor viewing