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The government was acquiring two barges to house 1,000 migrants in addition to one at Portland for 500. Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, said that small-boat crossings of the Channel were down 20 per cent, and ‘our plan is starting to work’. A group of asylum-seekers, transferred to a Comfort Inn in Pimlico and told they would have to share four to a room, refused to enter and stayed on the pavement. The scandal-hit CBI said that 93 per cent of the 371 members who voted backed its plans to reform; the British Chambers of Commerce launched a rival group called the Business Council.

The Duke of Sussex popped over to London to give evidence in the High Court about his claims of phone-hacking by Mirror Group Newspapers’ journalists listening to voicemails; the judge, Mr Justice Fancourt, said he was ‘a little surprised’ that the Duke was not in court on the trial’s first day. Sitting in the witness box with a computer screen, the Duke declared that he had ‘experienced hostility from the press since I was born’. In a written statement, he said: ‘Both myself and my wife have been subjected to a barrage of horrific personal attacks and intimidation from Piers Morgan, who was the editor of the Daily Mirror between 1995 and 2004.’

Waitrose put up signs saying ‘Sorry’ on empty shelves where fresh produce had not been delivered because of a distribution failure. Diesel prices fell by 12p a litre in May to an average of £1.47, but the fall was ‘smaller than it should be’ according to the RAC. Tens of thousands of employees of British Airways, Boots and the BBC had their personal data exposed by a data breach at their payroll provider, Zellis; a Russian cybercrime gang called Clop demanded a ransom. British Airways was fined $1.1 million after the US Department of Transportation said it had not provided ‘timely refunds to passengers’ for abandoned or rescheduled flights during the pandemic. Manchester City won the FA Cup after scoring their first goal in the final after 12 seconds.

Abroad

At Nova Kakhovka on the river Dnipro in Ukraine a dam was breached. About 17,000 people were evacuated on the Ukrainian-controlled bank and 25,000 on the Russian-occupied bank. Kyiv blamed Russia; Russia blamed Ukraine. Nato said Russia’s act was ‘outrageous’ and the EU called it ‘horrific and barbaric’. Yevgeny Prigozhin, the controller of the Russian Wagner mercenary group, called Russia’s claims to have inflicted 3,715 casualties on Ukraine in a new offensive in the Donbas ‘simply wild and absurd science fiction’. Andrei Rublev’s icon of the Holy Trinity was moved from the Tretyakov Gallery, where it has been since 1929, to Christ the Saviour Cathedral in Moscow.

In India, 288 people were killed when the Coromandel Express, from Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) to Chennai (formerly Madras) collided with a stationary goods train; its derailed carriages then struck the rear carriages of a passenger train going in the opposite direction. UK satellite analysis indicated that the opium poppy crop in Afghanistan was less than 20 per cent of what it had been last year. President Joe Biden, aged 80, tripped and fell at a US Air Force Academy graduation ceremony; the former president Donald Trump, aged 76, said: ‘You don’t want that – even if you have to tiptoe down the ramp’, a reference to his own difficulties at West Point in 2020. The Pope had a hernia operation. After a complaint from a parent, a school district north of Salt Lake City removed the Bible from elementary and middle schools for containing ‘vulgarity and violence’, under a law passed in Utah in 2022. ‘A severe conflict or confrontation between China and the US will be an unbearable disaster for the world,’ Li Shangfu, the defence minister of China since March, said at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, a security summit. Saudi Arabia is to cut oil production by a million barrels a day to keep up prices. Iran reopened its embassy in Saudi Arabia after a seven-year break. In golf, the PGA Tour and DP World Tour agreed to merge with the Saudi Arabian-backed circuit LIV Golf, which had disrupted the global game. Mexican police searching for seven young call-centre workers who had been reported missing found 45 bags containing human remains in a ravine outside Guadalajara. Astrud Gilberto, who recorded ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ in 1964, died aged 83.