T he Queen Mother was buried in the same vault as
her husband, George VI, in St George's Chapel, Windsor, after a funeral at Westminster Abbey attended by 25 members of European royal families. Fifty thousand people a day had waited for hours in queues reaching three miles long to file day and night past the catafalque in Westminster Hall where she had lain in state. The Queen broadcast to the nation on television, saying. 'The extent of the tribute that huge numbers of you have paid my mother in the last few days has been overwhelming.' Mrs Camilla Parker Bowles, the mistress of the Prince of Wales, attended the funeral, with a seat among the general congregation. Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, flew to America between the beginning of the lying-in-state and the funeral; he held talks with President George Bush of the United States on his farm in Crawford, Texas. He undertook to back American action in securing a 'regime change' in Iraq, and volunteered British troops to monitor any ceasefire between Israel and the Palestinians_ Lord Levy, Mr Blair's personal envoy to the Middle East, denied arranging meetings between British ministers and Westfield, an Australian property group that had been paying him £100,000 for business advice before he terminated his contract early, in February. Two hundred members
of the Special Branch in Northern Ireland were warned that they should exercise a higher level of security because documents stolen from the Castlereagh police station in Belfast included a list of their names and telephone numbers.
ISRAEL continued its occupation and pounding of towns in the Palestinianadministered territories despite an intervention by President Bush. who called for immediate withdrawal. 'Enough is enough,' he said. He called upon President Yasser Arafat of the Palestinian Authority to take action to stop terrorist attacks on Israelis. Mr Arafat was surrounded by Israeli forces in the ruins of his headquarters in Ramallah. Mr Colin Powell, the American secretary of state, was dispatched to the Middle East, making calls in several countries before reaching Israel; he was expected to he allowed to meet Mr Arafat. Before he arrived, Mr Arid l Sharon, the Prime Minister of Israel, said that military action would continue until 'terrorist organisations' were crushed, hut Israeli forces withdrew from Tulkarm and Qalqiliya. A suicide bomber blew up a bus in Haifa, killing at least eight and injuring a dozen more. In a fierce attack on Jenin, 13 Israeli soldiers were killed in an ambush and hundreds of Palestinians were caught up in the fighting. In the whole operation thousands of Palestinians were rounded up and hundreds detained. A Palestinian policeman was shot by a sniper as he attempted to put out a fire in the friary joined to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, the reputed site of the birth of Jesus, where 200 gunmen and civilians had taken refuge the week before; shooting towards the church was called 'a violation of the explicit and repeated public and diplomatic guarantees of the state of Israel' by a spokesman in Rome for the Franciscan friars who administer the basilica. In the Kajaki district of the south-western province of Helmand in Afghanistan, eight farmers were killed when security forces fired upon their march protesting against the level of government compensation ($250 an acre) for ceasing to grow opium poppies; the protests blocked the return of 14,000 refugees. Jose Javier Arizkuren Ruiz, a Basque terrorist already imprisoned in France, was sentenced to 13 years in prison in Spain for his part in a plot to assassinate King Juan Carlos in Majorca in 1995. The Hawaiian Humane Society launched a $50,000 operation to rescue a dog stranded on an abandoned Indonesian oil tanker, but the ship sank before they could reach it. The price of oil rose above $27 a barrel.
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