M r Robin Cook, the leader of the House of Commons,
said of Afghanistan: if you look back over the past month, there has been no situation in which we have put British troops into the ground civil war and I don't myself imagine that's going to change.' Four soldiers from the Special Air Service were wounded in Afghanistan and flown back to Britain. Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said in his preBudget statement that the British economy would grow by between 2 and 2.5 per cent next year. An extra £1 billion would be spent on the National Health Service. A bundle of small changes included the abolition of tax on football pools from April; abolition of stamp duty on house sales below £150.(XX), but only in 2,000 wards deemed to be deprived; a new credit for pensioners with modest savings which would require meanstesting. The Chancellor said he 'would not rule out tax rises' in an attempt to improve the NHS. Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister. said in a speech: 'The tragedy for British politics and for Britain has been that politicians of both parties have consistently failed, not just in the 1950s but on up to the present day, to appreciate the emerging reality of European integration: Mr Blair telephoned Mr Costas Simitis, the Prime Minister of Greece, about 12 British aeroplane-spotters, 11 men and a woman, who had been in jail for a fort night on spying charges. Loyalists called off their 12-week picket of children going to the front entrance of Holy Cross primary school in north Belfast. Sir Richard Branson took delivery of one of Virgin's new tilting trains intended to travel at 140mph on the West Coast route to Scotland; but delays on improving the track mean that they will not be able to go at 125mph until May 2003 or at 140mph until some unknown date. Marks & Spencer sold for $225 million Brooks Brothers, the American clothing chain which it bought for $750 million in 1988. Mary Whitehouse, the campaigner for cleaner television, died, aged 91. The cost of a colour television licence will rise from £109 to £112 in April.
ABOUT 1,000 American Marines landed 50 miles from Kandahar, which was besieged by the Northern and Southern alliances. The Northern Alliance — a Tajik force under General Mohamed Daoud Khan moving in from the east, and an Uzbek force under General Abdul Rashid Dostum moving in from the west — took Kunduz in northern Afghanistan from Taleban control. Before it fell, perhaps 600 mainly non-Afghan Taleban prisoners, captured at Kunduz and held at General Dostum's headquarters fort at Mazar-i-Sharif. took up arms against their captors, killing perhaps 100, and, with the help of American air power, being killed
themselves; 30 held out for more than a day, and perhaps 100 Northern Alliance troops were killed. After a quiet period in Israel, three days saw the deaths of 13 Palestinians, including seven children, and an Israeli soldier; two Palestinians then shot dead two Israelis in Afula and wounded 50 before being shot dead themselves. Israel said that its Shin Bet security service had arrested 15 Palestinian militants funded and trained by Iraq. King Gyanendra of Nepal declared a state of emergency after Maoist rebels killed 80 police and soldiers. losing 200 dead themselves, in four days. President Mugabe of Zimbabwe accused Western journalists of supporting terrorist opponents of his rule. A company in Worcester, Massachusetts, called Advanced Cell Technology, said it had for the first time cloned human cells as a source of stem cells for experiments. Two tons of cocaine were found on a vessel in the Atlantic heading for Galicia, in north-west Spain. High winds toppled a minaret at the town of Kayas near Ankara in Turkey and killed two passing worshippers. A fire in Phnom Penh destroyed hundreds of shacks and left 1,858 families homeless. An aeroplane crashed in woods near Zurich killing 24, including an American pop singer. Melanie Thornton, who was on tour to publicise her solo album Ready to Fly.
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