PORTRAIT ±_±.F 1 I n the eighth budget of his career, Mr
Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, proposed to narrow his deficit by cutting 40,000 public-sector jobs and selling off assets, including land worth £5 billion. The Inland Revenue and Customs & Excise would merge, making 14,000 people redundant. There was much tinkering. Duty on beer up lp a pint, wine up 4p a bottle; spirits, champagne and cider stayed the same. Duty on cigarettes went up by 8p a packet; petrol duty up by 1.9p a litre. In consideration of the burden of council tax, people over 70 would get an extra £100 from the government. Stamp duty on house sales stayed still, and the threshold on inheritance tax went up to £263,000, below the margin of house-price inflation. Any assessment of eurozone membership would wait till next year. 'Britain is enjoying its longest period of sustained economic growth for more than 200 years., he said. 'No one should get the idea that somehow if you were a country which was opposed to the military action in Iraq, you are less of a target for al-Qa'eda,' Mr Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, said. Lord Falconer, the Lord Chancellor, said in the House of Lords that the government would be dropping provisions in the Asylum and Immigration Bill to deny failed asylum-seekers the right of appeal to higher courts. Steve Harmison, the England pace bowler, took seven wickets for
12 runs when the West Indies were all out for 47 in their second innings of the first Test in Kingston, Jamaica. Daniel Tammet, aged 25, from Herne Bay, spent more than five hours reciting the value of pi to more than 22,514 places; he won the European record, but the world record is held by a Japanese man who has remembered the value to 42,195 places. Sydney Carter, the poet who wrote the hymn 'Lord of the Dance', died, aged 88. The British Trust for Ornithology said that 33 million birds a year die by flying into windows.
Spain announced the withdrawal of its 1,300 men in Iraq. This was the first act of the new Socialist government headed by Mr Jose' Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, elected three days after ten bombs exploded within 15 minutes in four commuter trains in Madrid, killing 201 and wounding 1,647. Seventy of those died in a double-decker train at the suburban station of El Pozo; three bombs exploded on a train 500 yards outside the central station of Atocha; others on a train inside Atocha station, and at Santa Eugenia in the suburbs. The next day 11 million Spaniards, a quarter of the population, demonstrated in the streets at 7 p.m., more than two million of them in Madrid. It was not then known if the outrage was committed by Euskacli ta Azkatasuna, the Basque separatist terrorists, or by al-Qa'eda; from small evidence the government tended to blame Eta, which
denied responsibility. But on the day of the elections Spanish police began arresting Moroccan suspects. Mr Vladimir Putin was reelected as President of Russia, winning more than 70 per cent of the vote; cut-price bread was on sale at polling booths, and the turnout was about 64 per cent. The Manezh, a military equestrian school built in 1817, just outside the walls of the Kremlin, burnt down. President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan said that it was al-Qa'eda that tried to kill him twice in December. Two 17-year-old suicide bombers from a Gaza refugee camp killed 10 Israelis in Ashdod; Israel initially responded with two airstrikes on Hamas workshops in Gaza City. President Roh Moo-hyun of South Korea was impeached after saying that he hoped the minority Uri party would do well in the elections. Mr Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the ousted President of Haiti, flew back from the Central African Republic to Jamaica. The Pope achieved a reign of 9,281 days, longer than any other successor of St Peter apart from Pius IX (1846-78). Cardinal Franz Konig, the Archbishop of Vienna from 1956 to 1985, died, aged 98. The National Space Agency gave the name Sedna, an Eskimo sea goddess, to a planet discovered in the Kuiper Belt of asteroids and said to be at least 1,250 miles across; in 2002 a planet 800 miles across in the same belt was named Quaoar, after a Californian deity. CSH
Previous page
