M r Tony Blair, the Prime Minister. met Mr Jose Maria
Aznar, the Prime Minister of Spain, in Downing Street, as negotiations by Mr Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, to hand over Gibraltar to Spain foundered over the use of the naval base there. Brigadier Roger Lane is to end his command of 3 Commando, which has been active in Afghanistan, after 14 months in the post; there have been recent attempts by the government's news managers to put it in a good light over the conduct of the war in Afghanistan at the cost of military reputations. Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, the Chief of the Defence Staff, flew off to Nepal, whose Prime Minister, Mr Sher Bahadur Deuba, had come to London earlier in the month asking for help to combat Maoist guerrillas. Jarvis, the company that maintained track at Potters Bar where seven people died in a train crash, made strenuous efforts to show that sabotage was behind the absence of nuts that should have held together points that failed. Lord Birt, the Prime Minister's special adviser on transport, said that the government should fund a system of new long-distance motorways through tolls. Another computer fault in the air-traffic-control system meant a day of long delays for air tray
ellers. EasyJet succeeded in taking over Go, the low-cost air operators that had been sold off by British Airways. British Airways announced an annual loss of £200 million. Mr John Prescott confirmed that he was suffering from diabetes, but controls it without injecting insulin. The Food Standards Agency confirmed Swedish research finding that chips and crisps contained carcinogenic acrylamide.
INDIA and Pakistan mobilised their armed forces after Islamic guerrillas killed many soldiers and civilians in Indian Kashmir. At the same time President Pervaiz Musharraf of Pakistan found himself politically isolated after a referendum that had been intended to express confidence in his rule instead indicated a wide lack of support. In India, a heatwave in which temperatures reached 118°F was said to have killed more than 700. In the Irish general election Sinn Fein won five seats (out of 166), but the notable success was that of Fianna Fail, which increased its number of seats to 80, just short of an overall majority; Fine Gad slumped to 31 seats and Mr Michael Noonan resigned as its leader. President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah won the elections in Sierra Leone and his People's party secured a majority of the seats in par liament. A suicide bomber disguised as an Israeli soldier killed three and injured more than 30 at a vegetable market at Netanya. Mr Ariel Sharon, the Prime Minister of Israel, dismissed from his cabinet four MPs who would not back an economic austerity package; they were from the religious parties Shas and United Torah Judaism. Mohammad Jihad Ahmed Jibril, the son of Ahmed Jibril, the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, was killed by a bomb in Beirut. Twelve of the 13 alleged Palestinian terrorists expelled to Cyprus after the ending of the siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem are to be parcelled out between six European Union countries: three for Spain, three for Italy, two for Greece, two for Ireland and one each for Belgium and Portugal. More than 100 refugees who wanted to be allowed to leave Chad were evicted by police from the cathedral in Ndjamena, the capital. East Timor became an independent state. In Liberia, Father Garry Jenkins, a British Catholic priest, and 60 blind people whom he had been looking after for some years disappeared, and it was feared that they had come to harm at the hands of anti-government guerrillas.
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