M r Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, introduced legislation to postpone
the local elections until 7 June; this is now expected to be the day of the general election too. The news was first leaked to the Sun newspaper. 'A short postponement for the reasons I have given is one thing,' Mr Blair said, 'an indefinite delay is quite another.' The postponement was prompted by the foot-and-mouth epidemic, which after six weeks had risen to 900 outbreaks. Despite a government plan to slaughter condemned livestock within 24 hours, of a million so far condemned 350,000 awaited slaughter; 160,000 slaughtered animals awaited disposal. Twenty great lorryloads of dead cattle were left waiting for burial at Great Orton, Cumbria, while people from the Department of Health argued that they might pose a threat of bovine spongiform encephalopathy. Vast burial trenches were dug at Widdrington, Northumberland, and Throckmorton in Worcestershire. Cheltenham races were cancelled. About 900 rotting sheep and cattle buried at Tow Law, Co. Durham, had to be dug up again when the Environment Agency said they might pollute an underground spring. Mr Michael Meacher, the environment minister, said there would 'unquestionably' be a wide-ranging public inquiry into the causes and handling of the foot-andmouth epidemic; but Mr Alastair Campbell,
the Prime Minister's spokesman, said he had jumped the gun. Mr John Prescott, the Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions, told Rai1track that the government would continue to give it money but not allow it to build new projects such as the second stage of the Channel Tunnel rail link, which would be given to new privatepublic partnerships. Shares in Prudential rose when it was outbid in its strange attempt to buy American General. Lord Hartwell, chairman of the Daily Telegraph from 1954 to 1987, died, aged 89. Sir David Ramsbotham, the chief inspector of prisons, condemned as unsafe Stoke Heath young offenders' institution in Shropshire, which has 500 inmates who suffered 717 injuries in a year.
AN American spy aeroplane collided with a Chinese fighter off the coast of China; the Chinese aircraft crashed and the pilot was lost but the American aircraft crash-landed on Hainan Island where the Chinese arrested its crew of 24. President Jiang Zemin of China said that the United States was solely to blame and demanded an end to spy-plane flights. Slobodan Milosevic, the former president of Yugoslavia, was arrested at his house in Belgrade and imprisoned to face charges of embezzlement; Western powers sought his trial by the war crimes tribunal in The Hague. Israeli helicopters fired rockets at Palestinian Authority buildings in the Gaza Strip after a mortar attack from Palestinian areas badly wounded a Jewish baby and wounded his mother. The attacks followed Israeli helicopter strikes on the headquarters of Force 17, the elite unit that acts in support of Mr Yasser Arafat, the President of the Palestinian entity; six members of Force 17 were captured by the Israelis. Since the violence began in September, 458 people have been killed: 375 Palestinians, 64 Israeli Jews and 19 others. Mr Hans Eichel, the finance minister of Germany, encouraged Germans to support the euro by saying its introduction was like Otto von Bismarck's introduction of a common currency and central bank to unite Germany in 1871. More than 30 were trampled to death during a pilgrimage to the shrine of Fariduddin Ganj Shakar, a 13th-century Sufi saint, at Pakpattan in eastern Pakistan. In Kenya two buses crashed 100ft from a bridge into the river Sabaki, near Malindi on the coast; 28 survived but perhaps 50 died. Commuters in New Delhi smashed and burnt dozens of buses in protest at the paralysing of public transport by police action against buses which had not been converted from diesel to compressed natural gas by the April deadline, set by a court order on environmental grounds in 1998.
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