T he Ark Royal aircraft-carrier set off for the eastern Mediterranean
for manoeuvres. Its sailing was linked by the press with preparations for war against Iraq. Field Marshal Lord Bramall, a former Chief of Defence Staff, warned America and Britain that they risked a biological or chemical attack by Saddam Hussein if they sought to overthrow him by war. Mr Mike O'Brien, the Foreign Office minister, visited Libya. After manufacturing output fell by 5.3 per cent from May to June, Mrs Patricia Hewitt, the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry. said: We let the impression build up in our first five years that we were interested in something called "the new economy", and we weren't interested in manufacturing.' More than 90 people in Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, were found to be suffering from Legionnaire's disease, among them an 88-year-old man who died; the disease was thought to have been spread by an airconditioning outlet in an alley. More than 140,000 people in Glasgow were told to boil drinking water because cryptosporidium parasites, which can cause diarrhoea, had been found in Mugdock reservoir in Dunbartonshire. The Escherichia coli 0157 bacterium was found in the water supply of the Rothiemurchus camp and caravan park at Coylum Bridge, near Inverness, around which dozens of people fell sick. Downing Street announced that Mrs Cherie Blair had suffered a miscarriage. Britain can expect a net gain in population from other than European Union sources of more than two million in the next ten years, according to Migration Watch, an organisation chaired by Sir Andrew Green, a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia. Three inches of rain in a day fell on some parts, flooding Pickering, North Yorkshire, and other towns. Insurers announced that they would no longer be able to guarantee insurance for houses in frequently flooded areas. A bird shorted an electricity substation and blacked out 43,000 houses around Torbay.
MR Saadoun Hammadi, the speaker of the Iraqi parliament and a close associate of Saddam Hussein, wrote to the American Congress, inviting a delegation for three weeks 'to search and inspect any plants and installations allegedly producing, or intended to produce, chemical, biological or nuclear weapons'. Iraq also invited the United Nations to send inspectors. Mr Joseph Biden, a Democrat and chairman of the US Senate foreign relations committee, said: 'Iraq must end its stalling tactics.' The United States called on friendly countries to build up reserves of crude oil; the United States already has reserves of more than 576 million barrels, enough for two months,
and Britain's oil companies have reserves for three months. A bomber from Hamas, the Islamist terror group, killed nine on a bus in northern Israel, a week after seven were killed by the same group at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The Israeli army sealed off West Bank towns, which had already been subject to curfew. The US Agency for International Development announced that 22 per cent of Palestinian children under the age of five were malnourished. Six Pakistanis were killed, four of them Muslims, when Islamist gunmen attacked Murree Christian school, 35 miles from Islamabad. A man and a girl of six were killed at a bus stop at Santa Paula near Alicante by a bomb planted by the Basque terrorists Euzkadi ta Azkatasuna. Mr Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada won the presidency of Bolivia after a congressional vote defeated Mr Evo Morales, a champion of indigenous coca farmers against a USbacked campaign of eradication. Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder of Germany opened the election campaign for the Social Democrat party three weeks early because of the strong challenge from the centre-right parties led by Mr Edmund Stoiber. The governor of Bangkok announced a plan to return to the wild 100 elephants which roam the streets with their mahouts.
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