Run! They're stepping up the media graphics attack!!
Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, in an attempt to further the aims of the war coalition, met the heads of government of France, Germany. Italy and Spain at Downing Street before flying off to Washington. He also planned to meet the King of Jordan, on a state visit to Britain, and General Pervaiz Musharraf. Dr George Carey, the Archbishop of Canterbury, said, on a visit to Bahrain and Qatar, that in the Western attack on Afghanistan 'we are not attacking Islam. This is not a conflict between two great world faiths. Sadly, it is a necessary conflict.' The detonator of a car bomb, of the same size as the one which caused much damage in Ealing in August, went off in central Birmingham at 10.39 on Saturday night, 3 November, but failed to trigger a full explosion of the bomb: it was clearly the work of the Real IRA. Mr David Trimble failed in an attempt to be re-elected as the First Minister of the Northern Ireland Executive: two members of his own party refused to vote for him, so that he gained only 49 per cent of Unionist support when the rules required 50 per cent or more. The deadline for the dissolution of the Northern Ireland Assembly and the calling of elections was midnight on 3 November: but Dr John Reid, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, took no action, and some members of the non-sectarian Alliance party declared themselves
Unionists after all, to save Mr Trimble. Hardline Unionists and Republicans cried foul. At the same moment the Royal Ulster Constabulary was abolished and the Police Service of Northern Ireland created. In a speech Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, gave the Confederation of British Industry the impression that Britain would not adopt the euro in a hurry; a Treasury report on technical studies of the five criteria for joining the common currency suggested that they would be hard to meet. British Airways' profits in the quarter ending 30 September fell to £5 million. Marks & Spencer's first-half profits rose 20 per cent to £220 million. The number of homes in Britain with access to the Internet fell from 40 to 39 per cent. At least a third of British women will have an abortion by the time they are 45, according to figures from the Birth Control Trust. In the Test Valley, Hampshire, a hotline for victims of racial harassment has not received any calls at all in its first six months. The government urged British Muslims planning to go on the haj to Mecca to be vaccinated for meningitis, from which ten pilgrims died last year. The Prince of Wales visited the Baltic states.
UNITED States B-52 bombers attacked Taleban troop positions in Afghanistan. The Taleban retook ground captured by the Northern Alliance at Aq-Kupruk, near Mazar-i-Sharif. Four thousand Pathan tribesmen from Pakistan crossed the border to join the Taleban forces. A CIA office, specialising in monitoring the United Nations, was destroyed in the collapse of the World Trade Center on 11 September, according to the New York Times. New York firemen demonstrated near the wreckage of the towers because the city has reduced the numbers sifting the debris, leading to human remains being mixed up by the lorryful. President George Bush of the United States called the anthrax threat 'a second wave of terrorist attacks upon our country', after the disease had killed four and infected 13 others. Police made arrests at Trenton, New Jersey, near the sorting-office through which infected post had passed. A man was arrested in Pakistan after anthrax was reported to have been sent to the fang, the country's biggest newspaper. Half a million people and 625,000 livestock were evacuated from the path of a hurricane in Cuba. Officials from the International Monetary Fund visited Turkey, where the currency has fallen by 60 per cent this year against the dollar while a million people have lost their jobs. The Pope beatified eight people, including two GreekCatholic clergy who died in prison in Slovakia under Communist rule.
CSH
Previous page
