M r Tony Blair. the Prime Minister, cancelled his speech to
the Trades Union Congress when he heard news of the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York; he made a short speech instead. 'This mass terrorism is the new evil in our world today,' he said. It is perpetrated by fanatics who are utterly indifferent to the sanctity of human life, and we, the democracies of this world, are going to have to come together and fight it together.' Next day a committee of the Cabinet decided to recall Parliament. The Conservative party postponed the announcement of its new leader, who had been chosen in a postal ballot of members. The membership of the Labour party was found to have fallen by 50,000 over the year to 311,000, a figure lower than the Tories'. The High Court ruled it illegal for Britain to detain asylumseekers under lock and key at Oakington, a former barracks near Cambridge. Eurotunnel appointed General Sir Roger Wheeler, commander of British land forces until his retirement last year, to prevent asylumseekers stowing away on its trains. After 29 weeks of the foot-and-mouth epidemic there had been 2.013 outbreaks with 3,854,000 livestock slaughtered on 9,327 farms. Protestants continued to demonstrate along the route taken by little girls and their parents on the way to Holy Cross
Catholic primary school in the Ardoyne area of Belfast. The Police Superintendents' Association said that 10 per cent of its 1,300 members are being investigated in criminal or disciplinary inquiries. Marconi shares reached a new low. Conrad Black, the proprietor of the Telegraph Group, was made a life peer.
A HIJACKED passenger aeroplane smashed into one of the 110-storey towers of the World Trade Center in Manhattan at a quarter to nine in the morning; 18 minutes later another plane smashed into the other tower. The towers caught fire; one collapsed and then the other. Another hijacked aeroplane crashed into one side of the Pentagon building in Washington. Thousands, including some 300 firemen, died in the attacks. President George Bush was in Sarasota, Florida, and said, 'Terrorism against our nation will not stand' before asking for a moment's silence. General Colin Powell, the American secretary of state, said it was a tragedy that would not affect the nature of our country'. President Vladimir Putin of Russia said: Such inhuman acts must not go unpunished.' Before the attack, Ahmad Shah Massoud, the foremost leader of anti-Taleban forces in Afghanistan, was said to have been killed by suicide bombers. Zimbabwe
agreed, at a Commonwealth meeting at Abuja in Nigeria, to restore the rule of law and prevent squatters from occupying white farmers' land in return for some £36 million from Britain. President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe flew back from Libya where he had been consulting his ally Colonel Gaddafi. Dozens were killed in violence between Christians and Muslims at Jos, the capital of Plateau state in Nigeria. A suicide bomber killed three Israelis at Nahariya railway station, in an attack for which the terrorist group Hamas claimed responsibility; on the same day a Palestinian gunman shot dead two Israelis in the Jordan valley, an attack for which Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility. Israeli aircraft responded by attacking Palestinian security buildings in five places. The second American spy plane in a fortnight was shot down over Iraq. In Kanpur, 240 miles south-east of Delhi, 6,000 Dalits, or untouchables, converted to Buddhism in protest at India's failure to raise the question of caste at the preceding week's conference on race in Durban. President Alexander Lukashenko of Belams won what he called an elegant victory' in a presidential election; a joint European monitoring mission found that the election was 'somewhat free, but clearly not fair'.
CSH
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