M r Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, said that the United
Nations should rapidly take up a presence in Kabul to fill the vacuum left by the departure of the Taleban; he expected the Northern Alliance to share power in a new government. Mr David Blunkett. the Home Secretary, said that a 'public emergency' would be declared so that article five of the European Convention on Human Rights could be suspended; this would allow the imprisonment without trial of asylum-seekers who could not be returned to their country of origin. A Bill to enact this, and other provisions, such as the seizing of assets and the extension of the crime of inciting racial hatred to include religious hatred, is to be rushed through Parliament. Mr Henry McLeish resigned as the First Minister of Scotland and the leader of the ruling coalition between Labour and the Liberal Democrats; he had admitted receiving undeclared income totalling /36,000 over 14 years for the sub-letting of part of his office, the rent for which had already been paid by the taxpayer. Miss Anji Hunter resigned as director of political and government relations, in reality a job working closely with the Prime Minister, in order to take up a post with BP; she was replaced by Lady Morgan, who as Sally Morgan had worked as an aide to the Prime Minister before being made a minister five months ago. There was rioting in north
Belfast and a 16-year-old Protestant boy died when a pipe bomb he was holding went off; the Queen visited Northern Ireland. Mr Blair is to hold talks with Mr Jose Maria Aznar. the Prime Minister of Spain, and the sovereignty of Gibraltar is acknowledged to be on the agenda, to the fury of Gibraltarians. More than 99 per cent of members of the Professional Footballers' Association voted to go on strike in pursuit of higher payment by televisers of Premier League games.
FORCES of the Northern Alliance captured Kabul without fighting two days after taking the city of Mazar-i-Sharif, 40 miles from the Uzbek border; they rapidly advanced into surrounding territory when Taleban soldiers fled. America had told the Northern Alliance not to enter Kabul before a political future for Afghanistan was arranged, but the city lay open before them. 'I order you,' said Mullah Omar, the Taleban leader. 'not to go hither and thither. Any person who goes hither and thither is like a slaughtered chicken which falls and dies.' President George Bush of the United States met President Vladimir Putin of Russia in Washington and told him that America would destroy 5,000 nuclear warheads over the next decade. 'We intend to dismantle conclusively the vestiges of the Cold War,' Mr Putin said in reply. An American Airlines Airbus A300 aeroplane with 260 people aboard broke apart and crashed soon after taking off from John F. Kennedy Airport, setting homes on fire in the Rockaway Beach area of Queens in south-east New York City and killing six or more on the ground. The Federal Bureau of Investigation gave the opinion that the source of anthrax sent through the post was not Mr Osama bin Laden's al-Qa'eda terrorist network but a lone man in the United States. In Australia Mr John Howard's conservative coalition won its third successive election, in good part because of its stern resistance to admitting seafaring asylum-seekers. Delegates from 142 nations met in Dohar, Qatar, for World Trade Organisation talks intended to admit both China and Taiwan to membership. In Algeria a spell of dry weather broke with rain storms, and more than 600 died, many of them in mudslides in the working-class Bab El Cued district of Algiers, where storm drains were said to have been blocked by the authorities lest they be used by terrorists. Alina Lebedyeva, a 16-year-old supporter of Russian nationalism who lashed the Prince of Wales in the face with a red carnation in Riga, was said to be facing as long as 15 years in prison by a Latvian court. Two Samoan fishermen survived for 132 days in an open 25ft boat, surviving on fish and seabirds and drifting 2,500 miles to New Guinea.
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