T he Queen opened Parliament, announcing Bills to end the rule
of 'double jeopardy', to allow the police to seize the assets of unconvicted 'criminals' and to make adoption easier; Her Majesty then changed clothes and dashed off to Royal Ascot. Kenneth Clarke and Michael Ancram joined the contest to become leader of the Conservative party. David Trimble was re-elected leader of the Ulster Unionist party unopposed; he then denied rumours that he was about to join the Conservative party. Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, who murdered the toddler James Bulger in 1993 when they were ten years old, were released from jail under new identities; Bulger's parents both made veiled threats towards them, and hundreds of Internet users sent similar messages to a vigilante website. Four youths were arrested and charged with the murder of Damilola Taylor, killed on a Peckham housing estate. Little attention was paid to the murder, with a machine-gun, of an 18-year-old in Manchester. There was rioting in Burnley. The chief constable of Sussex police resigned after it was revealed he had promoted two officers involved in a raid in which a naked and unarmed man was shot dead. The Lord Chancellor announced that blind people will be able to serve as magistrates for the first time. A Jewish broker Conservative leadership contest hots up
who claimed racial discrimination after being told to wear an Adolf Hitler uniform after arriving late for work settled with his employers for a sum believed to be .000,000. Bookmakers William Hill said they would no longer take bets on streakers appearing in Wimbledon matches, after losing money last year on people who made the bet then did the streak themselves. A vulture escaped from a zoo in Norfolk and was eventually caught after setting up home in a vicar's garden in Suffolk. An Italian scientist claimed that mysterious splashing attributed to the Loch Ness monster is really caused by seismic waves from an underwater geological fault.
ROMANO PROD!, president of the European Commission, told the Irish Republic to hold another referendum on the Nice treaty and to make sure that everybody voted yes this time, complaining 'Why do you have to dictate the rules of democracy of other countries?' The Yugoslav federal government passed a decree making possible the extradition of former president Slobodan Milosevic on charges of war crimes. A crowd of 10,000 Macedonians marched on their parliament in Skopje to protest at the decision of the government to allow Albanian rebels to escape from the city. General Pervaiz Musharraf, who has been in charge in Pakistan since a military coup two years ago, decided to make himself President. President Bush announced that the US Navy would cease to use the Puerto Rican island of Vieques as a practice bombing target: 'One of the worst decisions I have seen any president make,' as one of his Republican colleagues put it. A mother in Houston, Texas, drowned her five children in the bath. The mayor of Toronto was thought to have damaged his city's chances of hosting the 2008 Olympics after he refused to go to a meeting of the Association of National Olympic Committees in Mombasa, saying 'I just see myself in a pot of boiling water with all these natives dancing around me.' An alligator was captured in Central Park, New York, after a week on the run. A 56-year-old Egyptian businessman was arrested and charged with polygamy after allegedly marrying 69 women in the past 20 years, 11 of them in the past 12 months. The King of Swaziland made it a criminal offence to poke fun at his official titles, which include 'The Lion Which Devours' and 'The Sire of the Herd'. Men in Dubai won the right to dissolve their marriages by sending their wives three text messages on their mobile phones, each reading 'I divorce thee'.
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