M r Stephen Byers, the Secretary of State for Transport, approved
a deal to spend £300 million of public money, which, with £200 million raised in the City, would enable Network Rail (a new non-profit company limited by guarantee set up by his department) to buy Railtrack from its shareholders. He had said on 7 October, 'I can say for certain there will be no taxpayers' money made available to support shareholders.A rival consortium called Swiftrail, headed by Mr David James. said it might have sorted things out without the £300 million, but, since it was being offered to Network Rail, perhaps it should be offered to them too. Mr Martin Sixsmith, it emerged, is still being paid his salary as a Whitehall civil servant even though Mr Byers announced that he had resigned more than a month ago, which he denies. Consignia, formerly and shortly again to be called the Post Office, announced the loss of 15,000 jobs, mainly from the heavy-lossmaking Parcelforce division; the final total of lost jobs will be between 30,000 and 40,000, out of 220,000. Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss ruled in the High Court that a paralysed woman was competent to instruct her doctors to turn off a respirator that kept her alive. Mr lain Duncan Smith, the leader of the Conservative party, briefly visited the grim Easterhouse estate near Glasgow and then made a speech to the party's spring conference at Harrogate in which he said, 'It's about being a party that doesn't just drive past Easterhouse on the motorway: Corby in Northamptonshire is to impose a curfew from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. on children up to the age of 15; any found will be returned to their parents, who will be ordered to explain why they have allowed them out. Ashley Walters, aged 19, a rap singer with So Solid Crew, the garage act, was jailed for 18 months after pleading guilty to possession of a Brocock ME38 — an airgun replica of a Magnum revolver — loaded with five rounds of modified ammunition which made it a lethal weapon. Gareth Gates, aged 17, displaced Will Young (who had beaten him to be voted Pop Idol by television viewers) at the top of the record charts with 'Unchained Melody', which had been a No. 1 hit for Jimmy Young in 1955.
ARAB foreign ministers meeting in Beirut considered the Saudi Arabian peace plan for Israel and the Palestinian territories; in Israel Mr Arid Sharon. the Prime Minister, outlined a plan of his own. An earthquake in northern Afghanistan killed hundreds and left perhaps 10,000 homeless. The United States said it wanted to award the Congressional Medal of Honour, its highest gallantry medal, to a British Special Boat Service commando who led the rescue of a CIA officer from a revolt by hundreds of Afghan prisoners at Mazar-i-Sharif in November: it would be the first time that the medal was awarded to a living foreigner. North and South Korea agreed to resume talks and exchange special envoys in April. In Algeria, President Abdelaziz Bouteflika agreed to withdraw gendarmes from restive Berber territory and pledged to register the Berber tongue as an official language alongside Arabic. In Sokoto state, Nigeria, an Islamic appeal court lifted the sentence of death by stoning on Miss Safiya Huseini, who has a year-old daughter conceived out of wedlock; Mr Kanu Agapi, the Nigerian justice minister, had written to all 12 northern governors a week before saying that strict sharia punishments discriminated against the Muslim community and were unconstitutional, but the governors took no notice. The European Court of Human Rights is to award former King Constantine of Greece more than £75 million compensation for the estates confiscated from him by the Greek government in 1994; these included the house in Corfu called Mon Repos where the Duke of Edinburgh was born.
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