Mr Tony Blair, in a speech at the Labour party conference, said, ‘The challenge we face is not in our values. It is how we put them into practice in a world fast-forwarding to the future at unprecedented speed.’ To combat antisocial behaviour he proposed ‘a radical extension of summary powers to police and local authorities to take on the wrongdoers’ and ‘more competitive sports in schools’. Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who wants soon to be prime minister, said in his speech, ‘I learnt from my parents not just to do my best and to work hard but to treat everyone equally, to respect others, to tell the truth, to take responsibility’; this he called his ‘moral compass’. He promised, ‘I will — in the next year — visit every region and nation of our country.’ Only 61 per cent of the 1,001 ballots returned by members of the ‘electoral college’ of the Conservative party (MPs, constituency chairmen and other activists) voted to return the choice of a leader to MPs; a two thirds majority was needed to change the status quo. The Irish Republican Army has ‘decommissioned’ its arms, according to General John de Chastelain, the head of the international arms decommissioning body, and a chosen Methodist minister and a Catholic priest. At the beginning of the news conference announcing the event, General de Chastelain said, ‘I’m waiting for a starting gun …I should rephrase that, I’m waiting for somebody to tell me to start.’ The World Toilet Summit, held in Belfast, heard that ‘there is evidence that a significant number of children refuse to use school toilets because of the poorly maintained and unhygienic facilities. We know that there is an increased risk of urinary tract infections and constipation.’ A 20-year-old man of Asian origin joined the North Sussex magistracy; but he turned out not to be a disc jockey as had earlier been feared.
More than two and half million people drove north to avoid Hurricane Rita, which swept ashore over Texas and Louisiana, causing floods up to nine feet deep in coastal areas. Few were killed, although two dozen died when a bus full of evacuees burst into flames. A ward of New Orleans was flooded again. Rita and its predecessor Katrina put a third of the United States’s oil-refining capacity out of operation. In Iraq 10 people were killed by a suicide-bomber outside a police recruitment centre in Baquba; on another day 24 died in bombings; the bodies of 22 men captured and shot some days before were found near the Iranian border. Abu Azzam, also known as Abdallah Nahim, whose original name was Abdallah Mohammed al-Juhaari, the second-most wanted al-Qa’eda person in Iraq according to American forces, has been killed, they said. Imad Yarkas, also known as Abu Dahdah, an al-Qa’eda leader, was jailed for 27 years in Spain for conspiracy to murder in the attacks on America on 11 September 2001. In the United States, Private Lynndie England was convicted on six out of seven counts of mistreating Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Bagdhad. In Israel a barrage of missiles fired from Gaza met with retaliatory air strikes ordered by Mr Ariel Sharon, the Prime Minister. Mr Sharon then beat off until next April an attempt by Mr Benjamin Netanyahu to challenge him for the leadership of the Likud party. The Law and Justice party won the Polish general election and is forming a government with the Civic Platform party; both oppose the socialist Left and see themselves as heirs to Solidarity. The Pope met the dissident theologian Hans K
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