Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, said that the government had ‘got to make sure that the police have the powers they can to deal with people who are drug dealing in the street’. Mr Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, said that the government had abandoned plans to introduce a new offence of ‘glorifying terrorism’. Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, the new Lord Chief Justice, said, ‘Occasionally one does feel that an individual politician is trying to browbeat the judiciary.’ Britain’s Assets Recovery Agency and the Irish Republic’s Criminal Assets Bureau looked into the Provisional Irish Republican Army’s link to a £30 million property portfolio in Manchester. The government put pressure on health authorities to fluoridate water, under the Water Act 2003. The Civil Service is employing 117 staff and consultants on an identity card scheme that has yet to receive parliamentary approval. Mr David Blunkett, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, said he was considering using a lie detector to catch people fraudulently applying for benefits; he called the present incapacity benefit system ‘crackers’. Balfour Beatty was fined £10 million and Network Rail, the successor of Railtrack, £3.5 million for their parts in the Hatfield rail crash of 2000, in which four died. Shipping overtook air transport as Britain’s third largest service trade, behind financial services and travel. Mr John Banville, the Irish writer, won the Man Booker prize with The Sea. Buildings on Southend pier, at 1.3 miles the longest pleasure-pier in the world, were burnt down. Sir David Frost is to present a weekly current affairs programme for the al-Jazeera international channel. Arthur Seldon, a theoretical forerunner of Thatcherism, died, aged 89. Lady Thatcher’s 80th birthday was marked by a party to which the Queen and Mr Blair accepted invitations. Prince William is to be given a month’s work experience at the charity division of the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation in London. The late John Peel said in his autobiography that he had been raped at Shrewsbury school but, such was the general level of sexual abuse there, he ‘wasn’t especially traumatised by the experience’. Mr Chris Davies, a Liberal Democrat MP, started a campaign to stop supermarkets wrapping cucumbers in plastic.
An earthquake with a magnitude of 7.6 struck Kashmir, with its epicentre near Muzaffarabad. The estimated number killed stood between 35,000 and 40,000, with 2.5 million left without shelter. Most died in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, others in the Indian-controlled zone. Roads were blocked by landslides, and lifting gear did not get through to most ruined buildings; water and food were slowly reaching survivors in the cold and rain. Mrs Angela Merkel became Chancellor of Germany, heading a coalition government of her conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) and the Social Democrats (SPD), who took eight places in the cabinet. Morocco sent aeroplanes full of migrants back to Senegal; hundreds of people had tried to climb the razor wire between Morocco and the Spanish enclave of Melilla, and many who failed had been dumped by the authorities in the desert near the Algerian border. Mr Knut Ahnlund resigned from the Swedish Academy two days before the announcement of the Nobel prize for literature; ‘Most people in the Academy obviously hadn’t read more than a couple of pages in translation,’ he said of last year’s winner, Miss Elfriede Jelinek, an Austrian. Mr Mohamed el-Baradei and the International Atomic Energy Agency, which he runs, won the Nobel peace prize. The International Criminal Court in The Hague named Joseph Kony and the four other leaders of the marauding Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda as the world’s most wanted men. Milton Obote, president-for-life of Uganda before he was deposed by Idi Amin in 1971, died, aged about 80. Americans were shocked by film footage of policemen badly beating a 64-year-old black man in New Orleans. The European Union, fearing avian influenza, banned the import of turkeys from Turkey.
CSH
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