Conservative MPs got down to selecting the two candidates for the leadership of the party between whom members at large will be asked to choose; they did not include Mr Kenneth Clarke, who came last in the first ballot. Miss Patricia Hewitt, the Secretary of State for Health, confirmed that, if avian influenza communicable between human beings visited Britain, then perhaps a quarter of the population might be infected and 50,000 might die. Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, in a speech to Progress, a Labour party organisation, said, ‘What we must not do is fall for some modern version of the old Left delusion: that the problem with the progressive government is that it is not Left enough and if only its leadership rediscovered its true principles, all would be well.’ A Bill to enable the introduction of identity cards was given its third reading in the Commons, although the government majority was halved. The government agreed to allow serving public-sector workers to continue to retire at 60 while new employees must work till 65. Mr Shaun Woodward, the British minister responsible for health in Northern Ireland, announced that the government would impose a complete ban there on smoking in bars and enclosed public places. Harold Pinter won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Sir John Gieve, permanent under-secretary at the Home Office since 2001, is to replace Sir Andrew Large as deputy governor of the Bank of England in January. Standard Life, Europe’s largest mutual life assurance enterprise, pressed ahead with demutualisation and a flotation on the Stock Exchange. Mr Bob Kiley, the head of Transport for London, said the French engineering company Alstom should lose its £429 million 20-year maintenance contract for Underground trains after services on the Northern line were suspended for three days because of problems with their braking tripcocks. The number of registered sex offenders rose to 28,994, from 24,572 a year ago.
Avian influenza of the type H5N1 spread to the Danube delta in Romania and to the Greek island of Inousses near Chios. The estimated number of dead from the earthquake in Kashmir rose to 54,000; thousands in remote areas continued to lack shelter, food and medical help. Iraqis voted in a referendum on the draft constitution, which was expected to be approved; turnout was perhaps 60 per cent (compared with 50.7 per cent in the last American presidential election). Saddam Hussein went on trial in Baghdad on charges arising from the massacre of 143 people in the village of Dujail in 1982. American aircraft killed about 70 people around Ramadi, a stronghold of Sunni insurgents; local sources said that 39 of the dead were civilian bystanders. At least 1,978 members of the United States armed forces have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to a tally kept by the Associated Press news agency. The home approval rating of President George Bush of the United States fell to 39 per cent, the lowest level since he came to power in 2001, according to a Gallup poll. In a speech to a United Nations conference in Rome, President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe had some words to say about Mr Bush, Mr Blair and Iraq: ‘Must we allow these men, the two unholy men of our millennium, who in the same way as Hitler and Mussolini formed an unholy alliance, to form an alliance to attack an innocent country?’ Seven Muslim men, six of them of Moroccan origin, appeared in a Dutch court in Rotterdam accused of plotting acts of terrorism, including attacks on Schiphol airport, the port of Rotterdam and a nuclear reactor. The use of methamphetamines by oil-rig workers in America was said by industry sources to be hampering production. The Berlin-based Transparency International said that the most corrupt countries this year are Chad and Bangladesh, and the least corrupt Iceland.
CSH
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