Mr David Davis, Mr Kenneth Clarke, Mr David Cameron, Dr Liam Fox and Sir Malcolm Rifkind displayed what attractions they could muster as candidates for the leadership of the Conservative party at its annual conference in Blackpool. Boots the chemist, with 1,400 outlets in Britain, announced a merger with Allied UniChem, with 1,250 outlets in Britain and Europe, to produce a company with 100,000 employees and a value of £7 billion. A takeover of Telewest by its rival British cable operator NTL was expected to produce a communications company with revenues of £3.4 billion. BP warned that Hurricanes Katrina and Rita might knock more than £400 million off its third-quarter profits. The Office for National Statistics found that, at 570,000, the number of civil servants remained the same as the year before, despite a promise in 2004 by Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, to cut them by 84,000; public sector jobs rose by 95,000 in the year to June to stand at 5.85 million — nearly one in four employees. New figures from the Continuous Mortality Investigations Bureau gave a life expectancy of 89 years ten months to British men born in 1950; this worried pension providers. Ronnie Barker, the television comedian, died, aged 76. Police freed 19 prostitutes, mostly of East European origin, during a raid on Cuddles, a massage parlour in Birmingham. Three photographs from the Illustrator’s Figure Reference Manual (1987) were found to bear a striking resemblance to the figures in ‘The Singing Butler’ (1992), a painting by Jack Vettriano sold last year for £750,000. Gary Ozzy Osbourne, who had changed his name from Gary Bacon out of admiration for the singer, was jailed for life for murdering a friend.
Three suicide-bombs exploded at two seafood cafés at Jimbaran, a beach resort, and a three-storey noodle and steakhouse at Kuta on Bali, killing 22 and wounding 104. Suspicion immediately fell upon Jemaah Islamiyah, a group linked to al-Qa’eda, and newspapers carried photographs of the bombers’ severed heads in the hope that they would be identified. Abu Bakar Bashir, jailed for his part in the bombing on Bali in 2002 that killed 202, said, ‘I suggest the government bring themselves closer to God by implementing his rules and laws because these happenings are warnings from God for all of us.’ Al-Qa’eda posted a message to Iraq on the internet for Ramadan, which started on Tuesday: ‘We say, O Islam, muster your strength, and we incite believers to fight the worshippers of the cross.’ Sunnis once again threatened to boycott a referendum on the Iraqi election after the Shiite-dominated parliament ruled that a No vote would be valid in any of the country’s 18 provinces only if more than two thirds of the registered voters opposed it, rather than two thirds of those who actually voted. Formal negotiations for the admission of Iraq’s neighbour Turkey to the European Union began after round-the-clock wrangling at a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Luxembourg. Austria was the last of the 25 EU countries to withdraw opposition after it was conceded that Croatia too would be considered for membership. Mr John Roberts, a Catholic aged 50, was sworn in as Chief Justice of the United States. A boat capsized on Lake George, New York state, drowning 20 elderly passengers. About 30 per cent of railway workers and teachers, 23 per cent of electricity workers and 20 per cent of post office staff joined a one-day strike in France to protest at the cautious economic reforms of Mr Dominique de Villepin, the Prime Minister. Nicolas Cage, a film actor, and his wife Alice Kim, a former sushi waitress, called their new baby Kal-el, Superman’s name on the planet Krypton.
CSH
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