PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, made a speech at the Welsh National Assembly intended to rally wavering support for the war. 'Never forget how we felt watching the planes fly into the twin towers. Never forget those answering-machine messages. Never forget how we felt imagining how mothers told children they were about to die,' he said, in a delivery that slightly fluffed the lines. Mr Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, was unconvinced by calls to stop waging war during the month of Ramadan, which begins on 17 November: 'If you look at the history of warfare in Islamic countries,' he said, 'there have not been pauses during Ramadan.' A few Britons were reported to have been killed fighting for the Taleban in Afghanistan: but doubt was cast on the reliability of claims about the deaths made by alMajahiroun, an extremist organisation active in Britain. Mr David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, announced that the government would abolish the issuing of food vouchers to asylum-seekers, but would require them to carry identity cards and to remain in 'induction' centres while their applications were considered; Mr Michael Martin, the Speaker of the House of Commons, controversially expressed an opinion: 'I welcome the vouchers being abolished because they take away people's dignity.' The Appeal Court reduced to manslaughter the conviction of Tony Martin, who had earlier been
found guilty of the murder of a teenage burglar who had broken into his house. Princess Margaret was admitted to hospital. Consignia, which is the name adopted by the Post Office, said it would not collect at the times advertised from pillar boxes that it suspected were empty. Euronext, made up of the Paris, Amsterdam and Brussels stock exchanges, beat the London stock exchange in bidding for Liffe, the London futures exchange. The Treasury withdrew from sale some late 17th-century silver candlesticks, snuffers and trays made for privy counsellors; they had been expected to fetch £100,000. BBC governors criticised a children's television programme broadcast last May in which the former Spice Girl Mel B used the word `wanker'. Lever Brothers brought to an end production of bars of soap at its factory in Port Sunlight on Merseyside. An earthquake of 4.1 on the Richter scale brought down chimneys near Melton Mowbray. October turned out to be the warmest since some time before 1659.
SEVERAL thousand Pakistani volunteers gathered on the Afghan border offering to fight for the Taleban. American aeroplanes continued to bomb targets in the country, and some more civilians were killed in error. Another postal worker in New Jersey contracted pneumonic anthrax: of 14 cases in America of different kinds, three have
been fatal. Sixty tons of post on Capitol Hill remain unopened. Israel withdrew tanks and troops from Bethlehem and nearby Beit Jalla, keeping forces in Jenin, Qalqilya. Ramallah and Tulkarem in the Palestinianadministered West Bank; on the day of the withdrawal two Palestinians from Islamic Jihad shot dead four Israeli women at Hadera in the north of Israel; the gunmen were shot dead by police. During the Israeli occupation of the West Bank towns, which began on 18 October after the murder of the Israeli minister of tourism, 38 Palestinians were killed. Two gunmen opened fire in St Dominic's Roman Catholic church in Bahawalpur, Pakistan, where local Protestants were holding a service; 16 were killed. Mr Yeslam Binladen, one of the 51 or so brothers and sisters of Osama bin Laden, gave an interview in Switzerland, where he lives: 'We are not a family of terrorists,' he said. 'I will sue anybody who accuses me of having ties with Osama.' Fire following a collision between lorries in the St Gotthard tunnel in Switzerland killed 11. More than 180 people were arrested at the Frethun freight depot as they attempted to enter the Channel Tunnel to Britain. Russia experienced growth of gross domestic product for the first six months of 2001 — 5 per cent higher than for the same period a year before.
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