THE WEEK THAT WAS

IN Britain, Mr David Blunkett resigned from the Cabinet for a second time after acknowledging that he had not followed the employment guidelines for former ministers. On the same day the government avoided defeat on clauses in its Anti-Terrorism Bill by a single vote. In Australia, prime minister John Howard gave a warning of a specific terrorist threat to the country and said he would seek new anti-terrorist powers. In the United States the Washington Post revealed that the CIA operates a system of secret prisons for terrorism suspects in eight countries. President Bush warned that he would veto legislation drafted by Senator John McCain to prohibit the abuse and ill-treatment of prisoners suspected of terrorism. The two candidates for the Conservative Party leadership, Mr David Cameron and Mr David Davis, debated in a special edition of BBC TV's Question Time; opinion afterwards was that Mr Davis had recovered some of the ground he lost following Mr Cameron's much-praised speech at the Party conference. Ballot papers went out to Conservatives in the country; the result is expected in early December. Deloitte, the liquidators for the defunct Bank of Credit and Commerce International which collapsed in 1991, dropped their 12-year, 850 million pound, lawsuit against the Bank of England for acting in “bad faith”; the opening speech in the trial lasted 119 days, the longest in English legal history. The French prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, cancelled a visit to Canada in order to deal with the concsequences of several days of rioting in the poor suburbs of Paris occupied mainly by Muslims. Another cancelled visit was that of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to Iran following the speech by the Iranian president about “wiping Israel off the map”. The Prince of Wales and his wife kept their date to visit the United States and attended a dinner at the White House during which Prince Charles spoke of the need for better understanding of Islam by the West and the urgency of action on global warming. Canada announced that it would increase its annual intake of immigrants to 300'000. In Zimbabwe a government minister admitted that the forcible seizure of white-owned farms had contributed to country's massive crop failure.