He will be held to that: not just by anxious Tory MPs, but by the Labour leader, John Smith, who shows signs of cheekily wanting to emerge as the services' friend.Mr Smith has a point when he says there have been too many piecemeal cuts, adding his voice to those calling for a full defence review. 'Josephine, do we have any rabbi beards today?' I heard him shout There was a muffled discussion. But West Europeans cannot buy peace of mind by allowing them perpetual hegemony over other democracies, in some sort of genteel post-Communist appeasement. Iraq's re-entry would force all Opec producers to cut output to avoid a collapse in prices.Bottom Line, page 32.

Gad Gross was a driven, brave young man who turned up briefly in Beirut before the Gulf war embraced the slaughter of the Kurds, then set off for the killing fields of northern Iraq in the hope of selling his pictures to an American news magazine. Things are OK for now but we're not quite there yet, are we? There's still work to be done.'Work was done the next day at the Randburg City Council, neutral territory, in whose air-conditioned conference room Mr Mlambo, ANC officials, refugee representatives and white councillors sat, in the very image of a polite modern democracy, with Dr Carmichael and other members of the ICC. The steak and chips can wait until they get home.(Photograph omitted). The second is the history of attempts to bring it convincingly to life in the very different culture of its rediscovery. There followed a relentless campaign to get him removed from his teaching post at a boys' school, and his false indictment on charges of child abuse.The blurb on the book jacket claims that Lynch was then subjected to a trial reminiscent of scenes in The Bonfire of the Vanities.

Thirty five of them rolled up at Southern Counties in their battered Allegros and spanking new Fiestas. But Mont Blanc, which rises 1,000m above it, attracts clouds like a magnet. This might suggest that the company is looking forward to explosive growth. Smith fell 10p to 440p.Storehouse was ruffled by a Hoare suggestion that profits be taken The shares touched 200p but ended at 199p, up 1p They may go lower today. The other offer comes from Santiago de Compostela, Spain, with a tenth of that prize fund.When asked about the legality of staging such an event in Belgrade, a spokesman for the International Chess Federation (FIDE) said it had contacted the United Nations and will be 'undertaking a technical study of the proposals made by the bidders'.Meanwhile, the British Chess Federation has been talking to the Foreign Office, whose lawyers are examining whether trade sanctions would apply to an event in Bulgaria financed by Serbian money. WRITING and publishing political biography is a little like being a weatherman.

When you become attached to that, you become its prisoner.'Ken Livingstone disagrees 'I don't think he'll ever be a pet,' he said, then paused. 'A breathing space is vitally necessary for Russia, if only for a year or one-and-a-half years.'Political adventurers hope that an ungoverned Russia can become their easy prey,' he said, speaking inside the Kremlin from a podium still decorated with the hammer and sickle. Chris Donald, co-editor of Viz, may have been a delight and had them roaring in the balcony ('As I speak Paul McCartney is sitting by his fireside knitting a woolly sweater for his wife, with whom he shares a mutual interest in veggie burgers, while Mick Jagger is lying on some beach in Mustique giving Jerry Hall, or any other top model who happens to be passing, a bloody good seeing to In whose shoes would you prefer to be?'). A house-guest could rise to find that many of the day's lemmas had already been proved Research was over by lunchtime. As in his celebrated Baptism, Piero succeeds in making it appear entirely plausible that this Gospel episode, the birth of Christ, took place in Tuscany.