As Iraq reeled beneath savage and almost daily suicide bombings, US forces yesterday doubled the reward – from $5 million to $10 million – for the capture of Musab Zarqawi, an obscure and little-known associate of Osama bin Laden whom they claim is trying to provoke a civil war in Iraq.
Zarqawi, who is indeed inside Iraq, is trying to organise further bombing attacks on US troops and US-paid Iraqi police forces by using exclusively Iraqi Sunni Muslim insurgents. “People” from the new accession countries are welcome in Britain, but “workers” are not It’s an odd distinction for a leftish fellow. It plays all right in Westminster but you wouldn’t want to launch the policy in Brussels.Mr Howard made an effort to exploit some sort of difference between Mr Blair and Mr Blunkett on the subject. He summarised his argument as: “A bold statement on the Wednesday led to big headlines on the Thursday; a climbdown on the Friday and total confusion by the weekend.” That may have sounded better than it was.

Poland, for example, will have to pay us €105m annually.At stake here is the success or failure of enlargement. The governments with the deepest pockets ought to draw the lessons of the past Look at Ireland, Portugal or Spain. In 1986, the latter was poorer than Argentina; today these are vibrant economies on the verge of becoming net budget contributors.The May expansion should be a cause for celebration. Britain has championed the tearing down of Europe’s last borders. It would be shameful if a protracted wrangle over money were now allowed to turn public opinion, already souring amid unpleasant talk of influxes of gypsies and benefit scroungers, to hostility..

Anyone who has visited the United States knows precisely what Britain should be trying to avoid: a future in which more than half the adult population and one third of children are overweight or clinically obese and where weight is more often than not in inverse proportion to income. According to the latest report to identify obesity as a major British health problem, this will soon be a picture of the UK too if we do not shape up – and fast. Over the past 20 years, they report, obesity rates have doubled among children, trebled in women and quadrupled in men. The devastating effects on health are already apparent, with children as young as six experiencing breathing problems and young people being diagnosed with chronic diseases, above all, diabetes, that were formerly rare before middle age. They describe the implications as “terrifying” – a word not customarily heard in the dead-pan world of medicine.To its credit, this new report scans the whole horizon for remedies.