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France endured a second week of nocturnal violence, with more than 6,000 cars set on fire, nightly arson attacks on schools and leisure centres and dozens of police injured; hundreds were arrested. The rioters and arsonists were almost all Muslim youths from North and West Africa. The unrest spread from the outer suburbs of Paris to suburbs in provincial cities including Toulouse, Marseilles, Bordeaux, Dijon, Rouen and Orleans. The government invoked laws passed during the Algerian crisis to impose a curfew and other emergency restrictions. Australian police raided 23 houses and arrested eight people in Sydney and nine in Melbourne, and a court was told that they were committed to ‘violent jihad in Australia’. One of those arrested, Abu Bakr, had said, in an interview with Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio in August, ‘Osama bin Laden, he is a great man.’ The United Nations Security Council voted unanimously to extend the mandate of the almost 180,000-strong multinational force in Iraq for a year. A defence lawyer in the trial of Saddam Hussein was shot dead, the second in a fortnight. A month after the earthquake in Kashmir, the estimate for the number killed rose to 86,000 in the Pakistan-administered area and 1,350 in the Indian. Mr Alberto Fujimori, the former President of Peru who fled the country for Japan in 2000, was arrested in Chile, where he had been preparing a campaign for re-election. Texas voted to prohibit homosexual marriage; Maine voted for a charter of homosexual rights. Moose that had got drunk by eating fermented apples invaded an old people’s home at Sibbhult in southern Sweden; they left after a police dog barked at them.
CSH
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