The scheme was greeted enthusiastically in the City, where it was seen as evidence that the Government is opposed to a devaluation of sterling. However, he added that a much-touted attack on Lucas was unlikely. The work would include ripping out the concrete walkways, once described by the architectural historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner as 'a thrilling experience if the weather is fine' but which have become a haven for skateboarders and the homeless.While maintaining that it would still like, in conjunction with Stanhope Properties, to replace two concert halls on the site - the Purcell Room and the Queen Elizabeth Hall - with shops, offices and new leisure buildings, the board privately acknowledges that it 'can no longer plan to upgrade our facilities using the profits from commercial development'.A confidential memo to the chief executive, Nicholas Snowman, and the chairman, Sir Brian Corby, says: 'There is no longer any prospect of our being able to find a way ahead that does not make any call on the public purse. The shadowy video images now being studied by the police add poignancy to the story. When they met last December in the World Matchplay final Wattana won 9-4. But directors of the Lottery Promotion Company, which was the guiding spirit behind the lottery and has continued to advise the Government, have had talks with ministers and civil servants about targeting money for crime prevention. In correspondence with the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Norman Lamont, the founder of the Lottery Promotion Company, Denis Vaughan, wrote: 'Putting 35 per cent of both lottery and pools turnover into one charitable Foundation for Good Causes is fully justified, if crime prevention is taken as the reason. Shortly afterwards, when the PM was contemplating some fresh air, he was told to return to his room and shut the windows because of passing clouds of teargas.

Either it is flooding in Bihar, or there are droughts. First, Mr Yadav jolted Patna society by threatening to turn the old colonial golf course into a school where shepherd boys could practise rounding up sheep on the fairways. The Deligny floating swimming-pool on the Seine, which has been a Paris landmark for more than 200 years, sank into the river, AP reports from Paris. He does everything, even picking up a pen, with a good-natured flourish. In the mid-Eighties the Home Office had swooped on visitors from five of these countries, arguing that they were all places from which there was 'pressure to emigrate' to the UK.