It would be an offence to refuse to hand over drink, with a maximum pounds 500 fine.The Tory backbencher Dr Robert Spink, MP for Castle Point, introducing his Bill, said the measure was part of the Government's drive to "make our streets safer".The Home Office minister Timothy Kirkhope said the Bill would close a loophole in the law, which was causing problems all over Britain and provided a "quick on-the-spot solution" to a disturbing increase in "loud and loutish" behaviour.For the Opposition, George Howarth welcomed the measure and praised Labour controlled local authorities in Coventry and Glasgow for pioneering schemes to ban all public drinking on the streets.During debate on the Bill, Mr Kirkhope condemned soft drinks containing alcohol, so-called alcopops. The Confiscation of Alcohol (Young Persons) Bill, which was given an unopposed second reading in the Commons and now looks set to become law, gives the police powers to seize and destroy alcohol in possession of a person under 18 in a public place whom they believe has been drinking or is about to drink in public. Under the Bill's provisions, officers will be able to confiscate alcohol from anyone when they consider it will be passed on to under-age drinkers to consume in public, and also to report under-age drinking to the culprit's parents. Police will be given new powers to confiscate alcohol from under-age drinkers under a backbench Bill approved by the Commons yesterday with government and opposition support. Yvette Coulthard, head of group resourcing at ICL, declined to give away the company's selection criteria, but said examples could be a Cambridge computer science degree, systems- integration experience or "being captain of a team or senior prefect".ICL was won over to a program called Resumix when it used it two years ago to help recruit 500 people in three months to staff the National Lottery operator, Camelot.Another package, known as Oscar, is used by companies such as Sainsbury's and Tesco to "read" candidates' applications, including answers to the psychometric tests increasingly favoured by graduate recruiters.. Final-year students applying to ICL, Mercury and Motorola this year will be among those whose first challenge will be impressing a computer. Thanks to new software already widely used in America, candidates may be accepted or rejected on the basis of their degree subject, grade or institution, their skills, or even their role as third violin in the school orchestra.Once sorted into categories, they can instantly be sent a computer-generated rejection letter or invitation for interview.The development, still in its early stages, is viewed enthusiastically by employers struggling to cope with rising numbers of graduate applications. Increasingly, big firms offering hundreds of graduate jobs each year are turning to information technology to help sift through the thousands of applications pouring in. CVs and forms which would once have been sorted by hand are now more likely in some companies to be fed into computers programmed to trawl though the data in search of pre-set criteria.

Today, they have a new weapon in the battle to pick the best staff for the job - artificial intelligence. There was a time when employers relied on an eye for a good CV, a probing interview technique and a healthy sense of scepticism to seek out top graduates during their annual recruitment round. At first I was delighted when the song hit the charts, but what I really didn't want was to have my life taken over, which is what could have happened."He has no regrets, he says, about leaving the pop world for teaching. "If I'd written a lot more I might have been a lot richer now," he concedes "But would I have been more happy?". Now the advert and song have been revived for a new campaign.The song's success and reappearance now causes ambivalent feelings for its composer, arranger and singer Peter Dello who formed Honeybus, but left the group after "I Can't Let Maggie Go" because he did not like life on the road as a pop performer, and refused to sing the vocals when the song was first used in the Nimble advertisements.Now teaching music at Stepney Green school , 54-year-old Mr Dello says he just used Maggie for the sake of a name "I don't think I knew a Maggie actually. It was a classic pop song which had a lengthy afterlife as a long-running television commercial featuring a girl soaring skywards in a hot air balloon.

But the man who created the song wanted nothing to do with stardom and has become a teacher at a comprehensive in east London. Both parties ploughed significant resources into campaign web sites.Britain's main political parties have been holding back. Partly this is down to lingering technophobia and a desire to concentrate effort and resources on traditional forms of propaganda such as posters and party political broadcasts. But is it also because the rival parties are wary about prematurely over stretching their election expense accounts..

Now more than two million people in this country use the Net, a figure which is expected to rise by 50 per cent this year."Obviously only a minority of even these people are going to use the new media as their primary source of information in the forthcoming campaign, but the new media's coverage of the election is going to be more than a mere sideline," said Mr Martin.The first study of Internet use in the recent US presidential election reveals that almost a third of American voters (28 per cent) were online at some point during the course of the1996 presidential campaign."Any question of acceptance of the Internet as a source of political information was resolved on election night when so many news-hungry web users were online trying to get election returns that the entire computer network was swamped," said Adam Clayton Powell III, vice-president of the Freedom Forum, who will fly in from Washington for Tuesday's conference.Democrat and Republican strategists realised the increasing importance of reaching the wired generation some time back. On Tuesday, the first of a batch of special election web sites ( http://ge97.co.uk) is scheduled to make its debut. Political junkies eager for John Major to name the date of the general election will be relieved to learn that coverage of campaign '97 will kick off in earnest in only three days' time - on the Internet. Andrew Knight, former chief executive of News International, once remarked that Mr Hastings was an "intellectual lightweight" compared to Kelvin MacKenzie, then editor of The Sun.. It chauffeured him around for five days, finally dropping him off at his Northamptonshire estate.During Falklands War was not a hero of some fellow journalists. Rather than risk British Rail, he flagged a taxi in London and had it drive him the whole way.