Last month, after European farm ministers failed to reach agreement on maximum journey times - an eight-hour maximum and a 24-hour maximum were both on the table - Britain announced that it was going ahead with its own rules for a 15-hour maximum from 23 January. According to Mark Glover, of Respect for Animals, the rules will be "unworkable": the Continental authorities will simply not enforce them.About 2.5 million lambs and calves were exported to Europe in 1993 Sheep face long, crowded journeys without food and water. The calves, meanwhile, are sent abroad into veal crates - a veal production system banned in Britain which produces the pale veal favoured by the consumers of Germany, France and Italy.The paleness is produced by keeping the calves in the dark in tiny crates and giving them a diet which leaves them "on the borders of anaemia". Calves taken from their mothers at a day old are said to cry for them and to spend most of the time in the crates before slaughter licking and nuzzling each other for company.Mr Glover said: "They are social animals. All they want is to be with their mothers and others of their kind. It is pathetically sad to see them in these conditions."Slaughtering rules also vary widely across the Continent. Unlike the UK, many countries do not practise pre-stunning, for example.

The animal welfare lobby says the live animals trade is unnecessary and blames "over-intellectual" media pundits for denigrating such feelings as "sentimentality". Science, for example, has shown that animals can suffer stress. Mr Glover says emotion, not sentimentality, is what drives the protests, "and there is nothing wrong with emotion it is part of being human".. The fire which gutted part of Parliament Buildings in Belfast was most likely caused by an electrical fault, investigators said last night. The start of the blaze which caused £1.5m of damage, was traced to wiring behind the Speaker's Chair in the Commons Chamber.

They said there was no sign of arson and that there were no fire alarms or sprinkler system in use at the time of the fire. The disclosure that the blaze was an accident came as Sir Patrick Mayhew, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, announced the setting up of an independent inquiry into the blaze.. Leigh Bowery, the muse and model of the artist Lucian Freud, died suddenly aged 33 on New Year's Eve Obituary, page 31. .