Mr Magill recommended that the cost of the allegedly illegal policy, pounds 21.25m, should be recovered by surcharging them.The three-month process of public hearings held by Mr Magill, which examined the findings of the provisional report, ended on 7 February.Dame Shirley was represented by Anthony Scrivener QC, who questioned and cross-examined those who gave evidence.Dame Shirley has consistently denied her administration was involved in any illegal policy. JAMES CUSICK Dame Shirley Porter, the former Conservative leader of Westminster City Council accused in an auditor's report last year of operating a homes- for-votes scheme, has complained that delays in delivering the final report are "unjustifiable" and "intolerable". In a letter to the Independent, Dame Shirley, leader of the ruling Tory group between 1983 and 1991, claims the "delay" by district auditor John Magill is "unjustifiable and an abuse of the quasi judicial process under which he operates".She claims not to have heard from Mr Magill since before Christmas and that she, and the eight others effectively accused of gerrymandering in Mr Magill's provisional report in January 1993, have been "left in the dark, our reputations sullied".The auditor's provisional report identified Dame Shirley and the other councillors and officials as being responsible for the council's "designated sales" policy. limits them to a valuation of a mother's services, where the real loss is of a irreplaceable human being.''The judge reduced the amount Mr Osborne's insurers must pay to Samantha by 25 per cent to pounds 30,000 because her mother was not wearing a seatbelt Samantha did not attend yesterday's hearing.. The courts are called upon in cases such as this to quantify a loss which ... no sum of money can ever repair, and the law under which they have done so ...

Samantha Lewis, of Westhill, Aberdeen, brought the unique claim against the driver of the car which collided with that of her mother, Jane Lewis. William Osborne, of Benfleet, Essex, was convicted of careless driving in March 1978 and was fined pounds 25 and had his licence endorsed. Miss Lewis lived with her father for a short time afterwards but after he remarried spent the next few years bouncing between relatives and council foster homes before finally settling with an aunt in Aberdeen.Announcing the judgment, Mr Justice Sedley said: "At 13 months of age, Samantha was not capable of appreciating the fact of her mother's death but perfectly capable of becoming aware of her absence.''Any damages recoverable by Miss Lewis for the injury resulting from the loss of her mother, who was aged 21 at the time of her death, should not be reduced to reflect the "compensatory care given by her aunt and others." The question was whether the loss of her mother's services should be quantified as a loss suffered by "a happy and well-balanced child, which is what Samantha would very probably have been, or by an unhappy and disturbed child, which is what she became."The court is today doing what it can to recognise that the injury suffered goes beyond the bare loss of services which could be replaced by employing a housekeeper or nanny, and includes a maternal element ... An 18-year-old whose mother was killed in a car crash when she was a baby was awarded pounds 30,000 for the loss of her mother's love and support by the High Court in London yesterday. Gashed and dented lamp-posts stood at drunken angles or had been completely flattened. Yet, even on the streets of a city hardened by years of street violence, the sight of several slightly charred, blood-red carcasses lying in the gutter in the Whiterock area was shocking.Closer inspection, though, revealed them to be nothing more than a couple of sides of beef that had been looted from a butcher's shop in a soot- covered parade of businesses.No one had taken any action to remove them by late afternoon, or for that matter the vans and lorries that had been drawn - like a latter-day wagon train - into a circle to block the Springfield estate before being set ablaze.As old folks stood chatting on their porches looking on, tut-tutting, excited skinhead children gathered around the wreckage and policemen in their armoured Land-Rovers watched, steely-eyed, from behind grills and bullet-proof glass.Motorists, driving for all the world as though the obstruction was an everyday occurrence, slowed, queued and left the four-lane carriageway for the footpath to pick their way round the obstacles.The scene was much the same on the Falls Road, outside the Sinn Fein centre, and in Andersonstown, just along from the party's headquarters, where the smell of burning rubber - the signature of Ulster riots - still hung in the air.All along the road tangled coils of wire were all that remained of the tyres.Two single-deck buses, their cream and red livery a distant memory with only the bones of their superstructures remaining, neatly straddled all four lanes of the highway.Flames still licked around the diesel tank of one, but that was of no concern to the scores of youngsters in the football shirts of Glasgow Celtic and the Irish Republic who gathered at the scene admiring their trophies of the previous day.Walking along, noting the scene, one of the skinheaded youngsters spied this stranger and asked from the corner of his mouth, grinning: "Got a match?"Perhaps that is the point, burning buses in Belfast, particularly during the marching season of July and August, is a tradition that will die away slowly.As if to emphasise the point and support the view that Monday's violence did not spell the death of the peace process, police manning road blocks just half a mile away had abandoned their flak jackets of the day before in favour of shirt-sleeve order.. Before the vehicles had met their untimely end, put to the torch, some had plainly been used as battering rams by their new owners. In scenes that many prayed had been consigned to the dustbin of history, the blackened skeletal hulks of buses, vans and lorries sat strewn across the streets of nationalist west Belfast yesterday.

But campaigns have been going on for quite a number of years for the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four It's the same as we were doing for Lee We feel just the same as they do.". It was eerie, a ghostly echo of the past. It was also distressing that the rioting took place on the very day of his release."Asked if she could understand how the nationalist communities felt, she said: "To some extent, yes They feel as if they are getting a raw deal. His mother, Wynne Johnson, said: "It was very upsetting to learn people were shouting against Lee coming out and calling for their prisoners to be out.

The Royal Ulster Constabulary said 32 people were arrested in north and west Belfast as a result of 150 hijackings and petrol bombings during almost 20 hours of violence. Damage is estimated at pounds 4m.Clegg's family said yesterday that he had matured during the four years he spent behind bars. In Belfast, a bread van was hijacked and set alight, and attempts were made to hijack a petrol tanker on the Springfield Road in west Belfast.But the incidents were isolated compared to the violence in the province on Monday. Patients were evacuated from a hospital in Dungannon, Co Tyrone, after a bus containing a suspect dustbin inside was abandoned outside, but bomb disposal experts discovered that it was a hoax. It is far from the only violent demonstration organised by Sinn Fein in recent months."There was some trouble in Northern Ireland yesterday. Prominent members of Sinn Fein were present at a number of those. My constituents in west Belfast justifiably believe that there is one law for soldiers and another law for Irish prisoners."John Major replied that the decision to release Clegg had been a "judicial matter" which had been decided by Sir Patrick Mayhew, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, on its merits.He added: "I must say to the House and the country as a whole, it is patently absurd to equate Private Clegg's case with deliberate acts of murder by paramilitaries."The Prime Minister continued: "There was a very high degree of orchestration in yesterday's violent events in Northern Ireland.