Information technology is to revolutionise the annual university admissions paper-chase, sounding the death-knell for cumbersome prospectuses and application forms.

Sir: On the Continent, should you reach the traffic warden while he is writing your parking ticket it will be destroyed as long as you move on. In Germany, if the parking meter is out of order one has the right to park there until the meter resumes working. In this country, there seems to be no human or social angle in the approach of traffic wardens and their employers.

Rutland whizz too fast for country lanes

GRAND NATIONAL: Mudahim's victory in Ireland reinforces the claims of Lord Gyllene; Richard Edmondson talks to a trainer with a record of Aintree family success

The Speaker of the Commons, Betty Boothroyd, yesterday acted to stop the intrusion of message pagers in the chamber of the House.

There is a form of rough justice in the City and yesterday it was meted out in no uncertain fashion to Ian Hopkins, one of Nick Leeson's bosses at the time of the Barings collapse. Mr Hopkins' undoing seems to have been not that he failed to supervise and control the rogue Singapore trader adequately but that he refused to plea-bargain with the regulators in return for a light sentence and instead embarked on a highly public campaign to clear his name

I was leafing through a brief biog of William Hogarth the other day, in case the subject should come up in conversation in this his tercentenary year, and I should have to display some rudimentary knowledge of the man, and one thing in it brought me up short. It was an entry describing young Hogarth's sixth year. "1703. Family moves to St John's Gate, where Richard Hogarth (father) opens a Latin-speaking coffee house."

Nationalist anger at IRA attacks is only good sign for authorities, reports David McKittrick

A pounds 78m project to renew the canal linking Edinburgh and Glasgow with the help of Millennium Commission cash is being put in jeopardy by threat- ened overspending on the Greenwich Exhibition, according to Scottish MPs.

Shares in Wickes, the troubled DIY group, will finally resume trading today after shareholders yesterday voted overwhelmingly in favour of the company's pounds 53m rescue rights issue.

Corporate financiers are poised to resume negotiations in their long-running dispute with accountants over who should be liable when mergers and acquisitions go wrong.

.

For the first time since its invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Iraq is free to resume limited exports of oil on to world markets under an oil-for-food agreement with the United Nations which received final approval from the Secretary-General, Boutros Boutros Ghali, yesterday. Impoverished by the embargo placed on it after the Gulf war, Iraq will be permitted to sell $2bn (pounds 1.3bn) of oil over six months and use the proceeds to buy food and medical supplies. The outflow of oil, which will amount to roughly 600,000 barrels a day, compared to 3 million before the war, and the inflow of humanitarian goods will be monitored by UN personnel. Mr Boutros-Ghali agreed to the deal after Baghdad agreed to the conditions last month. The first oil could be flowing by Thursday.

The committee of MPs discussing the fate of the former whip David Willetts for allegedly trying to subvert a Commons investigation into the Neil Hamilton affair is deadlocked after three lengthy meetings in private this week.