The biting of fingers has begun and we shall see who screams first.”. A seven-year-old girl on a quest to become the youngest pilot to fly across America was killed with her father and flight instructor, when her light plane crashed in a storm in Cheyenne, Wyoming, yesterday. Jessica Dubroff’s single-engined Cessna aircraft plunged into a residential street a few minutes after take-off on the second day of a 6,500-mile round trip. Her father, Lloyd, who encouraged her to make the flight, was in the back seat. Jessica planned to beat the trans-continental record set by an eight-year-old last year.
But she only had four months’ experience in the cockpit.

The temperature at the high-altitude airport was close to freezing with heavy rain and hail. Hitting civilians is crossing a red line for our resistance forces. This has nothing to do with targeting of military headquarters.”I tell you this: the hand of the resistance is long and is capable of hurting the enemy. We have an expression here – that we and the Israelis are biting each other’s fingers. When the Israelis killed civilians, the Hizbollah always fired back into Israel, he said. He blamed the Israelis for the death of a boy in Bradchit village at the weekend.”But there is a balance of terror now,” the man went on “The Israelis used to hold the balance Now the balance is shifting to the resistance. But in a dingy office where a Donald Duck cartoon was playing on a miniature television on the sideboard, a bearded man close to the Hizbollah announced quietly to me that the Israelis had crossed a red line.

“They’re watching everything that moves.” Then the line went dead. The lines went dead all over Lebanon, just like the peace of Beirut that expired yesterday morning. By early afternoon, it was turning into a ghost city, its streets largely deserted, its shops closed, its restaurants empty.When I drove into the southern suburbs at dusk, the only men standing on the street corners were armed. The Hizbollah’s green-painted central offices – supposedly the “nerve-centre” which the Israelis said they had attacked – stood apparently unharmed. It was like listening to The House that Jack Built.When I called an old friend on his mobile telephone in the southern city of Tyre, he just had time to tell me that Israeli Apache and Huey helicopters were hovering over the city “They’re mounting mobile checkpoints in the air,” he said. The raids were in retaliation, said the bulletins, for the Katyusha attacks on Israel, which were retaliation for the killing of a 14-year-old Lebanese boy, which might have been retaliation for a suicide bombing against Israeli troops, which was retaliation for… Even the Lebanese radios reverted to their wartime role of endless news bulletins interspersed with the haunting laments of Fairuz, that most famous of Lebanese singers, whose voice is forever linked to the horror of the 16-year conflict that was supposed to have ended.The news was all bad: a 27-year old woman killed in her car by a missile- firing helicopter near the Jiye power station, south of Beirut; a civilian killed in an air raid in the inland town of Nabatea; a 60-year-old man cut down by the Beirut rockets.

Panic-stricken motorists, their headlights blazing, their hands clamped on the horn, blasted their way through the traffic jams. An ambulance, careering from side to side and up on to the pavement, siren screaming, swept past us with a carload of armed men behind it. In the Sahel hospital, a young man with his face bathed in blood was surrounded by television crews. “I was walking in the street and all I remember is a flash and then I found myself covered in blood,” he said.And the gunmen were back in the southern suburbs, bearded Hizbollah men with American M-16 rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, kitted out in webbing and camouflage jackets and captured Israeli helmets. Joining NatWest was a career change.”I felt I had a lot of useful skills, and I was looking for a niche where I could use them,” he says.

“The banks want to bring in people with industrial experience and train them in financial skills.”Alongside his day-to-day work, Mr Cady is on call to offer specialist advice to clients on construction, pollution and contaminated land.Half of the students on Mr Cady’s course had worked before joining NatWest. After that, he worked as a chartered geologist in the construction industry. As well as higher degrees, experience in another field, either before or after university, is increasingly valuable in the sector.James Cady, aged 30, is one of the new breed of banking recruits. He has just completed NatWest’s training programme and has joined the banking services section in NatWest’s Nottingham corporate banking unit.Mr Cady graduated in 1988 with a degree in geology. “A lot of finalists are deferring their career search into the summer.”Banks are also becoming more flexible in the type of graduates they hire. In order to do this, the bank has moved to year-round recruitment. “We don’t just want people in September and October,” Mr Killingley says.