The French interior minister Mr Sarkozy said yesterday that Paris would offer lump sums of &euro2000 £1300 per adult to asylum

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The French interior minister, Mr Sarkozy, said yesterday that Paris would offer lump sums of €2,000 (Â£1,300) per adult to asylum seekers who chose to go home. Others would eventually be expelled.Those who are judged to have a genuine case for asylum, after questioning by officials of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, will be divided between Britain and France. Mr Sarkozy said that he had no idea how many people would win the right to stay but it might only be a "few dozen".The numbers of people reaching the camp seems to have been swollen by a belief – encouraged by smuggling gangs – that anyone in Sangatte when it closes will be allowed to go to the UK. The problem facing the two governments has been compounded by the fact that the largest single group of Sangatte residents, both new and longstanding, come from Iraq.Many of them are Kurds. In the present political climate officials accept that it is not feasible to repatriate them. However, Mr Sarkozy said some of the Kurds were not from Iraq and would be repatriated.French human rights groups protested yesterday that the measures were a cosmetic, short-term solution.

Closure of the Sangatte camp would not, in itself, staunch the flow of asylum-seekers towards Britain, they said.Mr Blunkett earlier inspected a new five mile long, nine feet high, double security fence which has been erected around the railway freight yard at Fr?un near Calais. In the early summer, up to 70 asylum-seekers a day were arriving in Folkestone after hopping aboard freight trains at Fr?un. Since the building of the fence, the number has been reduced to one a day.Mr Blunkett said the rapid building of the fence was a gesture of "extreme good faith" by Mr Sarkozy. Standing on wasteland beside the two lines of fences, he promised to "fulfil my part of the bargain" and push through projected new legislation tightening rules for asylum seekers in the UK by November."We are sending the signal across the world that you cannot get through this way and you should use legitimate routes to Britain through economic migration," he said.Mr Sarkozy said that French police had cracked down successfully on smuggling gangs in recent weeks.. George Bush put on a display of conciliation and bipartisanship yesterday in a bid to prevent a row between Republicans and Democrats from derailing a tough congressional resolution authorising US military force against Iraq. The White House and Congress were moving to "a strong resolution", he said.Mr Daschle's outburst was provoked by accusations at election rallies by Mr Bush and the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, that Democrats, particularly in the Senate, did not care about national security. It reflected his party's seething frustration at how Iraq has taken over and stifled the campaign for the mid-term elections, now five weeks away.Instead of the faltering economy and corporate misbehaviour, issues on which Republicans are vulnerable, the confrontation with Saddam Hussein dominates all.In countless campaign trips President Bush has made to support Republicans, his standard stump speech is two-thirds Iraq and a third on domestic matters.Many Democrats agree with Robert Byrd, the influential West Virginia Senator, who said: "This war strategy seems to have been hatched by a political strategist intent on winning the mid-term election at any cost." Yesterday, Mr Daschle took up the White House olive branch, saying, in essence, that bygones should be bygones.

But the party is split, with many liberals believing the war momentum must be slowed, if not stopped.The broadside from the former presidential candidate Al Gore against Mr Bush has complicated matters. Mr Gore, despite his loss in 2000, remains the best-known Democrat apart from the Clintons, and is mulling a possible campaign in 2004. He outflanked more cautious Democratic leaders such as Mr Daschle and the House minority leader, Richard Gephardt, both weighing a White House run in two years.Mr Bush, with Republicans almost to a man behind him, and the Democrats divided, will get the tough congressional resolution he needs to show a divided UN Security Council he has broad national backing for a go-it-alone war to topple President Saddam.The White House has played its domestic hand cleverly. The draft resolution sent to Capitol Hill last week was criticised by many Democrats as a "blank cheque", endorsing action elsewhere in the Middle East, beyond Iraq. But the administration indicated it would accept a narrower resolution.The resolution will be passed before Congress goes into pre-election recess, at the latest by mid-October, leaving the Democrats free to focus on issues that serve them better..

The United States will send a senior envoy to North Korea early next month for discussions on Pyongyang's missile, nuclear and arms export programmes. The move restores contacts abruptly broken by the Bush administration when it came to office 20 months ago. It is also an unexpectedly early response by the administration to a signal from Kim Jong Il himself – passed on by Japan's Prime Minister, Junichiro Koizumi, who met the North Korean leader last week – that he wanted to improve ties with the US.The envoy is likely to be James Kelly, assistant secretary of state for Asian affairs. Plans for him to make a trip earlier this year were cancelled after naval clashes in which North Korean vessels entered the South's territorial waters in June.On the face of it, Mr Bush's approach to North Korea totally contradicts his belligerent stance against Iraq – even though it is Pyongyang, not Baghdad, which the CIA reckons to have the capability to make one or two nuclear weapons, and which exports missile technology to other countries on the US black list.But White House officials say the two cases are not identical. Saddam Hussein, who has flouted UN resolutions for a decade, is beyond redemption A clear and present danger, they insist. On the other hand, Kim Jong Il has shown an increasing desire to end his impoverished country's international isolation.One recent sign was a freeze on missile testing in the north Pacific, which has so alarmed the Japanese.