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Prisoners are poised to win undisclosed pay-outs after suing the Home Office because they were forced to stop taking drugs in jail, it was revealed.

Drugs charity DrugScope said the group of six inmates and former inmates who used heroin and other opiates were on the verge of settling out of court with the Prison Service.

The case – alleging the “cold turkey” withdrawal treatment they were forced to undergo amounted to assault – was scheduled to start at the High Court.

The size of the payouts under discussion has not been revealed. But the compensation levels are due to be finalised on Tuesday or Wednesday, legal sources said.

High Court judge Mr Justice Langstaff gave the go-ahead in May for a full hearing of the case. It focused on six test cases chosen from a total pool of 198 claimants. When finally resolved this week, all 198 may be handed compensation by the Prison Service – with sums potentially running into tens of thousands of pounds.

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With no space to store bodies, some victims of the sectarian slaughter are not being kept for relatives to claim, but photographed, numbered and quickly interred in government cemeteries.

Men fearful of an anonymous burial are tattooing their thighs with names and phone numbers.

In October, a particularly bloody month for Iraqi civilians, about 1,600 bodies were turned in at the Baghdad central morgue, said its director, Dr. Abdul-Razaq al-Obaidi.

The city’s network of morgues, built to hold 130 bodies at most, now holds more than 500, he says.

Bodies are sent for burial every three or four days just to make room for the daily intake, sometimes making corpse identification impossible.

“We can’t remove all the bodies just so that one can be identified and then put them all back in again,” al-Obaidi said. “We simply don’t have the staff.”

Al-Obaidi said the daily crush of relatives is an emotional and logistical burden.

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‘Elvis,’ a Blue penguin gets his new shoes checked from Penguin minder Bob Morgan at the International Antarctic Centre in Christchurch, New Zealand, Thursday, Nov. 9, 2006. The innovative shoe has been designed to fit over the feet of Little Blue penguins to keep them dry and free from infection after suffering problems when they moved to a new exhibit. (AP Photo/NZPA, John McCombe)

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President Bush was back on TV yesterday, without the scowl he’d been sporting the day after the election but with the surviving members of his Cabinet. He talked about how much he was looking forward to lunching with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and working on “the great issues facing America.�? Mr. Bush said his team would “respect the results�? of the election.

Just maybe not right away.

Without missing a beat, Mr. Bush made it clear that, for now, his idea of how to “put the elections behind us�? is to use the Republicans’ last two months in control of Congress to try to push through one of the worst ideas his administration and its Republican allies on Capitol Hill have come up with: a bill that would legalize his illegal wiretapping program and gut the law that limits a president’s ability to abuse his power in this way.

Mr. Bush listed his priorities for the forthcoming lame duck session of Congress. It was an odd list that included only two really urgent items — the bills that keep federal money flowing and the nomination of Robert Gates as the next secretary of defense. The rest was a grab bag that included one worthy but hardly urgent idea (getting Vietnam into the World Trade Organization) and a series of ideas ranging from bad to truly awful that Mr. Bush has been unable to get through Congress and hopes to ram through in the Republicans’ last weeks.

For example, he wants the Senate to ratify his recess appointment of John Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations. That vote, which is likely to be strongly debated, can easily wait for the new Congress, and should. Mr. Bush also pressed for quick passage of “the bipartisan energy legislation,�? which had Congressional officials scratching their heads in puzzlement about which bill he might mean. And he wants immediate approval of his administration’s deal to sell civilian nuclear technology to India despite that nation’s refusal to sign or abide by the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.