PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
'This is her first lynching.' Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, his family, some friends and security men flew in an aircraft of the Queen's Flight to Italy where he has been lent a 50-room villa in Tuscany by Prince Girolamo Guicciardini Strozzi. Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, surprised everyone by suddenly getting married, at home. The Department of Trade and Industry, which has the task of making sure that govern- ment departments pay their bills on time, found that its own record left it 51st out of 57. Police are to ask motorists to stand on one leg in the hope of catching people who have taken illicit drugs. The News of the World decided to stop publishing names and photographs of people it suggested were paedophiles after a 200-strong mob in Paulsgrove, Portsmouth, attacked a house, burnt a car and injured police in an attempt to get at one; the people of Paulsgrove then picked on 20 others they said were pae- dophiles. Mr Paul Boateng, a Home Office minister, said the government would urgently consider legislation to allow par- ents access to more information about pae- dophiles who might be living nearby; but later he restricted his proposals. The news- paper campaign was encouraged by a cou- ple whose little girl was murdered this sum- mer, although her killer has not been caught. Plaid Cymru chose Mr Ieuan Wyn Jones, the MP for Ynys Mon, as its leader. The population of the United Kingdom rose to 59,500,900 in mid-1999, 2.9 per cent high- er than in mid-1991; the number of people aged 16-29 fell by 13 per cent. The number of pickpocketing crimes on the London Underground rose to 10,003 in the past year from 5,141 a year before. Sir Alec Guinness, the actor, died, aged 86. Sir Robin Day, the broadcaster, died, aged 76. Roofs and gar- dens in Great Yarmouth were covered with little silver fishes during a thunderstorm.
A BOMB killed seven in Moscow; the mayor immediately blamed Chechens. George Speight, who led a coup in Fiji in May, was imprisoned and charged with minor offences; two soldiers were killed by his supporters in an ambush outside Suva, the capital. On the island of Arnbon, in the Moluccas, part of Indonesia, about 1,500 refugees from the village of Waai with no food or medicine were stranded in jungle- covered mountains because Muslim terror- ists threatened to kill them. More than 100 civilians were killed in a week in the parts of Kashmir under Indian control. Scuffles broke out between deputies in the Iranian Majlis after the speaker announced that a scheduled debate on press restrictions had been cancelled on the orders of Ayatollah Au Khamenei. Anwar Ibrahim, the former deputy prime minister of Malaysia, was "sen- tenced to nine years in prison for sodomy; he accused Dr Mahathir Mohamad, the Prime Minister, of using the judiciary to destroy him. The supreme court in Chile upheld a ruling in a lower court which removed immunity from prosecution enjoyed as a senator-for-life by General Augusto Pinochet, the former dictator. The Sephardic Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, who has connections with the Shas political party, shocked Israel with remarks relayed on the wireless: 'All those from the Holocaust, six million poor Jews, whom the Nazis — may their name be obliterated — killed, did they die for nothing? No. These are reincarna- tions of those who had sinned and made others sin.' Two British policemen, working as instructors at a police academy in Koso- vo, and two Canadians were arrested in Montenegro, near the border with Kosovo. Four members of Euzkadi ta Azkatasuna, the Basque separatist terrorists, died when some of their own explosives went off; the next day an Eta bomb killed a man in Zumaia, in the Basque country. Wild fires raged in American states west of the Rock- ies, burning four million acres. Mr Thomas Steinhauer, a Swiss, set a new world record for spitting cherry stones, with a distance of 25.22 metres.
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