PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
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Mr Peter Mandelson, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, suspended the Northern Ireland Assembly because the Irish Republican Army showed no sign of wanting to decommission its arms. Just as he announced his decision, Sinn Fein said that the IRA had come up with new peace pro- posals with which General John de Chaste- lain, the monitor of decommissioning, would be happy; for his part, the general issued a second report saying that his commission had a 'real prospect of an agreement which would enable it to fulfil the substance of its mandate'. But the IRA then broke off con- tacts with General de Chastelain and with- drew 'all propositions' on disarmament that it had made since last November. Mr Rhodri Morgan was elected as the new First Secre- tary of the Welsh Assembly after Mr Alun Michael resigned before a motion of no con- fidence could be passed against him; Mr Michael had been imposed on an unwilling Labour party in Wales through the guile of Mr Tony Blair's party machinery. An official report catalogued many terrible cases of sex- ual abuse and cruelty to children in 30 or 40 children's homes in North Wales in the 1970s and 1980s. Of the 165 passengers and crew released from the hijacked Afghan aeroplane at Stansted, 73 flew back to Afghanistan; 13, all in their twenties and thirties, appeared in court in Southend-on-Sea, charged with the hijacking; the rest were taken, after two days at the Stansted Hilton, to a training centre for firemen at Moreton-in-Marsh, Glouces- ter, until their applications for asylum could be considered. The Commons voted for the reduction of the age of consent to homosexu- al acts to 16. Mr Peter Tatchell, the homo- sexual campaigner, called for the decriminal- isation of such acts in public lavatories. Mr William Hague, the leader of the Conserva- tive party, said that Mr Blair was a 'control freak who had lost control'; he then set off in a lorry round Britain campaigning to 'save the pound'. Headline inflation hovered at 2 per cent. MPs are to receive a salary increase of 2.9 per cent. The minimum wage is to rise by 10p an hour to L3.70. Britain, second only to the United States in the export of services, saw its share of the world total rise to 7.4 per cent. The Royal Bank of Scotland at last secured the National Westminster Bank, for £21 billion. The London Underground was disrupted because 20 cracked escalators were stopped on the pretext of safety risks. The Rt Revd Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, Bishop of Arundel and Brighton, is to succeed the late Cardinal Hume as Archbishop of Westmin- ster. A new species of fungus — bluish with a smell of apples — was discovered on the coast of North Wales.
RUSSIAN forces attacked Chechen guerrilla positions in the south of the republic. Presi- dent Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe held a referendum to change the constitution and give himself more powers, and was surprised to receive electoral rejection by 54.7 per cent to 45.3 per cent. The medical reports of Gen- eral Augusto Pinochet that disposed Mr Jack Straw, the British Home Secretary, to disal- low his extradition were ordered by the High Court in London to be released to Spain, Belgium, France and Switzerland, under terms of strict confidentiality; by the next morning the full text was in two Spanish newspapers. Gibraltar's Social Democrats won elections with an increased share of the vote, and Mr Peter Caruana continued as chief minister. Inflation in Spain rose to 2.9 per cent, one of the highest levels in the European Union. A thousand Druse demon- strated against the annexation of the Golan Heights by Israel 18 years ago, and six were injured by Israeli forces' .plastic bullets. The Chinese arrested Archbishop John Yang Shudao of Fuzhou, aged 80; eight other bish- ops who refused to break links with the Pope were also said to be in prison. The state-run China Daily reported that 12 per cent of Chi- nese laundries and dry-cleaners returned clothes newly infected with hepatitis B germs. Colombia increased its coca cultiva- tion by 20 per cent in 1999 to 30,000 acres, according to United States officials. Charles Schulz, who drew the cartoon strip Peanuts, died, aged 77. Queen Margrethe of Den- mark set off on a visit to Britain. Skiers on the slopes of Etna witnessed a fiery eruption, but no villages have been endangered.
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