PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
In preparation for the election on 7 June, politicians spent the week being driven about in coaches. The Conservatives proposed detaining all asylum-seekers. Labour declined to promise a limit for the level of income above which no extra National Insurance would be charged. Lady Thatcher told a Conservative meeting that Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, would lead Britain by the nose into the single currency: 'I would never be prepared to do it,' she said. The nation spent days discussing the left jab given by Mr John Prescott to an agricultural labourer who had thrown an egg at him from close range at Rhyl. Margaret McDonagh, the general secretary of the Labour party, wrote to television executives saying: 'I have been provided with growing evidence that broadcasters have been inciting and colluding with protesters.' On one day no new outbreaks of foot-and-mouth were reported, but around Settle in North Yorkshire there were 15 outbreaks in ten days and 1,000 farms were put under restrictions: after 13 weeks of the epidemic there had been 1,624 outbreaks, with more than three million livestock slaughtered. In the first quarter of the year, Britain suffered a trade deficit of £7.7 billion (£5.2 billion after services were taken into account); this was the worst since
records began in 1697, when there was a surplus of £47,000. The price fixed for gold in London rose by 7 per cent in one day to $291.25 an ounce. Mr Conrad Black, the newspaper owner, renounced his Canadian citizenship. Train operators said they were returning to normal summer timetables, expecting to run one service in five late; but far more turned out to be late, especially on long-distance routes. Postmen held unofficial strikes in various parts. The Queen Mother and Princess Margaret (in a wheelchair) went to the Chelsea Flower Show. A woman who slipped on a mushroom at her local Sainsbury's at Alton, Hampshire, received £3,000 in an out-of-court settlement.
ISRAEL used jets for the first time since 1967 to attack targets in the Gaza Strip; 12 Palestinian policemen were killed in one raid. The action followed the murder of five civilians by an Islamic extremist suicide-bomber in Netanya. Leading Arab nations broke off relations with Israel. The international commission chaired by Senator George Mitchell on the violence in the region finally reported; among its recommendations was that there should be no further development of Jewish settlements in the West Bank or Gaza. The report was endorsed by General Colin Powell, the American secretary of state. Two British women on drugs charges were sentenced to prison 'for ever' by a sharia court in Ras al-Khaimah, one of the states in the United Arab Emirates. A Mormon from Utah with five wives and 29 children was convicted of bigamy and faced a long jail sentence. In the northern city of Iquique in Chile, 26 prisoners died in a fire. Italian police arrested six men they said belonged to a ring called the Paedophile Liberation Front or the Praetorian Brigade; they were said to have planned attacks on police, judges and priests who have opposed their activities. The Pope celebrated his 81st birthday and then spoke to the world's cardinals gathered for an extraordinary consistory in Rome. A work called `La Nona Ora', a wax model of the Pope being crushed by a meteorite, by the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan sold in New York for £620,825. The town of Lensk on the River Lena in Siberia was inundated, leaving 14,000 homeless, and the city of Yakutsk further downstream awaited floods while aircraft bombed an 18-mile obstruction of ice in the river. Nicotine chewing-gum makers petitioned Singapore to exempt them from the law prohibiting imports of the untidy comestible.
CSH
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