PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
The big fight Plans to give offices in the Palace of Westminster to the Sinn Fein MPs Mr Gerry Adams and Mr Martin McGuinness were delayed by the unwillingness of the Irish Republican Army to decommission arms. A second reading was given in the House of Commons to a Bill to allow members of the Irish Dail to sit in the Commons too. The Department of Trade and Industry began an inquiry into allega- tions that Mr Geoffrey Robinson, the for- mer paymaster general, encouraged fraud- ulent applications for DTI grants to be made by TransTec, his engineering compa- ny. EMI negotiated a merger with a divi- sion of Time Warner, which would give the combined music businesses an annual rev- enue of £4.9 billion; the merger came a week after a vast plan to merge Time Warner and America Online, the Internet provider. Mr Luc Vandevelde, a 48-year- old Belgian, is to be the new executive chairman of Marks & Spencer. Belgium sought a judicial review of the decision by Mr Jack Straw, the Home Secretary, to dis- allow the extradition of General Augusto Pinochet on medical grounds. The number of people seeking asylum in Britain last year rose to 71,160. More motor cars, 1,790,000, were made in Britain last year than in any year since 1972. Labour and Liberal Democrat ministers in the Scottish Parliament agreed on funding for further education; this had the odd effect of mak- ing tuition in Scottish universities free to Scots and to anyone from the European Union except students from England. The Scottish Parliament also hesitated in its plans to repeal Section 28 of the Local Government Act, which makes it illegal for schools to promote homosexual behaviour intentionally; as a debate on repealing the section for the rest of the United Kingdom reached the Lords, the government was surprised by the strength of opposition among Anglican and Roman Catholic leaders. Seamus Heaney won the Whit- bread Prize with his translation of Beowulf. Alan Pryce-Jones, the former editor of the Times Literary Supplement, died, aged 91. Five men were rescued in a Force 8 gale off the Orkney islands from the bows of the fishing vessel Be Ready on which fire had consumed the wheelhouse and was spreading along the deck.
RUSSIAN forces, still attempting to take control of Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, said they had found the body of General Mikhail Malofeyev, whom Chechen guer- rillas had claimed to have taken captive. Hundreds of thousands of Spaniards demonstrated against Euzkadi ta Askata- suna, the Basque terrorists, after an army officer was murdered when his motor car was blown up. There were exchanges of mortar and small-arms fire between Indian and Pakistan lines in Kashmir. President Jamil Mahuad of Ecuador was deposed in favour of a three-man military junta after announcing the replacement of the curren- cy — the sucre — by the US dollar; but the next day military leaders handed over power to Mr Gustavo Noboa, who had been vice-president and who announced a continuation of the same policy. After ten days in power, President Alfonso Portillo of Guatemala prompted the arrest of three soldiers on charges of murdering Bishop Juan Gerardi, known for his human-rights campaigns, in 1998. A man found guilty of abducting and sodomising an expatriate in Saudi Arabia had a hand and a foot chopped off. George Papandreou made a successful visit to Turkey, the first by a Greek foreign minister for 38 years. Hedy Lamarr the film star died, probably aged 86. Bettino Craxi, the first socialist prime minister of Italy, died, aged 65, in exile since his conviction for corruption. Kin Narita, who with her twin, Gin, was revered in Japan for aged dignity, died, aged 107. The population of Russia decreased by 716,900 in 1999, to 145.6 million, a trend that has continued for eight years.
CSH
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