PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
Mr Stephen Byers, until then the Chief - Secretary to the Treasury, took up the post of Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, from which Mr Peter Mandelson had resigned. Mr Mandelson had admitted little by little that he had borrowed £373,000 from Mr Geoffrey Robinson, the Paymaster General, to pay for a house in London, and that the interest chargeable on the loan was only at Midland bank base rate, and that he had a mortgage on the new property as well; but in his letter of resignation he said: 'I do not believe that I have done anything wrong or improper.' Mr Robinson also resigned, but it had been expected that Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, would get rid of him over Christ- mas in any case. It later emerged that Mr Robinson was behind the funding of some-: thing called the Political Economy Unit, which before the last election arranged work on policies such as the windfall tax. Mr Alan Milburn, a health minister, took his job. Mr Chris Smith, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, took on responsibility for the Millennium Dome. Central Television was fined £2 million for fake footage in a documentary about drug smuggling. Orangemen made sporadic but unsuccessful attempts to march from Drumcree to the centre of Portadown along the Garvaghy Road. General Augus- to Pinochet, confined to a house in Sun- ningdale under his bail conditions, was for- bidden from going to church on Christmas Day. Lord Soper, the socialist Methodist, died, aged 95. An attempt by Mr Richard Branson to fly round the world in a balloon failed when he became stuck in a low pres- sure system half way and had to ditch in the Pacific. Thousands of houses were left for days without electricity as storms swept over the north of Britain.
FEDERAL Yugoslav troops and armed Serbian police attacked the Kosovo Libera- tion Army, ending a two-month ceasefire by attacking the village of Lapastica with 100 armoured vehicles; the KLA claimed to have destroyed eight tanks. Foreigners were evacuated from Sierra Leone as rebels fought Nigerian-led forces supporting Pres- ident Ahmad Tejan Kabbah. Iraq, in the shape of its vice-president, Mr Taha Yassin Ramadan, declared it would fire upon Western aircraft patrolling the so-called `no-fly zones'; American jets replied with missiles when they came under anti-aircraft fire in northern Iraq. The Knesset rejected the handling of peace negotiations by Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, and voted to hold early elections. Mr Bill Clinton faced a trial by the Senate after Congress voted by 228 to 206 to impeach him. Mr Bob Livingston declared that he would not take up the post of Speaker of the House of Representatives because he had been caught in adultery. Mr Willy Claes, the former secretary general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, was given a suspended prison sentence for corruption when he was the economics minister of Belgium. Mr Oskar Lafontaine, the German finance minister, at the start of the assumption by Germany of the rotating presidency of the European Union, made it clear that he would press for tax harmoni- sation in member countries. A woman in Texas had octuplets, of whom the smallest died after a week. The Pope called for an end to capital punishment. Six men were lost when a storm hit the Sydney to Hobart yacht race, forcing 58 vessels out of 115 to drop out. The Indonesian government announced closure of 54 remote airports throughout the country to save money. Unemployment in Japan rose to 4.4 per cent, the highest since the second world war and equal to the rate in the United States; hundreds of officials evicted 35 homeless people from cardboard shelters along a walkway in Osaka.
CSH
Previous page
