PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
Kenneth Clarke is a great modern jazz fan The British and Irish governments issued a paper on the decommissioning of arms and policing of Northern Ireland that they called non-negotiable. The government adopted a high-handed strategy over foot-and-mouth in North Yorkshire, promising a 24-hour guard of farms by police and trading standards officers. In the meantime two large culls of sheep on the Brecon Beacons were carried out: 4,000 one day and 1,500 another. In the 23 weeks since the epidemic began there had been 1.907 outbreaks with 3,616,000 livestock slaughtered. Police who had been injured in the Bradford riots last month said they would sue their own force for damages. The High Court quashed an exclusion order made by the Home Secretary against Mr Louis Farrakhan entering Britain; the ban against the leader of the Nation of Islam had been in force since 1986. Mr David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, and other ministers jumped up and down in frustrated rage when Channel 4 broadcast a satirical programme in the Brass Eye series, masterminded by Mr Chris Morris, about the treatment of paedophilia by the media; more than 2,000 people complained to Channel 4 about the programme. A Green Paper was published proposing that those convicted of serious crimes should be placed on the Sex Offenders Register even if their convictions were not for sexual crimes, as long as some sort of evidence of a sexual
motive had been presented in court; anyone on the register would have to report in person to a police station on changing address, even the homeless. The mayor of London lost his High Court challenge to the government's scheme to reorganise the London Underground as a private-public partnership. Galileo won the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Diamond Stakes at Ascot. Mr Vittorio Orio and Mr Enzo Liszka became the first men to row a gondola across the English Channel; it took six hours 20 minutes to propel the craft from Dover to Calais.
AN extremist Jewish group attempted to lay a cornerstone for a new temple in Jerusalem. Palestinians threw stones at people praying at the Western Wall beneath the temple compound. Israeli troops threw stun grenades at Palestinians protesting in the compound. Six Palestinians, all members of the Fatah movement led by Yasser Arafat, died in an explosion at a car-parts warehouse in Nablus, on the West Bank. Israeli helicopters fired rockets at Palestinian police headquarters in Gaza City, wounding two policemen, and in a separate rocket attack killed six members of Hamas and boys of eight and ten in Nablus. Mr Tony Blair. the Prime Minister of Britain, visited Jamaica, where he promised a £200,000 training package for the island's police to help them combat crime linked to drugs, and Brazil, crossing over the border into Argentina, the first serving British prime minister to set foot there. His talks with President Fernando de la Rua of Argentina left out any mention of the Falkland Islands. Mr Blair also made a speech in Brazil about the European Union, one of a string from ministers that attracted no clear agreement from commentators about the government's intentions on holding a referendum on the euro. The European Court of Human Rights ruled that it was lawful for Turkey to ban the Islamist Welfare party. Saeed Hanayi, the self-confessed killer of 16 prostitutes in the holy city of Mashhad, in Iran, received support from local people and some newspapers. A man in central China was charged with selling his one-yearold son to pay an accumulated restaurant bill of about £60. Mount Etna continued its unpredictable eruption, sending lava towards nearby settlements. The Vistula flooded in Poland, making hundreds of villagers homeless. Dubai is to build an indoor ski-slope in the desert, with a 3,000-foot run of real snow. Two asylum-seekers tried to cross the English Channel on an inflatable sun-bed; they were picked up seven miles from Calais and released by police in France.
CSH
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