PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK No. 10 Downing Street is being
expensively refurbished Mr Sam Younger, the chairman of the Electoral Commission, commenting on the question to be posed in a referendum on joining the euro, said, Tin sure it would be the case that the government, in bringing in legislation on any referendum, would not want that question to be one that the Electoral Commission rubbished as being unfair.' Mr Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London, applied for re-admission to the Labour party: Mr John Prescott, a member of the national executive committee, commented, 'Last time, when he came before us, he told us a tissue of lies.' Mr Prescott resigned from the Rail, Maritime and Transport Union, which he had joined at the age of 17, after it withdrew financial support for a dozen Labour constituencies, including his own. The membership of unions in the Trades Union Congress fell in the past year by 37,000 to 6,685,353. Nationwide said that house prices had risen by 19.8 per cent in the year ending June 2002, the steepest rise since the end of the 1980s; the average property now costs £106,693. The government apologised in Parliament for statistical errors that had made it overstate the amount in pension funds by perhaps £30 billion. Equitable Life, the troubled mutual, increased the financial penalties for customers who want to withdraw their pension savings. A 108-year-old woman was said to
have died because she stopped eating, after being transferred from a nursing home that had to close for financial reasons. Mr John Reid, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, had Mr Johnny 'Mad Dog' Adair and other contacts with the world of Loyalist terrorism to tea. The Court of Appeal gave permission to the mother of one of the six Britons held at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba to bring a legal action against the government alleging a failure to protect his rights while in custody. A study by the National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders found that good street-lighting was up to four times more effective in deterring crime than the presence of closed-circuit television cameras. Tate Modern paid £22.300 for a tin of excrement produced by Piero Manzoni, who died in 1963.
THE United States said it would withdraw its peacekeeping forces from Bosnia lest they be prosecuted unjustly by the International Criminal Court which came into operation on 1 July. American aircraft somehow killed by accident dozens of villagers, including 25 at a wedding party, about 100 miles north of Kandahar; the Afghan foreign minister, Mr Abdullah Abdullah, said that it was unacceptable that 'civilians who suffered so much under al Qa'eda and the Taleban should suffer under the campaign against al-Qa'eda and the Talebari'. A naval skirmish between North and South Korea left four South Koreans and perhaps 30 North Koreans dead, A Russian Tupolev passenger aircraft and a Boeing 757 cargo aeroplane under the guidance of Swiss air-traffic control collided in the air near Lake Constance, killing 71, including 52 children from the autonomous republic of Bashkortostan. President Jiang Zemin of China chose the fifth anniversary of the handover of Hong Kong to criticise the record of its chief executive, Mr Tung Chee-hwa: 'I hope the executive, legislative and judicial branches will conscientiously work to improve their job performance.' Xerox admitted having exaggerated equipment sales by $6.4 billion over five years. The Nasdaq hit a five-year low. Jean-Marie Messier resigned as chairman of Vivendi Universal, the media conglomerate. As the six-month Danish presidency of the European Union began, Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia said they would refuse to join if they had to pay more to the community budget than they received in subsidies. Brazil won the World Cup. A German fisherman caught a piranha weighing more than 61b 8oz in the river Nackar near Heidelberg.
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