PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
New American Stealth bomber.
The Government committed £1.5 bil- lion to the development of the Eurofighter advanced combat jet aeroplane, which will cost £40 billion to produce. Mr Michael Heseltine, who is the Deputy Prime Minis- ter, was particularly self-congratulatory about the scheme when he visited the Farn- borough air show. A grenade was thrown into the home in Belfast of the parents of an imprisoned Loyalist activist, Alec Kerr, after the Combined Loyalist Military Com- mand, a terrorist group, told him to leave Northern Ireland after his release; another Loyalist activist, Billy Wright, nicknamed King Rat, was also told to leave Northern Ireland. Hugh Torney, known as Cueball, was shot dead in a feud within the Irish National Liberation Army. Mr Tony Blair, the leader of the Labour Party, said that he didn't much care whether he was described as a social democrat or a democratic social- ist; Mr John Prescott, the deputy leader, said that he himself was definitely a demo- cratic socialist. Mr Austin Mitchell, a back- bench MP, said that he and traditional Labour supporters felt like hedgehogs under the wheels of the New Labour jug- gernaut. Two drug dealers who had been sentenced to 18 years in jail each were released less than a year after being sen-
tenced because the trial judge recommend- ed to Mr Michael Howard, the Home Sec- retary, that the evidence they had given against other criminals merited a remission. A paedophile escaped from his keepers at Chessington zoo, where he had been taken for a day out, when he was allowed to go to the lavatory at a public house; he was recaptured while reading the Daily Mirror in a shop in Worthing. Dealings in three investment funds holding £1.4 billion for 90,000 people were suspended while regu- lators investigated the management of them by Morgan Grenfell. More than 500 British users were given the go-ahead to sue the makers of Larium, an anti-malarial drug, from which they say they have suf- fered side-effects. Damon Hill, the racing- car driver, has not had his contract with the Williams-Renault team renewed for next season. Residents of the Aran islands of Inishmore and Inisheer have had to send their laundry 30 miles to be washed because of a water shortage.
DOZENS of cruise missiles launched from American warships and B52 bombers bom- barded military targets in southern Iraq after Iraqi forces helped troops of the Kur- distan Democratic Party capture the city of
Arbil from the Patriotic Union of Kurdis- tan. Arbil is in the Kurdish so-called 'safe haven' in the north of the country protected by the Western Powers; the Powers extend- ed the no-fly zone in southern Iraq from the 32nd to the 33rd parallel north. Oil prices rose. Mr Dick Morris, a policy advis- er to President Bill Clinton of the United States, resigned from his post after a news- paper publicised his visits to a prostitute. Mr Clinton, after being adopted as Demo- crat ' candidate for the presidential elec- tions, said he sought an America where 'every 12-year-old will be able to log in to the Internet'. General Alexander Lebed signed a peace treaty with Chechen rebels. The Philippines government signed a peace treaty with Moro National Liberation Front rebels in Mindanao, where fighting has claimed 120,000 lives in recent years; the separate Moro Islamic National Liberation Front and the Communists kept on fight- ing. The Aum Shinri Kyo sect in Japan was ordered to pay £5 million worth of compen- sation to 3,700 people affected by Sarin gas that it let off in the Tokyo underground railway. More than 50 tribespeople drown- ed when a boat sank in the Nagavali river in Andhra Pradesh. A wolf killed its 12th vic-
tim in a village in Uttar Pradesh. CSH
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