PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
The man who dressed up as a monkey at Hartlepool football games was elected mayor of the town; Mr Ray Mallon, a controversial policeman once nicknamed Robocop, was elected mayor of Middlesbrough. In council elections, the Conservatives drew 34 per cent of the vote (adding 237 seats to their total) to Labour's 33 per cent (which gave them a net loss of 325 seats), but secured only 7,168 to Labour's 8,169; the turnout was 34 per cent. Three British National party candidates were elected councillors in Burnley, including one for the leafy ward of Worsthorne. Mr fain Duncan Smith, the leader of the Conservative party, dismissed Mrs Ann Winterton as rural affairs spokesman because she had told a joke at a rugby-club dinner which, in a formulaic way, mentioned the throwing of a Pakistani Out of a train window; she was replaced with Mr David Lidington. Lord Falconer announced a plan to build thousands of prefabricated houses for public-sector workers unable to afford housing in the South-east. Hundreds of Millwall supporters rioted outside their ground, injuring 50 police and 26 horses. The Queen set off on her Jubilee tour of Britain, beginning in the South-west, then visiting Newcastle. The Department of Transport announced that Mr Martin Sixsmith, its press chief, had not resigned after all (as announced by Mr Stephen Byers in February); the latest statement referred to him as 'a sue cessful director of communications', although he had been labelled in Parliament by Mr Byers as 'not a suitable person to remain in government'. Lady Castle of Blackburn, the only woman in the administration of Harold Wilson, died, aged 91. Lord Bauer, the economist who said that aid for poor countries was often wasted, died, aged 86. Mr Richard Compton, the owner of Newby Hall near Ripon, is to sell the Jenkins Venus, a 1,900year-old statue, to raise perhaps £3 million to save his stables from dilapidation.
PRESIDENT Jacques Chirac, the candidate of the Rassemblement pour la Republique, was re-elected in the French presidential elections, beating Mr Jean-Made Le Pen, the National Front candidate, by 82.06 per cent of the votes cast to 17.94 per cent. The turnout was 80.74 per cent of the electorate. Mr Chirac appointed Mr Jean-Pierre Raffarin, a member of the small Liberal Democratic party, as Prime Minister until the general election in June. Mr Pim Fortuyn, the 54year-old Dutch anti-immigration politician, was shot dead at Hilversum, three weeks before the general election; the cabinet considered postponing the election but decided on holding it as planned. Miss Aung San Suu Kyi, the pro-democracy leader of the banned opposition in Burma, whose party had won a landslide in 1990 but had not been allowed to
assume power, was released from house arrest after 19 months; she said she had been assured that she was free to travel about the country. In Operation Snipe, 1,000 British troops explored the mountains of south-east Afghanistan in search of al-Qa'eda fighters: DNA samples were taken from 23 buried bodies in the hope that one of them might prove to be Osama bin Laden's. According to American and British intelligence assessments, only 15 per cent of Afghan heroin cultivation has been eradicated in the programme begun last month. In Nepal, government forces said they had killed 550 Maoist guerrillas in a three-day operation. Mr Ariel Sharon, the Prime Minister of Israel, cut short a meeting in Washington with President George Bush when a suicide bomber killed 16 in a snooker hall at Rishon LeZion, near Tel Aviv. A deal was struck to end the siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem involving the dispatch of Palestinian terrorists to Italy; but the deal broke down when Italy said it had not agreed to it. A suicide bomber killed nine French workers and the Pakistani driver of a bus outside the Sheraton hotel in Karachi. Mr Lars Ulrich, the drummer in Metallica, is to sell 'Profit 1', a picture by Jean-Michael Basquiat, to raise perhaps £3 million to build a new house on a mountain top near San Francisco.
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