PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
Silly season cartoon. Summer arrives at last Two new food scares got off to a good start: rats in Aberdeen fed by Professor Arpad Purtai on genetically modified pota- toes for 100 days in an experiment were said to have developed reduced immunity; and tests found the presence in milk, even after pasteurisation, of mycobacterium para- tuberculosis, credited with causing Crohn's disease, a chronic inflammation of the gut. British Petroleum merged with the Ameri- can oil group Amoco in a £67 billion deal; it leaves BP shareholders with 60 per cent of the combined company, to be called BP Amoco, and 6,000 jobs are expected to be lost from the combined workforce of 100,000. The Apprentice Boys' march on the walls of Londonderry passed off with- out too much trouble, though one police- man had to fire into the air when his col- leagues were surrounded by nationalists. The government survey ship Mansal 18 sent down three unmanned midget submarines to inspect the wreckage of the trawler Gaul, which sank in 1974 in the Barents Sea, 70 miles off the North Cape of Norway; hatch- es were found open, but no clear conclu- sion could be drawn. Animal Liberation Front activists released at least 3,000 mink from a fur farm in the New Forest; the ani- mals were blamed for killing owls at a bird sanctuary and are expected to eat many coots and moorhens in the coming weeks. Ted Hughes, the Poet Laureate, was made an OM by the Queen. At Torbay more than 800 people complained of having cut their feet on exposed razor shells on the shore at low tide. England won the first five-day Test series for 12 years in an exciting match against South Africa.
A BOMB exploded at the American emb- assy in Nairobi at 10.35 a.m. on 7 August and ten minutes later another at the Ameri- can embassy in Dar es Salaam; at least 192, including 12 Americans, were killed and more than 4,000 injured in Nairobi and ten killed and 80 injured in Dar es Salaam. The United States offered a reward of $2 mil- lion for information leading to conviction of the bombers' controllers. Mrs Madeleine Albright, the American Secretary of State, agreed that a prime suspect was Osama bin Laden, an exile from Saudi Arabia living in Afghanistan who sees it as an Islamic duty to kill Americans and their allies; but others saw a Sudanese Islamic connection as possible. In Afghanistan the Taleban army of Islamic extremists gained control of the city of Mazar-i-Sharif, the northern stronghold of the opposition. Iraq refused to have any more to do with United Nations weapons inspectors, accusing them of being stooges of the United States. Mrs Hanan Ashrawi, the Donne scholar and Palestinian radical, refused to serve in the reshuffled cabinet of Mr Yasser Arafat. The Sultan of Brunei declared his son Prince Billah, aged 24, as the heir to the throne; the sultan's brother, Prince Jefri, has been in the doghouse since the state- run company Amedeo, which he was con- trolling, was found to have lost billions of pounds. The 9,000 people of Tuvalu in Polynesia hope to earn £5,000 a year each by renting out the Internet address assigned to their island. In Yucatan, Mexico, mem- bers of the ruling Institutional Revolution- ary party rioted in the town of Tekit and looted the town hall after a judge gave vic- tory in elections for the mayor to an oppo- nent. Europe continued to be hot: forest fires raged uncomfortably close to Athens; in Cyprus the temperature did not fall below 90F even at night, and the British military commander's house at Episkopi was burnt down by wildfires. At a summer camp at Novovolynska in Ukraine, 77 chil- dren and 15 adults were taken to hospital with food poisoning after eating stale cakes. At Niigata, 160 miles north-west of Tokyo, ten office workers complained of cyanide poisoning after drinking green tea.
CSH
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