PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
Subsidence: the process of subsiding, settling, or sinking 0 rangemen blockaded streets after a parade following a church service at Drumcree continued to be denied passage along the route it wanted to follow back to Portadown through a Catholic area. A 2501b car-bomb, presumed to be the work of the Real IRA, exploded outside a police station at Stewartstown, Co. Tyrone, but no one was seriously hurt. Mr Peter Man- delson, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, agreed to allow the police in the Province to be known in future as the 'Police Service of Northern Ireland (incor- porating the Royal Irish Constabulary)'; it then emerged that the RUC part of the title would never in practice be used. Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, and Miss Cherie Booth, his wife, accompanied to a police station their 16-year-old son Euan, who was formally reprimanded for being drunk and incapable in Leicester Square, where he was found two days earlier at 11 p.m. lying down after having vomited. Mr Paul Boateng, the minister respons- ible for prisons, said that the running of Brixton prison would be put up for bids from private companies. The BBC failed in an offer to turn the Millennium Dome into a theme park featuring characters from television. Headline inflation rose from 3.1 per cent to 3.3 per cent, its high- est since July 1998; underlying inflation rose from 2 per cent to 2.2 per cent. The royal family attended a service in St Paul's to mark the Queen Mother's 100th birth- day, which falls on 4 August. Prince William is to bear a coat of arms incorpo- rating scallop shells, a device from the arms of his mother. Pete Sampras won the men's title at Wimbledon for a record sev- enth time; the American Venus Williams won the women's title after having beaten her sister Serena in the semi-final. Lord Runcie, the 102nd Archbishop of Canter- bury from 1980 to 1991, died, aged 78. An Underground train with 100 people aboard rolled back half a mile into Chalk Farm station while the driver was appar- ently asleep.
MR Ehud Barak, the Prime Minister of Israel, despite the collapse of his ruling coalition, flew to America for talks at Camp David with Mr Yasser Arafat, the President of the Palestinian entity. Presi- dent Ezer Weizman of Israel, troubled by financial scandal, resigned. A missile being tested as part of America's proposed national missile defence system failed for the second time to hit a dummy incoming nuclear warhead; the departing President William Clinton could now shelve a deci- sion on the system. Montenegro rejected a change in the constitution of Yugoslavia to allow President Slobodan Milosevic to extend his time in office. Mr George Speight, whose supporters took 27 hostages in a coup seven weeks ago, agreed with the Fijian military to free the hostages in return for immunity and a new government excluding ethnic Indians. A conference in Durban on Aids heard that 8.6 per cent of the people of sub-Saharan Africa had the human immunodeficiency virus; 35.8 per cent of Botswanans were infected and 20 per cent of South Africans. Fifa decided by one vote to hold the 2006 World Cup in Germany after Mr Charles Dempsey, aged 78, abstained from voting for South Africa as he had been told to do by Oceania, which he represent- ed; there was talk of death threats and bribes. At a World Cup qualifying match between South Africa and Zimbabwe, police fired tear-gas, leading to a stam- pede that left 12 dead. More than 100 died by fire while scavenging fuel from an oil pipeline in southern Nigeria. More than 100 scavengers died in the collapse of a mountain of rubbish on the outskirts of Manila. In Spain 20 children died when a bus hit a pig-lorry near Soria. High tem- peratures led to wildfires from France to Greece. China loosed 700,000 trained ducks to counter a plague of locusts.
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