PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
qbøAPIIIIirl/W el WINDY ® Forced 10 sell his home, Hold., la, been living in the wilderness for months ... tht, ittt ttwill limit Iri, Iricml. die Priille Minister. .
Vallily /'ariunlvt,nnlitt01 Cr 10 TIonv and is reinstated as Moine rn Ireland Secretary!!
After default; It AA the Irivli itt At.lcitt
Tony throws a dinner for hint and toasts his future
Mr Peter Mandelson was appointed Secretary of State for Northern Ireland; he had resigned as Secretary of State for Trade and Industry only 10 months ago for some reason, after it became known that he had quietly borrowed £373,000 from Mr Geof- frey Robinson, then Paymaster General, Dr Mo Mowlam went from Northern Ireland to become minister for the Cabinet Office in place of Dr Jack Cunningham, who retired from the government, as did Lord Robertson, whose secretaryship at Defence went to Mr Geoff Hoon. Mr Alan Milburn became Secretary of State for Health in place of Mr Frank Dobson, who resigned to stand for the mayoralty of London. Before he went, Mr Dobson strongly advised doc- tors not to prescribe the anti-flu drug Relenza, made by Glaxo Wellcome. After days spent sorting through burnt wreckage, searchers concluded that the number killed in the train crash at Ladbroke Grove, near Paddington, was less than 40. A preliminary inquiry found that the train had gone 700 yards past a red signal. Some of the car- riages involved had been reconstructed from rolling-stock wrecked in the Southall train crash two years ago, although this did not contribute to the disaster. The Health and Safety Executive ordered Railtrack to take action on 23 signals which had each been passed at red at least five times. The government ordered Railtrack to relinquish what responsibility it had for safety. A Fer- ris-wheel more than 400ft high on the South Bank of the Thames in London was pulled upright by a vast crane. A government- appointed committee recommended the building of 1,100,000 new homes in the south-east of England by 2016. The head- line inflation rate remained unchanged at 1.1 per cent and the underlying inflation rate also stayed put at 2.1 per cent. Ford's Dagenham plant was disrupted by unofficial strikes in protest against alleged racialism at the factory, where 40 per cent of the work- ers are black or Asian. Deryck Guyler, the comedy actor who had played Frisby Dyke in lima, died, aged 85. The National West- minster Bank, in an attempt to fight more vigorously a takeover bid by the Bank of Scotland, got rid of its chief executive, Mr Derek Wanless, whose job will now be done by Sir David Rowland.
THE government of Pakistan was over- thrown by a military coup led by General Pervaiz Musharraf, the army chief of staff; the Prime Minister, Mr Nawaz Sharif, was arrested. President Bill Clinton of the Unit- ed States said of the opposing factions in Northern Ireland: 'They're like a couple of drunks walking out of the bar for the last time. When they get to the swinging door,
they turn right around and go back in.' Later that day he apologised, saying: 'I used a metaphor that was inappropriate.' President Boris Yeltsin of Russia went to hospital with 'flu'. Signor Romano Prodi, the new president of the European Commission, was said to have been told of a KGB spy ring, numbering 261 Italians, when he was the Italian prime minister between 1996 and 1998, although last week he denied having been told. Germany joined France in refus- ing to import British beef on the grounds of a supposed risk from bovine spongiform encephalopathy. The Pope made his 286th visit to another of Rome's 320 parishes and told children there that he had forgiven Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turk who shot him in 1981. A Bow Street magistrate approved a Spanish application for the extradition from Britain for trial on charges of torture of General Augusto Pinochet, the former President of Chile, who was arrested in London last year. A Brazilian businessman paid a friend £100 to chop off his arm with an axe in an attempt to claim £300,000 insurance; instead he will stand trial for fraud. A New Zealander who had the world's first hand-transplant in France last year was charged with credit-card fraud in Lyons. More than 400 were killed and 250,000 left homeless by floods in Mexico.
CSH
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