PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
The routing of Mandelson The German car manufacturer BMW made plans to sell Rover, which provides 50,000 jobs in England, principally in the West Midlands. The government said it would lend £530 million to BAe Systems (formerly British Aerospace) so that it could make the wings for the Airbus A3XX project of a double-decker aeroplane to carry perhaps 900 passengers, to be built by a four-nation consortium; the European Commission said that the loan would require European Union approval lest it constitute an unfair subsidy, and the United States was annoyed that the loan might have made the project unfairly competitive with its own version of the airliner. Mr Bob Ayling resigned as chief executive of British Airways after losing the confidence of the board. Harland and Wolff, the Belfast ship- builders, faced closure, with the loss of 1,745 jobs, when it failed to secure a £400 million contract to build a liner for Cunard. The government decided not to go ahead with a national 'flagship' as a replacement for the royal yacht. Barclays is to close 172 of its 1,900 branches on 7 April. The annual rate of increase of average earnings rose to 5.9 per cent. The government admitted that the tax burden had increased since the elec- tion. Mr Jack Straw, the Home Secretary, passed to the Lord Chief Justice responsi- bility for deciding how long the boys con- victed of killing James Bulger in 1993 should spend in prison. Ian Brady, the child-murderer, was refused judicial per- mission to starve himself to death without being force-fed. Dr George Carey, the Archbishop of Canterbury, asked Lord Hurd to review his archiepiscopal role. Mr Frank Dobson said that he had been advised by Labour party officials to shave off his beard while standing for election as Mayor of London. Mr John Major said he would not stand for Parliament at the next election. Eileen Fowler, the radio keep-fit enthusiast, died, aged 93. The Internet shopping business lastminute.com finished its first day of trading on the stock market valued at £733 million. Marks & Spencer is to give a less prominent place to its St Michael labels. The gas-powered Lots Road power station in Chelsea, built in 1905, is to be converted into flats.
THE Pope asked at a solemn service at St Peter's for God's forgiveness for members of the Catholic Church who had sinned in the Inquisition, in religious wars, crusades, persecutions, through anti-Semitic actions, injustice to immigrants or women and by crimes against the unborn. Cholera spread in Madagascar in the wake of cyclones that also devastated areas of Mozambique. Britain withdrew its High Commissioner from Zimbabwe after diplomatic bags holding seven tons of anti-surveillance equipment were forcibly opened up despite protests from diplomatists. With the encour- agement of the government of President Robert Mugabe, thousands more squatters occupied 450 white-owned farms in Zim- babwe. Mr Jose Maria Aznar's conservative Partido Popular won an increased and over- all majority in the Spanish elections, with 183 seats in the 350-seat parliament. Acting- President Vladimir Putin of Russia, who is shortly to face elections, welcomed Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister of Britain, on a visit to St Petersburg. General Radislav Krstic, a former commander in the Bosnian Serb army, went on trial in The Hague on charges relating to the mas- sacre of thousands of Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995. Japan seemed to be moving back into recession, though figures varied. An explosion in a coalmine killed 80 in Ukraine. The European Com- mission was pressed to act against the ritu- al slaughter of about 8,000 sheep, most of them imported from Britain, in the streets of French towns by Muslims celebrating Eid this week. Swaziland was thrown into political crisis by allegations that Mr Mgabhi Dlamini, the speaker of parlia- ment, stole a piece of cow dung from the king's cattle enclosure; the dung might have been used ritually either to influence or strengthen the king.
CSH
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