PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
`Hey, remember us? Truckers! You supported us, remember?'
The House of Lords defeated by 205 to 144 the Sexual Offences Bill which would have reduced the age of consent for homo- sexual acts to 16; they voted instead for an amendment by Lady Young to retain the illegality for both boys and girls of anal sex under the age of 18. The government undertook to push the legislation through, threatening to use the Parliament Act, though it was not clear how quickly that might take effect. As a curtain-raiser to next month's European Union summit in Nice, Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, made a speech at Mansion House saying `anything other than a constructive approach to Europe becomes frankly ludi- crous'. Mr Joschka Fischer, the foreign minister of Germany, said that the summit would set the 'keystone in the edifice of European integration — that is political integration'. The Mail on Sunday said it had seen minutes of a Cabinet meeting on 19 June 1997 showing that some ministers opposed the Millennium Dome project when Mr Blair wanted it pushed ahead. Police found a mortar bomb containing 225Ib of explosive in a van at Derrylin, Co. Fermanagh. Train operators are to claim perhaps £330 million compensation from Railtrack for its closures and restrictions on lines. The number of people out of work and claiming benefit rose unexpect- edly by 3,500 to 1,047,300. Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said he wanted to replace tax paid by peo- ple placing off-course bets by a tax on bookmakers' profits; the tax has been increasingly avoided by people placing bets with offshore bookmakers. A Sunderland market-trader prosecuted for weighing fruit and vegetables by the pound told the court that shrimps were being sold by the stone from a Sunderland Council fish- quay. Prince Harry had a minor operation after breaking a bone in his thumb playing football at Eton. Frisky, the cat that appears on the opening credits of Coronation Street, died, aged 14.
RECOUNTS and litigation proceeded in an attempt to show that either Mr George W. Bush or Vice-President Al Gore had won the American presidential election. The Congress of the Philippines proceed- ed with the impeachment of President Joseph Estrada, who has been accused of receiving illegal gambling pay-offs. The Supreme Court in Zimbabwe declared unlawful the seizure without due proce- dures of farms owned by whites; President Robert Mugabe said the seizures would continue. Police fired into crowds and pre- vented supporters of opposition candi- dates from voting in the final round of the Egyptian elections. More than 150 died when a train caught fire in a tunnel on a funicular railway at the Alpine ski resort of Kaprun in Austria. In Congo (Brazza- ville) 13 died of suffocation in an over- crowded cell in a police station in Pointe- Noire. Turkey is being offered a role in planning operations to be undertaken by a proposed European Union rapid reaction force, despite its recent clash with Greece during attempted joint manoeuvres. Alberto Lopez de la Calle, who has been accused of being a former leader of Euzkadi to Azkatasuna, the Basque nationalist terror group, escaped by climb- ing down knotted sheets from a hotel in Bayonne, where he was being guarded by police during extradition proceedings by Spain. Jacques Chaban-Delmas, the prime minister of France from 1969 to 1972, died, aged 85. The French press strength- ened fears in the country of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease contracted from cows infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy. In Burundi half the popu- lation of six million have contracted malaria and 500 have died. Scientists from the International Council for the Exploit- ation of the Sea said that stocks of cod in the North Sea would utterly collapse if some fishing grounds were not closed.
CSH
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