PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
Vox pop The government published the report by Professor Liam Donaldson, the Chief Medi- cal Officer, which recommends the legalisa- tion of the cloning of material taken from human embryos that will then be destroyed; MPs are to vote on the law later this year. The scientists who cloned Dolly the sheep are to stop experiments involving genetically modified pigs intended to supply parts for human organs, but denied it was because of fears of trans-species infection. Swine fever broke out at Saxmundham, Suffolk, spread- ing to other farms in East Anglia, where 10,000 pigs were slaughtered in an attempt to contain it; several EU countries banned the import of British pigs and pork. An Oxfordshire pest-controller died when cyanide fumes accidentally leaked from can- isters in his van. Police found a 5001b bomb in a car abandoned after a chase from Lon- donderry over the Irish border; it was thought to have been intended for detona- tion during the Apprentice Boys' parade on 12 August. There were dozens of attacks on houses in Northern Ireland. The Higher, Standard and Intermediate examination results of 147,000 Scottish pupils were delayed and in some cases mistakenly reported by the Scottish Qualifications Authority, the chief executive of which resigned. When the Civil Aviation Authori- ty withdrew the air-worthiness certificate of Concorde, British Airways suspended all its Concorde flights three weeks after an Air France Concorde crashed on take-off. A survey of people arrested in Liverpool, Not- tingham, Sunderland and South Norwood, London, found that 69 per cent of those arrested tested positively for illegal drugs; 9 per cent of those arrested admitted com- mitting more than 20 property offences a month. The East of England Development Agency, one of several created last year, found in a survey that fewer than 10 per cent of people were aware that they lived there; the region consists of Norfolk, Suf- folk Cambridgeshire, Essex, Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire.
FLOODS in Assam left five million home- less and exposed to disease. A Russian nuclear submarine with 116 aboard became stuck 350 feet beneath the Barents Sea in the Arctic, unable to move. The people of Gibraltar protested against the repair of a British nuclear submarine in its dockyard. US and British aircraft policing the 'no fly' zone in southern Iraq attacked anti-aircraft emplacements, killing two civilians and injuring others, according to Iraqi sources; the raids had resumed after a six-week lull. Two American spaceships are to be sent on an eight-month voyage to Mars where robots are to inspect the terrain for traces of water. Fires continued to rage in Ameri- can states west of the Rockies. The two leading parties in the People's Consultative Assembly in Indonesia drew up legislation to transfer many of the powers of the frail President Adurrahman Wahid to the vice- president, Mrs Megawati. President Abde- laziz Bouteflika of Algeria sacked six of the walis or administrators of the country's 48 regions and seven assistant walis in Algiers. A bomb on a night train in Uttar Pradesh in northern India killed 11 and injured 21. Fire killed 18 people scooping up oil from a broken pipeline at the village of Ekorinim in the Niger delta, an area where similar blazes have killed hundreds of others. The Russian Orthodox Church decided to canonise Tsar Nicholas II, his wife and five children, murdered by Bolsheviks in 1918, and 853 other martyrs from the Soviet peri- od. Children in Singapore were discovered to have the worst eyesight in the world, a study finding that by the age of nine, 43 per cent were short-sighted. A man in Saudi Arabia convicted of half blinding someone by throwing acid in his face had one of his own eyes removed (in a hospital in Medina) as a judicial punishment.
CSH
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