PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
Lord Levy's get-away-from-it-all tax haven Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, spoke in a video link-up to the White House, where President William Clinton of the United States was announcing that a 'work- ing draft' of the human genome had been drawn up. In fact only about 85 per cent of the three billion chemical base pairs that make up the genes on human chromosomes had been placed in the correct order. Mr Blair said that the 'implications far sur- passed even the discovery of antibiotics'; Mr Clinton said: 'Today we are learning the lan- guage in which God created life.' Two ver- sions of the draft were said to have been completed simultaneously by the publicly funded Human Genome Project, which involved British scientists at the Sanger Cen- tre, Cambridge (who did a third of the work), and the commercially run Celera Genomics in the United States. Mr Martti Ahtisaari and Mr Cyril Ramaphosa inspect- ed arms dumps belonging to the Irish Republican Army, then reported to Mr Blair at Downing Street and said they would return and have another look at the arms one day; the Northern Ireland Assembly had reconvened on the understanding that the arms would be put 'verifiably beyond use'. Mr David Lammy, aged 27, became the youngest MP by winning for Labour the seat at Tottenham left empty by the death of Bernie Grant; the turnout was only 24.4 per cent. A judge wept as he sentenced a 12-year-old boy to two years for dealing in hundreds of pounds worth of cocaine and heroin. A nurse was suspended as investiga- tions continued into the deaths of 18 termi- nally ill children. Investors began to fear that Arnazon.com, the biggest Internet retailer, would run out of money by next year, and its shares fell. Shares in Freeserve, Britain's leading internet service provider, fell after talks on a takeover by Deutsche Telekom failed. Members of Standard Life, Europe's biggest mutual insurer, voted against con- verting to a public company. Lord Levy, a rich fund-raiser for the Labour party and an unofficial government envoy to the Middle East, was said to have paid only £5,000 tax in 1998-99, although no one suggested he had behaved improperly; he said on the wireless that until he was nine his parents did not have a bathroom and so he now wanted to enjoy things. David Tomlinson, the actor, died, aged 83. Mike Tyson beat Lou Savarese when the referee stopped their fight at Ham- pden Park, Glasgow, after 38 seconds.
IN parliamentary elections in Zimbabwe the ruling Zanu-PF party won 62 seats, the new opposition party, the Movement for Demo- cratic Change, won 57, and the one other seat was won by a candidate from the small Zanu-Ndonga opposition party; President Robert Mugabe has 30 more seats in his gift. Mr Morgan Tsvangirai, the MDC leader, failed to win a seat. The Liberal Democratic party that has ruled Japan for most of the past half-century lost its majority in the lower house of parliament at a national election. Four women were released by coup leaders after being held for 37 days with 27 other hostages in the parliament building in Suva, Fiji. Parliamentarians in the Solomon Islands met to choose a new prime minister to replace Mr Bartholomew Ulufa'alu, who resigned under duress dur- ing a rebellion against the people of Guadalcanal, who have expelled 20,000 people from nearby Malaita who had settled there in recent decades. Spanish judges sen- tenced three Spaniards and two French- men to sentences of between 18 and 47 years each for their parts in a series of attacks on Spanish public figures on behalf of Euzkadi to Askatasuna, the Basque sep- aratist terrorists. In Australia, 18 young people died in a fire at a backpackers' hos- tel at Childers, Queensland; a man was arrested by police looking for an arsonist. Pierre Pflimlin, prime minister of France for a month in 1958, and mayor of Stras- bourg for 24 years, died, aged 97. Mr Bola Ige, the justice minister of Nigeria, advised women on how to deal with students who join criminal gangs or cults: 'All you girls, if any member of a cult attempts to rape you, chop off his prick.'
CSH
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