PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, explained to the Commons the government's policy on joining Euro- pean Monetary Union. 'Barring some fun- damental and unforeseen change in eco- nomic circumstances, making a decision during this Parliament to join is not realis- tic,' he said. 'If, in the end, a single currency is successful and the economic case is clear and unambiguous, then the government believes Britain should be part of it.' But there would be a referendum before join- ing. Shares plummeted in London, discour- aged by the falls in Hong Kong and New York; the Financial Times-Stock Exchange index managed to fall 9 per cent one morn- ing. Commonwealth heads of government met in Edinburgh. 'My goodness, I've been busy,' the Queen said in a speech after a video of her activities over the past 45 years. Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, gave a speech complementing a video called Britain: A Young Country with pic- tures of Canary Wharf, Oasis, the Notting Hill Carnival and the Cardiff Bay barrage. `The new Britain', he said, 'is a meritocracy where we break down the barriers of class, religion, race and culture.' Vickers put the Rolls-Royce car division up for sale. Cardi- nal Basil Hume, the Archbishop of West- minster, gave his support to a petition against abortion on the 30th anniversary of the Act legalising it; he said his message for Mr Blair was: 'You should give leadership within your party, and try to convince them that abortion is wrong.' The government opened pretty well all posts in the Army to women. A woman police constable was stabbed to death in Stratford, east London, as she joined in a raid to arrest a wanted man. A journalist wrote in an article for the Telegraph Saturday magazine that the late Dodi Fayed was in the habit of using cocaine; a spokesman for his father, Mr Mohamed Al Fayed, said, `Dodi Fayed was never connected with drugs.' The round reading room at the British Museum closed; the newly built reading room at St Pancras opens on 24 November.
SHARES on the Hong Kong stock market fell by 10 per cent in one day and kept on falling. The Hong Kong authorities strenu- ously defended the pegging of the Hong Kong dollar to the American dollar. In New York the Dow-Jones index registered its worst ever fall in one day, more than 7 per cent. The governing party in Algeria won a large majority in local elections which were denounced as corrupt by the Islamic Salvation Front. Israeli jets fired missiles at a base belonging to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine ten miles south of Beirut, killing a male nurse in its infirmary. Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, following remarks the week before that Israel's doves `have forgotten what it is to be Jewish', told parliament that Jewish settlements would continue to be built and no concessions made to the Palestinians unless they fought against terrorism. A man calling himself Captain Solo tried to stage a coup in Zam- bia but was soon captured. Australian sup- ply planes tried to help alleviate famine in Papua New Guinea, which is suffering from drought. Half the cars of Mexico City were banned from the streets as choking smog filled the valley in which it lies. Surgeons re-attached the left arms of two men who had had them jerked from their bodies when the rope snapped during a tug-of-war contest between 1,600 people in Taipei,
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