PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
. . Mandy's eyes blazed. "Keep your silly loan! just go on living in my dingy flatlet!" I put out my hand to stop him doing anything foolish — the other diners were looking at us. "You don't know what it's like not being able to entertain important people in your own home! Money's nothing to you. . . ." ' Mr Geoffrey Robinson, the former pay- master-general, who has published his mem- oirs, said of Peter Mandelson, now the Northern Ireland Secretary, who borrowed £373,000 from him in 1996 to buy a house: `He is saying I talked him into taking the money. That is not true.' Three men were arrested in County Louth and County Mon- aghan in the Irish Republic in connection with the Omagh bombing. Mr John Prescott, the deputy prime minister, resisted pressure from Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, to make a quick sale of the Millennium Dome to Legacy, the group that wants to turn it into a business park. The Department for Education and Employment said that for- eigners with skills in demand would be allowed to enter Britain and seek jobs and obtain work permits through their new employers. Mr James Mawdsley, a 27-year- old man from Ormskirk, Lancashire, was released from a Burmese prison after serving 14 months of a 17-year sentence for protest- ing against injustice in Burma. Four people were killed and dozens injured when the 12.10 p.m. King's Cross to Leeds train was derailed near Hatfield, Hertfordshire. Many places in East Sussex and Kent were badly flooded when six inches of rain fell in a day. The numbers known to have contracted the human immunodeficiency virus in Britain in 1999 rose to 3,300 (compared to 1,500 a year in the early 1990s); but the number of new undiagnosed infections was estimated at 10,000 for 1999. The number of those unem- ployed and claiming benefit fell by 16,400 to 1,035,300. The International Labour Organi- sation figures fell to 1,568,000 for the third quarter of the year. Lord Burns was appoint- ed the new National Lottery Commissioner. Research for the Department of the Envi- ronment, Transport and the Regions found that shoppers use 8 billion carrier bags a year.
VIOLENCE between Palestinians and Israeli soldiers continued, with the number of Palestinians killed this month rising to more than 100. Two Israeli soldiers were hacked and beaten to death by a mob in a Palestinian police station, and the act was caught on television cameras. Within hours Israeli helicopters had attacked the police station and other targets with rockets, though no one was killed in that operation. A sum- mit was arranged at Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, at which Mr Ehud Barak, the Prime Minister of Israel, shook hands with Mr Yasser Arafat, the leader of the Palestinians, and President William Clinton of the United States shook hands with them both, later per- suading them to agree to a truce, though it proved of the most tenuous kind. The price of oil rose. A London-bound aeroplane from Saudi Arabia was hijacked by two men and diverted to Iraq, where the two were arrested and everyone else sent back to London via Saudi Arabia; the whole thing smelt very fishy. Floods and mudslides destroyed houses in the Swiss and Italian Alps, and thousands in the Po valley were evacuated as the waters moved down. The Queen made a state visit to Italy and an official visit to the Vatican, meeting the Pope, who gave a rosary to her and to Mrs Robin Cook, the wife of the For- eign Secretary. There were riots in townships in Harare against the rule of President Robert Mugabe. Ebola fever, an incurable infectious haemorrhagic disease, killed at least 40 at Gulua, 200 miles north of Kam- pala in Uganda. Elections in Belarus were expected to fill its lower house of parliament with supporters of President Alexander Lukashenko after the opposition boycotted the polls; neither the European Union nor the United States recognised the elections as meeting internationally agreed standards. The murder rate in the United States fell to one every 34 minutes, the lowest since 1966. In Kerala six mourners at the funeral of an Indian air force pilot who had crashed were killed by a bolt of lightning. Mr Sauli Niinis- to, the finance minister of Finland, won the equivalent of £10,000 in the national version of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?
CSH
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