PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
The Real IRA get to recognise the enemy A500 lb car bomb was set off among Saturday shopping crowds in Omagh, Co. Tyrone. It killed 28, including seven chil- dren and 15 women, and injured 200, some of them terribly. A mother pregnant with twins, her daughter and her 65-year-old mother were killed in S.D. Kells draper's shop, outside which the bomb was placed; the shop sells school uniforms at this time of year. The crime was claimed by the so- called Real IRA, which issued an 'apology' for the civilian deaths; it broke away from the Provisional IRA last year in disagree- ment with the policies of Sinn Fein, the political face of the IRA. Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, and Dr Mo Mowlam, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, broke off their holidays to visit Omagh, and sought ways of co-operating with the gov- ernment of the Republic of Ireland to pre- vent small groups of terrorists from operat- ing. The Prince of Wales visited survivors and said that he remembered his anger when his great-uncle, Lord Mountbatten, was blown to pieces. A thousand more mink were released from the same farm in Hampshire from which the Animal Libera- tion Front let out 6,000 the week before. Glaxo Wellcome negotiated a merger with SmithKline Beecham, in a £105 billion deal that would create the world's third largest company, but lead to the loss of perhaps 10,000 jobs; a merger plan in February came to nothing. The Japanese finance group Nomura negotiated to buy Thistle Hotels, Britain's second largest such opera- tor, for £1.5 billion. Headline inflation fell from 3.7 per cent to 3.5 per cent; underly- ing rates fell from 2.8 to 2.6 per cent, still above the government target of 2.5 per cent, which has only been met once since the election. Thirty-five people were struck down with dysentery after buying fruit salad at Sainsbury's, Hayward's Heath. An epi- demic of oral Crohn's disease, which disfig- ures lips, struck western Scotland and was linked to consumption of fizzy drinks.
RUSSIA, in the face of an economic crisis, effectively devalued the rouble by up to 34 per cent and refused to repay foreign debts for at least three months. President Bill Clinton of the United States, who seven months ago had said, 'I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,' gave evidence for five hours in camera to a grand jury (the American legal entity entrusted with seeing if a prima facie case could be made against an accused); he then went on television and said, 'I did have a relationship with Ms Lewinsky that was not appropriate. In fact, it was wrong . . . Now, this matter is between me, the two people I love most — my wife and our daughter and our God . . . It is time to stop the pur- suit of personal destruction and the prying into private lives.' American citizens were advised to leave Pakistan after police inves- tigating the bombing of United States embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam arrested a suspect in Karachi and sent him to Nairobi. In Congo (formerly Zaire) the prestigious Zulu Battalion defected to rebels against the government of President Laurent Kabila; the capital, Kinshasa, was left without electricity when a power station fell to the rebels. Serbian militarised police crushed villages that had been controlled by the Kosovo Liberation Army on the out- skirts of Pec, the second city of Kosovo. Mr Steve Fossett, the American balloonist attempting to fly round the world, was struck by a storm and crashed 29,000 feet into the Coral Sea, east of Australia, where his craft caught fire before he was rescued. Julian Green, the novelist, died, aged 97. CSH
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