PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
Cool for cats Selkirk Sheriff Court dismissed a case brought against a man accused of selling beef on the bone. It ruled that the Beef Bones Regulations 1997 were defective because they were nonsensically all- embracing; the government said mysteri- ously that this did not matter. Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, made a secret arrangement with President Bill Clinton of the United States to import 10 lbs of highly radioactive uranium from the former Soviet state of Georgia to Dounreay. The ruling council of the Ulster Unionist party voted by 540 to 210 to support the Stormont agreement after Mr Blair assured its leader, Mr David Trimble, that he would keep an eye on what the Irish Republican Army did with its arms. A Catholic taxi-driver was shot dead in Andersonstown, west Belfast. Another Catholic, a council worker, was shot dead in Portadown. Mr Blair invited Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minis- ter of Israel (whom he addressed as 'Bihi'), to talks on peace in the Middle East, to be held in London in May; President Yasser Arafat of the Palestinian Authority agreed to join them. Mr Donald Dewar, the Secre- tary of State for Scotland, told Dr Ian Oliv- er to resign as Chief Constable of Grampian after a public inquiry criticised his Force; Dr Oliver said he was due to retire in six weeks anyway. British Steel decided to pay some of its British, Aus- tralian and Brazilian suppliers in euros. Sheikh Mohammed decided to train 120 of his horses in France. The Right Reverend Trevor Huddleston, the anti-apartheid campaigner who became Archbishop of the Indian Ocean, died, aged 84. Lord Howell, formerly Denis Howell, a sports minister and, memorably, the minister with respon- sibility for the drought of 1976, who made it rain within two days of his appointment, died, aged 74. Sir Ronald Millar, the play- wright and speechwriter who came up with Mrs Thatcher's little joke, 'The Lady's not for turning,' died aged 78. Lady (Linda) McCartney, the Beatles wife and vegetari- an, died, aged 56. Headline inflation rose from 3.4 to 3.5 per cent; the underlying fig- ure was unchanged at 2.6 per cent, the tenth time in 11 months it has been above the government target of 2.5. A mediaeval rabbit warren near Blaby, Leicestershire, was recommended by English Heritage for listing as an ancient monument.
PRESIDENT Boris Yeltsin of Russia again nominated as prime minister Mr Sergei Kiriyenko, who has already been rejected twice by the lower house of parliament. President Robert Kocharian of Armenia, a former nationalist prime minister, approved a new cabinet. Saloth Sar, who took the nom de guerre Pol Pot, and was responsible for the deaths of more than one and a half million Cambodians through his extreme Marxist policies, died, aged 73. Octavio Paz, the Mexican writer and Nobel Prize winner, died, aged 84. Feminist groups in Ciudad Juarez, near the Mexican border with the United States, complained that the authorities were not doing enough to catch the killers of 118 women who have been murdered there in the past five years. Mexico raised import tariffs, in contraven- tion of the North American Free Trade Agreement, on fructose sweetener made from maize in order to protect its sugar cane growers. Tornadoes struck Tennessee. Mr Rupert Murdoch, the newspaper owner, separated from his wife of 31 years. A bit of ice the size of Yorkshire split off the Larson B ice shelf next to the Antarctic peninsula. The United Nations food agency said there would be a catastrophic famine in the south Sudanese state of Bahr el- Ghazal unless it receives permission from Khartoum to increase the number of relief flights. Residents of Kuala Lumpur had their water cut off because of a severe drought that is expected to last until Octo-
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