PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
London Fashion Week Dr Robin Pearson, director of post- .graduate studies at Hull University, and Vic Allen, formerly professor of economics at Leeds University, were both exposed as agents for the Stasi, the defunct East Ger- man secret police force. While still a Com- munist agent, Dr Allen attempted to become chairman of CND, the Campaign for (unilateral) Nuclear Disarmament. The government announced £150-million worth of aid for livestock farmers. Gordon Brown, Chancellor of the Exchequer, refused to spend a windfall of £10 billion estimated to have accrued from unexpectedly high tax receipts. The Tories said they would have used it to cut taxes, while the Liberal Democrats, meeting for their annual con- ference in Harrogate, decided they would very much like to spend it on schools and hospitals. Diaries written by Judith Chaplin, John Major's late political adviser, revealed that Mr Major was organising his campaign to become prime minister before the first ballot of the Tory leadership election which toppled Margaret Thatcher in 1990. Mr Major also confided in Mrs Chaplin that he wanted Lady Thatcher 'destroyed', on the grounds that she was 'mad', 'loopy' and `emotional'. The Countess of Wessex was accused of exploiting her royal position by posing for photographs with the new Rover 75 at the Frankfurt motor show as part of her publicity work for the car. The Home
Office accused fire brigades of having a `macho culture' and ordered them to abol- ish the practice of saluting, and to employ more women, more gays and lesbians and more people from ethnic backgrounds. The Women's Royal Voluntary Service, which delivers meals on wheels, announced a 'cor- porate makeover', saying 'our customers are more businesslike now and we have to be too'. Another rider was crushed to death by his horse in cross-country trials, the fifth to die this year. Frankie Vaughan, the singer, died, aged 71. The government said that its advisers in England were happy for the ban on beef-on-the-bone to be lifted, but that the chief medical officers of Wales, Scot- land and Northern Ireland didn't agree.
THREE thousand United Nations troops, including 250 Ghurkas, arrived in East Timor to begin the job of silencing the guns of the militiamen who have been fighting the country's moves to independence. A team of UN investigators also arrived, with the aim of bringing prosecutions for war crimes. The German Chancellor Gerhard SchrOder refused to reverse public-spend- ing cuts as his Social Democratic party suf- fered heavy losses in local elections in the Ruhr and in Saxony. The wife of Sumner Redstone, the owner of Blockbuster video stores and the tenth richest man in Ameri- ca, filed a divorce claim for £1.8 billion —
the largest in history — after a private detective allegedly photographed Mr Red- stone hand-in-hand with another woman in Paris. An unemployed man wandered into a church in Fort Worth, Texas, and shot dead seven of the congregation. Survivors of the Waco massacre, in which self-pro- claimed messiah David Koresh and 80 of his followers were burned to death in 1993, returned to the site to rebuild their church; the FBI recently admitted that it, rather than Koresh, may have been responsible for the fatal fire, by firing pyrotechnic gas canisters into the cult's compound. More than 1,700 people were killed in an earth- quake in Taiwan. Simon Ole Makallah, a Kenyan game warden accused of killing British tourist Julie Ward in 1988, was acquitted of the charge in Nairobi. Fifty- nine soldiers implicated in a coup against the Zambian government in 1997 were sen- tenced to death. Rachel Goldwyn, a British human-rights campaigner, was sentenced by a Burmese court to seven years in prison with hard labour for singing a protest song against the government. Vets in India cured a cow with indigestion by removing 4,000 plastic bags from its stomach. Raisa Gor- bachev, wife of the former Soviet leader, died, aged 67. A crowd of 20,000 assembled in Belgrade demanding the removal of Slo- bodan Milosevic as President.
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