PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
Global warming Wimmm! yum! yum! more! slurp! mmm!'
Soldiers were brought back on to the streets of Belfast as members of the illegal terrorist groups the Ulster Volunteer Force and the Ulster Defence Association fought; two men, one a UDA member, were shot dead in a car outside a book- makers, and rival headquarters were attacked. Mr Johnny 'Mad Dog' Adair was sent back to prison, from which he had been released on licence; he is the leader of the Ulster Freedom Fighters, who are aligned to the UDA. Mr David Shayler, who used to work for MI5, returned to England after three years in France and was charged under the Official Secrets Act, being released on bail; he had claimed that two MI6 officers had somehow been in on a plot to kill Colonel Gaddafi. His prosecu- tion will be complicated by the Human Rights Act, which has been passed to con- form British law to the European Conven- tion on Human Rights. More than 250,000 people who had signed up for free Internet access through Altavista found that the service had never been made available and never will be: 'I was absolutely remiss in not communicating this,' said Mr Andy Mitchell, the managing director of Altavista UK. Young black people in Britain, according to Dr Tony Sewell, a black academic, did less well at school because they had become the victims of 'a big culture to do with selling trainers, sell- ing magazines, rap music and so on'. A woman judge was raped in the ladies' lava- tory at Sheerness station in Kent. A guest at a hotel in Italy where Euan Blair, the son of the Prime Minister, was staying complained that he was making too much noise on returning in the early hours. A Frenchman who complained to fellow guests in a Windsor hotel about the noise they were making was stabbed in the stom- ach. The European Union lifted a ban on the export of live pigs and pig semen from Britain, excepting East Anglia, where there has been an outbreak of swine fever. Mr Lionel Mann, the Queen's chef, contracted salmonella food poisoning on a trip to Mexico. Prince William is to go to St Andrews University to read history of art. Parts of East Yorkshire were covered by three inches of hailstones.
RUSSIAN authorities, who had been behaving shiftily over the whole matter, repeatedly giving out false information, admitted that all 118 submariners had died in a nuclear submarine lying on the bottom of the Barents Sea, 350 foot down; British and Norwegian rescue vessels had been asked to help only after a delay of several days, but Norwegian divers rapidly found that the submarine was full of water and nothing could be done. More than three million people faced starvation when Kenya was afflicted with its worst drought in living memory; herdsmen have driven 70,000 cat- tle into Nairobi in search of pasture among its flower beds and public spaces. Spanish police arrested several suspected members of Euzkadi to Askatasuna, the Basque sepa- ratist terrorists, who have murdered 11 people this year. Spanish police returned 308 immigrants trying to land near Tarifa; more than 7,000 have been arrested this year. Bosnian police arrested 31 Iranians, 25 ethnic Kurds and 15 Sri Lankans illegal- ly present in the country. Venezuelan police, in an operation financed by the United States Drug Enforcement Agency, seized 173 packages bound for Europe con- taining five tons of cocaine; the annual world production is perhaps 1,000 tons. General Pervez Musharraf, the military ruler of Pakistan, complained that Britain had not sent back 14 people, including Miss Benazir Bhutto, whom his government accuses of corruption. The population of Russia continued to decline during the first six months of the year, falling by 425,000 to 145,100,000. The Pope addressed a crowd of about two million at a World Youth Day meeting in the Rome suburb of Tor Vergata.
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