PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK D owning Street let it be known
that Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, was sympathetic to plans to build new nuclear power stations; but then government ministers announced he had not made up his mind after all. The wholesale price of gas reached five times its cost at the beginning of November. Because of increased rail freight traffic (from 15.1 billion tonne-kilometres in 1996 to 20.7 billion in 2004), chiefly in imported coal, new goodslines might be built in Britain, according to Mr Iain Coucher, the deputy chief executive of Network Rail. Two probationer policewomen were shot, one fatally, when they were called to a travel agency in Bradford that was being raided. Having encouraged people to get injections against influenza, the government announced that the vaccine had run out; luckily, cases of flu were running at only about 12 (against epidemic levels of 200) per 100,000. David Austin, the cartoonist for The Spectator and other papers, died, aged 70. Lord Black of Crossharbour, the former owner of the Telegraph group, delayed by a week his appearance in court in Chicago to face fraud charges. Mr John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister, wrote to Sir Christopher Meyer, the former ambassador to the United States, who had published some indiscreet memoirs, and suggested he could no longer be regarded as an ‘honest broker’ as chairman of the Press Complaints Commission; Mr Prescott said Sir Christopher had been seen in Washington as a ‘red-socked fop’. A few public houses began to take advantage of 24-hour licensing under a new law. The number of applicants for work permits from Eastern European countries in the EU totalled 60,000 just for the third quarter of 2005. Dr John Sentamu, the new Archbishop of York, born in Uganda, called for St George’s Day to be celebrated properly; ‘The English are somehow embarrassed about some of the good things they have done,’ he said. In 2004, 7,258 new cases of human immunodeficiency virus infection were diagnosed, compared with 3,499 in 2000; most of the increase was attributable to heterosexually acquired cases contracted in Africa. A 41-yearold woman was drowned in Brighton trying to save her Alsatian dog from high seas; the dog survived.
Mr Ariel Sharon, the Prime Minister of Israel, aged 78, left Likud, the party he helped to found in 1973, started a new centrist party and asked the President to dissolve parliament. In Iraq at least 145 civilians died in four days of attacks, including two bombings at Shiite mosques; on another day a suicide car bomb killed 18, including ten police, in the northern city of Kirkuk. Eight supporters of al-Qa’eda were said to have been killed in a gun fight at Mosul. President George Bush of the United States visited China. During talks with President Hu Jintao he made no acknowledged progress in seeking more respect for intellectual property rights or in securing a further appreciation in China’s currency. Mr Bush then visited Mongolia, which has 160 troops in Iraq. He met President Nambaryn Enkhbayar, who was educated at Leeds University and has translated Dickens into Mongolian; Mr Bush said, ‘This is a beautiful land, with huge skies and a vast horizon — kind of like Texas.’ General Motors, the American motor-car makers, announced it was sacking 30,000 employees and reducing production in North America by 800,000 units to 4.2 million units a year. Two months after a general election, Mrs Angela Merkel was finally sworn in as Chancellor of Germany, leading a coalition government. In a referendum, Kenyans rejected a governmentbacked change in the constitution. Mr Jacob Zuma, who was expected to succeed Mr Thabo Mbeki as President of South Africa, but was sacked as vice-president when he was charged with corruption, announced that he now faced a charge of rape too, which he denies. The central bank of the Philippines apologised for misspelling the name of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo on the 100-peso note, worth about £1. CSH
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