PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
Diana helps out on another operation Sixty Tory MPs defied their party whips to vote in favour of a Private Member's bill which would have given the British Parlia- ment power to overrule judgments made by the European Court of Justice. There were rumblings from within the Cabinet that Britain might respond to the ban on export of its own beef by banning Continental imports. They soon died down as Michael Heseltine, the Deputy Prime Minister, said he would rather seek a diplomatic end to the dispute. The Labour deputy leader John Prescott warned his colleague Clare Short not to make any more public pro- nouncements that taxpayers might face larger bills under a Labour government; he then went on to say that 'quite a lot' of peo- ple would pay more tax were Labour to win the election. The Senior Salaries Review Body was said to be considering raising MPs' pay by 30 per cent. Perhaps not sur- prisingly, a Gallup poll suggested most of Britain's young would rather have the Queen as Prime Minister than any MP. An IRA bomb damaged an empty house in the Boltons, a wealthy residential street in Kensington. The High Court ruled that the traitor George Blake should keep the royal- ties from his memoirs. The organisers of the London Marathon ran out of water when an unexpectedly warm day added to runners' thirst. A paralysed rugby player won damages against a referee he alleged should not have allowed a scrum to col- lapse, leading to his injuries. Homosexual Christians published a collection of litur- gies for ,those wishing to 'come out'. The Queen celebrated her 70th birthday with a takeaway dinner; she had intended to dine at an inn in Bray but arrangements were changed after a newspaper revealed the location. The Princess of Wales stood and watched as a seven-year-old African boy underwent open heart surgery. Dr Kalim Siddiqui, the Slough resident who set up his own 'Muslim parliament', died aged 65. Christopher Robin Milne, who as a child was fictionalised and put into his father's Winnie-the-Pooh books, died aged 75. A man accused of kidnap had his conditions of bail changed so that he could audition for the television show Blind Date.
ISRAEL continued to retaliate against attacks by Hezbollah guerrillas by bom- barding southern Lebanon with artillery fire. One raid killed 94 refugees at a United Nations camp. Viscount Weymouth nar- rowly escaped death when a guest house in New Delhi collapsed, killing 17. Muslim gunmen opened fire on Greek tourists boarding a bus in Cairo; 18 were killed. An assortment of left-wing political parties called the Olive Tree Alliance recorded a modest majority in the third Italian general election in four years. The leader of the rebel forces in Chechnya was reported to have been killed in a Russian rocket attack. President Clinton signed an agreement with Japan to keep 47,000 American troops in the country. Bernard Goetz, a New York man who became a folk hero after shooting four youths he thought were about to rob him, was ordered to pay one of them dam- ages of £28 million. The Tasmanian Supreme Court ruled that a frozen human embryo has every right to inherit his par- ents' worldly goods. A British man was hanged in Singapore for murdering a South African tourist. The first attempt by South African climbers to scale Mount Everest was in doubt after their leader threatened to kill the editor of a newspaper sponsoring his expedition. A militant environmental group threatened to wage war against a mining company which wants to blast a mile-wide open-cast gold mine into the hills of Montana. Nasa announced it is to spend £500,000 to develop a kettle which boils water in space. Molly Keane, the Irish nov- elist, died aged 91. Chinese scholars react- ed angrily to a British historian's theory that Marco Polo never visited the country and made up many of his tales about the splendours of Chinese civilisation while in
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