PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
Asylum seekers? Absolutely not! Just decent British cricket fans trying to get out of the country.'
The government said it was considering imposing visa requirements for visitors from the Czech Republic after the number of applications for asylum reached 192 last month, mostly from Romany gypsies. Mr Jack Straw, the Home Secretary, also ordered asylum-seekers to be dispersed from coastal towns. This came after the publicising of remarks he had made about gypsies and travellers: 'Many of these so- called travellers,' he had said on a local radio interview rebroadcast when he was on holiday, 'seem to think that it is perfectly OK for them to cause mayhem in an area, to go burgling, thieving, breaking into vehi- cles, causing all kinds of trouble, including defecating in the doorways of firms and so on, and getting away with it.' The owner of a farm at Emneth in Norfolk was charged with murder after a 16-year-old supposed burglar from Newark, Nottinghamshire, was found dead outside the farmhouse and a 29- year-old man was treated for shotgun wounds. Police investigating an alarm at Uppark, the country house in Sussex, found that it had been set off by a toad that had hopped into the building. Dr Mo Mowlam stood next to Mr David Andrews, the For- eign Minister of Ireland, when he said: 'I think it's fair to say the ceasefire has been intact for a number of years now and the IRA in the round have not been using their weapons.' A cruise ship, the Norwegian Dream, with 2,400 passengers and crew returning from Scandinavia, collided 17 miles off Margate with a cargo ship, the Ever Decent, which caught on fire. Mr George Robertson, the Secretary of State for Defence, was created a peer; in October he becomes Secretary-General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. Britain and Argentina announced joint military exercises in the South Atlantic later in the year.
THOUGH a few survivors were rescued from beneath rubble, Turkey turned its attention to burying bodies and clearing wreckage after the earthquake in which per- haps 35,000 were killed. Heavy rain made the plight of the homeless survivors worse. President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia suddenly announced elections, pulling the rug from under opposition groups, which held a rally of 150,000 calling for his resig- nation; but the Serbian Renewal Move- ment, headed by Mr Vuk Draskovic, remained unwilling to join forces with the Alliance for Change, the chief member of which is the Democratic party, led by Mr Zoran Djindjic. Albanians in Orahovac in Kosovo tried to stop Russian soldiers oper- ating under the umbrella of K-For from entering the town lest they join forces with Serbs living there; they held up placards in English reading: 'We don't like Russians.' Allied aeroplanes were said to have bombed the tomb of the Apostle Matthew 20 miles north of Mosul in Iraq. The black economy accounted for up to 85 per cent of new jobs in Latin America, according to a report by the International Labour Organisation. A Swiss military accountant was arrested during investigations into the theft of more than £4 million worth of funds; then the head of the Swiss secret service was suspended at his own request as investigations began into claims that hundreds of weapons had been bought to arm a 'secret army'. Three Japanese banks, the Industrial Bank of Japan, Fuji Bank and Da-Ichi Kangyo Bank, announced plans to merge and form the biggest bank- ing group in the world. More than 30,000 Japanese were found to have committed suicide last year, twice the number the year before when the economy was not doing so badly. Two died but 311 survived when an aeroplane crash-landed at the new Chek Lap Kok airport in Hong Kong during a tropical storm, flipped on to its back and burst into flames. A giant panda called nal Yun gave birth to a cub in San Diego zoo, the first to be born in the Western hemi- sphere since 1990. Swaziland was cut Of because of heavy snowfall. CSI-I
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