kArsi:IRTRAIT OF THE WEEK
The pound in the pocket.
Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, said in an interview with the Daily Mirror 'I think it is very important Princess Diana is allowed to carry on the work that she is doing. She earns a lot of respect and admi- ration from people all round the world.' The Duchess of York said of Diana, Princess of Wales, in a syndicated column: `Nothing can stop me loving her with all my heart.' The decision by Mr Blair to allow Liberal Democrats to sit on a Cabinet com- mittee could be 'the beginning of the end of the Labour party' to make way for a party similar to the Democrats in the United States, according to Mr Tony Senn, the Labour member for Chesterfield. Mr Roy Hattersley, a former deputy leader of the Labour party, said that it was no longer 'a force for a more equal society'. Mr Adair Turner, the director general of the Confed- eration of British Industry, and Mr John Edmonds, the general secretary of the trade union that calls itself GMB, announced that the high value of the pound could create unemployment; they asked Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, to 'talk it down' by entertaining the possibility of joining a single European currency. 'If he starts talking about linking the pound to the Italian lira,' Mr Edmonds said, 'then maybe the markets will think the pound isn't so strong.' The government cancelled ten large road-building schemes including the controversial Salisbury by- pass, but decided to proceed with the 27- mile Birmingham northern relief road, which will be the first motorway on which tolls will be collected. A Green Paper pro- posed an elected mayor for London. Mr Jack Straw, the Home Secretary, recom- mended that the murderer Rosemary West be kept in prison for the rest of her natural life. Gordon McMaster, the Labour mem- ber for Paisley South, died, aged 37. Ray- mond Jackson, the cartoonist Jak on the Evening Standard, died, aged 70.
THE ASSOCIATION of South East Asian Nations met and raised the number of its members to nine: Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, Brunei, Vietnam, Thailand, Laos and Burma; Cambodia can not join until it has resolved its latest con- stitutional crisis. The American Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, sang a funny song of her own composition at an Asean dinner, to the tune of 'Don't Cry For Me Argentina': 'Don't cry for me President Clinton/You thought that you could not send me/Out Middle East way/But here I'm in KL. . . . 'An American journalist said he had seen the ousted Cambodian dictator Pol Pot, the first sighting for 18 years. In Afghanistan, forces controlled by General Ahmed Shah Masood closed in on Kabul, which is occupied by the Taleban, the extremist Islamic movement. In Algeria 50 people in a town 20 miles south of Algiers were killed, most of them by having their throats cut by Islamic extremists; such killings have occurred every few days this year. The river Oder burst its banks again, flooding large areas in Germany and Poland. Nearly 9,000 acres of pine-wood and scrub near Marseilles were destroyed by fire. A Jordanian aeroplane at an air show near Ostend in Belgium crashed, killing eight. The Iranian government spon- sored the simultaneous marriage of 2,200 couples in the province of Isfahan. Iranian customs said they seized a total of one ton of caviar being smuggled out of the country last year. Customs men in Russia refused a bribe of $1 million from smugglers trying to bring in a lorry convoy full of vodka from Georgia. Chinese customs said they seized a total of 62,000 tons of oil products being smuggled into the country last year. The Chinese city of Guangzhou has banned polystyrene food containers; Chinese rail- ways said they collected 20,000 tons of the containers from tracksides last year. The Pathfinder mechanical rover on Mars trav- elled 20 feet, as far as a rock nicknamed the Mini Matterhorn, though its batteries were running low. Three men from Yemen sued Nasa, the American space agency, for inter- fering with Mars, from which they claim their ancestors came 3,000 years ago. CSH
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