PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
IN THE Budget, Mr Kenneth Clarke, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, cut a penny from the standard rate of income tax; cut 26p from a bottle of spirits; put up a packet of cigarettes by 15p and a litre of petrol by 3p; doubled airport taxes; and called it a 'virtuous Budget'. Nearly 100 pages of press releases on the main contents of the Bud- get had found their way to the Daily Mirror; its editor patriotically declined to publish them lest the markets be plunged into chaos; when the contents of the leak became known share prices reached their highest ever. Mr Clarke earlier tried to soothe the Commons about some other documents emanating from the EC. Some people said that they meant that Britain would be fined huge sums if its economy misbehaved, even if it stayed outside a single European cur- rency; other people said they meant no such thing; Mr Clarke said it did not mat- ter, as he promised not to commit Britain to anything at all at a meeting of finance ministers (Ecofin) next week. The Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg ruled that the British Board of Film censors had not infringed the 'freedom of expression' of a director by refusing a certificate to a film called Visions of Ecstasy showing St Teresa of Avila in a sexual fantasy with Christ. Miss Roisin McAliskey, the daughter of the former Irish nationalist MP, was sought for questioning by German police investigating the bombing of a British barracks at Osnabruck. A 600lb car bomb was defused before it could go off outside a police build- ing in Londonderry. Police detonated stun grenades to free a disabled man who had been abducted in Liverpool and held to ransom at a hotel at Barnet, in north Lon- don. About 20,000 passengers on 276 Underground trains in London were stranded in tunnels, some of them for up to an hour and a half, by an electric power fail- ure. Babcock International agreed to buy the Rosyth Royal Dockyard from the Min- istry of Defence. Sorley MacLean, the Gaelic poet, died, aged 85. The Stationery Office (formerly HMSO) is to shed 900 jobs. The words 'Charles Prince of Wales' are to replace 'the Prince and Princess of Wales' in Church of England services, in consequence of a Royal Warrant restoring the prayers to their form before 1981. Mr Tony Blair, the Leader of the Opposition, appeared on Desert Island Discs, choosing `Recuerdos de la Alhambra' as his favourite record and Ivanhoe by Scott as his favourite book.
PRESIDENT Bill Clinton of America and President Jiang Zemin of China are to visit each other's countries. Russia is to with- draw its remaining troops from Chechnya, where rebels have been fighting for inde- pendence. Russia is to repay debts incurred by the Tsarist government. Voters in Bela- rus were said to have voted by a preponder- ance of 70 per cent to 30 in favour of Presi- dent Alexander Lukashenko being given sweeping new powers. Belarus also turned over the last of its nuclear warheads to Rus- sia, but hung on to the missiles that con- tained them. Cuba refused to grant a placet to allow the new Spanish ambassador to Havana to take up his post. The United States is to allow entry to 5,000 Kurds employed by American-backed relief agen- cies in northern Iraq. Food prices in Bagh- dad halved at the news that the United Nations is to allow Iraq to sell some oil. French lorry drivers went on strike and blockaded roads and ports, preventing British lorry drivers from using Channel ferries. Italy rejoined the EC exchange-rate mechanism after four years out of it. An aeroplane on a flight from Addis Ababa to Nairobi was hijacked by three Ethiopians who ordered the pilot to fly to Australia; he said it would run out of fuel, which it did, crashing in shallow water next to the Comoros with the loss of 123 lives, though 52 survived. Dame Joan Hammond, the opera singer, died, aged 84. A Zimbabwean MP was fined £66 for biting off the upper lip of a fellow politician during talks to end divisions in the ruling Zanu-PF Party. The lip was produced as evidence in court. CSH
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