PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
r David Trimble, the leader of the Ulster Unionist party, was expected to become the First Minister of the new 108- seat Northern Ireland Assembly and Mr John Hume, the leader of the Social Demo- cratic and Labour party, his deputy, after elections by proportional representation gave the UUP 28 seats, the SDLP 24, the Democratic Unionist party (led by Dr Ian Paisley) 20, Sinn Fein (led by Mr Gerry Adams) 18; other Unionist parties got seven seats, the non-sectarian Alliance party six, the Northern Ireland Women's Coalition two, and independent Unionists won the last three seats. Mr Martin McGuinness of Sinn Fein denied that his party, which is the political face of the Irish Republican Army, should wait to take part until the IRA decommissioned its weapons. 'These issues are red herrings. They are cul-de-sac issues. They are the road to nowhere,' he said. An IRA bomber, James McArdle, was sen- tenced to 25 years in prison for his part in the 1996 destruction of South Quay on the Isle of Dogs, in which two men died; but he may well, like other members of terrorist groups active in Northern Ireland, be released in two years. Another 1,000 sol- diers were sent to the province for the Orange Order march at Portadown, which has been prohibited by the new Parades Commission from using a route along the Catholic part of the Garvaghy Road. Two Labour MPs, Mr Ian Davidson, of Glasgow Pollok, and Mr Dennis Canavan, of Falkirk West, appealed against their exclusion by the party from its list of candidates for elec- tion to the Scottish Parliament. Mr William Hague, the leader of the opposition, had an operation on his sinuses after a week in bed with a high temperature. More than 10,000 companies have gone bust in the past three months, a 10 per cent rise over the previous quarter. The last tea auction in London took place after a history of 319 years. Lord Rayner, the former chairman of Marks & Spencer, who was brought in by Mrs Thatcher in 1979 to improve government efficiency, died, aged 72. Mr Rudy Narayan, a disbarred barrister and campaigner for black people, died, aged 60. More than 15,000 people attended an open-air concert in the rain put on by Earl Spencer, the brother of Diana, Princess of Wales, at Althorp, where she is buried, which opened to the paying public this week. Over 80 mil- lion antler moth caterpillars destroyed 1,000 acres of the Howgill fells in Cumbria, forc- ing sheep to lower ground.
PRESIDENT BILL Clinton of the United States, preaching from the pulpit of Chong- wenmen Protestant church in Peking, said, `I believe the Chinese and Americans are brothers and sisters as children of God.' Mr Clinton met President Jiang Zemin and told him that the killing of students around Tiananmen Square in 1989 was 'wrong'. Mr Robert Gelbard, the US special envoy to the Balkans, held talks with leaders of the Kosovo Liberation Army near Geneva. A Geneva-based economic research company called CRG found that London has become the most expensive city in which to live in western Europe and the tenth most expen- sive in the world. Mr Sergei Kiriyenko, the Prime Minister of Russia, begged its parlia- ment to vote through austerity measures to remedy its financial crisis. Unemployment in Japan rose to 2.93 million, the highest since records began, in 1953. Hundreds of people, especially children, continued to die in drought-stricken southern Sudan. An earthquake in the southern Turkish province of Adana killed more than 100. The South African rand fell to an unprece- dented low despite efforts by the US Feder- al Reserve and the Bank of England to prop it up. An Iranian had a fatal heart attack when his sentence to be hanged for rape was being read out in a Tehran court. In Brandenburg in eastern Germany the corpse of a man was found in his flat in front of the television, where he had died four years before.
CSH
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