PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
Stop whining Mr Ken Livingstone tagged everyone along by delaying his decision about stand- ing for Mayor of London as an indepen- dent candidate. Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, said: 'There is no doubt that there is potential for harm, both in terms of human safety and in the diversity of our environment, from GM food and crops'; the opposition claimed that this was a change of policy. Republican terrorists planted a bomb which failed to go off completely at barracks at Ballykelly, Co. Londonderry. An MP, Michael Colvin, and his wife Nichola were presumed dead when a raging fire destroyed their house in Hampshire. The Adam Smith Institute found that 40 per cent of those under 24 entitled to vote have not registered to do so. Mr Alan Milburn, the Secretary of State for Health, said that more nurses would be trained and more money spent on their recruitment. Mr Blair suggested that things would improve if nurses were allowed to order the X-raying of patients and prescribe drugs. The murderer Ian Brady gave evidence at Liverpool Crown Court to support his attempt to resist force-feeding in a fast he intended to end with his death. Local councils complained to the Home Office about the daily £2.6 million cost of putting up asylum-seekers. Cats and dogs were let into Britain from France without having to go into quaran- tine, under a new scheme of documenta- tion, with computer chips implanted beneath the animals' skin. Stanley Matthews, the football player, died, aged 85. Ernest Lough, who in 1927 as a boy treble sang '0, For the Wings of a Dove' on a very popular record, died, aged 88. The Duke of Sutherland put up a painted Egyptian sarcophagus for sale to raise £30,000 to help support Dunrobin Castle.
HUNDREDS of thousands remained homeless in Mozambique because of floods; they were beset by lack of food, malaria and other water-borne diseases. The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation decided not to send more troops to keep the peace between Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo. Yugoslav troops under the com- mand of the Belgrade government were sent to Montenegro, one of the two republics of Yugoslavia, after it opened its border with Albania, which had been closed for three years. Russian troops were accused of atrocities against Chechen fighters after a video of a mass grave was seen in the West. Mr Jorg Haider stood down as leader of the Freedom party in Austria, though he retained the governor- ship of the province of Carinthia. The tower of Pisa was said not to have moved in the past three months. More than 80,000 fled sulphurous ashes and lava dis- gorged by Mayon volcano, 200 miles from Manila. The Pope visited Mount Sinai. Mr Lionel Jospin, the Prime Minister of France, was pelted with stones and cut short his visit to Israel and the West Bank after calling Hezbollah (the Islamic guer- rillas) `terrorists'; on his return to France he was told by President Jacques Chirac that 'challenging French impartiality in the Middle East would harm the credibility of our foreign policy'. There were demon- strations on the streets of New York after a jury acquitted four policemen who had shot dead with 41 bullets a black man from Africa. A car ploughed head-on into 100 cyclists competing near Nimes, killing four and injuring 17. An EU-funded study found that of the 80,000 prostitutes from outside the union 32 per cent come from Eastern Europe, 32 per cent from South America, 22 per cent from Africa and the rest from Asia; 16,000 worked in Greece. A tree-dwelling rodent the size of a cat, related to the extinct Inca Tomb Rat, was discovered near Cusco, Peru, and named Cuscomys asganinka. CSH
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