PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, returned from holiday to find Ulster Unionists demanding the resignation of Dr Mo Mowlam, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, after the Irish Republi- can Army threatened to murder six teenagers unless they left the province. Unionists said they would prefer not to take part in the review of the Good Friday Agreement under Senator George Mitchell, the independent arbitrator. Mr William Hague, the Leader of the Opposi- tion, said that Mr Blair was guilty of a `betrayal of trust'. Mr Robin Cook, the For- eign Secretary, said that Hawk jets, made by British Aerospace, had been used by Indonesia over East Timor, in breach of the conditions imposed on their purchase: Mr David Blunkett, the Secretary of State for Education, admitted that class sizes in sec- ondary schools had increased since the gen- eral election. Caning in all schools became illegal. Eurostar denied it was taking advan- tage of British passengers by charging them £129 for a return train fare to Brussels, where return tickets to London could be bought for only £108. Microsoft was obliged to shut down for a time its Hotmail e-mail system, used by 40 million, after hackers found a way to read subscribers' messages. Martin Pipe became the trainer with the most National Hunt winners this century when Bamapour became his 2,644th at Newton Abbot. The Most Rev- erend Moses Tay, Archbishop of South East Asia, refused to visit 'most heretical' Scotland for a meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council, principally, it seemed, because of the views on homosexu- ality held by the Most Reverend Richard Holloway, the Primus of Scotland. Two British homosexual men spent £200,000 getting a woman in America to bear twins for them by in vitro fertilisation using their sperm; they are due in December, a boy and a girl to be called Aspen and Saffron. A woman in Rotherham became a grand- mother at 26 after her 12-year-old daughter gave birth to a boy in the bathroom. Ruud Gullit resigned as manager of Newcastle United on the grounds that the press was hounding him about his private life. A mil- lion people went to the Notting Hill Carni- val; only one man was shot (in the stomach) and two others stabbed.
Al, 1 ER a turnout apparently exceeding 98 per cent in a referendum in East Timor expected to endorse independence, Mr Ali Alatas, the foreign minister of Indonesia, said interim administration would in that case be handed over to the United Nations; Indonesia invaded the former Portuguese territory on 7 December, 1975. In Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, 300 wounded soldiers attacked a minister's car with crutches and sticks in a protest at being neglected by President Charles Taylor, whom they fought to put into power in 1996. Jordan raided and closed down premises used by Hamas, the Palestinian Muslim extremist group, and issued warrants for the arrest of four of its leaders. Russian aircraft and artillery attacked Islamic rebel positions in Dagestan. Russian criminals were accused of laundering perhaps $10-billion-worth of funds through the Bank of New York. Fire destroyed 50,000 acres between Lake Arrowhead and Apple Valley, 80 miles east of Los Angeles. In the United States, 17,047 people died of Aids in 1998, a 20 per cent decrease from the year before; in 1998, 40,000 Americans were infected with HIV, the virus that causes Aids. The Most Reverend Helder Camara, the former Archbishop of Recife and a champion of the poor, died, aged 90. In the Czech Republic, regional authorities stopped the municipality of Usti nad Labem from building a six-foot wall between houses on one side of a street and buildings on the other side, where 37 gypsy families live. CSH
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