PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
Unhappy snaps: 'We vant to be alone' Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, held talks with Mr Carlos Ghosn, the presi- dent of Nissan, which said its decision to build a new car-production plant depended on the stability of currency and whether Nissan would get a £50 million government grant. Mr Stephen Byers, the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, said that from September motor-car suppliers would have to offer the same discounts to individual buyers as to fleet buyers. Motorists who think tax on petrol is too high boycotted petrol pumps for a day and tried to get lorry drivers to blockade Dover, though only 12 turned up. Police had earlier chased a lorry from Dover across Kent and found 30 illegal immigrants inside. The British Bankers' Association called 'unworkable' a government plan to set up a 'universal bank' at post offices for people who had no other account. Barclays temporarily sus- pended its Internet banking service, Britain's biggest, after customers found they could gain access to details of others' accounts. The demand for electricity in London is expected to rise by a fifth in four years with the building of so-called 'Inter- net hotels', which are used to house equip- ment for use by web-based companies; each centre is expected to consume twice the electricity needed by Bristol, mostly to water-cool the machinery. Hyder, the Welsh electricity and water company, rec- ommended a bid to take it over from Nomura, the Japanese investment bank that is to turn the Millennium Dome at Greenwich into a theme park. Mr Ivan Massow, who is 32, homosexual, quite rich and had wanted to be a Tory MP, left the party because he said it was now 'nasty' and joined the Labour party. The European Court of Human Rights awarded £21,000 damages to a man who had been convicted in a British court of taking part in his own house in sexual activity with more than one man; the court also found unlawful British statutes on homosexual behaviour. A 64- year-old woman faced the confiscation of £5 million that she was said to have made from saunas in north London that func- tioned as brothels. The pianist John Lill had his hand slashed when he was robbed in a Hampstead street one afternoon. Sainsbury's said it was perfecting a method of pasteurising eggs without cooking them. The nation continued its proleptic celebra- tions of the 100th birthday of the Queen Mother on 4 August.
MR William Clinton, following the break- down of talks at Camp David between Israel and the Palestinian entity, advised the Palestinians not to declare independence in September as they had announced. Mr Ehud Barak, the Prime Minister of Israel, survived a motion of no confidence, but Mr Shimon Peres (who was backed by Mr Barak) was surprised not to be chosen as President, the Knesset choosing to elect instead Mr Moshe Katsav. There were riots in Lima when President Alfonso Fujimori began another term of office despite protests that his election had been invalid. Euzkadi ta Askatasuna, the Basque sepa- ratist terrorist group, murdered the seventh person it has killed in Spain since it ended its ceasefire. The Zimbabwean government said that it had identified a total of 3,041 white-owned farms to be seized and reset- tled. China sentenced to death a govern- ment official accused of taking more than £3 million in bribes, Mr Kimitaka Kuze, the head of the Financial Reform Commission, Japan's top banking regulator, resigned in the face of reports that he had accepted money from companies. The 4,000 inhabi- tants of the Japanese island of Myakejima were told that it had drifted three inches to the north-east after a month of small earth- quakes. A Hungarian-speaking prisoner from the second world war was found still to be living in a Russian mental hospital.
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