PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
Amateurs! Let me have a go.'
The London and Frankfurt stock exchanges are to merge under the name IX. Alchemy, the venture capital group, withdrew from negotiations to buy Rover from BMW. New negotiations began with the Phoenix Consortium, which intended to continue volume production of motor cars at the Longbridge factory near Birm- ingham; but there was a deadline of only four weeks before the plant closed. Anar- chists and anti-capitalist May Day demon- strators dug up Parliament Square, sprayed the Cenotaph with graffiti, smashed up a McDonald's in Whitehall and looted a sou- venir shop next door. Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, said it must never happen again. Police closed Magdalen Bridge in Oxford to 10,000 people peacefully cele- brating dawn on May Day. Mr Michael Heseltine announced that he would not be standing for Parliament because he did not want to be 'lobby fodder'. Final bids from the successful five companies seeking licences to run the next generation of mobile telephones reached £22.48 billion; Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, indicated that the money would go to pay off a bit of the national debt, thus reducing interest payments. It was right to use words like 'flooding' about asylum seekers, Mr William Hague, the leader of the Conservative party, said; `There is no question, when we have more than 100,000 asylum seekers in the queue for processing their applications, that we have a flow that is out of control.' Mr Brian Souter, the co-founder of Stage- coach, financed a privately organised refer- endum on the proposed repeal of Section 28 (known as Section 2a in Scotland), which prohibits local authorities from pro- moting homosexuality in schools. P&O's new £200-million liner Aurora broke down 18 hours into its maiden cruise.
THE euro fell to new lows against the pound (58p) and the United States dollar (90.8 cents). Mr Jean-Claude Trichet, the next president of the European Central Bank, came under investigation for his part in the scandals at Credit Lyonnais in 1992 and 1993. In the United States anti- trust officials demanded that Microsoft be broken up into its Windows operating sys- tems part and a separate applications company. Zimbabwe announced a change to be made in the law to allow confiscation of farms owned by white men with no com- pensation; European countries arranged contingency plans for evacuation of their nationals. Because of the crisis in Zim- babwe and the failure of talks in London, Mr Robin Cook, the British Foreign Sec- retary, postponed a trip to Iran. There, a closed trial continued of 13 Jews accused of spying for Israel; there are about 25,000 Jews in Iran. Talks continued between Israel and the Palestinian authority about establishing an independent Palestine, although the Israeli government gave per- mission for 174 more families to settle in the occupied West Bank. 'Unemployment, exploitation of minors and low wages per- sist and are even getting worse in some parts of the world,' the Pope said during a Mass for workers on May Day, advocating debt forgiveness to ease such problems. In France unemployment fell just below 10 per cent. Twenty North Africans drowned when their boat sank as they tried to cross the Straits of Gibraltar; Spain arrested 1,500 North Africans trying to enter ille- gally in the first four months of the year. Drought and temperatures of 115 °F afflicted different parts of India. Islamic militants held captive 21 hostages, includ- ing some Europeans, in the southern Philippines. A man convicted of smug- gling cannabis was executed with a sword in a public square in northern Saudi Ara- bia; there have been 25 executions there so far this year.
CSH
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