PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
Diana, Princess of Wales, died, aged 36. She was killed with her friend Dodi Fayed, aged 42, in a car crash in Paris. Her brother, Earl Spencer, said: 'I always believed the press would kill her in the end.' He was referring to the paparazzi photographers on motor-bicycles who had been pursuing the car when it crashed. Seven of these photographers were arrest- ed by French police and charged with manslaughter. The driver of the car, Henri Paul, a Fayed employee, was also killed; he was found to have 175 milligrams (or, by a later test, 187 milligrams) of alcohol per millilitre of blood — the effect of drinking the equivalent of more than a bottle of wine — the French legal limit being 50 mil- ligrams per litre. The car had been going at more than 120 mph; the Princess, in the back, was wearing no seat-belt. A body- guard working for the Fayeds, Mr Trevor Rees-Jones, also in the car, survived. Lord Wakeham, chairman of the Press Com- plaints Commission, began an inquiry into press treatment of the Princess. Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, called Diana, Princess of Wales the 'People's Princess'. She is to be buried at the Spencer family chapel at St Mary the Virgin parish church, Great Brington, Northamptonshire, after a funeral at Westminster Abbey. Crowds queued for seven hours to write in books of condolence at St James's Palace. An unex- ploded bomb from the second world war, lying within ten feet of the main pipeline from the Nelson oilfield 100 miles off Aberdeen, was dragged clear and blown up in safety. A woman who sank up to her neck into the mud of the Thames foreshore at Hammersmith was saved after dialling 999 on her mobile telephone. A small tor- nado near Newark, Nottinghamshire, picked up 40 pigs and threw them half a mile.
ISLAMIC extremists murdered 300 people in villages south of Algiers in a week; about 1,500 people have been murdered since early June, when the government won multi-party elections in Algeria with promises to put down the insurgency. Presi- dent Hosni Mubarak of Egypt said that the murders were an offence to Islam, and urged the Islamic Salvation Front in Alge- ria to enter into talks with the government. The stock markets of south-east Asia slumped, with stocks in the Philippines falling 25 per cent in a month; Thailand, Malaysia, Hong Kong and, to a lesser extent, Tokyo also suffered falls. The Thai baht, the Malaysian ringgit and the Indone- sian rupiah were badly hit, and the Philip- pine peso sank to a historic low. President Boris Yeltsin of Russia promised to step down in 2000 when his term expires. Mr George Foulkes, the Minister for Interna- tional Development, spent two days on Montserrat, the volcano-blighted Carib- bean island; it was his ill-informed warning of a cataclysm that had set off a panic plan to evacuate the island. His superior, Miss Clare Short, the Secretary of State for International Development, spoke of 'vile' attempts by Labour spin doctors to under- mine her reputation since the latest crisis in Montserrat; she will visit the island soon, where people want to call a new settlement Port Diana. Officials from Albania, Bulgar- ia, Georgia, Macedonia, Turkmenistan, Turkey, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan and Kaza- khstan met in Sofia to discuss plans for a new road to link the Adriatic with the Black Sea. Twenty children drowned in a swim- ming pool at Nsele, near Kinshasa, after troops tried to impose order on their behaviour. A 25-stone man from Windsor, Canada, spent a week stuck in his bath, sur- viving on tap water before being rescued.
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