PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK Do not attempt to look at
the eclipse of Tony Blair without rose-tinted spectacles Mr George Robertson, the Secretary of State for Defence, was put forward as the next secretary-general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. This guaranteed that there would be some reshuffling of the Cab- inet just when weeks of speculation had come to an end with the appointment of 13 new ministers, including Lady Scotland of Asthal as a minister at the Foreign Office, Miss Kate Hoey as sports minister, and Lord Macdonald of Tradeston as transport minister (with the right to attend Cabinet meetings). Mr John Prescott lost some of his close allies in a shuffle of half the minis- ters in his large department of Environ- ment, Transport and the Regions. Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, visited Kosovo, where he was greeted by crowds chanting 'To-ny'. The Irish Republican Army shot dead a 22-year-old man suspected of being an informer; a 17-year-old was shot in both anIdes in East Belfast and a 39-year-old was shot in one leg in West Belfast. NatWest announced an 18 per cent jump in profits to £1.14 billion. Protesters dressed in white overalls and masks pulled up maize in a field at Spital-in-the-Street, Lincolnshire; but the field they wanted to destroy, where genetically modified crops were being grown experimentally, was on the other side of the road. The government is to con- tribute £5 million towards the £25 million needed to send a small machine to burrow under the surface of Mars. Nirad Chaud- huri, the Indian writer who regarded Britain's withdrawal from India as a betray- al, died in Oxford, aged 101. The Queen Mother celebrated her 99th birthday. The BBC suffered a grave blow when Des Lynam, its sports commentator, moved to ITV. A couple watching television in Sutton Coldfield during thundery weather saw from the window a red ball of fire approaching; it blew a two-foot hole through the roof.
GERMANY refused to allow British beef to be imported despite the European Union having lifted the ban on its export. A man in Atlanta, Georgia, killed his wife and his two children with a hammer and then shot dead nine people he blamed for his ill-fortune as a day-trader. There was a bomb attack on the Serbian Orthodox cathedral in Pristina hours after Mr Blair's visit. Russia began a campaign to sell abroad its Iskander-E short-range rocket system that can be used by infantry forces and would suit dozens of small-scale wars. The Taleban movement of militant Islamic extremists in Afghanistan made a push to overcome the rival North- ern Islamic Alliance led by Ahmad Shah Masood. HSBC Holdings, the international bank with large interests in the Far East, announced profits bigger than expected, prompting hopes that economic recovery in Asia might have begun. Thousands of ille- gal immigrants were said to be arriving ill London aboard Eurostar trains from Paris, where they had each bought two tickets to evade customs officials. More than 400 were killed when two trains collided head- on at Gaisal station, in West Bengal, the north-eastern state of India; the Brahmapn- tra Mail from Gauhati and the Awadh- Assam Express from New Delhi smashed into each other 300 miles north of Calcutta. A spacecraft was deliberately crashed into the moon at the end of its mission in an attempt to dislodge any water so that it could be detected; none was. Many coun- tries in south-east Asia were flooded. A tent in which a wedding party was under way, 250 miles north of Riyadh in Saudi Arabia, caught fire killing 50 and leaving 130 injured. King Abdullah II of Jordan dis- guised himself as a taxi driver to discover how things were going in Amman. The 17,000 taxi drivers of Athens went on strike. CSH CI The heading 'Politics' appeared last week over a feature article instead of in its usual place above Bruce Anderson's column. This was because of an error, not of the editorial staff, but of the printers, who apologise.
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