PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
Hey, you! I told you to get out of my palace!'
Sinn Fein went to law, arguing that because it was not identical with the Irish Republican Army it should not be excluded from all-party talks after police in Northern Ireland declared that two men killed the week before had been murdered by the IRA. Mr Gerry Adams, the President of Sinn Fein, said: 'I am absolutely pissed off with trying to make this thing work, and those who have no interest in making it work seize upon two men being killed to exploit it and bring this process down.' A 1,0001b bomb from the second world war was found 23 feet underground on the site of a new housing development at Chippen- ham; hundreds of people were evacuated before it was destroyed by means of a con- trolled explosion. Eurotunnel, the operator of the Channel Tunnel, announced losses of £611 million for the year, mostly attributable to interest payments; the com- pany said it had made an operating profit of $57 million. A Burger King shop at Waterloo station caught on fire; another, at Heathrow airport, had caught on fire in December. Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Min- ister, entertained Mr Salman Rushdie, the novelist, at 10 Downing Street, on the anniversary of an Islamic fatwah condemn- ing him to death. Mr Justice Harman resigned after an Appeal Court commented adversely on the 20 months he had taken to give judgment in one case, saying that `delays on this scale cannot and will not be tolerated'. Mr Jack Straw, the Home Secre- tary, said that a register of freemasons in the judiciary, police and prosecution service would be compiled, with those already employed supplying their names voluntarily and new employees being obliged to. Pro- fessor Sir Harry Hinsley, the former Master of St John's College, Cambridge who helped break the German Enigma code, died, aged 79. Mr Ruud Gullit was sacked as manager of Chelsea Football Club after he had asked for £2 million a year for his contract to be renewed. The government repaid £10 billion of the national debt with the help of tax paid early through the new self-assessment system. Kwik Save and Somerfield, which between them have 1,500 food stores, negotiated a merger.
MR KOFI ANNAN, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, insisted on going to Baghdad to talk to President Saddam Hus- sein of Iraq, much to the annoyance of President Bill Clinton of the United States and Mr Blair, who did not want the UN to stand in the way of a punitive allied attack on the country. Mr Robin Cook, the For- eign Secretary, flew to Montserrat, the vol- cano-blighted Caribbean island. More than 200 people, including seven on the ground, were killed when a Taiwanese aeroplane crashed into houses when trying to land in fog at Taipei airport. In Cameroon more than 100 died when a train carrying liquid fuel crashed; many had been filling buckets with fuel when fire engulfed them. More than 80 died in bombings in southern India on the eve of the country's elections; Islam- ic extremists were blamed. In China 16 died when a bus was blown up on a bridge over the Yangtze in the city of Wuhan. Ernst Jiinger, the German thinker, died aged 102. Martha Gellhorn, the left-wing journalist, died, aged 89. The European Court of Jus- tice in Luxembourg ruled against a lesbian railway worker, employed by South West Trains in Britain, being entitled to claim free travel for the woman with whom she lived. The Vatican is to build a £27 million underground carpark to cater for pilgrims during the millennium. CSH
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