PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
In his budget, Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, did not per- secute the middle classes as much as they had feared. Existing tax-exempt special sav- ings accounts (Tessas) and personal equity plans (Peps) will be eligible for transfer to new individual savings accounts (Isas) with- out penalty, and the proposed £50,000 limit on Isas has been dropped. Beer went up a penny a pint but spirits excise was frozen. Unleaded petrol went up by 4.4p a litre. Corporation tax was cut by a penny in the pound. A new 'working family tax credit' will be payable for low earners through pay packets. Underlying inflation (excluding mortgage payments) rose unexpectedly by a tenth of a percentage point to 2.6 per cent. A man charged with having murdered a Catholic and a Protestant at Poyntzpass, Co. Armagh, was found tortured and hanged in the Maze Prison wing devoted to members of the Loyalist Volunteer Force, some of whom must have murdered him. Mr Ken Maginnis, the Ulster Unionist spokesman on security, removed some little tricolours from a map of Ireland in the House of Commons canteen that had been put there to mark St Patrick's Day. Beef from herds in Northern Ireland certified free from bovine spongiform encephalopa- thy is to be allowed to be exported to Euro- pean Union countries. Professor Richard Lacey told a public inquiry into BSE that its incidence appeared to be waning only because farmers were burying diseased cows on farms 'on a massive scale'. Mr Jonathan Aitken, his daughter Victoria and her godfather, Mr Said Ayas, were arrested and released on bail as police continued investigations into the collapse of a libel action brought last summer by Mr Aitken. Mr Gerry Robinson, who becomes chair- man of the Arts Council in April, is to invite all its members to resign. Fire ser- vices criticised water companies for reduc- ing water pressure as a way of cutting down on leakage. A man was killed when a police van hit him as he crossed the road at 2.30 a.m. in Acton, west London; he is the sixth person to be killed by a police vehicle in London in the past 15 months.
MR GERRY Adams, the president of Sinn Fein, the political face of the Irish Republi- can Army, was invited to a St Patrick's Day lunch at the British Embassy in Washing- ton; he was offered salmon terrine and beef Wellington. A White House worker, Mrs Kathleen Willey, claimed that President Bill Clinton had fondled her in a corridor outside the Oval Office. Mr Clinton had his labrador dog, Buddy, castrated. Letters and underclothes that had belonged to Presi- dent J.F. Kennedy were auctioned in New York. Mr Zhu Rongji was chosen to suc- ceed Mr Li Peng as first prime minister of China; he is an economic reformer. A Hindu nationalist coalition led by the Bharatiya Janata party was invited to form a government in India. The Spanish trade union, the UGT, demanded a 35-hour week by the year 2000. Socialists and the Front National made gains in French local elec- tions. Mr Robin Cook, on his first visit as Foreign Secretary to Israel, went, against the wishes of the Israeli government, to see the Har Homa Jewish settlement, known in Arabic as Jabal Abu Ghneim, at the edge of East Jerusalem; as a result, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, cancelled a dinner with Mr Cook. A Vati- can document on the Jewish holocaust said that while 'the Shoah was the work of a thoroughly modern neo-pagan regime' the Church regretted 'the errors and failures of those sons and daughters of the Church' who did not help the Jews. A Bulgarian bishop, Evgeny Bosilkov, tortured and exe- cuted in 1952, was beatified by the Pope. President Boris Yeltsin of Russia cancelled engagements because of a 'cold'. Dr Ben- jamin Spock, who advised parents to feed children when they cried, died, aged 94. In Brazil, forest fires burnt, out of control, over an area three times the size of Wales.
CSH
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