PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, visited Northern Ireland and then announced that Parliament would be recalled next Wednesday to enact a law designed to make it easier to convict those suspected of terrorist offences; the plan is to send a Bill to the House of Lords on Thursday, have it back on the same day in the Commons if peers amend it, and send it for Royal Assent before the night is out. The Bill will provide for conviction on the basis of silence and for the use of senior police officers' opinion in finding accused guilty of belonging to an illegal organisa- tion; both Irish and international terrorists are meant to be the object of the new law. Mr Blair met Mr Bertie Ahern, the Taoiseach of Ireland, at Cong, Co Mayo. Britain and the United States proposed that two Libyans suspected of a part in the bombing of an aeroplane over Lockerbie, killing 271 in 1988, should be tried in The Hague by Scottish judges under Scottish law but without a jury; this idea was offered to Libya as an inducement to allow the sus- pects' trial and to be rewarded with a lifting of economic sanctions. The government is to experiment in Wales next year with a weird scheme to use the long-term unem- ployed as classroom assistants to help teach children to read. The people of Sonning Common, near Reading, Berkshire, responded with fear to the return to their village of a paedophile who had been in prison for six years. British Airways turned away from its normal supplier, Boeing of America, and chose the European Airbus consortium to provide up to 188 short-haul jets, with British Aerospace building the wings and a consortium involving Rolls Royce supplying the engines. Mr Ian Byatt, the director-general of Ofwat, annoyed water companies by proposing ways in which consumers would be able to choose between suppliers. A man died when he was stung by innumerable wasps at Erlstoke, Wiltshire. A man died when he fell into a vat of molten zinc in Witham, Essex. A Hertford-born woman juror in Vancouver was jailed for 18 months for having started an affair with a defendant charged with hav- ing killed two men. A kind of avine mosquito, Culex pipiens, was said to have adapted to drinking the blood of rats and human beings in the London Underground.
MRS MADELEINE ALBRIGHT, the United States Secretary of State, said that fighting terrorists was 'the war of the future' after America used cruise missiles from ships in the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean to destroy a pharmaceuticals factory in Sudan and a camp in Afghanistan. The action was in response to the terrorist bombs that killed more than 200 at the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es- Salaam. The man named as a leader of anti- American terrorism, Mr Osama bin Laden, a rich Saudi Arabian with a hideout in Afghanistan, was reported to have said: 'The battle has not started yet. The response will be with action, not with words.' A bomb killed a man and injured 25 in a Planet Hol- lywood restaurant in Cape Town; a group of Islamic extremists said it carried out the attack. The terrorist Abu Nidal was said to be under detention in Egypt. President Boris Yeltsin of Russia dismissed the entire government with a single decree. Mr Sergei Kiriyenko was replaced as Prime Minister by Mr Viktor Chernomyrdin, who had been dismissed by President Yeltsin on 23 March but is now spoken of by him as his succes- sor. The rouble fell even further. Newspa- pers began to give lewd details, some involv- ing a cigar, from the evidence given by Miss Monica Lewinsky to the grand jury investi- gating the behaviour of President Bill Clin- ton of the United States. Angola and Zim- babwe sent troops and jet aircraft to defend the rule of President Laurent Kabila in the Democratic Republic of Congo; soldiers from Rwanda and Uganda backed rebel forces. An army of 10,000 specially trained chickens was set on to a plague of locusts in northwestern Xinjiang, China. CSH
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