PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
The High Court ruled that a pair of Siamese twins, expected to die in six months as they are, must be separated even though it meant the certain death of one of the girls, who has no lungs; the parents, who come from Eastern Europe, believe the sep- aration is 'not God's will'. Each year, up to 20,000 foetuses over 13 weeks in develop- ment may feel pain when aborted, accord- ing to Professor Vivette Glover, the chair- man of a conference in London on foetal awareness. Research at St Mary's Hospital, London, found that bovine spongiform encephalopathy might be harboured in a form that shows no symptoms, in poultry, sheep and pigs, then be passed into human beings and spread by surgical instruments even when sterilised. The OM group, which owns the Stockholm stock exchange, pre- pared a hostile takeover bid for the London Stock Exchange, which had expected to merge with the Frankfurt stock exchange. The National Lottery Commission decided not to accept either the bid from Camelot or the one from Sir Richard Branson's Peo- ple's Lottery to run the national lottery; it then gave Sir Richard a month to overcome its objections to his bid, while his rival Camelot sought a judicial review of the decision. BT is to raise the minimum charge in telephone boxes from lop to 20p and to introduce charges for directory inquiries from public telephones. Jersey might hold a referendum on independence next year. Mr George Carman, the renowned libel barris- ter, is retiring at the age of 70 on doctor's orders. A paediatrician fled her house in South Wales after it was daubed with `paedo' by vandals who thought her job description meant she was a paedophile. Reggie Kray, suffering from cancer, was released from prison after 32 years to die. A girl of 11 was shot in the back but sur- vived when feuding loyalists opened fire on a house at Coleraine, Co. Londonderry; 25 other houses were attacked in one night. Only two people were murdered at the Notting Hill Carnival, which attracted a million and a half visitors.
THE Ostankino broadcasting tower in Moscow, at 1,771ft the second-tallest free- standing structure in the world, caught fire, killing four people caught in a lift and blacking out television broadcasts. A for- mer brewery in Prague burnt down, the city's biggest fire for a decade. In Sierra Leone 11 soldiers of the Royal Irish Regi- ment were kidnapped 45 miles from Free- town by a marauding militia of former gov- ernment troops called the West Side Boys. Three Israeli soldiers were shot dead by their own side during a botched raid on the village of Assira Ashmaiia, on the West Bank, intended to capture Mahmoud Abu Hanoud, a Hamas leader blamed for two bombings in 1997 that killed at least 21 Israelis; he was wounded but gave himself up to Palestinian troops in Nablus. Liberia freed four journalists it had arrested on charges of spying after they and Channel 4, for which three worked, apologised for any offence caused. In the southern Philip- pines, five women and a man held since 23 April were freed by the Abu Sayyaf guerrilla group fighting in the jungle for an independent Muslim state; seven Western- ers and 12 Filipino evangelists are still hostages, another American was kid- napped, and the rebel group has grown from 500 to 5,000 because of the attraction of ransom money. Euzkadi to Askatasuna, the Basque separatist terrorists, murdered another local politician in Zumarraga in the Spanish Basque country; Eta has mur- dered nearly 800 since its campaign began in 1968. M. Jean-Pierre Chevenement resigned as the interior minister of France because he opposed the granting of limited legislative powers to Corsica, favoured by M. Lionel Jospin, the French Prime Minis- ter. Chinese police arrested the Revd Gao Yihua for saying Mass in a house in Jin- feng in Fujian province. Smoke and ash filled the air as Mount Oyama erupted on the island of Miyake-jima 100 miles south of Tokyo; 500 children were evacuated and 4,000 adults stayed indoors.
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