PORTRAITOFTHEWEEK
The government was twice defeated in the Commons in votes on the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill, making its provisions less broad. The government produced a form with a box to tick for people who wanted to prevent lifesaving treatment being given them in future; this was according to the Mental Capacity Act, 2004, which comes into effect in 2007. A White Paper on health proposed treating more people outside large hospitals; but a question of funding remained. Mr David Blunkett, the disgraced former Cabinet minister, said his ‘sense is that there is a new understanding’ between Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, and Mr Gordon Brown about the latter replacing the former; ‘So good on them,’ Mr Blunkett said. Mr Simon Hughes, a candidate for the leadership of the Liberal Democrats, became the latest MP of his party to say that he had had homosexual experiences, days after he said he hadn’t. An 11-year-old girl fell ill at her primary school in Glasgow through taking too much heroin, which she was reported to have been buying for two months in £10 bags from a dealer outside a shopping centre in Pollok. Mr Pete Doherty, the singer, was remanded in custody in Pentonville prison, north London, after admitting possession of heroin; he will be sentenced on 8 February. The Arctic Monkeys’ ‘Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not’ became Britain’s fastest-selling debut album, with 360,000 being bought in a week. Christopher Lloyd, the gardening writer, died, aged 84. The government devised a code of ‘freedoms’ for animals, to be provided by their owners on pain of imprisonment; they cover diet, living conditions, companionship or solitude, freedom from signs of abnormal behaviour and from pain, suffering, injury and disease. Animal activists daubed with threatening messages the home of the company secretary of GlaxoSmithKline, which tests drugs on animals before human beings. There is only a 70 per cent chance of Wembley Stadium being ready for the Football Association Cup Final in May, according to the managing director in Britain of Multiplex, which is building it.
Hamas won the elections for the Palestinian Authority with 57.5 per cent of the vote and 76 of the 132 seats; Fatah got 32.5 per cent of the vote and 43 seats. Mr Ehud Olmert, the acting Prime Minister of Israel, where a general election is due next month, said, ‘The state of Israel will not negotiate with a Palestinian administration if even part of it is an armed terrorist organisation calling for the destruction of the state of Israel.’ President George W. Bush of the United States, said, ‘A political party that articulates the destruction of Israel as part of its platform is a party with which we will not deal.’ The United Nations, United States, Russia and the European Union said that aid to the Palestinians ‘would be reviewed by donors against that government’s commitment to renounce violence’. Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States recommended that the International Atomic Energy Agency should report Iran to the UN Security Council over its nuclear development programme; Iran called the action ‘unconstructive and the end of diplomacy’. Ayman al-Zawahiri, the al-Qa’eda leader whom American forces tried to kill in January in an air attack that killed 13 in a Pakistan village, released a videotape saying, ‘Bush, you are not only defeated and a liar but, with God’s help and might, a failure.’ Saddam Hussein shouted at the new judge presiding over his trial in a Baghdad court. Russia’s security service said it had arrested two men accused of spying for Britain. In Poland 62 people died when the roof of a convention hall in Katowice collapsed during an event attended by 500 pigeon-fanciers; snow was blamed. More than 60,000 people in the Ukrainian city of Alchevsk were left without heating for a week in which temperatures fell to minus 25˚C.
CSH
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