PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
Special relationship Mr John Major, the Prime Minister, supported M. Jacques Chirac, the French President, who paid him a visit, in his deci- sion to set off the third in a series of tests of nuclear bombs in the south Pacific. A Bill was rushed through Parliament in four hours which brought parole conditions for prisoners in Northern Ireland into line with those on the mainland, thus allowing the release of about 90 convicted terrorists. The Domestic Violence Bill was shelved after a campaign that said it would under- mine the family. A Commons committee rejected suggestions by the Nolan Commit- tee that MPs should declare their income. Miss Clare Short, recently appointed trans- port spokesman in the shadow Cabinet, said on television that the legalisation of cannabis should at least be considered; even though this opinion had been expressed by members on both sides of the House for many years, she felt obliged to apologise to Mr Tony Blair, the leader of the Labour Party. Mr Michael Heseltine, who likes to call himself the First Secretary of State, is to have a kidney stone removed this month, but he doesn't expect it to detain him for more than a couple of days. Dr David Hope, who is to be the new Arch- bishop of York, was nominated as a knight. The Revd Sun Myung Moon, who runs the Unification Church, was barred from enter- ing Britain by the Home Secretary. Nick Leeson, the financial trader who is said to have brought down Barings Bank, apolo- gised to the people of Singapore for having said he might not get a fair trial there and added that he would not resist extradition from Germany to Singapore. Major-General Lennox Napier, who retired this week as the chairman of the Central Rail Users' Consul- tative Committee, said that the way privati- sation was being arranged was like a pan- tomime without a happy ending. The Queen was hoaxed by a Canadian disc jockey who broadcast a quarter-of-an-hour telephone conversation between them in which he was pretending to be the Canadian Prime Minis- ter. The Duke of Northumberland died, aged 42. The Government proposed legisla- tion that would allow it to interfere with gas heaters in the hope of saving 40 people a year from carbon monoxide poisoning.
PRESIDENT Yeltsin of Russia cancelled engagements after being struck down by heart disease. Russia agreed to send troops to Bosnia, but not as part of a combat force that would be under the command of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. Croatia made threatening noises about the possibili- ty of taking Eastern Slavonia by force. Elec- tions in Croatia favoured President Franjo Tudjman but failed to give him the two- thirds majority he would have needed to change the constitution. Thousands of Bosnian Muslim refugees were still missing around Banja Luka, which is controlled by Bosnian Serbs. Tens of thousands of civil- ians were driven from their homes in the Jaffna peninsula in Sri Lanka during contin- ued fighting between government forces and the Tamil Tigers. Quebec voted by a majori- ty of about 1 per cent not to secede from Canada; the Premier of Quebec, Jacques Parizeau, resigned after having blamed the defeat on 'money and ethnic votes'. Sheikh Mohammad Fadlallah, the founder and leader of the terrorist group Islamic Jihad, was shot dead in Malta by Israeli secret agents. General Magnus Malan, the former defence minister of South Africa, and ten other senior officers were charged with mur- der despite an amnesty for those suspected of political crimes before the change of regime. Mr Ken Saro-Wiwa, the anti-oil company campaigner, was sentenced to death by a special court in Nigeria. Mr Roh Tae-Woo, a former president of South Korea, was summoned by public prosecutors investigating a fund of more than £400 mil- lion he had amassed while in office. More than 280 died in a fire in the underground railway in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. In a Slovakian steel works 13 died from carbon
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