PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
`Confess!'
Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was met at a meeting of European Union finance ministers by a scheme hatched by Mr Oskar Lafontaine of Germany and Mr Dominique Strauss-Kahn of France to make the tax systems of all member countries the same. Mr Lafontaine said it was his personal opinion that Britain's veto should end and that we must eventually go to qualified majority voting on the sensitive issue of taxes. President Roman Herzog of Germany made an offi- cial visit to Britain; while he was in a car- riage with the Queen at Windsor, one of the Household Cavalry fell from his rearing horse and hurt his shoulder. Mr Martin Taylor resigned without warning as chief executive of Barclays, and its shares imme- diately fell by 8 per cent; the bank, Britain's second largest, had just announced that it would not achieve pre-tax profits for the year of more than £1.9 billion, less than expected. After much fiddle-faddle and secrecy, Marks and Spencer appointed Mr Peter Salsbury as its next chief executive in preference to Mr Keith Oates, who then said he would not mind the job at Barclays. Midland's high street banks are to be renamed HSBC. The 39,000 workforce of Rover were invited to vote on a deal entail- ing the loss of 2,500 jobs, proposed by its owners BMW to save car production at Longbridge, near Birmingham. The Scot- tish National party won a by-election to the European parliament for North East Scot- land, pushing Labour into third place behind the Conservatives. Mr Nicholas Brown, the Minister of Agriculture, sug- gested that the sale of beef on the bone would be legalised early next year. The wrestler, Giant Haystacks, Martin Ruane out of the ring, died, aged 52. Chris Ofili, who specialises in using elephant dung, won the Turner Prize with paintings including `The Adoration of Captain Shit'. Peter Tatchell, a campaigner on homosexuality was fined £18.60 for 'indecent behaviour' in breaking into the Archbishop of Canter- bury's sermon last Easter.
EXXON AND MOBIL, the two largest oil companies in America, discussed a merger to create the world's biggest company. Boe- ing, the world's largest aircraft maker announced it would cut 48,000 jobs by the end of 1999. Deutsche Bank acquired Banker's Trust, an American bank, to form the world's biggest banking operation; the City of London expected 3,000 jobs to be cut there as a consequence. Total, the French oil group, agreed to take over PetroFina, the Belgian oil group, to create the sixth-largest oil company in the world. The Pope invited rich nations to forgive the debts of poor nations for the millennium Mr Jose Miguel Sulza, the foreign minister of Chile, flew to London and Madrid, ask- ing for General Augusto Pinochet, the for- mer dictator, to be returned; Spain had issued a warrant for his extradition from Britain on charges of torture. The Rev- erend Canaan Banana, the former Presi- dent of Zimbabwe, was found guilty on charges of sodomy, but was found to have fled the country. Voters in Quebec elected once again a Parti Quebecois government, which promised last time it was in power to hold a referendum on declaring the inde- pendence of the province; yet the anti-inde- pendence Liberal party gain 44 per cent of the popular vote, against the Parti Quebe- cois' 43 per cent. Archdukes Felix and Calf Ludwig Habsburg-Lothringen, the sons of Carl, Emperor of Austria and King of Hun- gary, petitioned the Austrian government for the return of several thousand acre s confiscated from their family by the Nazis,' A train crash near Khanna in Punjab killed more than 200. Four children were train' pled to death trying to get into a cinema 10 Chervonograd, Ukraine, to see the f1 Armageddon.
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