The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 5 March 2005

A speedy round-up of the week's news

The government did a good deal of nodding and winking to the opposition over its rushed legislation to provide for house arrest without trial and other controls on anyone suspected of connections with terrorism. Mr Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, conceded that judges should decide if suspects were to be put under house arrest, but police should have powers to hold them in the meantime. The government majority was reduced to 14 in a Commons vote. Sajid Badat, 25, from Gloucester, was convicted, after pleading guilty, of conspiring with Richard Reid, the attempted ‘shoe-bomber’ jailed in America, to destroy aircraft in December 2001; Badat dismantled his own shoe-bomb and was arrested in November 2003. After a meeting of Anglican primates at Newry, Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, called on the Anglican Churches in the United States and Canada to ‘repent’ for unilaterally consecrating a bishop who was ‘in a committed same-sex relationship’ and for holding ‘public rites of blessing for same-sex unions’ respectively. Hundreds of people demonstrated in the nationalist Short Strand area of Belfast against the Irish Republican Army’s cover-up of the murder by some of its members of Robert McCartney, whose sisters have since called for the murderers to be brought to justice; the IRA responded by expelling three of its members. The Copenhagen-based Danske Bank bought Northern Bank, from whose Belfast headquarters the IRA stole £26 million in December, and its sister National Irish Bank in the Irish Republic for £967 million. HSBC announced annual profits of £9 billion — the biggest yet made by a British-based bank. In January, 2.5 billion text messages were sent on mobile telephones; in the whole of 1999 only 1.1 billion were sent. A law came into force obliging all horses and donkeys to have ‘passports’ lest unsuitable specimens be eaten.

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