Portrait of the week | 10 September 2015

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David Cameron, the Prime Minister, told Parliament that he had authorised the killing, on 21 August, by means of an RAF drone, of a British citizen near Raqqa in Syria, Cardiff-born Reyaad Khan, 21, an adherent of the Islamic State. Ruhul Amin, from Aberdeen, also an Islamic State activist, whose killing had not been approved in advance, died in the same attack, along with another Islamic State supporter who was with them. Mr Cameron called the strike a lawful ‘act of self-defence’. Khan was said by government sources to have been plotting an attack during the VJ Day commemorations in London on 15 August, and although that had been thwarted, he was thought still to have a ‘desire to murder’ people in Britain. A third Briton, Junaid Hussain, 21, was killed by a separate US airstrike on 24 August. Wayne Rooney beat Sir Bobby Charlton’s record by scoring 50 goals for England.

Mr Cameron announced that Britain would accept 20,000 more refugees in the next five years, from camps bordering Syria, not from among those already in Europe. An extra £100 million would be spent, taking British government aid to Syrians to more than £1 billion. The revision to policy followed the publication of photographs showing the body of three-year-old Alan Kurdi, one of the two little sons of a Kurdish migrant from Syria drowned with their mother when their father tried to leave Turkey for Greece in a small craft. The father, Abdullah, returned to Kobane, in Kurdish Syria, to bury them. In the year to June, 2,204 people from Syria had applied for asylum in Britain, of whom 87 per cent had had their applications granted. Ninety monoliths that once stood 15ft tall in a line beside Durrington Walls, near Stonehenge, were found buried three feet deep.