Portrait of the week | 18 August 2016

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Theresa May, the Prime Minister, who was supposed to be on a walking holiday in Switzerland, wrote to Xi Jinping, the Chinese President, saying that she wanted to strengthen Britain’s trading relationship with China despite uncertainty over the construction of the nuclear power station at Hinkley Point. During her absence and that of the Chancellor of the Exchequer from Britain, Boris Johnson, the Foreign Secretary, was the ‘senior minister on duty’, Downing Street conceded. Regulated rail fares in England and Wales and regulated peak-time fares in Scotland will rise by 1.9 per cent in January, that being the annual rate of inflation in July, as measured by the Retail Prices Index (up from 1.6 per cent the month before). As measured by the Consumer Prices Index, inflation rose to 0.6 per cent in July from 0.5 per cent in June. Unemployment fell by 52,000 to 1.64 million by June; claimants continued to fall in July after the EU referendum. A diplomat from the North Korean embassy in Acton, west London, defected and fled abroad with his family.

In the Olympic Games, Britain overtook China at the end of the first week in the medal tables, reaching second place to the United States. British gold medals included six for cycling and three for rowing. A dog seized by police in June and returned to its owner last week killed a man in Huddersfield five days later. The sale of so-called zombie knives, with curved blades and serrated edges, was made illegal.

Anjem Choudary, 49, the Islamic cleric, and a supporter of his, Mohammed Mizanur Rahman, were convicted of inviting people to support the Islamic State, contrary to the Terrorism Act 2000. Public Interest Lawyers, the solicitors’ firm that brought forward many allegations of wrongdoing by British troops in the Iraq war, is to close this month, having been told it would no longer receive legal aid funds.