Portrait of the week | 22 August 2013

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The cost of the HS2 railway line was expected by some in the Treasury to rise from £43 billion to £73 billion. The number of new homes being built in England rose by 6 per cent in the three months to June. The United Kingdom has lost more than 40 per cent of its bank and building society branches since 1989, according to a report by Nottingham University. The proportion of candidates achieving A or A* grades at A-level fell a little to 26.3 per cent, from 26.6 per cent in 2012. The overall pass rate rose marginally to 98.1 per cent from 98 per cent. David Cameron, the Prime Minister, told the BBC that he was suffering from a ‘protruding disc’ in his back. Mo Farah won both the 10,000 metre and the 5,000 metre titles at the athletics World Championships in Moscow.

Lord Sacks, on the eve of his retirement as Chief Rabbi, said that he thought ‘the government has not done enough’ to support marriage. Mrs Justice Eleanor King ruled in the High Court that a 36-year-old
man with learning difficulties should have a vasectomy lest he become a father for a second time, which he wishes to avoid. Dave Lee Travis, aged 68, the BBC disc jockey whose broadcasts cheered Aung San Suu Kyi during her detention, was charged with 11 counts of indecent assault and one of sexual assault relating to allegations by nine women then aged between 15 and 29 of incidents between 1977 to 2007. The upper age limit for jurors in England and Wales is to be raised from 70 to 75. Matt McKeown, 52, from Plymouth, achieved a record speed for a supermarket trolley of 70.4mph.

David Miranda, a Brazilian who lives with Glenn Greenwald, a Guardian journalist who has written about security information leaked by Edward Snowden, was held at Heathrow for nine hours, under schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000, which obliges the person detained to ‘give the examining officer any information in his possession which the officer requests’.