Portrait of the Week – 7 August 2004

Thirteen men of Asian appearance in their twenties and thirties were arrested by police investigating terrorism; the arrests were in north-west London; Bushey, Hertfordshire; Luton, Bedfordshire and Blackburn, Lancashire. Separate plans by al-Qa’eda terrorists to attack buildings in Britain were discovered after arrests in Pakistan, but the Home Office said no more than: ‘We are maintaining a state of heightened readiness.’ Mr David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, came up with the idea of a new law to force paedophiles to take lie-detector tests when asked if they had been in contact with children after being released from prison. Mr Mark Palios resigned as chief executive of the Football Association over the handling of reports that he had had an affair with a secretary employed by the association with whom Mr Sven-Goran Eriksson was also said to have had an affair. The Most Revd David Hope, the Archbishop of York, announced his resignation, and plans to become the incumbent of a parish at Ilkley, West Yorkshire. The owners of the Alton Towers entertainment park in Staffordshire were ordered by a judge to reduce the noise of screaming from passengers on a ride called Oblivion that sends them plunging 195ft at 68 mph; local residents had complained. A 33-year-old woman was evicted from her council flat in Birmingham and given an antisocial behaviour order banning her from possessing a hi-fi, radio or television after playing Eminem and Dido very loudly. Experiments in Morayshire showed that acid rain had the beneficial effect of suppressing methane production by bacteria in peat bogs. Francis Crick, one of the men who discovered the double helix structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, died, aged 88. Eastern England was swamped with millions of hoverflies, the larvae of which feed on aphids. The consumption of potatoes fell by 4.5 per cent in Britain last year, a government survey showed, as eating fads took against carbohydrates.