Portrait of the week | 28 November 2013

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Alex Salmond, the First Minister of Scotland, outlined Scottish National Party plans for independence, which included keeping the pound and armed forces of 15,000, replacing the BBC with the Scottish Broadcasting Service and introducing random breath tests. The Ministry of Defence said it would investigate claims that in 1972 an Army plainclothes undercover unit shot dead people in Northern Ireland unconnected with paramilitary activity. A bomb containing 132lbs of home-made explosives failed to go off properly in a car parked at Victoria Square in central Belfast. Rape at the hands of under-age perpetrators is seen as ‘normal and inevitable’ among children in some areas, according to the Office of the Children’s Commissioner for England. A poll of 15,000 Britons found that those aged 16-44 were having sexual intercourse fewer than five times a month, compared with more than six times a decade earlier. Frederick Sanger, the biochemist who twice won the Nobel Prize, in 1958 for work on the structure of proteins, and in 1980 for sequencing DNA, died, aged 95.