Portrait of the Week – 30 July 2005

Four bombers escaped in London when the detonators they used failed to set off explosives they were carrying. The attempts, 14 days after the public transport bombs in London, were made on the No. 26 bus and on Underground trains at Warren Street, Shepherd’s Bush and Oval. A fifth bomb was abandoned at Little Wormwood Scrubs, west London. The next day, police shot dead an innocent Brazilian electrician, Jean Charles de Menezes, at Stockwell Underground station; he received seven bullets in the head and one in the shoulder. Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, said, ‘The important point here is there’s nothing gratuitous in what’s going on; there’s nothing, you know, cavalier here. There’s no conspiracy to shoot people.’ When police made an arrest in Birmingham, they decided not to kill the man but to stun him with a Taser stun gun. Two of the men sought for the bombing attempts had been legally resident in Britain for more than 10 years. Opposition parties supported government plans to pass more repressive laws, but drew the line at imprisoning suspects without charge for three months. Professor Sir Richard Doll, whose research in the 1950s established the link between smoking and lung cancer, died, aged 92. The Institute for Public Policy Research recommended that the state pension age should rise to 67. Every child aged between eight months and four years will receive a bag of books, at a total cost of £27 million, Miss Ruth Kelly, the Secretary of State for Education, announced. Clergy of the Church of England may cohabit under the Civil Partnerships Act when it comes into effect on the eve of St Nicholas’s Day, but only if they refrain from homosexual acts, according to a ‘pastoral statement’ by the House of Bishops of the General Synod.