Portrait of the Year

JANUARY Mr Ken Macdonald, the Director of Public Prosecutions, said it was all right to kill burglars ‘honestly and instinctively’. Iraq held elections. Abu Musab al-Zarkawi, the al-Qa’eda leader in Iraq, said, ‘We have declared a fierce war on this evil principle of democracy.’ The numbers killed by the deadly wave that devastated the fringes of the Indian Ocean on Boxing Day 2004 was put at 178,000. Mrs Adriana Iliescu, aged 67, gave birth to a baby girl in Bucharest. China decided to measure Mount Everest, amid reports that it had shrunk by four feet.

FEBRUARY Members of the IRA murdered Robert McCartney, a Catholic, at a Belfast pub, provoking demonstrations by hundreds after his sisters protested. Miss Ellen MacArthur sailed single-handed round the world in 71 days, 14 hours, 18 minutes and 33 seconds; she was made a Dame. Mr Mahmood Abbas, the President of the Palestinian Authority, and Mr Ariel Sharon, the Prime Minister of Israel, declared a ceasefire at a meeting at Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt.