- Portrait of the Week — THE GOVERNMENT defeated a Labour
Party motion censuring it for its economic policy, but not until Mr. Harold Wilson had described it as 'tired, dis-
credited and caste-ridden boasting of nothing but a certain amount of Edwardian elegance and rather questionable family appointments,' and not until Mr. Maurice Macmillan had said that the country and industry had looked in vain for economic leadership from his father's Govern- ment, thus reminding the House that not all the family has, in fact, been appointed. It was estimated that the new National Health Service contributions and higher charges for prescrip- tions would save the Exchequer more than £70 Million a year. The Chancellor of the Exchequer said that it would be wrong to stimulate home demand, and it was announced that the Bank of England would make it easier for exporting firms to get credits. President Kennedy told Congress how he intended to check the drain on the dollar, and Western Germany offered to give the Americans a helping financial hand. Seven American big businessmen were sentenced to imprisonment for price-fixing, bid-rigging, and other violations of the anti-trust laws.
THE SOUTHERN RHODESIAN constitutional con- ference agreed, unexpectedly, on a new franchise, a constitutional council, and a Bill of Rights. There were riots at Luanda, in Angola, which the Portuguese blamed on Communist agitators, Cap- tain Galvao being a long way away, in Brazil, where he was granted political asylum, but had the liner Santa Maria taken back from him. In Leopoldville, General Mobutu put his army in a state of alert, and at the United Nations the Libyan, Yugoslav, Indonesian and Guinean dele- gates asked for a revised United Nations policy in the Congo.
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THE EGYPTIAN GOVERNMENT released Mr. James Zarb, a British subject, after he had served more than four years of a ten-year sentence for espion- age, and in London the Attorney-General opened the case against *an alleged spy-ring which, he said, was in radio communication with Moscow from the cosy London suburb of Ruislip. Not to be outdone, Mr. John Gollan, general secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain, speaking at a Daily Worker conference in St. Pancras, sug- gested that Mr. Macmillan be tried at the Old Bailey for treason. Police officers of the rank of sergeant and above got a rise in pay of up to £8 a week, backdated to last September.
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THERE WERE AVALANCHES in the Swiss, the French and the Italian Alps, and in the English Lake Dist- rict. In Belgium a slag heap engulfed a village, killing a number of people; and bulldozers were out in New York, to clear the streets of a record snowfall. The new Sunday Telegraph came out, and the almost equally new Weekly Post packed Up. Meanwhile Odhams have been sending out letters to dissuade shareholders from harkening to the Daily Mirror takeover bid.
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IT WAS AGREED by viewers, television critics and leader-writers that nothing in the life of Mr. Danny Blanchflower, a professional footballer, became him like his refusal to take part in 'This is Your Life.' an impertinent and soppy BBC Television programme. A retired woman missionary burned a copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover in the street in Edinburgh : she said that she had not read it fully, but was convinced it was evil. She expressed no gratitude to Penguin Books for putting it into paper covers and so making it easier to burn. A Cheshire railwayman, having won £160,000 on the pools, said that he hoped that his sons, who were deeply religious, would accept their good fortune as God's will.
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