Portrait of the Week A (1000 WI ER for President
Sukarno, who cele- brated twenty years of independence on Monday with bonlires of Imperialist Beatle records, and a sudden rift in the Malaysian Federation on Tuesday with fireworks in his capital. Meanwhile, the Prime Ministers of Malaya and Singapore announced their decision to part with mutual regret and the minimum of ill-feeling. 'We will trade to the limit, and even with the Devil, to survive,' said Mr. Lee Kuan Yew, a resolution Mr. Callaghan might have envied.
IHOUCiH IT WAS a black week for Messrs. Bottom- ley and Greenwood, with the Aden talks petering out for pure lack of the will to agree, and Rho- desia as keen to leave the Commonwealth as Singapore to stay in it, it was as bright as it could be for the Chancellor. The trade figures for July were a real treat, or, as the Prime Minis- ter put it, sitting on a sand dune in his sky-blue shorts, 'a welcome slap in the face' for defeatists.
(OWLICTING REPORTS came from another neck of the woods, when more than a thousand plain- clothes Pakistanis crossed what is laughingly called the cease-fire line into Kashmir. Threats of revolution and counter-revolution flew to and fro in Greece and a conflagration in a Titan ll missile-silo in America chilled spines everywhere. The Social Democrats ha.ve a two-point lead for the West German elections, Herr Ulbricht seemed to have embarked on a face-lift for the Berlin Wall, and in London a lift was proposed for the chime of Saint Paul's, and the Berliner Ensemble, opening at the Old Vic, made life pleasant for deprived Brechtians.
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A TWELVE-YEAR-OLD SCHOOLCHRL from South Africa triumphantly claimed a women's world swimming record, and a Russian space lawyer called for a litter campaign to clean up Outer Space. Marble statues of Lords Wellesley and Cornwallis were decapitated in Bombay, and various other reputations suffered, though not from physical attack. Demosthenes was exposed as a liar by a classicist at Cambridge, Harold Philby belatedly lost his OBE, and Al Capone's Son was charged with stealing two bottles of aspirins from a chain store. Malcolm Muggeridge, defending. his liberal faith from charges of cynicism, said. 'I don't know what I want—except that it isn't what I've got.' Patience Strong took a firm line in support of the Clean Up TV Cam- paign, and President Johnson, attempting to quote Robert Lowell, chose some lines from 'Dover -Beach.'
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