PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
A 12-week-old Boeing 737 broke into pieces as it attempted to make an emergen- cy landing at the East Midlands Airport. The aircraft was flying from London to Belfast and the accident cost 44 lives of the 126 on board. The prospect of Britain's largest takeover battle loomed as two sets of consortia, one led by Plessey and the other by the American company General Electric, began to stalk Lord Weinstock's GEC. The Plessey group, headed by Sir John Cuckney, will be investigated by the Office of Fair Trading. The Government appointed Mr Eric Hammond, the leader of the electricians' union recently expelled from the TUC, to the National Economic Development Council, the last forum where ministers, employers and unions discuss the economy. The American bank, Chase Manhattan, made 135 of its City staff redundant and announced that it would no longer deal in shares in London. Mr Rupert Murdoch's News International won control of the Collins publishing house in a deal worth £403 million. The annual figures for payments under the public lending right agreement showed that books by the writer Catherine Cookson accounted for more than a third of the 100 most borrowed books from British librar- ies. Miss Judit Polgar, the 12-year-old Hungarian chess prodigy, won the Hast- ings Challengers' chess tournament, ahead of four active male grandmasters.
AMERICAN F-14s shot down two Libyan fighter planes in international waters 127 miles north of Tobruk. In Libya journalists were taken to inspect the installation that the United States has said is a chemical weapons' factory; it was, however, far too dark for the observers to see anything of importance. At an international confer- ence in Paris on banning chemical arms the Soviet Union announced that it would begin destroying its stockpile of chemical weapons without waiting for a treaty. Emperor Hirohito, who ascended the Chrysanthemum Throne of Japan in 1926 with divine status, died aged 87. He was succeeded by his son, the Crown Prince Akihito, the 125th emperor. Amid protests from British war veterans it was announced that the Duke of Edinburgh (who was present at the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay in 1945) would attend the funeral. In what may be the last curtain call for `Reaganomics' the outgoing President of the United States proposed a $1.15 trillion budget for the next fiscal year. The inde- pendent prosecutor in the Iran-Contra case in the United States moved that the central charges against Oliver North, the former White House national security aide, should be dropped due to insurmountable prob- lems with the use of classified information. In India two Sikhs convicted of murdering the former Prime Minister, Mrs Indira Ghandi, in 1984 were executed. Mr Eugene Terreblanche, leader of the white supremacist Afrikanef Resistance Move- ment in South Africa, was accused of drunkenness and extra-marital affairs after he was involved in a scandal with a former model, Miss Jani Allan. Idi Amin, the former dictator of Uganda, was detained at Kinshasa airport after arriving in Zaire on a false passport. Some 100,000 Portuguese citizens of Macao (80 per cent of whom are Chinese) will be issued with EEC pass- ports; 650 Hong Kong civil servants who applied for British citizenship for loyal service to the Crown were told that they had been turned down. MStJT
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