16 MARCH 1985, Page 3

Portrait of the week

president Chernenko died at last, and

was succeeded by Mikhail Gorbachev with Andrei Gromyko as second in com- mand. It was announced that President Chernenko had suffered from emphysema and cirrhosis of the liver, amongst other things. President Reagan emerged from his annual check-up with a small growth in his bottom. The Geneva arms talks resumed. Lech Walesa was once more summoned to the prosecutor's office in Gdansk. The Israeli withdrawal from Southern Lebanon became even bloodier. Among the more spectacular slaughters of the week were a car bomb explosion in Shi'ite district of Beirut, which killed at least 60 people; a suicide attack on an Israeli truck just inside Lebanon which killed 12 soldiers; and a retaliatory raid on a Shi'ite village in which at least 30 people were killed. The Shi'ite militias threatened to raid inside Israel once the frontier was re-established. The Gulf War, too, entered a nastier phase in which hundreds of civilians were killed: both Baghdad and Teheran suffered air raids; as did numerous towns along the frontier. Basra was shelled; and the Iraqis claimed to have hit another tanker. The President of Greece, Constantine Kara- manlis, resigned in protest against constitu- tional changes. In Germany there was a resurgence of terrorism with an anti-British flavour. An attempt was made to assasin- ate Air Marshal Patrick Hine on an auto- bahn, and bombs went off outside the offices of mining companies, apparently to punish them for selling coal to Britain during the strike.

The strike itself finally collapsed even in Kent and Scotland, and the recrimina- tions began. Mick McGahey was set upon and badly beaten outside his home by two unidentified assailants; Mr MacGregor said of the sacked miners, that: 'People are now discovering the price of insubordina- tion . . . and boy, are we going to make it stick!' The Nottinghamshire miners attempted to sack their pro-strike general secretary, Henry Richardson. Unemploy- ment rose by 20,000 to settle at 13 per cent exactly. The Labour Party's other great defiance of the Government, over rate- capping, fizzled out. First the ILEA, and then the other affected authorities, finishing at the very last minute with the GLC, set legal rates. The Sizewell inquiry ended after 26 months. Channel 4 was allowed to show its documentary about MI5's unwarranted interest in other peo- ple's telephone calls; a 'middle-ranking MI5 operative' was committed for trial at the Old Bailey on rape charges; a new chief of the service was appointed. Peter Hogg, an airline pilot, was sentenced to three years in jail for murdering his prom- iscuously unfaithful wife Margaret, in 1976, and dumping her corpse in Wastwa- ter, where it remained for 7 years until found by police divers looking for someone else. In the meantime, Mr Hogg had divorced Margaret on grounds of deser- tion, so he was sentenced to a further twelve months for making false statements. A baby which had spent part of its early life as a frozen embryo was born in Manches- ter. A five-year-old Australian girl was given a heart-lung transplant at Harefield hospital. Her father has been charged with robbing a hamburger restaurant in Mel- bourne to raise money for the operation. Mr Robert Woodruff, responsible for the growth of Coca Cola company, died. So did Thomas Creighton, a car mechanic from Arizona, with the unenviable distinc- tion of having had three hearts, two human and one artificial, transplanted into him in