— Portrait of the Week A ROCKET AIMED AT VENUS
was launched from a Soviet earth satellite, and was expected to arrive in the second half of May, which ought to be a nice time of the year on Venus. The Katanga authorities announced the escape, murder by tribesmen, and burial, of Mr. Lumumba, the deposed Prime Minister of the Congo, and two of his former ministers, and rewarded the village where they had been put to death. The Soviet Government demanded the condemnation of Belgium, the arrest and trial of President Tshombe of Katanga and General Mobutu, and the dismissal of Mr. Hammarskjdld, for the insti- gation of and connivance in 'an international crime.'
THE Observer gave details of the 'violent, acri- monious and fundamental' conflict that broke out between the Russians and the Chinese at the Moscow conference of Communist parties in December, in the course of which, it seems, the Chinese accused Mr. Khrushchev of 'revisionism,' and Mr. Khrushchev said that Mao Tse-tupg was just another Stalin—a rude word in Moscow these days. There was also a bit of a public tiff between Professor Fred Hoyle and Professor Martin Ryle, both of Cambridge, over what the former called the 'fantastically cheap success' of the latter's 'began-with-a-big-bang' theory of an evolving, not a static, universe.
* A WHITE PAPER ON HOUSING offered bigger sub- sidies for local authorities that needed them, and an incentive to others to adopt differential rent schemes. Another White Paper, on defence, told nobody anything they didn't know already. The Opposition, already angry over the Government's NHS policy, was also cross with Sir Gordon rouche, deputy Speaker, for accepting the clo- sure of the debate on it, but could not persuade him to resign. The Prime Minister announced that he would set up a Royal, but small and brisk, Commission on the Press.
* THERE WAS RIOTING in Angola, and high words at the Northern. Rhodesian constitutional talks in London, where Mr. Macleod was accused of Privately letting Sir Roy Welensky know about his constitutional proposals before divulging them to the delegates. More than a quarter of the Conservative Party's MPs tabled a motion that the Government should stick to the 1958 Lennox- Boyd plan for Northern Rhodesia and, in effect, that Mr. Macleod should go slower in Africa.
OR. VERSVOCRD sent South African Security B"anch detectives to London to investigate South Africans there who might cause 'unpleasantness' when he arrived for the Commonwealth Con- ference in March. General John Grombach, United States Army (retired), set detectives on to looking into Lord Exeter's political affiliations and sympathies, because 'he leaned over back- wards to appease both Moscow and the Chinese Reds in connection with the Olympic Games,' but later said that he would take Lord Exeter's word tor it that he was not a Communist.
iltritCHILL COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE, decided to allow women guest4 at high table; the limit on the num- ber of women undergraduates in the University was removed; and a referendum on women's mem- bership of the Union was circulated, Sir Winston Churchill lost his budgerigar, Toby, and Prince Philip shot six gurials in Swat.
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