— Portrait of the Week— THE AMERICAN FORD MOTOR COMPANY, which
al- ready owned half the share capital of its British subsidiary at Dagenham, offered more than £130 million for the rest of the shares—and absolute Ownership and control. A lot of economic patriots Were very cross, and a number of speculators made quite a lot of moneys Meanwhile; two-thirds of the British Motor Corporation's labour force Was on short time 'because,' said the management, of the deteriorating situation in the car industry,' and 1,100 car workers were dismissed by the Pressed Steel Company at Swindon, where unem- ployment was more widespread than at any time since the hungry Thirties.
*
PRESIDENT NGO DINH DIEM put down the attempted Coup d'etat in South Vietnam. Four Negro chil- dren were admitted to elementary schools in New Orleans and a hundred white children walked out; Other white adolescents rioted; the Stile Legisla- ture sacked the school governors who had let the 'liners in (they were six-year-old girls) and a ,Negro parent observed that 'these guys are damn bad losers.' Armistice celebrations in Algiers turned into a pitched battle between • police and nationalists, and in Paris the trial by military court continued of twenty Right-wing participants in last January's insurrection in Algiers. United Nations troops in Katanga were taught how to ci,ea! with wounds inflicted by poisoned arrows. The engagement was announced of Princess Astrid of Norway to a Mr. Johan Martin Ferner, Probably the first old boy of Bradford Technical College to become betrothed to a princess.
* HOARD OF TRADE FIGURES for October showed that exports were the lowest for any month this year, and below the monthly average for two years Past; the Board put much of this down to shin- ning delays caused by the Port of London strike by tally clerks. Mr. George Brown, a Right-wing supporter of Mr. Gaitskell, was elected deputy
leader of the Parliamentary Labour Party, in Preference to Mr. Fred Lee, a Left-wing sup- porter of Mr. Wilson. Mr. C. F. Cobbold an- nounced his resignation as Governor of the Bank of England. and Lord Cromer-was appointed in
hts Place, which seemed to surprise a lot of nesple, but nobody more than the leader-writer wbo observed in the Times that 'there is no posi-
tive reason for crediting him with the knowledge of the wider aspects of currency and credit, or of
the wider economic and industrial issues, which many People would like a Governor of the Bank to have.'
* k WHITE PAPER gave details of a reorganisation of the Territorial Army, which will reduce its numbers from 300,000 to about 190,000, but will leave unintegratcd, after all, the London Irish. who had been in some danger of being amalga- mated with the London English. There were out- breaks of fowl pest which led to the slaughter of 325.000 birds, and an epidemic of foot-and- mouth disease resulting in 18.000 animals being destroyed.
THE ADVISORY COUNCIL on the Treatment of Offenders unanimously rejected the idea' of re- introducing judicial corporal punishment in a report which was calculated to convince all think- ing People, but .not the Tory back-benchers. An hour or so after a boy of eighteen and a young Man of twenty-three had been hanged for capital murder—as' a deterrent, it was thought, and not Pour encourager les autres--a bank guard was shot dead, in the course of a bank robbery, after Which two men of twenty and a boy of sixteen Were charged with murder, and a girl of eighteen With receiving.
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