PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK New spies exposed
Mrs Melita Norwood, a Communist 87-year-old great-grandmother living in Bexleyheath, Kent, was revealed to have spent 40 years, under the code-name Hola, giving nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union; though the authorities have known about this since 1992, she has not been prosecut- ed. The information was given to the secu- rity service by Vasili Mitokhin a KGB archivist who defected in 1992; he also claimed that there had been plans to dis- rupt the investiture of the Prince of Wales in 1969 and to maim Rudolf Nureyev after his own defection. Mr Michael Portillo confirmed that, despite having admitted to `homosexual experiences', at least during his time as an undergraduate at Cam- bridge, he wanted to stand in the by-elec- tion for the seat of Kensington and Chelsea left vacant by the death of Alan Clark. Mrs Clark said her husband had not become a Roman Catholic, but the priest who reportedly received him into the Catholic Church said he had. The headline rate of inflation fell to 1.1 per cent in August, the lowest since July 1963; the underlying rate was down by a tenth of a percentage point to 2.1 per cent. Mr John Taylor, the deputy leader of the Ulster Unionists, withdrew from the talks under Senator George Mitchell reviewing the
Good Friday Agreement. Wellcome, the pharmaceutical company, withdrew from building a planned £100 million science park near Cambridge because of govern- ment reluctance. The High Court prohibit- ed the trustee in the bankruptcy of Jonathan Aitken from selling personal let- ters belonging to him. A woman succeeded in giving birth to triplets even though one of them developed in a Fallopian tube, and thereafter grew in her stomach cavity on the outside of her womb.
MILITIAS backed by Indonesian soldiers burnt and looted the whole of Dili, the capital of East Timor, and drove the peo- ple out, into the countryside or over the border into West Timor. It was not clear how many thousands of civilians had been killed. The United Nations evacuated its staff and 1,000 refugees sheltering in its compound. President Habibie of Indonesia said on television that he would allow in a UN force, which the United Nations Secu- rity Council commissioned with full powers, and Australia offered to lead it. A block of flats in Moscow blew up, killing more than 90; four days later another bomb destroyed another block of flats killing more than 100. The mayor of Moscow ordered all flats to be searched for explosives, and President Boris Yeltsin blamed terrorists; Mr Shamil Basayev, a leader of Chechen Islamic rebels, said it was nothing to do with him. New tremors in Turkey brought down more buildings and killed several people. UN aid workers attempted to move to a camp nearer Monrovia about 5,000 refugees from Sierra Leone, forced from camps in northern Liberia by fighting there. Warriors of the Bokora tribe in north-eastern Uganda massacred 400 old men, women and children of the rival Matheniko tribe and took 2,000 cattle in revenge for an attack a month ago that killed 140. Thousands of government troops in Sri Lanka, backed by aircraft, attacked positions of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in the north-western dis- trict of Mannar, killing about 70. An inter- national conference on Aids was held in Lusaka, Zambia, and heard that 33 million in Africa were infected with the human immuno-deficiency virus. The city authori- ties in New York began spraying pesticide all around to kill mosquitoes carrying encephalitis, which a few people have recently contracted. Alfredo Kraus, the opera tenor, died, aged 71. A woman in Japan died when she broke her skull after falling off her five-inch heels.
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