—Portrait of the Week
AFTER COOING IN PARIS like a sucking Picasso dove, and after talking to Mr. Nash in terms as sweet as New Zealand honey, Mr. Khrushchev went to Baku and talked tough again about Berlin. President de Gaulle had no end of a time in Washington and New York, and said that France would remain 'attached to the United States for ever.' Mr. Syngman Rhee, on the other hand, did seem to have resigned from the presi- dency of South Korea, and few South Koreans seemed inclined to urge him to stay. The President of Tunisia warned France against aggressive in- cursions across the Algerian frontier, and the Channel Study Group urged the building of a Channel railway tunnel at a cost of £109 million. Britain, France and Western Germany agreed to co-operate in developing and producing aircraft and guided missiles. Many thousands were killed and injured in an earthquake in South Persia. The United Nations conference on the law of the sea ended in failure : Britain will continue to fish in what Icelanders consider Icelandic waters.
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WHITE SOUTH AFRICANS continued to beat up, round up and lock up black South Africans. Twenty-nine of the accused in the treason trial there instructed their counsel to withdraw from . the case because the new emergency regulations Made a fair trial impossible, and the existence of a press censorship, hitherto denied, was made official. The Malay Government was authorised to express at the Commonwealth Conference its disapproval of South African policies. In Cyprus the editor of a Right-wing paper which opposes Archbishop Makarios was kidnapped, and the talks on the British bases stuttered on.
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THE NATIONAL. UNION of Shop. Distributive and Allied Workers flouted their executive council and general secretary—to say nothing of Mr. Gaitskell —and came out in support of unilateral nuclear disarmament. The TUC finally told the ETU to choose, on pain of suspension, between taking legal action against those who accuse it of ballot- rigging and accepting an independent inquiry into the allegations. There were strikes on the Clyde and at Morris Motors, but involuntary unemploy- ment fell to 1.8 per cent. of the working popula- tion--regarded by experts as the sign of 'an extreme boom.' It was announced that rail fares would go up, and the banks were found to have lent a lot of people a lot mote money, some of it Perhaps for season tickets. The Government pro- duced its Finance Bill—'seventy-three clauses, seven schedules, and eighty pages. and scarcely one of them intelligible at first reading.' observed a Tinter leading article in which it was easy to detect a note of admiration.
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THE QUEEN CONFERRED the Order of Merit on Sir Cyril Flinshelwood and Mr. Graham Suther- land, and the Garter (about which, as Lord Melbourne said, there is `no damned merit') on Lords Radnor and Digby, who are not quite so well known. Plans to establish universities in York and Norwich were approved in principle, and a plan to establish Princess Margaret and Mr. Armstrong-Jones in a grace-and-favour resi- dence at Kensington Palace was announced. The approved souvenir programme gave details of the BBC's arrangements to televise the ceremony, but not of ITV's, and praised the bride's 'ex- cluisite complexion; 'beautiful soprano voice' and perfect natural seat on a horse'; and Mr. Dermot Morrah. a Times leader-writer and Arundel Herald Extraordinary, suggested that `today's ceremony involves the symbolic recognition that Photography as one of the fine arts hase come of age.'
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