PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
'Do 1 hear three per cent, four, five, six, seven.....
Britain's balance of payments for May registered a record deficit of £1.2 billion bringing the cumulative deficit so far this year to £4.7 billion. Amid fears of a sharp rise in inflation base rates were increased to 9.5 per cent. At the EEC summit in Hanover Mrs Thatcher faced a concerted campaign to get Britain to join the EMS with the longer-term prospect of the crea- tion of a European central bank, an idea which she publicly rejected. Mr Arthur Scargill urged the Labour leadership to 'throw away their Filofaxes' and 'steer a straight course' for Marxism. He announced that he is supporting Mr Benn in the Labour leadership campaign. Mr David Alton, the SLD MP, called for an end to hostilities with Dr David Owen. The inquiry into the King's Cross fire came to an end, having sat for a total of over 500 hours. Sir John Hermon, chief constable of the RUC, announced that he would retire next year. An Army helicopter had to make a forced landing in South Armagh after it was hit by terrorist gunfire. A bomb planted by the IRA exploded on A school- children's bus. The takeover battle for Rowntree finally ended with the success of the £2.5 billion bid from Nestle. Boscobel in Shropshire, believed by many to contain the oak tree in which the future Charles II took refuge after the battle of Worcester, was reopened to the public. A mammoth production of Verdi's Aida at Earl's Court, with a cast of some 600 performers was bedevilled by mishap: Miss Grace Bumbry in the title role could only manage one act of her first performance due to a throat infection and a sun god fell through a trap door on stage. Monet's Dans la Prairie, painted at Argenteuil in the mid 1870s, fetched £14.3m. Some 10,000 sheep con- taminated by radiation have been lost track of and may already have been eaten.
MR MIKHAIL Gorbachev proposed a shift in executive power from the Party machine to a new national assembly and the 52,000 local soviets, during a three- and-a-half-hour speech to the special national Communist Party conference, the first of its kind since 1941. Suggestions that the KGB be reformed were swept aside. The Soviet Union deployed military units in several towns and cities in the Nagorno Karabakh region where there has recently been much rioting. Some 30,000 people demonstrated in Budapest about plans for drastic agricultural reform in Romania which will affect ethnic Hungarians who live there. China's Protestant Church in- stalled its first two bishops for 33 years, following the lifting of a ban. In the Gulf War Iraq claimed it had retaken the Majnoon Islands, an area rich in oil: President Saddam Hussein declared that final victory was near. According to a television programme due to be screened next month in Britain, Ronald Reagan, while working as an actor in the 1940s and 1950s, was an informer for the FBI. The Pope visited Austria and annoyed Jewish lobbyists by meeting President Waldheim. The Pope was, however, described as 'unsmiling'; he described Nazism as a 'lunatic ideology'. At an air show in France an Airbus A320 crashed into a wood, killing three of its 136 passengers: the pilot, not the plane, became the centre of the investigation. A runaway suburban train in Paris crashed killing more than 50 people at the Gare de Lyon. Ending months of deadlock, farm ministers of the Economic Community concluded a price agreement for the year following a devaluation of the 'green drachma'.
MStJT
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