PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
'I don't blame him, he's only obeying orders.'
Two large, gelatinous tears made their way down the cheeks of Chancellor Kohl when he told a press conference that it would be very wrong of President Reagan to abandon his projected visit to the German war cemetery at Bitburg, which a majority of the US Senate had condemned. The President arrived for the Bonn econo- mic summit determined to carry out the visit, though with as little press coverage as possible. Congress rejected his bill calling for aid to the Nicaraguan contras, but the Administration imposed a trade embargo on Nicaragua instead. The Prince and Princess of Wales visited the Pope, and did not attend, as they had been expected to do, a private celebration of Mass. This was blamed in some circles on the personal intervention of the Queen. The Lebanon continued to fragment: there was fresh fighting across the Green Line in Beirut, while Christians fled in large numbers from the southern coast to the town of Jezzine. The Israelis left Tyre. The Swedish govern- ment which had renounced the use of nuclear weapons in 1958, explained that
the underground explosions involving plutonium that it had carried out in a suburb of Stockholm in 1972 were purely defensive. The further explanation of why it was also making parts for a bomb is awaited with interest. Seventeen thousand gold miners were sacked in South Africa after a prolonged strike. Most were later reinstated. A bomb killed two men in Brussels; another, in Bonn, was defused.
SIR KEITH Joseph announced that the teachers were mad if they thought they would get any more money from the Government. They continued to hold strikes. The Cabinet postponed at the last minute its discussion of the Fowler reviews on social security, which were meant to have been cleared by all the ministers involved. This was widely blamed on a late intervention by Nigel Lawson. The new rules on supplementary benefit, which prevent young people from staying for more than eight weeks in bed and break- fast accommodation, came into operation. Ken Livingstone was at last selected as the
Labour candidate for Brent East. The sitting MP, Reg Freeson, announced he would sue the NEC. The TGWU decided to hold a fresh election for the post of general secretary, though still using branch ballots rather than postal ones. The National Council for Civil Liberties de- cided that a report commissioned on the miners' strike, which asserted that 'the freedom not to take part in a strike is as much a fundamental right as the right to strike', was unacceptable. The team re- sponsible for the report resigned, and the general secretary seemed likely to do so as well. A signalman in Neasden decided his box was too cold one morning, and went home, which entirely disrupted commuter traffic into northern London. Dr David Owen, while out sailing, helped to rescue five naval cadets who had stranded them- selves on a cliff in Dorset. Marje Proops announced: 'There have been numerous instances of eyes meeting across crowded Old Tyme dance halls ending in mating In sheltered housing.' Sir Max Aitken died.
ACB
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