PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
Studying football hooliganism The Conservatives improved their majority in local government elections in Wandsworth and Westminster, contrary to poll-based predictions, though overall Labour won 300 seats and control of 13 councils including Bradford, another Con- servative flagship. News from Frank Reed, the American hostage released from Beirut, that John McCarthy and Brian Keenan are still alive was greeted by renewed pressure on the Government to help them. Plans to give some Cabinet ministers public relations advisers were abandoned in case it seemed as though they needed them. A mugger stole a briefcase in the City of London containing Treasury Bills and Certificates of Deposit worth £291.9 million. A hippie who mur- dered his five-year-old stepson for being slow to get into his pyjamas was jailed for life. He had previously beaten his border collie to death. The BBC paid £50,000 to Duncan Campbell, investigative journalist, after a television drama which portrayed a man very like him as a cross-dressing kleptomaniac over-attached to his cat. John Gummer, Agriculture Minister, told an audience at Butcher's Hall that the Bible taught that meat was an essential
part of diet. Vegetarians, including the Speaker of the House of Commons, ob- jected. The Governor of Strangeways, Brendan 0' Friel, said the forces of evil were behind the riot at his prison, and that he had been particularly worried during Good Friday the 13th. A Leeds United match against Bournemouth ended with 25 injuries and 80 arrests in the holiday town. Police were assured by the Football League that they would be able to inter- vene in future to move potentially violent fixtures. Cardinal Tomas 0' Fiaich, leader of the Catholic Church in Ireland, died near Lourdes at 66. Nicky McIrvine, 29, on Middle Road, 14, unexpectedly won the Whitbread Trophy at Badminton.
Latvia declared independence from the Soviet Union. Lithuania appealed to France and West Germany to mediate between it and the Soviet Union; and the prime minister, Mrs Prunskiene, came to London. President Bush proposed that the Western allies should lift many restrictions on the sales of high technology equipment to eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The US abandoned plans to modernise nuclear artillery and short-range missiles
based in Germany. The governments of East and West Germany reached agree- ment on the details of monetary union. The tenth anniversary of the death of Marshal Tito in Yugoslavia was marked by Serbian nationalist groups who demons- trated with placards calling him a war criminal. Leaders of the ANC met Presi- dent de Klerk for talks on the future of South Africa. Mrs Mandela's chief body- guard was charged in court with murdering a 14-year-old boy. A civilian handler and an alsatian guard dog disturbed three suspected IRA men planting a bomb near a barracks in Hanover, West Germany.
Racist extremists in Czechoslovakia attacked gypsies, tourists and Vietnamese guest workers, chanting 'Gypsies to the Gas chambers, Keep Bohemia White'. The French National Assembly passed the first reading of a Communist-backed Bill to outlaw all acts of racism and xenophobia. Argentina handed over to West Germany Josef Schwammberger, 78, an alleged war criminal said to have murdered hundreds of Jews. An Australian woman who is said to be allergic to the 20th century gave birth to a baby in the stainless steel room, lined in porcelain, which is her home. SB
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