The Week
The Shah of Persia has warned that his country may be facing a 'Vietnam situation' and has been purchasing arms in enormous quantities. It is not yet clear who the other competitors are in the arms race.
East German frontier guards shot an Italian lorry driver who turned out to have been a Communist Party member. Such incidents have brought relations between the two Germanies to their unfriendliest since mutual recognition in November 1972. The East German newspaper Neues Deutschland says that permission may no longer be given for West Germans to visit relatives in the East.
Mexican diplomats in Oslo have been canvassing and distributing leaflets in support of President Luis Echeverria Alvarez's candidacy for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Eight French Catholic intellectuals added support to the appeals of priests (and Auberon Waugh in last week's Spectator) against the papal suspension of Mgr Marcel Lefebvre, who intends to celebrate the Tridentine Mass.
Rhodesian troops struck at a rebel base over the border in Mozambique, as American troops in South Vietnam used to strike into Cambodia and Laos.
The Prime Minister warned us twice not to waste money. Hundreds of lesser officials warned us not to waste water. In the latest round of the legal fight between Sir James Goldsmith and Private Eye, editor Richard I ngrams was fined £250 for contempt of court but escaped going to prison, where he might have met John Stonehouse MP, just sentenced to seven years, whose last act before disappearing abroad had been to sue Private Eye.
Another MP, Gerard Fitt, the Social Democratic and Labour Party member for Belfast West, took a pistol to hold off a mob of the Provisional IRA who had broken into his home in the constituency, The attack came after a meeting addressed by the Provo harridan Mrs Maire Drumm, who was subsequently arrested.
Another MP, Geoffrey Sedgemore (Labour), complained that the tycoon Roland 'Tiny' Rowlands, had made a 'threatening' telephone call to his wife following criticism concerning his company. Lonrho.
English Jews boycotted the Dorchester Hotel because it had been bought by Arabs. And the head of Scotland Yard's new hotel intelligence unit reported that thefts had reached a new peak—without regard, presumably, to the victim's religion.
Swine flu was ruled out as the mysterY disease that is killing American Legion members who had attended their annual convention in Philadelphia. Professor Ton That Tung, a Vietnamese expert on defoliation poison used by the Americans in the recent war, told the Italian newspaper L'Unita that if a marked increase in cancer of the liver is noted in the area north of Milan, this will probably be due to the effect of dioxin released from a factory at Seveso. A British chemical expert K. D. Crow told The Times that Professor Tung was con' fusing Tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin with Trichlorophenoxyacetic.
The stars were in the news as the American Viking I space craft sent more snabs from Mars, and the British government revealed having spent £750,000 on a radio telescope that was never built. The number of Post Office executives earning a fivefigure salary rose to 347 compared with sixty-two last year and a mere two in 1974' which may'explain why the Post Office cannot afford a Sunday collection of letters. New Zealand's All Black rugby team, whose tour of South Africa had upset the Olympic Games, lost the first Test to the Springboks. Black South Africans, wh°, always support the visiting team, continuen rioting in Soweto and other townships. The dramaturge Kenneth Tynan announced plans for another sex play; als° that he is going. to live in America. GO" speed him.
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