PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
`I asked Kurt Waldheim for advice on how to deal with our hippy problem.'
Dr David Owen reiterated his belief that Polaris must be replaced, thus des- troying before it was even published an agreement which a joint commission drawn from the two Alliance parties had taken two years to prepare. It said they should delay deciding 'whether and if so how' to replace Polaris. Mr Steel asked: 'If we can't agree before we get into government, how can we agree when we are in govern- ment?' Mrs Shirley Williams said that Dr Owen should compromise. Mr Pat Wall was endorsed as a Labour parliamentary candidate after telling Mr Kinnock that he now has nothing to do with the Militant Tendency, and the press that he and the Militant newspaper are both Marxist, or `good old-fashioned socialist'. Having bal- loted their members, the print unions rejected News International's offer of £50 million in compensation for lost jobs. It was announced that electricity prices would fall by 3.5 per cent. Mr Victor Paige, chairman of the NHS management board, resigned. Other health administrators claimed they had been gagged about the reasons for this, but Mr Norman Fowler, Secretary of State for Social Services, insisted that it was 'business as usual' in the NHS. A judge told the hippie 'peace' convoy to leave the New Forest. The police dispersed the convoy almost at once. Alex- ander Funk, a school caretaker from east London, was jailed for three months for allowing the school to be used for dog- fighting. The RSPCA said it was fighting a `national dog-fighting machine'.
DR KURT Waldheim, standing for a return to 'fairness, morality and Christian values', was elected President of Austria. It is alleged that as an officer in the German Wehrmacht he was responsible for killing Jews in the Balkans during the second world war. Israel withdrew her ambassador. Dr Fred Sinowatz, the Social- ist Chancellor, resigned because Dr Wald- heim's Socialist opponent had done so badly. Serious fighting again broke out in the black Crossroads settlement outside Cape Town, between 'vigilantes', thought to have police backing, and 'comrades'. The Commonwealth's Eminent Persons Group advised that talking to the South African government is useless and recom- mended economic sanctions. In Sri Lanka, time bombs exploded on two crowded buses, killing almost 70 people. In London, Patrick Magee, an IRA man, was con- victed of murdering five people at the 1984 Conservative Conference in Brighton, when the Prime Minister and other mem- bers of the Cabinet narrowly escaped. It was decided that Princess Anne should not go to Peru because it is unsafe, and Mr Mark Thatcher had to move out of his Dallas flat because other residents felt threatened. The Queen made Bob Geldof an honorary Knight of the British Empire' Prince Andrew spoke of his worry that Britain's youth is threatened by pollution'. Oxford City Council appointed a homosexual Cambridge undergraduate to be the first local government officer charged exclusively to deal with Aids. England lost the first Test against India, and Gatting replaced Gower as captain. AJSG
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