PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
An attempt was made, with the help of an obscure procedural device, to revive Enoch Powell's Bill banning experiments on human embryos. It was defeated after Dennis Skinner discovered a procedure even more obscure and more effective. The Government announced a cautious expansion of Stansted Airport, and pay awards for nurses, doctors, dentists and the Services which were all in breach of its own guidelines on public sector pay. The coun- cillors of Lambeth, who still have not set a rate, were threatened with surcharges by the district auditor. Twenty-five prisoners convicted of spying for the West, most of them German, were exchanged for four Eastern Europeans in Berlin, but the prisons thus emptied seemed likely to be filled by other means. The trial opened at the Old Bailey of six aircraftsmen and a soldier from the GCHQ base in Cyprus. All were accused of betraying 'sackfuls' of secrets to a foreign power, presumably Russia. It was alleged that the leader of the ring had been sodomised by two Arabs and then blackmailed into recruiting others by the same method. A public high school for homosexual teenagers was opened in a • Methodist church in Greenwich Village. It was suggested that the spy ring recently uncovered by the FBI, which involved, among others, a former 'Sailor of the month' on USS Nimitz, had told the Russians a great deal about methods of detecting nuclear submarines. Mehmet Ali Agca told a court in Rome that the KGB had paid £900,000 to finance the plot to assassinate the Pope. President Reagan announced that he would continue to observe the terms of the Salt II treaty. France detonated another device at Murur- oa Atoll.
JUST before the Israelis formally left the Lebanon, their clients in the SLA kidnap- ped 23 Finns from the Unifil force, and threatened to shoot them all unless Amal returned 11 Phalangist prisoners. Amal in turn demanded that the Israelis release some of their prisoners. The stalemate continued. In an attempt to limit the Lebanese civil war to the Lebanon, Fifa banned all English football clubs inde- finitely from playing abroad. The Belgian minister of sport said steps might be taken to extradite 37 Liverpool fans from Britain to face serious criminal charges in connec- tion with the Brussels riot. Bob Geldof, a popular singer, announced plans for two gigantic concerts to raise money for the victims of the Ethiopian famine. A Belgian diplomat was arrested in New York and charged with attempting to smuggle heroin worth $44 million: a Syrian diplomat was expelled, after the intervention of the Queen, from London after squatting for three years in a flat in Kensington after the lease ran out. A corpse which may or may not be that of Dr Josef Mengele was exhumed in Brazil. Mengele's son announced that he had concealed the knowledge of his father's death since 1979 'out of consideration for the people who were in contact with him. . . . All victims and their relatives have our deepest sym- pathy.' A Catholic priest in Poland was jailed for a year for resisting the removal of crucifixes from the walls of a local school. Mats Wilander and Chris Evert Lloyd won the singles in the French Open Cham- pionship. Barry McGuigan beat Eusebio Pedroza to win the World featherweight boxing championship. The manager of a West German football team was granted a divorce from his wife after he found her in bed (on three separate occasions) with the centre-forward, goal-keeper, and a mid- field dynamo; she later admitted ravishing the whole of the first team and most of the
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