PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
An explosion on the Piper Alpha oil platform off the east coast of Scotland, thought to have been set off by a gas leak, destroyed most of the rig and killed 166 people: Mr Paul 'Red' Adair, now aged 73, was summoned by Occidental Petroleum to the scene of the disaster in order to help put out the fire that continued to burn fiercely on the remains of their platform. Britain announced an arms and air base deal with Saudi Arabia thought to be worth up to £15 billion — the largest ever Western arms deal. The Ministry of De- fence said that an order for three Type 23 anti-submarine frigates had been placed with Yarrow Shipbuilders, providing job security for some 3,800 employees; redun- dancies will now inevitably occur at the Swan Hunter yard on Tyneside. Kirklees council conceded the right of parents to send their children to a school other than one where 85 per cent of the pupils are Asians. After failure to reach agreement between the Treasury and the Department of Education and Science, the Government postponed its plans to reorder students' finances by a system of grants and loans. The Royal Latin Grammar School in Buck- ingham announced that it would be giving up the teaching of Latin. Air Commodore Ferdinand West, the last remaining British VC of the first world war, aged 92, died; as did Mr Jimmy Edwards, the comedian, who won the DFC as an airman in the second.
ON a visit to Poland, Mr Gorbachev proposed pan-European disarmament summit talks, offering to cut Soviet air strength in East Europe in exchange for the reduction of American F16 fighters from Spain and Italy. Ten people were killed and 40 seriously injured when three masked gunmen fired indiscriminately at passengers on a Greek inter-island tour boat. The gunmen, thought to be Arabs, fled in a small boat. President Reagan announced that the US would offer com- pensation to the families of the 290 passen- gers of the civilian Airbus shot down by the US Navy over the Gulf; he said, however, that this did not mean that America accepted any blame for the incident. PLO supporters of Yasser Arafat were driven from their last stronghold in Beirut by dissident Palestinian guerrillas. Several thousand workers forced their way into Yugoslavia's federal parliament building demanding changes in the government's programme. Many Armenian demonstra- tors were reported to have been injured in further clashes with Soviet troops. Prince. Norodom Sihanouk resigned as the head of the resistance coalition meeting in Bang- kok. Although this move came as a sur- prise, the Prince is still regarded as a central figure in the process of negotiations leading up to a meeting in Jakarta later this month of all the parties in the Cambodian conflict. Bitter wrangling followed the presidential election in Mexico where the claims to victory of the 'official candidate', Carlos Salinas de Gortari, were strongly challenged on grounds of electoral fraud. Opposition candidates did well by any count and Mr Salinas conceded that Mex- ico's era of a one-party state — that of the curiously-named Institutional Revolution- ary Party — was over. Mr Dukakis chose Mr Lloyd Bentsen as his running mate for the presidency of the United States. The magazine Forbes published a list of indi- viduals thought to have a personal worth of more than a billion dollars: three of the world's small, but not select, club of billionaires are said to have made their money as cocaine dealers. MStJT
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