PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
The Bank Holiday was sunny and, except in High Holborn, pleasant. There the ubiquitous Mr Tariq Ali led demonstrators who protested against the power of Herr Axel Springer over the German press: twenty-one people were arrested. This was an echo of another demon- stration, in Berlin, where police hosed students and someone threw a stone which hit a photo- grapher and killed him.
The nation returned to find that London Bridge had been sold to the United States for a million pounds. McCullough Corporation, of Lake Havasu City, Arizona, will put the bridge across the Colorado River there. As a further national economy, the Government announced that Britain would withdraw from EIDO, the European joint venture into space rocketry. Two sets of decimal coins—of five new pence, equal to a shilling, and ten new pence, a florin —were shown to reporters and later retrieved from them: they come into currency on Tuesday. In Greece the approaching first anni- yersary of the revolution was marked by the subjection of two former Prime Ministers, Mr Papandreou and Mr Kanellopoulos, to house- arrest. In Chicago, Major Daley gave police orders to shoot arsonists on sight.
President Johnson, garlanded in Honolulu —his popularity, said the polls, had risen sharply since his decision to retire—was work- ing on his plans for peacemaking in 'Vietnam. From Hanoi came a statement doubting the sincerity of his intentions, and around Khe Sanh fighting flared up again. News of fighting farther north—in three separate provinces of China—was giVen to Peking from wall-posters. Among the Chinese government's difficulties was to decide whether it governed 800 million people or merely 700 million: a recount has been called for.
Anxiety over the use of automatic level crossings was heightened when a car, stalled. on a crossing near Gainsborough, was struck by an express train and five people were killed. A similar accident two months earlier at Hixon, Staffordshire, derailed a train and killed eleven people. The chairman of British Rail- ways said that, in view of the information he had been given, 'a reappraisal of the problem may be necessary.' Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir John Salmond died, and so did Sir Myles Wyatt, chairman of British United Air- ways, and Miss Edna Ferber, who wrote Giant and Showboat: The head of Pancho Villa was reported missing from his grave at Chihuahua, Mexico. Manchester United were a short head in front of Leeds United, Manchester qty and Liverpool as a keil2 race for the Footba'l LeagUe championship neared its end. Mr Marlon Brando has given up the prinCi. pal part in a new film so that he can work for the civil rights movement in the United States: he was said to be 'devastated' by the murder of Martin Luther King. The 1,300 dustmen of Memphis, Tennessee, in whose cause Dr King was working when he was killed, have won their claim for union recog- nition and an increase in pay equivalent to £2 lOs a week.
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