PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
`I want you to nip over to Berlin,
bomb the Bundesbank and nip back again.'
Interest rates rose by 5 per cent; earlier Mr Major had cancelled at the last moment a visit to Expo 91 in Seville, because of the exchange rate crisis. Norman Lamont. the Chancellor, proposed pay increases of between 2 and 3 per cent in the public sec- tor next year. A woman friend of Mr Mel- lor's, Mona Bauwens. told a libel jury that he would sometimes drop in to her Mayfair flat for 'a cup of tea'. She said she had also paid air fares and lodging hills for the Mel- lor family on holiday in Marhella. She was suing the People for linking her to Palestini- an politics. Homosexual relations among judges and lawyers in Scotland were blamed for miscarriages of justice in a police report. The Lord Advocate, Lord Rodger of Earlsferry, ordered a review of five cases. Scientists disagreed over whether traces found on the hands of the Maguire Seven were really nitroglycerine. The re-examination was made by a commit- tee established by the May inquiry, charged with looking into the evidence that led to the imprisonment of members of the family in 1976. Their convictions were quashed on appeal last year. Unspecified new evidence on the case of the Birmingham Six was also claimed by a Sunday newspaper. Up to 100,000 people may he able to appeal against drink-driving convictions after one case showed that there was a loophole in the way many charges were framed. David Alton said that he would not stand again as a Liberal Democrat after the party's con- ference passed a motion making support for abortion part of its policy. Kevin Maxwell, the bankrupt businessman, visited an Oxfordshire Job Centre. Neo-Nazis and so-called 'anti-fascists' clashed outside Waterloo Station in London; there were 44 arrests and thousands of travellers were delayed. Nigel Mansell, the Formula One world champion, resigned from his team, Williams, over contractual difficulties. Tak- ing his cue from David Gower he said: `To say that I have been badly treated, I think, is a gross understatement.'
GERMANY, in response to international pressure, reduced its Lombard interest rate, but only by a quarter of a percentage point. This was generally seen as the least that the Bundesbank could do; but support- ers of the Maastricht Treaty nevertheless announced that it would rally the yes vote in the French referendum on the subject this Sunday. The lira was effectively deval-
ued by 7 per cent. In response to the Ger- man move, the pound fell to its lowest yet: Sweden cut its overnight interest rate from 75 per cent to 20 per cent. then put it hack again. M. Jacques Delors called upon Britain and other EEC countries to respond to German generosity by helping to give food, lodging and work to thousands of refugees now flooding into GermanY. Inflation in Russia during the first week of September alone reached 4.4 per cent. Thousands died in Pakistan as floodwaters swept towards the sea. Ahimael Guznui, the leader of the Sender() Luminoso Maoist terrorists, was arrested in Peru. President Fujimori called him 'a diabolical gerini • Yugoslav peace talks in Geneva were in disarray as Sarajevo came under renewed heavy shelling, though a Bosnian delegation promised to attend in the near future. The talks had been set up after Lord Owen and Mr Cyrus Vance visited Sarajevo. Britain pledged 1,800 troops to patrol Bosnia.Troops from New Guinea killed two people in a raid on a village in the Solomon Islands as part of action against separatists of the Bougainville Revolutionary Army, Anthony Perkins, the star of Psycho, died of
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