PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
Ninety-five people, more than half of them under the age of 20, were crushed to death during a football match at the Hillsborough stadium in Sheffield. Fixed steel fences, designed to stop hooligans invading the pitch, trapped Liverpool fans in an overcrowded area. The Home Secret- ary signalled the end of standing terraces at main football clubs. The police were blamed for opening gates to let the crowds in. Police blamed fans for bad behaviour. Senior judges avoided a confrontation with the Government by postponing a meeting that threatened to disrupt the work of the courts; Lord Hai!sham accused the Gov- ernment of 'thinking with its bottom' over its Green Papers to reform the legal profession. An IRA bomb hidden in a van killed a young shop-worker and wounded over 30 others when it exploded without warning outside the RUC station at War- renpoint, Co Down. Mr Paul Anthony Kane, who escaped from the Maze prison six years ago, became the third IRA member to be extradited from the Irish Republic since 1984. The rate of inflation rose to 7.9 per cent; Treasury officials said that this was consistent with the Chancel- lor's view that inflation will peak at eight
per cent. As part of the delicate legal ballet over the Bill to end the National Dock Labour Scheme Mr Ron Todd, general secretary of the TGWU, told dock em- ployers to begin 'meaningful negotiations'. Labour announced that it will take back British Telecom and the water industry into public ownership if it wins power at the next general election. The Royal Col- lege of General Practitioners rejected the Health Secretary's White Paper on reform of the NHS.
AS a Warsaw court restored Solidarity's legal status, President Bush announced a $1 billion aid plan for Poland. Battles raged in the streets of Beirut as artillery and rocket exchanges between Christian and Muslim fighters reached a new peak of savagery; among those killed in the indis- criminate bombardment was the Spanish ambassador to Lebanon. More deaths were reported from Israel as troops opened fire on Palestinian protesters. In Uruguay a 1986 law which prohibits investigations into past human rights abuses was narrowly upheld at a national referendum. The leadership of the Communist Party in Georgia was purged following nationalist riots in Soviet Georgia that left 19 people dead. Geliy Ryabov, a Soviet writer of popular thrillers, claimed that he had found the remains of the Russian royal family, executed in 1918, including a skull said to be that of Tsar Nicholas II. Presi- dent Bush agreed a general outline for reducing the American federal budget deficit to the 1990 target of $100 billion. The speaker of the House of Representa- tives, Mr Jim Wright, was formally accused of 69 possible violations of rules governing outside income and acceptance of gifts. Shintaro Abe, the Japanese politician thought most likely to take over from Mr Takeshita if he were forced to resign, became himself implicated in the Recruit Cosmos scandal. American scientists using a new type of linear accelerator produced for the first time the elusive Z particle, considered to be a key to understanding the fundamental laws of nature. Sugar Ray Robinson, the celebrated boxer, Abbie Hoffman, the American `Yippie' leader of the late 1960s protest movement against the Vietnam War, and Hu Yaobang, the deposed former general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, died. MSLIT
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