Portrait of the week
One of Britain's most famous Angli- cans, Mr John Selwyn Gummer, preached a sermon. He said that church leaders 'can no more pontificate on econ- omics than the Pope could correct Galileo on physics', and accused the leaders of not 'bothering too much about the facts'. The leaders said Mr Gummer had got his facts wrong. The General Synod of the Church of England carried by 307 votes to 183 a resolution calling for legislation to permit the ordaining of women. The Archbishop of Canterbury said he favoured this but didn't want it to be done. Mr Edward du Cann, for 12 years chairman of the 1922 Committee of Conservative backbench MPs, was defeated in an election by Mr Cranley Onslow. Mr Peter Walker made an ostentatiously wet speech. The execu- tive of the National Union of Mineworkers ignored appeals by Mr Roy 'I stand by consultation now as I have done through- out this dispute' Hattersley and others to consult the rank and file, and voted to continue the pit dispute indefinitely. Two more people, this time teenage boys, were killed mining coal from a railway embank- ment. Thousands of miners went back to work, including a senior NUM official in the Durham area, and NUM officials in the North Wales area said they no longer supported the strike, but the Coal Board abandoned its hope that the strike would be over by Christmas. It said that it would have no more talks with the union unless it received a written guarantee that Mr Arthur Scargill was ready to change his utterly intransigent position concerning pit closures. Mr Scargill went to the Russian embassy to ask for money and a blockade of fuel supplies from Eastern Europe. According to Mr Mick McGahey, the miners have received a million pounds from the Soviet Union. Mr Neil Kinnock left for a visit to Moscow. A strike at Austin Rover appeared to be crumbling, many men returning to work. Nearly four billion pounds' worth of shares in British Telecom was offered for sale. The Govern- ment was said to have rejected a costly plan to reduce sulphur emissions from power stations, which are thought to cause acid rain.
president Mitterrand and Colonel Gad-
dafi met in a Cretan holiday resort and agreed that no country should intervene in Chad. President Mubarak of Egypt said that Colonel Gaddafi was lending his help to plots to kill President Mitterrand, Chan- cellor Kohl, King Fahd and Mrs Thatcher. Mrs Thatcher met Dr Garret Fitzgerald at Chequers for an 'Anglo-Irish summit'. They agreed to meet again soon. It was revealed that a log from the submarine HMS Conqueror (which by sending the Belgrano and her crew to Davy Jones's locker helped sweep the Argentine navy from the ocean during the Falklands war, and has already lost one of the logs recording this achievement) ,'had been des- troyed, leaving only one log. Hopes rose that arms control talks between the US and the USSR might resume in the spring. A gas explosion killed hundreds of people in Mexico City. Europeans were told that the EEC wine harvest had produced four billion bottles too many of wine, and that they would therefore have to pay £600 million in subsidies, which works out at roughly 14 pence a bottle. The West German Foreign Minister called off a visit to Poland. At Hamburg, 192 Poles jumped ship.
rr he Princess of Wales named P&O's new liner Royal Princess. It was made in Finland, but the lifeboats are British. The Animal Liberation Front, a secretive organisation whose name suggests an animal membership, claimed as a hoax to have poisoned some Mars bars. It also threatened to break into scientists' homes and smash their fingers. Asiph Moham- med, who was suffering from depression, hacked his feet off with an axe, but Dundee Royal Infirmary sewed them back on again. Promiscuous homosexuals were asked not to give blood, a haemophiliac having died in the Royal Infirmary at Newcastle seven months after being tre- ated with blood plasma infected with Aids. Mrs Victoria Gillick asked the Court of Appeal to stop doctors prescribing the contraceptive pill to under-age, schoolgirls without telling their parents. India's under- 25 cricket team beat England by an innings and 59 runs. Grimsby beat Everton 1-0. Astrid Herrera, a Venezuelan psychology student, became Miss World. A maid from a hotel near Dorking was convicted of taking, among other items, 41 bathroom mugs and 1681b of sugar cubes, which she
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