Portrait of the week
Bed Guards broke into the British Mission in Peking and burnt it to the ground on Monday, when the -Chinese ultimatum on Hong Kong ex- pired, and Mr Donald Hopson led his men from the ruined building at dawn with a bandage round his head. The Foreign Office in return forbade Chinese diplomats in Britain to leave the country or go farther than five miles from Marble Arch, Mr George Brown decided to come home from Norway and Mr Wilson flew back from the Scillies to see what could be done. Elsewhere two Ameri- can planes which crossed the border by mistake were shot down over Chinese territory.
Meanwhile, East Germans were found moving the German border westward, and there was a plague of ferocious large-winged flies in Naples. Sir Dingle Foot, in a provocative letter to Mr Wilson, resigned as Solicitor-General and was unexpectedly succeeded by Mr A. J. Irvine, while Mr Gunter called for an end to fuss about the means test and sternly told the comrades to 'stop equating profits with incest or lechery.' Britain began to withdraw -from Aden, the Edinburgh Festival opened and • the football season started rather badly with iron -bars flung among spectators and knives drawn. The cricket season ended sourly, too, with England captain Close jeopardising his chance of leading the MCC tour to the West Indies by unsporting behaviour in a county match, for which he was properly censured by the MCC.
Fierce lighting continued in Nigeria between fliafran and Federal troops. As usual, both sides
• claimed to be winning. At home, police combed the country for further gold smugglers and found four rifles and a sub-machine-gun in a farm in Bed- efordshire. Eight Pakistanis, landed by motor=bbat on a lonely beach in Kent, were arrested as illegal immigrants, and Bee Gees fans, marching on White- hall with a one and a half ton elephant named Cada. were tinned back by police.
There were floods in Alaska, more earthquakes in the Pyrenees and the us embassy in London was sprayed with machine-gun bullets by persons unknown. The celebrated Surrey puma turned up --again in Berkshire and a 4,000 year old figurine -was unearthed in Somerset. Foxes were reported settling down in London suburbs, the Duke of Wellington celebrated his eighty-second birthday and Mr E. H. Preston of Tewkesbury won the National Town Criers' championship.
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