PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
mr Salman Rushdie made what appeared to be a partial 'apology' for what he called the 'genuine distress' caused to `sincere Muslims' by his book The Satanic Verses; the Ayatollah Khomeini, however, brushed it aside and said that Muslims must ensure that the author is 'sent to hell'. The 12 foreign ministers of the European Community condemned this 'incitement to murder' and agreed to recall their ambas- sadors from Teheran. The returning Brit- ish chargé d'affaires said he had been assured that the row would not affect the fate of the imprisoned Englishman, Mr Roger Cooper. The Iranian chargé d'af- faires in London was 'invited to leave' Britain. A soldier with an unloaded rifle confronted two armed IRA bombers found at night within the grounds of army bar- racks near Shrewsbury; he alerted 50 of his sleeping comrades minutes before their quarters were blown to pieces. The 30th successive monthly fall in unemployment figures saw the total below two million for the first time since 1980. The rate of inflation reached 7.5 per cent, the figure that the Chancellor of the Exchequer said he was expecting only by the middle of this year. British Rail accepted full responsibil- ity for the rail crash at Clapham last December caused by a signal malfunction, which led to the death of 35 people. A Gallup opinion poll showed that the Con- servative lead had fallen to 1.5 per cent. The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Lane, attack- ed the Lord Chancellor's plans to reform the legal system as 'one of the most sinister documents ever to emanate from Govern- ment'. Mr John Browne unexpectedly won a new lease of life for his Privacy Bill in Parliament. MPs from Westminster and the Dail agreed the structure of an inter- parliamentary body to discuss matters of common concern. In a bitter battle at the Victoria and Albert Museum Mr John Mallett, one of the keepers forced to leave by the new Director, Mrs Elizabeth Esteve-Coll, said he was going with the `sincerest contempt' for her and the trus- tees.
MRS Winnie Mandela fell from grace with almost all South African anti-apartheid organisations as two of her young hangers- on (known as the Mandela United Football Club) were charged with the murder of a teenager. A personal appeal from Mr Gorbachev to President Bush to seek help in achieving a peaceful settlement in Afghanistan fell on stony ground in Washington where the US policy of supr plying arms to rebel forces continued unchanged. An international scientific study of the ozone layer above the Arctic showed that depletion levels were 50 times higher than previously thought. The US and the European Community stepped back from the brink of their hormone- injected beef war by agreeing to send the dispute to an impartial panel. Progress appeared to have been made in the talks in Poland between the Communist author- ities and Solidarity. Mr Vaclav Havel, the Czechoslovak playwright, was jailed for nine months on charges of incitement and obstructing a public official. Mr Eduard Shevardnadze, began the first Soviet Mid- dle East initiative for some years with a round of 'shuttle diplomacy'. Mr James Bond, the distinguished American ornitho- logist whose name was 'borrowed' by the author Ian Fleming for his fictional British secret agent, died. MStJT
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