PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
TII huff and puff, and I'll blow your house down.'
or the first time in 19 months, the rate of inflation fell: from 8.3 to 8.2 per cent. The annual rate of growth in the economy also fell — by 0.4 per cent to 1.6 per cent — which was taken as a further sign of success in the war against inflation. But the Chancellor said that interest rates would remain at their present levels for some time yet. The Tories, under the generalship of their new chairman, Mr Kenneth Baker, launched a surprise holiday blitzkrieg against Labour's policy review. There were not many casualties. Shares in Wellcome Laboratories increased in value overnight by £1.3 billion, or nearly a third of the company's total worth, on news of the successful trial of its anti-Aids palliative drug, Retrovir. The Monopolies and Mer- gers Commission recommended that trad- ers should be free to charge different prices for cash and credit card sales. A pleasure boat, the Marchioness, which had been hired for a birthday party, was rammed and sunk near Southwark bridge in Lon- don in the early hours of Sunday morning. Some 60 people, including the guest of honour, were thought to have been drowned. A leaking pipeline from Tran- mere on Merseyside to a Shell refinery 12 miles away discharged 150 tonnes of crude oil into the Mersey. Manchester United Football Club was sold to Mr Michael Knighton for £20 million and celebrated the beginning of the football season by beating the league champions, Arsenal, by a score of 4-1. Mr George Adamson, the lion tamer and former husband of Joy, was murdered by Somali bandits near his home in Kenya.
MR Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a journalist and member of the Solidarity movement, be- came the first non-communist prime minis- ter of Poland since the war. As he came out of the presidential palace after meeting with General Jaruzelski, the President, Mr Mazowiecki said: 'I am going into the woods to think.' President Gorbachev said that no solution to Poland's problems was possible without the communists, but the official Soviet newspaper, hvestia, called the development 'natural'. It also criticised the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia 21 years ago. When the Czechs themselves tried to do likewise — during a demonstra- tion in Prague — they were beaten up and arrested. Thousands of East Germans con- verged on the recently opened border between Hungary and Austria: 1,300 of them crossed to the West at the weekend alone. Back in the USSR there was continued unrest owing to nationalist tensions in Azerbaijan and Estonia. In Lebanon a brief, UN-inspired cease-fire ended in renewed fighting between Syrian and Lebanese Christian forces around Beirut. The Syrians attempted to cut the Christians' supply-lines by shelling the port of Jounieh. In Iran Mr Rafsanjani sacked the interior minister who had obli- quely criticised him for being insufficiently immoderate in his hatred of the West but he warned that Western intervention in Lebanon would endanger the lives of the hostages held by the Iranian-backed Hiz- bollah. A Colombian senator and pres- idential candidate, Senor Luis Carlos Galan, was murdered by drug-dealers, an increasingly popular method of death in his country. The Columbian government
rounded up 12,000 suspects. JVB
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