Portrait of the week
Aprivate Parliamentary Bill which would have required newspapers to print a correction of equal size and prominence whenever it was said that they had printed an inaccurate story, failed. Mr Michael Foot said that the campaign to persuade him to resign as leader of the Labour Party was fabricated by the Daily :Mail, Ithe Times, the Sun and the Daily Express. An inquiry was opened in Whitehall into how documents that recorded possible changes in the Government's policy on family life were leaked to the press. It was reported that among those prominent in planning the new policy was Mr Ferdinand Mount, formerly political correspondent of 'the Spectator.
There were rumours that the Government was considering banning strikes in key ser- vices such as the emergency services, among nurses and medical staff and by gas, water, electricity and nuclear power workers. The water workers' strike was settled, with the unions winning £3 a week more than the £10 offered by the Government. After 30 days most people in the country had still not missed a drop of water as a result of the strike. British Telecom announced that it was bowing to years of pressure and in- troducing, for a six-month trial period, itemised telephone bills. It was explained that one reason they had delayed so long was because they did not wish to cause domestic strife when husband and wife each saw which numbers the other had been telephoning.
Metropolitan police cadets continued to dig up the garden of a house in north London in their search for more bones from the corpses of 13 male bodies. The search so far has yielded various bones and a dental plate. Professor David Bowen, a leading pathologist, started his task of try- ing to reassemble the remains. In Australia bush fires, the worst for 45 years, raged across South Australia and Victoria killing at least 68 people over a front of 750 miles. More than 350,000 farm animals were also lost. Several men were arrested for arson.
In India 600 villagers were massacred in the elections in the state of Assam. The vic- tims were Moslems and the massacres were the worst since those that followed Indian independence. The Commander of the Argentine Army stated that there had been 32 attempted military coups since he had been appointed. A Royal Naval doctor revealed that many of the troops who took Mount Kent in the Falklands had lost all sensation in their feet and that they had had to spend the previous night walking around in figures of eight in order to keep warm enough to fight. A Royal Engineers' sap- per, suffering from love sickness, drove a 40 ton tank across 80 miles of Dorset and Hampshire at 22 mph, pursued by slow moving police cars. Nobody was hurt.
In Mexico the Queen expressed a wish to visit Spain for the first time and the Mex- ican President said that he would do what he could to arrange it. The arrival of the Princess of Wales in Glasgow was greeted with a spate of letter bombs sent by 'the Scottish National Liberation Army'. Princess Anne cancelled a visit to an East London school when she was told that there might be demonstrations against unemploy- ment. Buckingham Palace obtained an in- junction against the Sun and sued for damages in respect of a series of articles about to be published based on the memories of a former royal store keeper. The Greater "London Council abandoned a proposal to give £53,000 to the 'Troops Out' movement which opposes British policy in Northern Ireland. Israel proposed to send a former Irgun terrorist as its next ambassador to London, and the diplomat in question said that opponents of this sug- gestion were discriminating against former terrorists who were Jews. General Ariel Sharon, who recently resigned as Israeli defence minister after being implicated in the Beirut massacres, was reappointed to two important cabinet committees oversee- ing defence and matters in the Lebanon. The Palestine Liberation Organisation an- nounced in Algiers that the borders of a future Palestine state should be the West Bank, the Gaza strip and Jerusalem. In Bournemouth a kidney patient was In- structed to install frosted glass by the town's chief planning officer, after neighbours complained that they could see him lying, fully-clothed, attached to his
`She is not amused.'
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