PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
Killer bookworm MI John Major, the Prime Minister, let it be known that he was 'pretty annoyed' by comments in a forthcoming volume of memoirs by Lady Thatcher, a former prime minister. She had said that he should not resign, despite his errors, because his ideas about Europe were improving. This set the cat among the pigeons in the Government: Mr Michael Heseltine, who likes to call himself the President of the Board of Trade, strongly defended Mr Major; Mr Michael Portillo, the Secretary of State for Employment, praised Lady Thatcher. Meanwhile, Mrs Betty Boothroyd, the Speaker, ruled that Sir Jerry Wiggin, a Conservative MP, need not have his offence referred to the Commons privileges committee if he apologised; he had put down an amendment under another mem- ber's name. The Government outlined pro- posals to limit ownership of newspapers and television channels: for example, a newspaper group, as long as it did not have too many readers, might own two channels as long as not too many people watched them. The nation was cheered by Mr Rupert Murdoch's threatening to sell or close his loss-making newspapers, such as the Times. A Green Paper on identity cards was published. Lloyd's offered compensa- tion of £2.8 thousand million to names who lost money; it also announced losses of £1.2 thousand million for 1992. Lord Wilson, Prime Minister from 1964 to 1970 and 1974- 6, died, aged 79. Geoffrey Dickens the pop- ulist Conservative MP for Littleborough and Saddleworth, died, aged 63. A policeman who had a sex-change operation has applied to rejoin the force as a policewoman.
ISRAEL AGREED to suspend expropria- tion of 130 acres of Palestinian land in east Jerusalem, after Israeli Arab MPs threat- ened to bring down the government. The Bishop of Banja Luka, which is controlled by Bosnian Serbs, went on hunger strike in protest against an outbreak of murders of Catholic priests. The Pope embraced Presi- dent Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic and President Lech Walesa of Poland dur- ing a short tour of eastern Europe. The Aga Khan visited Ismaeli Muslims in the Pamir mountains. Russia continued to kill Chechen rebels. Iran set an artificial exchange rate of 3,000 rials to the Ameri- can dollar, about half the market rate, and threatened to inflict dreadful punishments on currency black-marketeers. The Interna- tional Monetary Fund lent $1.8 thousand million to Algeria. The Right-wing did not do half as well in the Belgian elections as the press had generally predicted. There was not much more Ebola fever in Zaire, but 3,200 have died of meningitis in Niger, and in Mexico there were a few hundred deaths from cholera. Mexico asked the United States if it could take more water from the Rio Bravo on their common bor- der because of a drought. An intruder in the White House grounds was shot and wounded. Sir Patrick Mayhew met Mr Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Fein, the political face of the Irish Republican Army, in Washington. China expressed anger at the United States decision to allow the President of Taiwan to enter America for a college reunion; since 1979 such visits had been refused because the United States recognises China as the sovereign authority over Taiwan. 'The World of Lily Wong', a cartoon strip in the English-language South China Morn- ing Post, published in Hong Kong, was dropped; it had mocked the politicians of China. A surgeon operated on a woman with a collapsed lung at 33,000 feet on a flight from Hong Kong to Britain; he cut a hole in her chest with scissors and pushed a makeshift catheter into her with a coat hanger; brandy was used as an antiseptic and to calm the surgeon afterwards.
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