PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
Not waving but drowning.
Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, tried to prod his Cabinet into forgoing a £16,000 pay rise next year; one Cabinet min- ister said that it was all right for Mr Blair, whose wife earns a good salary, 'But what about the rest of us?' Mr David Trimble, the leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, agreed to take part in political talks in the same room as Mr Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Fein, the political face of the Irish Republican Army, but he declared his aim as exposing the IRA and having Sinn Fein expelled from the talks. The Welsh voted by a majority of only 6,721 for an assembly without powers to impose income tax. Mr John Prescott, the Secretary of State for Environment, Transport and the Regions, said that referendums, promised in the Labour party manifesto, to decide if regions of England should have their own elected governments would not be held during this Parliament; 'But nobody can doubt the momentum has started,' he commented. Mr William Hague, the leader of the Opposi- tion, invited all Conservative party members to vote not only for his continuance as their leader but at the same time for some unde- fined changes in the running of the party; these, Mr Hague said, were based on 'six basic principles: unity, decentralisation, democracy, involvement, integrity and openness'. Mr Alan Clark, the Conservative member for Kensington and Chelsea, said that this meant the whole party was being asked 'to confer a blank cheque on a small coterie of management consultants to pro- ceed as they think fit'. A train from Swansea bound for Paddington crashed into an empty goods train at Southall, Middlesex, killing six and injuring 160; its automatic warning system, intended to draw attention to signals at red, was said to have been logged as out of order at Cardiff. Viscount Tonypandy, who, as Mr George Thomas, was Speaker of the House of Commons from 1976 to 1983, has died, aged 88.
LUCILLE McLauchlan, was sentenced by a Saudi court to a flogging and eight years' imprisonment on charges related to the murder of Yvonne Gilford, an Australian nurse. In Algeria 200 were massacred on the outskirts of Algiers, one of the largest single atrocities recently blamed on Islamic extremists. In the United Arab Emirates, a woman who had paid £430 for a newborn baby demanded her money back on finding it deformed and denounced the mother to the police, who arrested her for adultery. A coalition dominated by the Solidarity Elec- tion Action party won the biggest block of votes in the Polish elections, with 34 per cent, ousting the Democratic Left Alliance (with 27 per cent) which is made up of for- mer Communists and has run the country for the past four years. In the Serbian elec- tions, the Socialist bloc, led by Mr Slobodan Milosevic, won about 40 per cent of the seats in parliament and is likely to form a coalition with the even more vehemently nationalist Radical Party. Judge Feargus Blackie adjourned the trial of the former president of Zimbabwe, Mr Canaan Banana, on 11 charges of sodomy and homosexual assault after a submission by the defence that a fair trial was impossible because of pre-trial publicity and hostility toward homosexuals in the country. Mr Koko Sato, the head of the Management and Co-ordination Agency of the Japanese government, resigned from the Cabinet after 11 days because of controversy over his conviction in 1986 for taking bribes. The computer on the Mir space station failed again, disrupting its generation of solar power. Forest fires raged in an area of Indonesia the size of England, pouring smoke over Kuala Lumpur in neighbouring Malaysia and driving its citizens to put on masks. Surgeons sewed back on the scalp and face of a woman in New Zealand whose hair had been caught in milking-parlour
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