PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
Tackling violence Mr Tony Worthington private mem- ber's Right of Reply Bill was killed off in the House of Commons; the Government announced a review of the conduct of the press, saying that editors and publishers were now 'on probation'. Facing the possi- bility of defeat at Westminster the intro- duction of the football membership identi- ty card scheme was delayed. Nineteen Tory rebels voted against the Govern- ment's refusal to link the annual uprating of child benefit to the rate of inflation. Trade figures for March, revealed on Wednesday, were much better than those for January and February, with the deficit on visible goods standing at £1.69 billion. Figures for the first quarter of the year from the building societies showed that mortgage lending was down by 25 per cent when compared with the same period for 1988. Three Ulster 'loyalists' were arrested in France when they tried to sell parts of a Blowpipe surface-to-air missile stolen from a Territorial Army base in Co Down to a South African diplomat. Greatly against the wishes of Mr Bill Jordan, its president, the national committee of the Amalga- mated Engineering Union voted down merger talks with the electricians' union, the EEPTU. Journalists and technicians at the BBC held a 24-hour strike as part of their pay claim campaign. Lord Whitelaw disclosed in his memoirs that Mrs Thatcher `can be infuriating' and that he 'would never dream of going to stay with her'. Daphne du Maurier, the celebrated au- thor, died at the age of 81. An asteroid weighing some 400 million tons and travell- ing at 50,000 mph passed within half a million miles of the Earth — a 'near miss' according to astronomers.
SENIOR West German ministers went to Washington to explain Bonn's reluctance about the proposed modernisation of short-range nuclear missiles in Europe. Mr Bush apparently spent 20 minutes talking to Mrs Thatcher on the telephone in anxiety about this. The US Defense Secret- ary, Mr Dick Cheney, proposed cutting $7 billion from the 'star wars' programme so beloved by former President Reagan; he also announced that production of the B-2 'Stealth Bomber' would be pushed back. The Recruit Cosmos financial scandal finally caught up with the Japanese prime minister, Noburo Takeshita, who resigned. His political secretary committed suicide. Following the death of the deposed Chinese Communist leader Hu Yaobang, tens of thousands of protesters calling for more democracy defied government bans in Peking and other cities. The Soviet Academy of Sciences announced the elec- tion of Andrei Sakharov as one of their deputies to the new national congress. The death toll in the current round of fighting in Beirut rose to 300 with 1,000 wounded. Rioting over price rises spread through Jordan, forcing the resignation of the prime minister, Zaid Rifai. A gun-turret blew up on a US battleship first launched in 1942, the Iowa, killing 47 sailors. Soviet authorities admitted that poison gas had been used during the recent riots in Geor- gia. Scuffles marked the centenary of Adolf Hitler's birth in Braunau, his home town in Austria. Herbert von Karajan announced his resignation as chief conduc- tor of the Berlin Philharmonic orchestra. A bottle of Margaux 1784 which had be- longed to Thomas Jefferson was broken by a waiter in New York. It was said to have
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