—Portrait of the Week— HIE BIRTHDAY of the Prince of
Peace was cele- brated.One hundred and twenty-seven people were killed on the roads of Britain, and 525 in road accidents in the United States. A United Nations spokesman alleged that Rhodesia had supplied Katanga with heavy mortars, and the men to fire them. Egypt broke with the Yemen; tension in- creased in Kuwait, and British servicemen and an aircraft-carrier were ordered to stand by. Thirty- one people were killed in Algeria where the promised Christmas truce was broken by OAS, and fifty-one died when a terrorist bomb exploded in Bogota. In Italy sixty-nine people were killed in a train crash, and disaster struck a BEA Comet over Ankara, killing twenty-eight passengers. A parcel labelled 'Sherry' blew up in the hands of a company director in King's Langley, and rob- bers slashed open twenty-five mail bags on the Perth Express, getting away with thirty registered packets, one of them containing a thousand- pound brooch. A third of a ton of Brighton rock was seized by the Health Department as being allegedly unfit for human consumption, and the cries of four people trapped all night in a lift at Leeds were answered by only one passer-by, who said, 'What can I do?' and walked away. Acrimony, mutual recrimination and the accustomed deadlock,' was the Guardian's description of how the talks between Equity and the independent television companies ended: so the Equity strike continued, and between 250 and 500 actors and actresses drew on strike funds. In Birmingham a pedestrian was knocked down on a Pedestrian-crossing by a pedestrian. The Katanga Cabinet refused to endorse the pact signed by Mr. Tshombe; the six Common Market countries failed to agree on an agricultural policy; and President Kennedy and Mr. Macmillan agreed that preparations should be made for renewing atmospheric nuclear tests, probably on Christmas Island.
* ON THE OTHER HAND, a Czechoslovak family of six escaped through deep snow and over barbed wire into Western Germany, and President Ken- nedy and Mr. Macmillan agreed to reopen nego- tiations with the Soviet Union over the question of Berlin. The 125-mile-an-hour cyclone 'Beryl,' which had scared the daylights out of everyone In Mauritius, caused no casualties and no damage. A man of seventy-nine bicycled from Richmond to Hyde Park to take part in the Christmas Day swimming race in the Serpentine in which twenty- eight competitors dived into water one degree above freezing. Czechoslovakia swapped three German generals who had been in gaol there Since the war for two Czech secret-service agents imprisoned by the German Federal Republic, and the Japanese Government talked about lending £23,000 to Kenya's umbrella-menders and donkey- cart manufacturers. A Cape Town magistrate called Solomon declared parking-meters ultra THE POPE, in his Christmas message to the world, appealed to 'those who control the economic forces' to 'risk everything—but not the peace of the world and the lives of men—to seek every Means that modern progress has put at their disposal to increase the welfare and security of the world, and not to sow distrust and mutual suspicion.' The Queen, in her Christmas message to the Commonwealth, said that things wouldn't get any better 'if young people merely express I themselves by indifference or by revulsion against what they regard as an out-of-date order of things' * MR. FRANK RICHARDS, the creator of Billy Bunter, died at the age of eighty-six, and it was announced that the Duchess of Kent would have a baby in the summer.
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