- Portrait of the Week— UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA became
a republic and left the Commonwealth : the three-day strike by non-whites, planned as a protest, was moderately successful in Johannesburg, but fizzled out else- Where. The United Arab Republic .broke off diplo- Matic relations with the new State, but the British High Commissioner there, and his opposite num- ber here, both became ambassadors. President Kennedy arrived in Paris for his talks with Presi- dent de Gaulle, on his way to Vienna for his talks With Mr, Khrushchcv. Before leaving Washington, he commended the Foreign Aid Bill to Congress as the most important single part of his policy for ensuring the nation's security, and his brother, the Attorney-General, said in a broadcast that within thirty or forty years a Negro might well become !resident of the United States—which would make It a mere century and a half or so since Negroes became entitled to run.
MR MACMILLAN EXPLAINED away Mr. Butler's now notorious speech about our Spanish chums, but failed to explain away Mr. Butler. Mr. Macleod, the Colonial Secretary. also had some explaining to do. on behalf of his under-secretary, Mr. Hugh 'eraser, who had said in Kenya that independence wouldn't come about for several years.Therc were unprecedentedly low majorities for the Govern- Ment in two divisions over the North Atlantic Shipping Bill—a number of Conservative back- benchers being less than enthusiastic about the Proposal to give public Money to the Cunard Line to build another big ship while the Cunard used its own money on aircraft. Meanwhile, one of the British ships already in the North Atlantic—the trawler Red Crusader—was fired upon by a frigate for forbidden fishing in the Farocs.
Tip' GENEVA TALKS about Laos continued, and SO did the Pathet Lao military operations, in spite of the supposed cease-fire. The Commonwealth Sec-. retary. Mr. Sandys. flew to Rhodesia at the urgent request of the Southern Rhodesian Prime Minis- ter. during the deadlock that followed the break- down of the constitutional conference in Salis- bury, LORD AMORY was announced as the next British High Commissioner in Canada, and it was generally supposed his job would be to win the Canadians over to the idea of Britain's joining the Common Market. An American supersonic bomber. the B-58. flew from New York to Paris in 3 hours, 19 minutes, 41 seconds, no doubt with a tail wind. At the British Trade Fair in Moscow Vickers-Armstrongs and an associated West Ger- man company got a £4 million order from the Soviet Union for a complete plant for the produc- tion of nylon industrial yarn and tyre cord. The trial opened in Paris of the rebel generals; the prosecution asked for a sentence of life imprison- ment, THE BURNHAM commirrEE reached agreement on higher salaries for teachers, but the annual con- ference of the Civil Service Clerical Association refused to ratify the pay agreement drawn up With the Treasury in December, and it looked as though the civil servants wouldn't get a rise for some time. The threatened strike at John Summers and Sons. of Shotton, who manufacture a third of Britain's output of sheet steel, was called off. The Amalgamated Engineering Union suspended its assistant general secretary, Mr. E. A. Roberts, for an alleged infringement of the union's election rules. The Duke of Edinburgh opened Commonwealth Technical Training Week, pointing out that 'no people can afford to waste the natural aptitudes, brains and skill of its people and expect to develop a reasonable standard of living.' It was announced that Princess Margaret was expecting a baby; and Psidium won the Derby at 66-1.
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