PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
French fish queuing for visas to enter Britain The Government won a vote on new plans for the closure of coal-mines entailing at least the temporary reprieve of 12 pits out of 30 that were to close; four Tory MPs voted against and three abstained. The scheme will cost £500 million. Whips forced two all-night sittings to push through debate on the Maastricht Bill. The chair- man of the committee of the whole house disallowed an amendment on the Social Chapter (No.27) but allowed another (New Clause 75) put forward by Labour. French fishermen seized a Royal Navy patrol boat on a goodwill visit to Cherbourg and burnt the White Ensign while the crew took refuge below decks; earlier three Navy fish- eries protection officers had been abducted as they tried to arrest a French vessel. Guernsey fishermen patched up a truce with their French counterparts, but friction continued. In reaction to the IRA bombing in Warrington 15,000 people protested in Dublin against terrorism; the IRA agreed to meet for talks with Mr Gordon Wilson, whose daughter Marie they murdered in Enniskillen five years ago. Three senior executives of Hoover were sacked when a scandal was exposed in which air tickets to America were offered to customers who bought Hoover appliances. So many people took up the offer that the company could not supply anything like enough seats. Mr Don Tresham, an American who advocates direct action against abortion clinics, was served with a deportation order after appearing on British television. Anthony Trollope was honoured by a memorial in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey, 110 years after his death. The 1 May bank holi- day will be replaced by one in October. Emma Thompson won an Oscar for best actress in her role in Howard's End. Cam- bridge won the Boat race. Mr Paul Foot, the award-winning journalist resigned from the Daily Mirror after the newspaper's edi- tor, Mr David Banks, allegedly said that Mr Foot was 'cracking up'. A Dinky toy Foden flat truck fetched £4,600 at auction.
A UNITED NATIONS convoy evacuated more than 2,000 women and children from the besieged Bosnian town of Srebrenica, but not the ones that had been selected as most in need. Some refugees were killed in the rush for places in the trucks; others died during the arduous journey. The same thing happened in a repeat exercise. As Serbian forces tightened their grip on east- ern Bosnia, Mr Boutros Boutros Ghali, the UN Secretary General, recommended to the Security Council the adoption of the plan for partition of the former Yugoslavia drawn up by Lord Owen and Mr Cyrus Vance, though the Bosnian Serbs had not
agreed to it. Mr Boris Yeltsin survived in office when the Congress of People's Deputies failed to gain a two-thirds majori- ty for his impeachment, but it did overturn some of his decrees. The United States and Britain dropped their stipulation that Sad- dam Hussein should step down before they discontinued sanctions against Iraq. Magis- trates in Palermo accused Mr Giulio Andreotti, the former Christian Democrat prime minister, of involvement with the Mafia. The next Prime Minister of France is to be M. Edouard Balladur following a landslide for the moderate-Right coalition, which gained four-fifths of the seats in the National Assembly; the Socialists were trounced and the National Front and Envi- ronmentalists won no seats. The People's National Party won five-sixths of the seats in the Jamaican elections during which 12 people were killed. There were grenade attacks on Vietnamese in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia; the victims had resort- ed there after massacres of Vietnamese in the countryside. The Gaza strip was sealed off by Israel when stabbings of Israelis by Palestinians continued. The Governor Gen- eral of Australia has ordered the slaughter of 100 kangaroos that hop around the gar- den of Government House in Canberra; they had bred from a dozen released there
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