PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
n IRA bomb murdered Ian Gow, MP, chairman of the Conservative back- bench Northern Ireland Committee, at his home in Sussex; the Prime Minister attended a service in his memory. A siege at Tokyo Joe's, a night club in central London, ended when a gunman surren- dered after holding 101 hostage. At one point in the siege he had swapped two hostages in return for smoked salmon sandwiches. Mr Wakeham, the Energy Secretary, denied that he had offered Lord Hanson a £15 million sweetener for the purchase of PowerGen, which produces 30 per cent of Britain's electricity. National Power announced that 5,000 jobs are to go, while PowerGen will lose 1,000. ICI is to withdraw from the fertiliser business, los- ing 640 jobs. Sir James Miskin, Recorder of London, retired saying that the decision to free the Guildford Four was mad. Lord Mackay, Lord Chancellor, said he believes juries may be reaching the wrong verdicts because they do not understand the argu- ments. A survey of 16-year-olds in ttAe Home Counties showed that standards'''of spelling have dropped in five years: three quarters could not spell the word commit- tee. The Labour party is to suggest state funding for major political parties. A man was jailed for three years for the attempted rape of his wife, who had left the marital home. Graham Gooch broke a series of records with a two-innings total of 456 runs against India at Lord's. A Japanese elec- tronics group bought ICL, Britain's biggest computer manufacturer. The Vice- Chancellor of the University of Strathclyde suggested that contraceptive ingredients should be added to cereals in order to prevent a world population explosion.
FOLLOWING the visit of Francis Maude, then Foreign Office minister to Peking, it was disclosed that China would refuse to recognise the 225,000 British passports to be issued to Hong Kong Chinese before 1997. In Hong Kong five members of the colony's first political party were fined for demonstrating with loud-hailers. A coup was attempted in Trinidad and Tobago by a Muslim group backed by Libya, who took prisoner the prime minister, Ray Robinson (who was later released) and 40 others. Nelson Mandela, deputy president of the African National Congress, rejected claims that a communist plot planned the overthrow of the South African govern- ment by force. Aids became the leading cause of death for women aged 20 to 40 in major cities in America, Western Europe and sub-Saharan Africa, according to the
World Health Organisation. The former head of East Germany's secret police was arrested on suspicion of helping West German terrorists. Boris Yeltsin, President of the Russian Republic, demanded emergency action to help farmers distri- bute the grain harvest and prevent catas- trophe. Food and fuel supplies from Mos- cow to Georgia were cut off in response to protests from nationalists who blocked a railway line near Tbilisi. Israel's science minister said that his country needed che- mical weapons as a deterrent to Iraq. President Castro of Cuba accused Presi- dent Bush of having a sick obsession with plotting his downfall. The Progressive opposition party used pictures of Genghis Khan to attract voters in Mongolia's first free elections, won by the reformed Com- munist party. Charles Taylor claimed pre- maturely that he had taken control of Liberia from President Doe, whose troops were accused of the massacre of 600 civilians sheltering in a church. A man was rescued from the ruins of a hotel in the Philippines after having been buried for 14 days by an earthquake. A commando group of French farmers poisoned 94 En- glish sheep with insecticide as part of a campaign to stop imports.
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