PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
Film of an alien that visited Earth will be shown on television Mr Michael Portillo, the Secretary of State for Defence, flew to Washington and pleaded for the United States legisla- ture not to lift the embargo on supplies of arms to Bosnia. Hanson, the Anglo-Amer- ican conglomerate, made an agreed bid of £2.5 billion for Eastern, an electricity company; it was the third bid for an elec- tricity company in three weeks. Two little boys were murdered in one place and a little girl in another. Two parents applied to a court to have the life of their blind and deaf son terminated. Two people with Down's syndrome succeeded in marrying despite opposition from the father of one of them. Mr David Alton, the Liberal Democrat member for Mossley Hill, said that he would not be standing in the next election because of a trend in his party towards 'technocratic politics greased by vested interests', with activists calling for euthanasia and the banning of goldfish being given as funfair prizes. An unmar- ried mother was made parish priest of a Church of England parish in Wiltshire; her son is 23. Experiments with tolls on motorways are to begin on the M3. The weather continued hot, with the third hottest July this century in some parts. More than 20,000 houses in Halifax had their water cut off when a pump failed. Dominic Cork got a hat-trick in the fourth Test against the West Indies, at Old Traf- ford, which England won.
CROATIAN forces fought Serbs in Kraji- na, the area theoretically straddling Bosnia and Serbia near Bihac; Croatian Serbs, the Bosnian government forces and the army of Fikret Abdic, an independent Muslim general, also took part in the fighting. Mr Franjo Tudjman, the Presi- dent of Croatia, rejected a deal proposed by the United Nations intended to stop war between Croatia and Serbia. The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation promised to bomb assailants of the Unit- ed Nations-declared safe areas. Mr Andrei Kozyrev, the Russian foreign min- ister, expressed deep disapproval of Croa- tian mobilisation. President Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia called upon General Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb comman- der, and President Alija Izetbegovic of Bosnia to make peace. In the United States the House of Representatives fol- lowed the Senate in voting for a revocation of the arms embargo against Bosnia; but President Bill Clinton said he wanted to veto it, and in any case it would take weeks to come into operation. Russia and Chechen rebels announced a ceasefire. In Nigeria a secret tribunal which sentenced 40 people last month, possibly to death, was said to have been active again. China reiter- ated its claim over the Spratly Islands, but said it was willing to abide by international law; the islands are also claimed by Taiwan, Brunei, Vietnam, the Philippines and Malaysia. Cosmo, the biggest credit union in Tokyo, collapsed after customers with- drew £430 million, some 15 per cent of its deposits, in one day. Walt Disney is to pay £12,000 million for a company called Cap- ital Cities/ABC, in a move to create the world's biggest entertainment company. Westinghouse took over CBS with a bid of £3.4 billion. The United States Senate voted to cut off $10 million from the Unit- ed Nations until its staff in New York paid millions of dollars of parking penalties and restaurant bills that are outstanding. The United States announced it would take 20,000 fewer refugees than the 110,000 it took last year. People in Peking were asked to pay £400 to register their dogs and prove they were within a permit- ted size; this led many poor people to sell their dogs to restaurants. CSH
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