PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
`No chance of a wrongful arrest is there, officer?'
Mr Michael Portillo, when he was Chief Secretary to the Treasury, wrote a stiff letter to Mr Michael Heseltine, the President of the Board of Trade, according to a leaked copy published in the Guardian. It showed a fundamental difference in poli- tics between them. 'Your report,' he wrote, `relies on the assertion of widespread mar- ket failure, unsubstantiated by evidence. In my view, that is no justification for public spending programmes.' Winston Silcott, a murderer in jail, has been offered £10,000 compensation by the Home Office for being unjustly imprisoned for the murder of PC Keith Blakelock, a crime of which the Appeal Court found him innocent; he said of the award: 'At the end of the day that's a joke.' Lord Archer was cleared of insider dealing. The Independent reduced its price from 50p to 30p. Railway signalmen held a strike over two days in the eighth week of their inaction. Two Turners insured for £29 million were stolen from a Frankfurt gallery where they were on loan. Norwich public library burnt down. Lester Piggott, aged 58, fell spectacularly from Coffee'N Cream at Goodwood, but was not badly hurt. Mr Kelvin McKenzie, the former edi- tor of the Sun, quit his seven-month-old job as managing director of the the satellite television company BSkyB. His employer, Mr Rupert Murdoch, said, 'I wish him a very successful future.' Dorothy Hodgkin, who received the Nobel Prize and the Order of Merit for her work in chemistry, died, aged 84. Anne Shelton, a sweetheart of the forces, died, aged about 70. Robin Cook, who wrote extraordinarily violent crime novels under the name Derek Ray- mond, died, aged 63. Lord Delfont, the the- atrical impresario, died, aged 84. Caitlin Thomas, the widow of Dylan Thomas, died, aged 81. Pubs will be able to open all day on Sundays from next year under Govern- ment plans.
MORE THAN 20,000 soldiers of the defeated Rwandan forces regrouped in refugee camps near Goma in Zaire. They tried to dissuade refugees from returning to Rwanda although thousands continued to die from cholera, dysentery and exhaustion. The United Nations Security Council gave permission to the United States to use all means necessary, including invasion, to restore President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power in Haiti. Bosnian Serbs rejected plans by the contact group of Russia, the United States, Britain, France and Ger- many to share out Bosnian territory. Oil workers in Nigeria entered the fifth week of a strike designed to achieve the release of Chief Moshood Abiola, who was on trial for treason on the grounds that he claims to be the rightful President. The price of a barrel of September Brent crude rose to nearly $19. Trade talks between the United States and Japan broke down. An interna- tional consortium has lent $190 million to a private company in China; new share listings in China were suspended for the rest of the year; Chinese Labour disputes were running at a thousand a month. Germany introduced regulations to curb insider trading. Russia made threatening noises at Chechenia, for- mally independent since 1992, fearing that it is a pool of criminals. Lisa Marie Presley, the daughter of the famous singing star, revealed that she had married, 11 weeks before, Michael Jackson, the famous singing star. A sculpture in the Gaudi Museum in Barcelona fell on a little boy and killed him. A 14-year-old boy from Berzene, in France, set a new record for beret-throwing, achiev- ing a distance of 119 feet.
CSH
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