—Portrait of the Week— MR. HEATHCOAT AMORY'S second Budget knocked
twopence a pint off beer, and thus made it cheaper to celebrate the reductions in income tax and purchase tax. Dr. Adenauer agreed to be kicked upstairs into the Presidency of the German Federal Republic. The Dalai Lama reached India safely. Lord Montgomery an- nounced his intention of visiting Moscow, whence Mr. Paul Robeson arrived to become the first Negro to play Othello at Stratford-upon- Avon.
THE CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUER took two
hours and one minute to blue £295 million on tax concessions, and to assure the House of Com- mons that this was not a spending-spree Budget : Mr. Gaitskell welcomed the cuts in taxation, 'such as they are.' Mr. Grimond said that it was a better Budget for pubs than for pensioners, and The Times complained of the indirect tax remis- sions that 'only a beer-drinker can get anything like a fair deal out of it all.' Beer was not, it seemed, a typical top-people tipple.
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DR, ADENAUER, who has been Chancellor of the German Federal Republic ever since there, has been a German Federal Republic—that is to say since 1949—accepted his own Christian Demo- cratic, Party's nomination for the Presidency. It was said that he will certainly be elected in July, that this would mean the end of his active political career, and that the people of Western Germany were thunderstruck—he is only eighty- three. The announcement of Dr. Adenauer's intentions gave greater potential plausibility than had at first been apparent to the announcement from Washington that there were `no serious or fundamental differences' between the •Western powers over negotiations with the Soviet Union. Lord Montgomery said that his visit to Moscow would not make matters worse, that he wanted to talk to 'these people to see what they think about it all,' and that he would be back for the Cup Final.
GENERAL KASSEM, the Prime Minister of Iraq, and his Minister of Economy talked for two hours on Monday with the chief British representative in Iraq of the Iraq Petroleum Company, and Cairo newspapers reported an imperialist plot. The managing director of BOAC accused the United States Government of breaking its promises in refusing permission to BOAC to serve Honolulu and San Francisco. Archbishop Makarios sug- gested to the Governor of Cyprus that the ban on the Cyprus Communist Party should be lifted, and a scientific attaché was appointed to the British Embassy in Moscow.
* JEFFREY HALL, the England and Birmingham City footballer, died on Saturday of poliomyelitis. He was twenty-nine, three years too old for inocula- tion under the National Health Scheme. More People than usual among those who arc eligible applied during the week for inoculation, and it was announced that in some places inoculation dances would be held. A 2,000 lb. bomb that had lain unexploded on the South Bank of the Thames since 1940 or 1941 was taken to Shoeburyness to be blown up, after a corporal had banged on it for some time with a hammer and chisel and not been blown up. A Professor Pidd, of Michigan University, lit an electric light bulb by dipping a rod of enriched uranium, surrounded by cesium gas, into the core of a reactor. The neutron flow activated uranium fission in the centre of the thermocouple while the flow of the reactor coolant outside cooled the cesium gas. People who understood this regarded it as a good thing.
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