PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
Law and order ARoyal Navy minesweeper appeared off the Blackpool coast, signalling the exceptional security measures being taken to protect the Prime Minister during the Conservative Party conference, which opened on Tuesday. A number of leading Tories made the usual pre-conference coded messages of dissent. Mr Leon Brit- = said that the Government should appear to be more caring, whilst the modest Mr Peter Walker said the Govern- ment should appear less arrogant. Mr Keith Best, the former Conservative MP found guilty of making dishonest multiple applications in the 1985 public offering of shares in British Telecom was given a four-month prison sentence at Southwark Crown Court, which was quashed by the Court of Appeal. Mr Best was fined £4,500, probably more than his illicit pro- fits from the operation. The TSB is buying Hill Samuel, the troubled merchant bank for £777m, possibly with the help of capital supplied by more recent new share issue multiple applicants. Shares in the Quest Group were suspended following a hoax announcement to the Stock Exchange that the company had won a £40m contract in the Soviet Union. The British Medical Journal published research showing that cases of childhood leukaemia and cancer in Seascale, the village next to the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant, are ten times more frequent than the national average. Sir Peter Medawar, the winner of the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1960, has died. So have Sir Geoffrey Jackson, • who as British ambassador in Uruguay was kid- napped by Tuparmaros guerrillas in 1971, and Commissioner Catherine Bramwell Booth, the 104-year-old granddaughter of the founder of the Salvation Army. A pioneer of the microchip, Mr James Mor- gan, who left the electronics rat-race to run Britain's most isolated railway station, in the West Highlands, has lost his job. It is to be taken over by a robot.
IN Lhasa, Tibet, armed police blocked all main roads out of the city, during the most serious anti-Chinese unrest in Tibet for over a decade. Up to 19 deaths have been reported in the rioting, which followed the visit to Washington and London by the Dalai Lama. Mr Mikhail Gorbachev con- ceded for the first time that the Soviet government is facing widespread public opposition to plans to scrap the existing price control system by the start of the next Five Year Plan, in 1991. But in Washing- ton, Mr Nigel Lawson called for a break with the system of free floating exchange rates established in 1973, and for a move to a permanent system of managed exchange rates. In a further echo from the past Mr James Baker, the US Treasury Secretary, said that the gold price should be included in a new inflation indicator. A large earthquake rocked Los Angeles and a wide area of southern California. It struck dur- ing the morning rush hour, and many motorways were closed. A hundred people were injured and 36 suffered heart attacks. Ford bought Hertz, the car hire company, for $2.3 billion. In Johannesburg, South Africa, a surrogate grandmother gave birth to triplets. She had been implanted with her daughter's ova, which had been fertil- ised by her son-in-law. The copyright on Proust's A la recherehe du temps perdu expired on Monday. Jean Anouilh, the playright, died. Colonel Sitiveni Rabuka, the leader of the coup in Fiji, declared Fiji
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