— Portrait oi the Week— THE TRIAL OPENED in Moscow of
Francis Powers, accused of espionage, who pleaded guilty, and a reprieve was refused for Peter Poole, sentenced to death in Nairobi for the murder of his African houseboy. The popular newspapers made capital out of the anxieties of Mrs. Powers and the grief 01 Mrs. Poole.
MR. LUMUMBA continued to treat Mr. Hammar- skjold and the United Nations forces as Belgian mercenaries, and Mr. HammarskjOld called a meeting of the Security Council at which to air their differences. The Cyprus Republic was pro- claimed, as the Black Watch piped farewell to Sir Hugh Foot, the last Governor, and presented arms to Archbishop Makarios, the first President. In Aden, still—so far—a British possession, the trades union congress called a strike and threatened passive resistance and a boycott of British goods. In Laos, Prince Souvanna Phouma became Prime. Minister‘,. Foreign Minister and Minister of Defence. in place of Tiao Somsanith. and dutifully had second thoughts about the Speaker of theAiouse when Captain Kong Lee, leader of last week's coup (fetal, said that he didn't care for his first Choice. The captain himself said that when things settled down he was going to found a political' party, lobe the only one in the country, and called the Youth Party. Meanwhile. he went back to his military duties, to the dis- appointment of those who had hoped that he was going to proclaim himself King Kong.
THE STRIKE OF SEAMEN continued, under the leadership of the 'Seamen's Reform Movement,' clearly directed as much against the National Union of Seamen as against the shipowners. There Were token strikes by dockers in London, at Avon- mouth and on Merseyside, and by aircraft workers 10 .Belfast. The Cunard Line annbunced that the Britannic would be scrapped at the end Of the season—an end hastened, they said, by the strikes. But the experts Said that strikes had little to do with the drop in exports and the widening of the trade gap shown in the Board of Trade's latest seasonally adjusted figures.
1.11R EIGHTY-TWO-MEMBER disarmament commis- sion met for the first time in eleven months, and the United States offered a cut in atomic weapons and asked for renewed negotiations. The United S.tates also launched the world's first 'radio satel- lite,' from which messages can be, 'bounced,' and recovered the first man-made object to return in- tact from space—a 300 lb. instrument capsule. An American pilot reached 131.000 feet in making the highest man-made flight in history, and another fell sixteen miles from a balloon, the world's record parachute drop. Professor Lovell of Jodrell Bank asked the Russians to put one of his radio telescopes in one of their sputniks, because the Americans couldn't oblige him for years, and said that it was time we had our own satellites to Put his instruments in.
* THE ASSISTANT COMPTROLLER of the Lord Chamberlain's office took a look at the Ballets Africains to decide whether they really were a ballet and outside his province, or.a play in mime, and within, it. They proved to be a ballet, and thus permitted to bare their bosoms, photographs of which duly appeared in the Express, the Mail, the Sketch, the Mirror, the Telegraph, and the 6,uardinn, but not in the Herald, the News
hronide, or the Times.
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