Portrait of the Week
BRITAIN'S EXPORTS ROSE to a record high figure, and the trade gap dropped to a record low one. A Government White Paper announced substan- tial improvements in National Assistance pay- ments. Britain, Austria, Denmark, Norway, Portu- gal, Sweden and Switzerland agreed to hold a conference in Stockholm that would bring nearer a 'little free trade area' of the 'outer seven.' The Parliamentary Labour Party agreed with its leader that Britain should accept NATO's American tighter bombers, to which General de Gaulle wouldn't give house-room. France. which wouldn't have the American aeroplanes, looked like not having for some time the use of any French railway trains or buses either.
I HERE WAS A GOOD DEAL Of sunshine and high temperatures. Five people were drowned at the weekend in boating and bathing accidents, but the Brigade of Guards trooped the colour of the 3rd Battalion Coldstream Guards (which is shortly to be disbanded), without a single soldier fainting, or dropping his musket. The Trooping was for the Queen's official birthday, which was also marked by a couple of Tory peerages; knighthoods for Michael Redgrave and Stanley Spencer; and an MBE for Mr. J. B. T. Cowan, senior superinten- dent of prisons in Kenya, which last award turned quite a number of stomachs, as a motion in the House of Commons was designed to make clear. Standard Motors said that their patience was ex- hausted, and sacked a hundred men, working on the new Triumph Herald cars, who had been asking for a lot more money.
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THE OPPOSITION asked for an investigation into the Hola murders: the Government refused, but per- suaded the House deeply to regret the deaths of the eleven men, and to support the remedial and disciplinary action being taken to prevent such things happening again.
VEN PEOPLE WERE KILLED in Kerala, India's only Communist State, when police fired on a crowd' demonstrating against the Government. Thirty-six people were killed in floods in Hong Kong. An Algerian Moslem was shot by members of the FLN at a church door in a Paris suburb, with his French bride on his arm.
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JOHN OSBORNE'S The World of Paul Sliekey came off after a six weeks' run at the Palace Theatre; the Hamlet of Trinity College Oxford's production was sent off for harbouring a private Ophelia in his rooms. The last passenger train ran from Rugby to Leamington Spa, and the train service is to be replaced by more buses. The trains used to take thirty-five minutes; the buses take an hour.
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IN TALLAHASSEE, Florida, an all-white jury con- victed three white men of raping a Negro girl, but recommended them to mercy. The All Blacks arc to be all white: the Ncw Zealand Rugby Football Union finally decided not to include Maoris in the team to visit South Africa next year and said that it was concerned only with the best interests of its Maori players. In California. the voice of a woman talking to a fleet of taxi-cabs by short-wave radio failed to burn the topless towers of Ilium, but succeeded in exploding an American missile in Florida. Reuter reported that `American scientists.' meeting in secret, are understood to have called for international action to prevent a similar inci- dent in future.' Married men, meeting in public houses, are understood to be speculating as to what kind of international action.
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