— Portrait of the Week— AT THE COMMUNIST PARTY CONGRESS in
Moscow Mr. Khrushchev announced that the Soviet Union would explode a 50-megaton bomb, the biggest yet, and that there was one twice as big in the cupboard. He also said that he wouldn't insist on a time-limit for the signing of a German Peace treaty if the West showed what he called willing. In its main leading article, the Daily Express hailed Mr Khrushchev's speech as an important and welcome contribution to maintain- ing peace,' and proof of his strength, courage and willingness to negotiate. The article didn't men- tion the bomb at all. But, as if to give Daily Express readers an idea of the paper's wisdom in foreign affairs, the next one referred to Lord Avon (Sir Anthony Eden) as 'having been proved right by events' in the Middle East, which 'demonstrated the wisdom of the policy on Suez, which Lord Avon launched but was not allowed to fulfil.' A meeting of senior diplomatists of the four Western powers, to discuss the question of Berlin, planned to have been held in London, had to be cancelled because of French opposition.
THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY CONFERENCE came to an end, and Parliament reassembled—recalled early by agreement between Government and Opposition to discuss foreign affairs. Unlike the Daily Express, Mr. Gaitskell thought that the resumption of nuclear tests meant that 'the hopes of peace had perceptibly dimmed.' In the Lords, on the other hand, Lord Home (the Foreign Secretary) seemed more hopeful. Rootes, who Make motor-cars, sacked 8,000 workers who had been rendered idle by an unofficial strike of a thousand workers in one of the group's subsidi- aries. A Ministry of Labour intervention in the dispute between the Steel Company of Wales and some of its workers was unsuccessful, and more than 15,000 steel workers were laid off. Mr. Selwyn Lloyd told the Conservative Party Con- ference that the Government was bent on making great changes in the machinery of arbitration.
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TSIIOMBE OF KATANGA failed to hand over his United Nations prisoners (most of them Irish), as promised, and Dr. Conor O'Brien, United Nations representative in Katanga, said that the cease-fire agreement was therefore in abeyance. An independent committee of inquiry ',members of the International Commission of Jurists, among them Mr. Gerald Gardiner) con- 1,11rined Tunisian allegations that atrocities had "een committed by French parachute troops in lbhe Bizerta fighting in July: these were denied
the French Government, and some members
°,1. the International Commission, among them 'Ord Shawcross, dissociated themselves from the report because there had been no communication for the French Government, nor any request '"r French official comment. One French news- Paper that printed a long summary of the report, and an atrocity story of its own, was first con- ['seated and then censored.
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svAs ANNOUNCED by an American producer that he was going to put the Duke of Windsor on television in an autobiographical series: he ,10Ped to get other members of the Royal Family `" itake part. The Daily Mail announced that r,
three lee Birendra of Nepal was one of the last .oree in the Eton junior steeplechase, that the
harajah of Jodhpur came in 510th, and that Is,wnnee Richard of Gloucester missed the senior steeplechase, but didn't say who were the winners: it was thought that they must have been com- moners. lei's, Somebody stole the platform sign from railway station at LlanfairpwIlgwyngyllgo- g!rYehwyrndrobwIlllantysiliogogogoch. An an- "'shed father in Atlanta, Georgia, suing his mother-In-law for having given his sixteen-month- (31,01(1. ,daughter vodka in her tomato juice, asked damages' of a million dollars on the !founds that the mother-in-law had shares in a vodka distillery.
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