PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
Spoilt but valid.
The Prime Minister, Mr John Major, met representatives of other world powers in an attempt to establish a diplomatic plan to stop the fighting in Bosnia. Mr Vitaly Churkin, the Russian deputy foreign minis- ter, Mr Warren Christopher, the United States secretary of state, and Mr Alain Juppe, the French foreign minister, decided with him that it would be nice if the Serbs stopped killing people for the next four months and after that Bosnia should be carved up according to agreed lines. A new round of defence cuts, mysteriously called Front Line First, is intended to get rid of thousands of jobs. Lloyds Bank is to take over the Cheltenham & Gloucester build- ing society. Mrs Frederick West, the wife of a builder from Gloucester, was charged with the murder of a girl and some sexual crimes; her husband has already been charged with the murder of ten women. The popular press has deplorably suggested that they might be guilty. A woman sued her husband for allowing her to fall from a roof where she had been pursuing her 21- month-old son; she was awarded £500,000 damages, recoverable from his insurers. Mr John Butler, aged 34, an unemployed juror
had a can of KL high-strength lager wrest- ed from his grasp by a judge at Croydon Crown Court on the fifth day of a trial for indecent assault and was committed to the cells for the day; he said: 'I just felt like a drink in the early morning and must have had a drop too much.' The Princess Royal is to be invested into the Order of the Garter. The Prince of Wales lost his dog, Pooh. A man was shot dead and 16 shot in the legs by the Irish Republican Army in Belfast. Dr Graham Leonard, the former Bishop of London, became a Catholic and was ordained a priest by Cardinal Hume in his private chapel.
SOUTH AFRICA went to the polls for the first time under universal suffrage. Bombs killed 21 people and injured dozens before voting began; they were thought to be the work of right-wingers. The United Nations declined to sanction the bombing of Serb positions when Serbian forces were tardy in observing an ultimatum to withdraw from Gorazde, where they had killed more than 700 people by bombardment. As the Serbs withdrew eventually they set houses on fire and blew up a water-treatment plant. A new exclusion zone of 20 kilome- tres was set up round Gorazde and the UN said that Nato aeroplanes really would be deployed this time if the Serbs didn't behave. Ten people survived the crash of a Taiwanese Airbus in Japan which killed 261. Mr Li Peng, the Prime Minister of China, was given a stallion when he visited Kirghistan. Mr Tsutomu Hata became the Prime Minister of Japan; the Socialists immediately announced they were leaving the coalition he heads. Aldrich Ames, who is accused of selling American secrets to Russia, did a deal with his prosecutors to avoid possible death for him and embarrassment for the Central Intelligence Agency. Soldiers in Haiti killed more than 20 villagers in an area loyal to the deposed president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The right-wing Arena candidate won the presi- dential elections in El Salvador; General Umberto Ortega offered his resig- nation as head of the Nicaraguan armed forces in an effort to mend hostilities between Left and Right. President Richard Milhous Nixon died, aged 81.
CSH
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