PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
A small minority spoiling it for all the others.
Mr Robert Maclennan, MP for Caith- ness and Sutherland, a barrister, became the new leader of the SDP. There were no other nominations for the position recently vacated by Dr David Owen. At their conference in Portsmouth the SDP con- firmed that they would go ahead with negotiations with the Liberals in the hope of forming a new political party early next year. Both the Conservatives and the Labour parties had representatives in Port- smouth trying to woo dissatisfied dele- gates. Special Branch detectives believed that they had foiled a plot to assassinate Mr Tom King, the Northern Ireland Secretary. Three people were held under the Preven- tion of Terrorism Act after police had noticed suspicious goings-on near Mr King's farmhouse in Wiltshire. Sir Ian MacGregor, former Chairman of British Steel and the National Coal Board, failed to be elected to the British Gas Board after its Chairman, Sir Denis Rooke had ex- pressed his displeasure with the proposal. The Notting Hill Carnival ended in vio- lence when angry youths fought running battles with police. Police said that 250 crimes had been reported to them during the two-day festival. One man was stabbed to death. Head teachers warned the Gov- ernment that Mr Kenneth Baker's plans to reform schools could run into major trou- ble from the teaching profession. The Metropolitan Police announced that, fol- lowing the Hungerford massacre, it will issue no new licences for semi-automatic rifles and carbines, pending new Home Office guidelines on gun-ownership. A pair of 12-bore sporting guns, ordered by the Duke of Windsor the day before he met Mrs Wallis Simpson, fetched a record £42,900 at auction.
PRESIDENT Aquino of the Philippines defeated an attempted military coup by bombing the headquarters of the armed forces. The coup was led by Colonel Gregorio Honasan, who helped install her as President 18 months ago, and was the fifth such attempt since the revolution which bought her to power. In the Gulf the Iranians fired on a Kuwaiti freighter near the Straits of Hormuz in response to newly-resumed Iraqi attacks on their ves- sels. Chancellor Helmut Kohl announced that the West German government would not stand in the way of the withdrawal of 72 Pershing missiles based in his country as long as the United States and the Soviet Union reached an agreement on medium and short-ranged nuclear missiles in Europe by the end of this year. In South Africa an explosion in a gold-mine shaft trapped 64 miners underground. They were all feared dead. A Thai Airways jet plunged into the sea off the island of Phuket while trying to avoid a collision with another airliner. All 83 people on board were killed. A former secretary to five West German presidents was found guilty of treason and sentenced to eight years in prison for passing on secrets to her lover, a KGB agent. The Canadian runner, Ben Johnson, set a new world record for the 100 metre sprint of 9.83 seconds, at the World Athletics Championships in Rome. In South Korea typhoon Dinah killed 33 people. The Israeli cabinet voted to halt development of its own Lavi jet fighter, which was to have been their main adv- anced combat aircraft for the 1990s. The film director John Huston, the actor Lee Marvin, and the humorous writer George
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