World Notes ZIMBABWE

Poor Neil Kinnock. Sinking ever lower in the polls, the leader of Britain's Labor Party embarked on an eleven-day goodwill tour of southern Africa designed to lift his ratings. En route from Mozambique to Zimbabwe last week, Kinnock and his entourage landed by mistake at a tiny military airstrip near the Mozambican border. Instead of a welcoming party, the plane was met by Zimbabwean soldiers, armed with Soviet-made AK-47 automatic rifles, who herded Kinnock's 15-member group into a whitewashed hut.

Furious at such treatment, Kinnock traded profanities with a rifle- brandishing lance corporal before joining the others inside. Leaning out of the hut, Kinnock challenged the soldiers to ask the corporal "if he knows who I am," and vowed that "he won't be a lance corporal very long."

The group was released after 90 minutes, and later received an apology from President Robert Mugabe. While Kinnock downplayed the incident, accounts of his failure to display a stiff upper lip provoked chuckles at home.