Ulster Unionist Head Wins Party Vote

David Trimble, leader of the Ulster Unionists, Northern Ireland’s biggest Protestant party, narrowly won a crucial party battle, keeping alive the province’s power-sharing government. Angry that the Irish Republican Army has not begun disarming, Ulster Unionist hard-liners had put forward a motion calling for the party to withdraw from the government, collapsing it, if the IRA doesn’t make a disarmament move by Nov. 30. Trimble defeated the motion by proposing sanctions against the IRA-linked Sinn Fein party, junior coalition partners.