Cable Briefs

Press, 4 December 1978, Page 8

Cable Briefs

Refugees drown The Malaysian police have st>'pended because of bad weather a search for 99 Vietnamese missing from a boat that broke up in heavy: seas off the north-eastern Malaysian coast after it was refused permission to land. The refugee boat with 290 people aboard capsized just 100 metres off a beach near Pasir Puteh, about 80km from the Thai border, and the bodies of 44 Vietnamese! who drowned were, 1 recovered and buried. A; total of 147 survivors from! the boat who managed to reach the shore were given temporary shelter at a camp near the Kelantan state dapital of Kota Bharu. — Kuala Lumpur. Loan to stay The Carter Administration has no intention of deporting a former Vietnamese general whose photographs and television film of summary execution in Saigon of a Vietcong prisoner in 1968 were shown throughout the world, a Justice Department official has said today. “There is no prospect of him being deported,” Terry Adamson, the Justice Department’s director of public information said in an interview about the future of General Nguyen Ngoc Loan. — Washington. Journalists’ strike The National Union of Journalists in Britain has ordered 9000 provincial journalists to strike for higher pay from today. The strike would hit almost every daily and weekly paper in England and Wales, outside of London, and three Belfast dailies. It would be the first national strike by provincial members in the 71-year history of the union. The provincial journalists are seeking a $37-a-week increase from newspaper owners, represented by the Newspaper Society. — London. Evidence inconclusive The United States House of Representatives Assassinations Committee has completed its public inquiry into the killing in April, 1968, of Dr Martin Luther King, Jun., without exposing a clear conspiracy in the assassination of the civil-rights leader. “The evidence tends to paint the outlines of a conspiracy,” Congressman Louis Stokes, the committee’s chairman, said at the end of the final public hearing. But he added in an interview: “I’m not sure, given the passage of time, that we proved conclusively that there was a conspiracy.”.—Washington.