Cable Briefs

Press, 11 July 1979, Page 8

Cable Briefs

Girl ‘dying of age’ A five-year-old girl is dying in a hospital in San Diego of old age, a San Diego Children’s Hospital spokeswoman has said. The girl, Penny Valentine, is wrinkled, has arthritis, cataracts, failing eyesight, and acts much of the time like a senile, old lady. Penny has Cockayne syndrome, an illness with'no cure which speeds the ageing process, and is growing old at 20 times the normal rate. The girl’s present “age” is between 90 and 100. The spokeswoman said the child’s mother had authorised doctors to publicise her daughter’s condition, of which there were only about a dozen recorded cases, in the hope that someone might produce a cure. — San Diego.

A sties charges Bob Astles, the Britishborn aide to the ousted Ugandan dictator. Idi Amin, has been charged with two further offences to add to the murder, armed robbery, and theft of which he has already been accused. Astles arrived at the Kampala Magistrate’s Court handcuffed to a former Ugandan policeman, Charles Tindyebwa. Both pleaded not guilty to the charges of shopbreaking and stealing from a private house. Speaking from the dock Astles said that at the time of the alleged offences he had been engaged in anti-corruption and antismuggling activities. “It now seems that every smuggler I may have approached can make allegations against me,” he said. — Kampala.

Socialists warned Italy’s largest party, the Christian Democrats, has warned the man designated to form the country’s thirtyeighth post-war Government that they will not tolerate an alliance of Communists and Socialists. The warning followed the nomination earlier of the Socialist leader, Bettino Craxi, as Prime Minis-ter-designate in an unexpected development in Italy’s six-month-old political crisis. — Rome. Oil threat The American Ambassador to the United Nations (Mr Andrew Young) expressed doubt about whether the world financial system can cope with the additional economic strains caused by more expensive oil. He told a meeting of the United Nations Economic and Social Council that the existing structure had withstood the heavy strains caused by the quadrupling of oil prices during the 1973 Arab >il embargo against the United States. But he added: “It is not clear at all that the world financial system will be able to deal with the current situation,” and he urged Governments to reach consensus on mutually beneficial i structural change. — Geneva.