Cable briefs

Press, 20 April 1981, Page 6

Cable briefs

Skydivers survive | Fifteen people were killed and four skydivers para- | chuted 2400 m to safety at the week-end when a twin-engine commuter airplane and a smaller craft collided in clear, calm weather near the Loveland Airport in Colorado. Four men on the smaller plane, which carried skydivers from a parachute centre, bailed out after the collision and floated to the ground. Two skydivers were killed apparently as they attempted to jump from the crippled aircraft, and all 13 aboard the commuter- plane were killed. Federal aviation authorities are investigating the collision. — Loveland. - Target missed " The Soviet Union has am nounced economic targets had been overfulfilled so far this year in many key areas including oil production, but indicated that over-all industrial growth was well below target. An official report issued by the Central Statistical Board and published in the Soviet Government newspaper, “Izvestia,?. said industrial growth was 3.1 per cent up on the first three months of last year, well short of the annual growth target of 4.1 per cent. — Moscow. Gun law backed Americans continue to favour licensing owners of hand-guns, but they do not think stricter gun-control laws would have prevented the recent assassination attempt aimed at President Reagan, an Associated PressN.B.C. news poll says. The public splits almost' evenly on whether stricter gun-con-trol laws would reduce the number of murders in the United States. But by a wide margin, they say such laws would, not keep guns out of the hands of criminals. Interestingly, even gun owners favour tougher licensing laws. — New York. Shroud 'not fraud' Scientists who have studied the Shroud of Turin, believed by many to have . been the burial cloth of Jesus Christ, have concluded the image on the cloth is not a painted fraud, one of the experts has said. Samuel Pellicori, an optical physicist dealing with light and radiation and a member of the study group, said, however, that the experts were not yet certain how the image, of what appears to be a bloodied, bearded man, could have got from a body to the cloth. Thirty American experts studied 2000 photo-, graphs and experiments con-’ ducted on the shroud in Turin in 1978 and have reached what Mr Pellicori said were their preliminary conclusions on the matter. — Santa Barbara. Landslip kills 23 : : . Twenty-three people are reported to have been buried alive by a huge landslide at the village of Rerer in the North Celebes in Indonesia. Five bodies have been recovered and the search was continuing for the 18 other people believed to have been engulfed by the earth, the official Antara news agency reported. The landslide presumably occurred after torrential rains that had caused heavy flooding in two districts. — Jakarta. Thousands march Thousands of demonstrators joined in anti-nuclear marches in London and the north-west city of Manchester at the week-end. The protests coincided with a march on the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation headquarters in Brussels by groups opposed to plans to site taqtical nuclear weapons in Europe. About 7000 people took part in the Manchester march, one of the biggest anti-nuclear demonstrations Britain has seen outside London. — ’ London.s- •