Cable briefs

Press, 1 June 1981, Page 6

Cable briefs

1 Sadat amnesty President Anwar Sadat of Egypt has raised public e m . ployees' wages by at least 20 per cent, boosted food subsidies, and said he was freeing four jailed political opponents. including a former s Vice President. Ali Sabri. Mr i Sadat told a workers’ Mav • Day rally near the industrial ■’ city of Helwan he was de- j creeing an amnesty for MrSabri and three other Left- ■ ists jailed for life 10 years • ago for plotting against Mr 1 Sadat in the power struggle that followed the death of President Nasser in 1970. Mr Sadat said increased oil revenues and Suez Canal earnings enabled him to raise the public employees' monthly minimum wage ' from $24 to s36.—Cairo.

Charges dropped "The Soviet authorities have dropped charges of anti-State slander against a dissident Russian Orthodox priest who recanted on Moscow television last year, according to the official Tass news agency. Father Dmitri Dudko appeared on Moscow television last June and admitted producing books and articles, slandering the Soviet Union and passing them . to anti-communist organisations in the West. He faced a maximum sentence of seven years jail and five years internal exile if tried' and convicted.—Moscow.

Finger threat Ransom-seeking kidnappers holding a wealthy Italian shoe industrialist have sent his left little finger with a demand for more money, say the police. The family of Antonio Filograno, aged 57. already has paid 1500 million lire (about SNZI.7M) to the abductors since he was abducted on November 13, 1980.— Casarano, Italy. S4M masterpiece? ■■ A religious painting worth $4.72 million, thought to be by the Spanish master ( Velazquez, has been discovered in a Welsh village church. But church officials have no intention of selling it, so the location of the. , masterpiece is being kept; secret for security reasons. A 1 Welsh artist, Thomas Demp-J ster-Jones, made the find; when he was called in to clean and restore a small’ collection of paintings in the church. As he cleaned off the , dirt and grime, Mr Dempi-1 ster-Jones said he realised it j was "an old master of ex-j tremely high standard.” He] is convinced that the painting, depicting Christ sharing! a meal with two desciples at I Emmaus, is by Velazquez, A and was painted between I 1617 and 1620. — London. C.I.A. closes up The American Central Intelligence Agency has decided to stop receiving visits from journalists, f in keeping with a Reagan ‘Administration trend towards tighter control over outgoing information. <The decision, taken by the C.l.A.’s director (Mr .. william., Casey) will affect American journalists only, as foreign journalists have long been excluded from the agency’s headquarters in Langley,’’Virginia, a suburb of Washington. — Washington. N-records vanish Records of the French Atomic Energy Commissar-j iat, in particular those relat-1 ing to deals with Pakistan ! and Nigeria, have been destroyed since the president <1 J elections, according to tue Socialist National Personnel Union for Atomic Energy. The records were burnt at the Paris office of the Com-| missariat in the days before power was transferred to President Francois Mitter- ■ rand. According to the union the Commissariat, through the Societe Generale Nucleaire, had helped Pakistan to build a retreatment plant "with all the risks of proliferation which that entails.” — Paris. Wall St ‘narrow’ President Reagan . says that New York’s Wall Street, the centre of United States financial markets, is not a good place to get economic advice. "In Wall Street, with all due respect, I think they are looking through a very narrow glass and only seeing one facet,” he says. “They (Wall Street) are only watching anything that may change interest rates and the bond markets.”—Washington.