Cable briefs

Press, 1 April 1989, Page 10

Cable briefs

Bride racket? Immigration officials are investigating a possible Fijian bride racket after a man accused of arranging for his de facto wife to marry an Australian flew home to Fiji. An Immigration Department spokesman said Kris Kumar, aged 28, was permitted to leave, rather than be deported, to save taxpayers the cost of airfares. Kumar’s de facto, Nadu Chinnamon, aged 26, and her two-month-old son, would hopefully leave under supervision within the week after travel documents have been arranged, he said. — Sydney.

Sanctions opposed

A majority of black South Africans believe economic sanctions and violence are the wrong way to fight apartheid, according to a poll published in Britain. The survey for the “Independent” newspaper and Independent Television News was conducted among 550 blacks living in all the main metropolitan areas by Markinor, an independent South African research company. It showed that 54.7 per cent of those questioned were against using economic sanctions to try to end South Africa’s apartheid racial segregation policy. More than 61 per cent said it was wrong to use violence. — London. Drivers to pay Drivers who want to enter the centre of Florence will have to pay 6500 lire (SNZB.3O) for the privilege from April 10. — Florence. Japan apologises The Japanese Prime Minister, Noboru Takkeshita, has offered Japan’s first formal apology to North Korea for its past colonial rule and post-war history of ignoring the Pyongyang Government. He said he regretted Japan’s past icy relations with North Korea and called for a dialogue to warm ties. — Tokyo.

$63,000 overlooked

A Japanese businessman in Nagoya got into his car and drove off, forgetting he had left five million yen ($NZ63,000) on the. roof, Japan’s national broadcasting corporation, NHK, reported. A banker and a housewife passing by helped him recover all the money. — Tokyo. Driver error

A train driver’s error was solely to blame for the Purley rail crash on March 4 in which five people were killed and 87 injured, a British Rail manager said. — London.

Fusion

experiment

Italian scientists have said they will try to duplicate an experiment carried out in the United States which couid herald a new era of cheap nuclear energy. The State nuclear energy body, Enea, said it was almost ready to attempt an experiment to release energy from subatomic particles by fusion. Martin Fleischmann of Britain’s Southampton University and Stanley Pons, of Utah University in the United States, stunned scientists last week with their claims to have achieved nuclear fusion using only simple laboratory equipment. — Rome. Virus fears

British scientists fear a second wave of the virus which killed thousands of seals in the North Sea last year. Scientists in the Sea Mammal Research unit in Cambridge who had hoped the virus had died out, recently found the bodies of four seals which had died from the virus. It is blamed for the deaths of 17,500 seals last year. — London. Research hit

Destruction of the world’s tropical rain forests could jeopardise chances of finding cures for cancer, heart disease and A.1.D.5., the World Wide Fund for Nature said. The Geneva-based fund said almost half the West’s pharmaceuticals came from natural products or were synthesised from chemical blueprints provided by nature. Each year an area of rain forest the size of Austria was being destroyed along with its wildlife, it said. At that' rate one in five animal, insect and plant species might disappear by the year 2000. — London. Divorce sought The Greek Prime Minister, Andreas Papandreou, has filed for divorce from his Ameri-can-born wife, Margaret. Mr Papandreou an-

nounced in October that he would seek an end to his 37-year marriage to the former Margaret Chant, of Elmhurst, Illinois, following his public affair with an airline stewardess, Dimitra Liani. — Athens. Arsenic danger Cocaine users may risk an illness they had not bargained for, arsenic poisoning. Three doctors reported in the “New England Journal of Medicine” that they had treated a man, aged 18, who developed nausea, vomiting, profuse diarrhoea, a painful tingling, muscle weakness in the legs and an inability to feel pain, temperature change or vibration in the hands and feet after repeated use of cocaine. When they tested his hair and urine, they discovered levels of arsenic, one of the deadliest poisons known, at roughly 10 times normal levels. — Boston.

Lumpectomy safe

An eight-year study has confirmed earlier findings that a relatively conservative operation called a lumpectomy is as effecting in treating breast cancer as removing the entire breast. The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, comes four years after the initial discovery that a woman in the early stages of breast cancer does not need to have her entire breast removed in a radical mastectomy. Until 1985, virtually all women in the United States suffering the disease underwent the disfiguring radical mastectomy. A lumpectomy removes only the tumour and a portion of the surrounding tissues. — Boston.

Migration allowed

Peking said it would allow a Chinese man to join his pregnant Italian wife in Rome as soon as possible but declined to give a date. Zhu Juwang’s wife, Patrizia Riccardi, has been living in a caravan outside China’s Embassy in Rome for the last 12 days. — Peking.