Cable briefs

Press, 2 November 1989, Page 9

Cable briefs

Quake toll rises

Workers searching the twisted wreckage of San Francisco’s Interstate 880 found the bodies of a woman and a man in separate vehicles, some two weeks after the earthquake, a police spokesman said yesterday. The body of Joyce Ann Mabry, aged 31, of Berkeley, California, was found on Monday night, said Alameda County Sheriff’s Sergeant Jim Knudsen. Searchers found the body of James Flores, aged 39, of Rohnert Park, early yesterday, Sergeant Knudsen said. The discoveries raised the death toll in the quake’s worst disaster to 41 and the overall number of people who died in the quake to 66.—NZPA-AP

Nuclear test in U.S.

An underground nuclear weapons test measuring 5.8 on the Richter scale rocked the Nevada Desert yesterday and sent shock waves as far away as Las Vegas, 170 km from ground zero. An Energy Department spokesman pronounced the test “highly successful.” The test was the ninth of the year at the nation’s nuclear proving grounds and the 696th announced blast since nuclear testing began there in 1951.—NZPA-AP

Govt reassures whites

The South African Government yesterday told whites not to panic about growing black protest and dismissed Rightists’ demands for emergency talks on its new tolerance of dissent. The Justice Minister, Kobie Coetsee, in a statement aimed at the country’s white minority, said there was no reason to panic about law and order following a huge week-end rally near Johannesburg in support of the banned African National Congress. The main opposition Conservative Party called. Sunday’s 70,000-strong meeting a blatant challenge to authority and demanded a special sitting of Parliament to discuss law and order.

‘Veteran’ search

Japan is to investigate reported sightings of a straggler from the Imperial Japanese Army on a remote Indonesian island which Australian forces used as a base during the Second World War. Three officials from the Japanese Embassy, including the defence attache, will travel this week-end to the island of Morotai, in the northern Maluku group, where Indonesian authorities have confirmed five sightings of a longhaireq, bearded old man wearing rags. One witness is said to have heard the man singing in Japanese.

Hostages get help

A, number of pop groups, including The Moody Blues;’are planning an album to help promote a campaign to free hostages in Lebanon, says the International Hostage Release Agency. It will be issued on November 27, the thirty-third birthday of the British ‘television journalist John McCarthy, kidnapped ®i his Way. to Beirut AirpiJrt on April 17,. 1986. He is one’of 18 Western hostages missing in Lebanon.—NZPA-AP