Commonwealth leaders, including the British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, have given South Africa six months to start dismantling apartheid or else face a programme of voluntary sanctions. A seven-page record released in Nassau represented a partial victory for Thatcher who, throughout the first five days of the Commonwealth summit, had firmly resisted the idea of economic sanctions. She nevertheless agreed that, as part of an immediate package of measures against Pretoria, each member of the 49-nation group should be ready to take whatever unilateral action was possible to preclude the import of South African Krugerrand gold coins.
CM’s son investigated
The Karnataka government ordered a judicial probe into the alleged “corrupt practices and misdeeds” Chief Minister Ramakrishna Hegde’s son, Bharath, his sister-in-law’s son, Idaya Shankar, C P Laxman, a coffee planter of Coorg, and Nagaraj, personal assistant to the chief minister.
Vietnam typhoon
Vietnam appealed for international aid on Monday after a typhoon last week left about 800 people dead or missing and hundreds of thousands homeless, officials said in Hanoi. The officials said it was the worst natural disaster yet in central Vietnam. A total of 670 people were confirmed dead, 128 were missing and 257 were injured after Typhoon Cecil swept across 350 kilometres of Binh Tri Thien province.
Family planning
Two novel schemes, including one offering huge cash incentives, are on the anvil to give a decisive thrust to the family welfare programme and to arrest the population explosion in the country. Apart from limiting the size of the family, the policy stipulates that every couple must adopt spacing methods. The scheme is the result of a long-drawn exercise carried out by the Health Ministry.
