Norwegian radio quoted pollution-control officials as saying radioactivity in the Oslo area was 50 per cent higher than usual and high readings were reported in central Stockholm.

The leaks were originally thought to have originated from Sweden's Forsmark nuclear power plant, where about 600 workers were evacuated.

In Moscow, Soviet atomic energy authorities told the Swedish embassy they had not heard of any nuclear accident on Soviet territory which would cause radioactive material to reach Sweden.

The following day, the Soviet Union looked abroad for help to quell a burning nuclear reactor amid an official news blackout and state radio reports describing the power station accident as 'a disaster'.

Soviet officials in Stockholm and Bonn contacted government nuclear authorities to seek advice on how to put out burning graphite in the Chernobyl atomic power station, north of the Ukrainian capital, Kiev.

This was the first official information on the mishap - two days after it was believed to have occurred.

A Swedish expert said the Chernobyl reactor appeared to have suffered a meltdown of its reactor core. Western countries pressed Moscow to say exactly what had happened at the plant.

The Soviet news agency Tass said one of the reactors had been damaged and there had been some casualties, but gave no details.

The Duchess of Windsor, the American-born divorcee for whose love Edward VIII gave up the throne in a sensational romance that rocked the British empire, died at her Paris home. She was 89.

She had been bedridden for many years and her death marked a lonely end to one of the world's great love stories.

Edward had become king on the death of his father, King George V, in 1936.

When the new king refused to be separated from his constant companion of two years, prime minister Stanley Baldwin gave him an ultimatum: Give up Mrs (Wallis) Simpson or abdicate.

The handsome bachelor king chose abdication, relinquishing sovereignty over a quarter of the world's population.

'I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and discharge my duties as king as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I love,' he said in a moving radio broadcast to his people the world over.

Billionaire financier Li Ka-shing and several other executives from his Cheung Kong (Holdings) conglomerate were named by the Insider Dealing Tribunal as having a 'high degree of culpability' in insider dealing surrounding share transactions completed two years earlier.

After almost 18 months of deliberations and consideration of thousands of hours of evidence, the tribunal found that culpable insider dealing took place when Starpeace, a company controlled by Cheung Kong, sold 55 million shares in International City Holdings from January through March 1984.

Hong Kong insider dealing law provided for no action further than the identification of parties found to be culpable insider dealers - the only penalty faced was in the publication of their names for public knowledge.

A seven-year-old Sha Tin boy was diagnosed as HIV-positive.

Hong Kong's youngest HIV-positive resident was a haemophiliac and depended on infusions of the blood-clotting agent known as Factor 8 to stop him from bleeding to death in the case of an accident.

It was understood that he had contracted the virus through a transfusion of Factor 8 which had been derived from blood from the United States.