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Excerpts from the South China Morning Post this week in 1985

Hong Kong took its first cautious step towards democracy when 25,000 voters turned out to return 18 candidates to the Legislative Council.

Competition was keen, with most winners, particularly in the electoral colleges, defeating their rivals by the narrowest of margins. Only three of the 409 eligible voters failed to vote.

In the functional constituencies, 24,803, or 57.6 per cent, of 43,076 eligible voters cast their ballots.

Almost all winners were political moderates, professionals or businessmen; their  average age was  about 45.

Hui Yin-fat, director of the Hong Kong Council of Social Service,  was the first winner in the functional constituencies.

The legal functional constituency poll, probably the most widely watched, returned Martin Lee Chu-ming,  ahead of his closest rival, Henry Litton,  by 488 to 312. The other  candidate, Edmund Chow,  managed  43 votes.

Szeto Wah  won the teaching constituency seat by a landslide, scoring 12,706 votes - more than 10,000 clear of his nearest rival.  There were 18,512 valid votes.

Heung Yee Kuk  members suffered  one of the biggest election upsets in the New Territories electoral college vote.

Not one of the seven kuk candidates won a seat.

The major surprise was the New Territories East constituency, where four prominent rural figures were defeated by city man Andrew Wong Wang-fat,  a university lecturer.

Prior to the poll, analysts blamed widespread public apathy squarely on the fact that only 70,000 people - just over  1 per cent of the population - were classified as eligible voters under the indirect elections concept.

Of these, only 48,000 actually bothered to register to vote, despite a publicity blitz by the government.

Of the 64 candidates for 24 Legco seats, six breezed in unopposed.

Britain agreed to take in more than 400 Vietnamese refugees from Hong Kong who had relatives in  Britain.

The move was in response to an investigation of the Vietnamese refugee problem by the all-party Home Affairs Committee of the House of Commons,  which  urged ministers to relax family criteria for admitting the refugees. Ministers pointed out that Hong Kong had an acute problem as a result of large numbers of immigrants from mainland China.

People objected to the fact that these  illegal immigrants, with whom they had close and often family ties, were repatriated and they did not see why the Vietnamese should be given special treatment, the ministers said.

Between 40 and 60 babies were pulled out alive from two maternity wards levelled in Mexico City's earthquake more than a week earlier.

Patrick Duhamel, head of the French medical team at the scene, said infants could tolerate dehydration and lack of food fairly well if they were uninjured.

When rescuers found mothers beside the babies, the women were almost always dead.

Doctors believed that in such conditions and in extreme darkness,  babies might go into a state resembling hibernation, he said.

The quake claimed more than 5,000 lives.

Bernard Legaros, the son of a prominent Filipino United Nations official, was found guilty in a New York court of second-degree murder for  the sadomasochistic  killing of a Norwegian  student.

The 24-year-old defendant showed no emotion as  jurors decided he had intentionally caused the death of Eigil Dag Vesti, of Oslo, a student at Manhattan's Fashion Institute of Technology.

He was found guilty of shooting the victim in the back of the head at point-blank range with a 'survival' rifle after hours of beatings and whippings.

The prosecution planned to ask for the maximum sentence of 25 years to life.

Yuko Gordon brought home Hong Kong's first-ever medal in the Asia Athletics championships, winning the silver in the women's marathon.

Gordon clocked 2 hours, 54 minutes and 15 seconds - 10 minutes slower than her best time.



slice of life