Cannibal crash survivors, 10-year-old gives birth to twins and China blanks Soviet sit-down request: headlines from 40 years ago
- A journey back through time to look at significant news and events reported by the South China Morning Post from this week in history
A 10-year-old girl giving birth to twins and petrol prices rising by 500 per cent made the headlines four decades ago this week.
June 3, 1979
● One of two survivors of an Idaho plane crash said he and his sister-in-law ate parts of her father’s body while they desperately waited to be rescued from the snow-covered White Cloud Mountains in the western United States. Brent Dyer, 20, said the decision to eat part of the body of Donald Johnson, 50, was made after he and Donna Johnson, 18, had been without food for nearly a month. The trio were passengers on board a light aircraft which crashed on May 5 that year.
● A 10-year-old girl gave birth to twins in a hospital in Indianapolis a week before. A spokeswoman for the American Medical Association said the case was unique, based on their records. The mother’s identity and information about her pregnancy were not disclosed. The twins weighed 3 lbs and 6 oz each were doing well upon discharge. Hospital records showed there had been instances of girls as young as six years old giving birth in some Native American tribes.
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June 4, 1979
● A couple from New York were awarded US$517,000 damages from Ford and US$225,000 from Hertz, which rented a Ford Pinto to their daughter Judith Bird. The young woman died four years earlier in a blazing wreck after a rear-end collision ignited the car’s petrol tank.
June 5, 1979
● Two supporters of Chinese Senior Vice-Premier Deng Xiaoping were under attack by anti-Deng forces, according to a local left-wing magazine. The pair were Hu Yaobang and Hu Qiaomu. The former was the Central Committee’s Secretary-General of the party and propaganda chief, and the latter was president of the Academy of Social Sciences. Both were purged during the Cultural Revolution and when Deng was rehabilitated in April 1973, he brought them back to serve alongside him.
June 6, 1979
● The Soviet Union suggested to China that representatives of the two nations meet in Moscow in a month to start negotiations on normalisation of relations. There was no immediate response from Beijing.
June 7, 1979
● The late Chairman Mao Zedong’s second wife, together with China’s best-known woman writer, were rehabilitated and made members of the country’s United Front organisation. He Zizhen, whom Mao divorced in 1937, was one of 109 new members elected to the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. After the divorce, Mao married Jiang Qing, a member of the infamous Gang of Four.
June 8, 1979
● Hong Kong’s air links with Europe were badly hit by three major European airlines suspending their flights because of the grounding of the widebody DC10 jets. Carriers around the world grounded their DC10 fleets pending further safety checks on the aircraft following a series of fatal accidents.
June 9, 1979
● South Africa increased the price of petrol by a massive 38 per cent to make it among the most expensive in the world. In the past 10 years, the country’s petrol price rose almost 500 per cent. It was three times more expensive than US petrol prices in that same year.
Remember A Day looks at significant news and events reported by the Post during this week in history
