A farmer with six ‘wives’, a mix-up of dead bodies and Hong Kong preparing for a space station crash

An Italian man with six “wives” being taken to court and Hong Kong preparing for a potential crash landing of a US space station made the headlines four decades ago this week. July 8, 1979 ● A special gold coin would be minted by two American companies, with sales proceeds donated to Vietnamese refugees in Hong Kong through the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. A total of 100,000 coins would be minted using 22-carat gold. Each would be sold at US$275. The sale was expected to bring in a profit of at least US$10 million. ● China and the United States signed a comprehensive trade agreement designed to boost bilateral trade. American imports from China during the first five months of that year totalled US$196 million, compared with US$324 million for the whole of 1978. July 9, 1979 ● The six “wives” of Giuseppe Scaffidi Fonte wept as a judge from the town of Patti in Sicily sentenced him to three years’ imprisonment for living off immoral earnings. But moments later the women applauded as the sentence was suspended and the “Sultan of Cuccubello” was set free. The court was told that Fonte, 37, a farmworker, was living with seven women, and had exchanged one of them for a motor van. ● Representatives of Sai Lau Kok residents whose homes would be demolished to make way for the MTR’s Tsuen Wan depot flew to Britain to petition members of parliament for better compensation. A total of 389 families in seven buildings in the area would be affected. July 10, 1979 ● The Japanese widow of a Cambodian diplomat described in published diary extracts how she ate rats to survive after the fall of Phnom Penh to Khmer Rouge forces in 1975. Yasuko Naito, 46, lost her husband, a former first secretary at the Cambodian embassy in Tokyo, and two sons from illness after being forcibly evacuated to the countryside from Phnom Penh. She said in the diary that her life was “worse than that of a cow”. July 11, 1979 ● The Hong Kong government appointed a Skylab security officer to coordinate emergency measures for a worst-case scenario if fragments from a US space station should fall on Hong Kong. John Ashdown, who normally worked for the security branch operations division, would liaise with the US consulate. The space station eventually plunged to Earth off the coast of Western Australia a day later. July 12, 1979 ● The Peking Daily said Beijing’s public works division was more than 2 billion yuan in debt (about HK$6.25 billion at the time), and claimed that public housing space was being left empty despite a serious housing problem. In a stinging attack on the efficiency of the capital’s administration, the newspaper claimed that investment in public works had also fallen far behind the city’s needs, and called for a major overhaul of Beijing’s residential areas. July 13, 1979 ● Cracks had been discovered in the engine mounting of a Pan American Boeing 747 jet at Kennedy Airport, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said. PanAm reported the cracks after a routine inspection several days before. But an FAA spokesman denied a news report that the cracks were almost identical to those in the engine mounting or pylon that caused the crash of an American Airlines DC-10 jet in Chicago on May 25 that year. July 14, 1979 ● Hong Kong’s health authorities scrambled to mediate between two families after one of them claimed the wrong deceased body and had it cremated and interred. The confusion happened during a two-day public holiday in July that year when the two bodies were placed in the Princess Margaret Hospital mortuary awaiting claim by relatives. ● The US Federal Aviation Administration announced that it would lift its June 6, 1979 order grounding all 138 DC10 aircraft registered in the country. The McDonnell Douglas-built airliners were grounded due to cracks found in some planes following an American Airlines DC10 crash in Chicago on May 25 that year which killed all 273 people on board. The FAA said inspectors were satisfied that safety questions about the aircraft had been resolved. Remember A Day looks at significant news and events reported by the Post during this week in history

A farmer with six ‘wives’, a mix-up of dead bodies and Hong Kong preparing for a space station crash

.css-1mniedq{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;}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 journey back through time to look at significant news and events reported by the South China Morning Post from this week in history