a207  0916  01 Apr 79
AM-Foreign Briefs,530
    BANGKOK, Thailand (AP) - More than 2,800 Indochinese refugees flew
from Thailand to the United States last month, the largest exodus
since August 1976, an American refugee official said Sunday.
    Thailand still has an estimated 150,000 Indochinese refugees within
its borders and more are coming faster than third countries are
willing to accept them.
    The United States sharply increased its quotas last year in response
to the plight of the Vietnamese ''boat people,'' refugees who fled
their communist-governed land by sea and often ended up in countries
unwilling to accept them.
    ---
    LONDON (AP) - Volunteers began a two-month vigil Sunday to protect
two pairs of rare golden eagles that flew south from their usual
haunts in the Scottish Highlands to the scenic Lake District of
northwest England.
    The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds says it hopes the
golden eagles, which have majestic eight-foot wingspans, will breed at
the new site. The society organized the vigil because two pairs of
eagles that ventured into the Lake District some years ago lost their
eggs to nest-robbers.
    A spokesman says there are only 300 pairs of golden eagles left in
Britain. He said the eagle population has been decimated by pesticides
and insecticides, which make their eggs infertile.
    ---
    TOKYO (AP) - ''The Life of Galileo,'' a play by Bertolt Brecht,
opened in Peking Saturday - the first contemporary foreign play to be
staged in China since 1966, the Xinhua (Hsinhua) news agency said.
    Huang Zoulin, 73, head of the Shanghai People's Art Theater,
directed the Chinese-language production.
    ''We keep the play's central idea of the scientist's responsibility
to society and of science breaking through superstition and at the
same time emphasize the idea of democracy that runs through the
play,'' Huang was quoted as saying in the dispatch received here.
    ---
    MOSCOW (AP) - The Soviet Union is lending Britain a ''mummified''
40,000-year-old ''baby'' mammoth for exhibit in London in May, the
Soviet newspaper Izvestia says.
    The mammoth, which has been on view at a zoology museum in
Leningrad, was discovered preserved in a layer of ice and crushed
stone in Siberia, the paper said Saturday. It said the ''priceless''
mummy has been insured ''for a big sum.''
    ---
    SALISBURY, Rhodesia (AP) - A Red Cross plane carrying a medical team
from a mission hospital in southeastern Rhodesia was hit by ground
fire but managed to continue flying, a spokesman for the International
Red Cross said Sunday.
    Francois Perez said the incident took place last Tuesday as the
small plane flew from the mission to Fort Victoria, about 150 miles
south of Salisbury. He said two bullets hit the plane, one in the wing
and one in the cabin, but none of those aboard - the pilot, a doctor
and two nurses - was injured.
    It was not known who shot at the plane. Black nationalist guerrillas
fighting the Salisbury government have shot down two Rhodesian
civilian airliners in recent months.
    ---
    MANCHESTER, England (AP) - The death toll from a coal mine explosion
March 18 rose to 10 Sunday when two more miners died from burns at a
hospital here.
    Three men were killed instantly in the methane gas blast at Golborne
Colliery near Wigan, and eight others were critically burned. Only
one of the injured remains alive and he was ''critical but
comfortable,'' a hospital spokesman said Sunday.
    
ap-ny-04-01 1217EST
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