The World - News from Aug. 4, 1987

Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev said that a political settlement to eliminate the apartheid system of racial separation in South Africa would be best for both blacks and whites living there. “It is time at long last for Pretoria to understand this as well,” Gorbachev said at a dinner in Moscow honoring the visiting president of Mozambique, Joaquim Chissano. “New ideas, a fresh approach and collective efforts are needed,” Gorbachev said, according to the official news agency Tass. “The collapse of apartheid is ineluctable. But we are not supporters of ‘the worse the better’ thesis.