Fresno Girl Gamely Makes Points to Promote Peace

--Peaceful international relations are a game--just ask 12-year-old Michelle Alexander of Fresno, Calif. Michelle invented the “Give Peace a Chance” game three years ago as a third-grade class project. In the board game, players, who use small markers that carry a nation’s flag, are rewarded for cooperation with other countries. After her game won first place in the 1985 International Children’s Peace Prize competition, Michelle went on a world tour sponsored by Children as Peace Makers Foundation. She has played her game against Andrei A. Gromyko, president and former foreign minister of the Soviet Union; U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar; Chinese Vice President Ulanhu, and Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. “I always lost,” she admits. Michelle and her mother, Roberta, are on a second trip to the Soviet Union, where her game is being translated into Russian. Michelle will receive the World Children’s Day Foundation Award at the United Nations on April 24.

--Pope John Paul II approved the election of an English nobleman as sovereign of the 900-year-old Knights of Malta. Andrew Bertie, 58, a retired teacher of modern languages and a descendant of Britain’s House of Stuart, was elected to the lifetime post of grand master from among 22 aristocratic candidates last Friday. The result was kept secret pending approval by the Pope. The Knights of Malta, heirs of the Crusaders and history’s oldest chivalric order, support medical facilities in 90 countries. The grand master of the Sovereign Military Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes and of Malta is the highest-ranking layman in the Roman Catholic Church. Bertie succeeds Angelo de Mojana di Cologna, an Italian who died Jan. 18.

--William Styron is in good company. He has been chosen as the 29th recipient of the Edward MacDowell Medal, which has previously been awarded to writers Thornton Wilder, Eudora Welty and Lillian Hellman; composers Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, and artists Georgia O’Keeffe, Willem de Kooning and Louise Nevelson. Styron is being recognized for his lifetime achievements as a writer, including the 1967 book “The Confessions of Nat Turner,” which won a Pulitzer Prize, and “Sophie’s Choice,” which won the American Book Award in 1980. Styron will receive the medal Aug. 21 at the MacDowell Colony, a retreat for artists in Peterboro, N.H., founded in 1907 by composer Edward MacDowell and his wife, Marian.