The World - News from Feb. 3, 1989

More than 1 million workers paralyzed Greece’s largest cities with a 24-hour general strike over the Socialist government’s austere wage policies and its links to financial scandals. The walkout closed banks, stores and government offices and grounded Olympic Airways, the national carrier. Buses, trolleys and taxis stayed off the streets. Hospitals staffed by skeleton crews accepted only emergency cases. The strikers were protesting the government’s failure to index wages to inflation, which ran at 14% in 1988, and a plague of multimillion-dollar scandals in which senior officials from Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou’s Socialist party have been implicated.