News Currents

EUROPE Soviet Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov, who recently accused Western banks of mounting a "credit blockade" against Moscow, told his parliament June 17 he had no faith in a plan worked out by economist Grigory Yavlinsky in association with US economists. The plan, hammered out over three weeks at Harvard University, has been submitted to Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, president of the Russian Federation, who both back the plan. The Soviet Union should have direct foreign investment in its industry r a

ther than loans, Pavlov said (story, Page 1).... Romanian Prime Minister Petre Roman June 18 faced the biggest worker protests since his National Salvation Front took power 18 months ago in Romania's anticommunist revolution. Some 30,000 strikers gathered outside government headquarters in Victory Square protesting an inflation that has soared as Romania tries to switch to a Western-type market system.... Protestant and Catholic politicians stood together in Belfast for a minute's silence at the opening of

historic peace talks June 17, remembering the dead from a conflict that has touched virtually every family in Northern Ireland.

UNITED STATES

A meeting June 18 with President Bush and talks with bankers about Brazil's $122 billion foreign debt topped the agenda of Brazilian President Fernando Collor de Mello's visit to the US.... The first round of layoffs of city workers in New York reached 6,000 and another 2,000 will be getting pink slips later this week as the city struggles to close its multibillion-dollar budget gap.... Boris Yeltsin, the new popularly elected president of the Soviet Union's Russian republic, left Moscow June 18 for the

US and a meeting with President Bush.

JUSTICE

The US Supreme Court made it more difficult for convicts to sue officials in efforts to improve general living conditions in prisons. The court, ruling 5 to 4 on a case from Ohio, said prisoners, in order to win a suit, must prove officials exhibited a "deliberate indifference" to their plight.... In San Francisco, homosexual Jeffrey Collins, who was fired from his job with a Shell Oil Company subsidiary, won $5.3 million for wrongful termination in what is believed to be the largest award of its kind b y

a US court.... In Roanoke, Va., a federal judge upheld Virginia Military Institute's all-male admissions policy. Lawyers for the school argued that presence of women would not only change the complexion of the institution, but alter its mission.... The first black federal judge in the Deep South, Robert Collins, went on trial in New Orleans on charges he accepted a bribe in exchange for granting leniency in the sentencing of a drug trafficker. A jury of nine whites and three blacks heard opening arguments

June 18.... The FBI announced indictments and arrests in "sting" operations in Florida, South Carolina, and Alabama that included the recovery of 16 military missile warning devices worth $1.8 million.