News Currents

EUROPESoviet President Mikhail Gorbachev's science adviser Yevgeny Velikhov has recommended that an international body be appointed to help oversee the Soviet Union's nuclear weapons while the country is in political turmoil. In Paris, Francois Heisbourg, director of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, said gangsters might try to steal and sell some of the Soviet Union's 30,000 nuclear weapons. He said a solution could be "double-key agreements," under which the Kremlin and the repu blics both controlled the weapons. NATO has such an arrangement. The briefcase with Gorbachev's set of nuclear codes was taken from him during the recent coup, temporarily disrupting the Soviet chain of command.... Russian Republic President Boris Yeltsin, his power greatly enhanced after the botched coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, will seek an early end to the territorial dispute with Japan over four islands, one of his aides has told a Japanese reporter. This would free up large amounts of aid to the Sovi et Union conditionally promised by Japan. UNITED STATES About a dozen Cuban detainees appeared on the roof of a federal prison in Talladega, Fla., Tuesday, displaying a bedsheet banner demanding "justice, freedom, or death." They are holding 10 hostages in an attempt to avoid deportation to Cuba.... Gov. L. Douglas Wilder (D) of Virginia visited New Hampshire Tuesday with an "America first" message, possibly signaling a presidential bid. Appearing in Nashua, he said President Bush is neglecting domestic needs.

ASIA AND THE PACIFIC The Khmer Rouge now insists that the Cambodian government's paramilitary police be included in the forces to be demobilized under an agreement reached Tuesday, it was learned yesterday. The Monitor's Sheila Tefft reports that Richard Solomon, a senior US diplomat, said yesterday a compromise on demobilizing rival armies "is moving in the right direction." A complication in the complex negotiations is that Phnom Penh Prime Minister Hun Sen wants the Khmer Rouge to be cited for "genocide," stemming from th e deaths of more than 1 million Cambodians during the Khmer Rouge's rule.

AFRICA Five years after UN members promised to revive Africa's devastated economies, the continent faces a crisis of "tragic proportions," UN Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar said yesterday. In a major report, the secretary general called the plan a failure, citing a shortage of international aid to combat rising debt and a fall in commodities prices. He concluded that Africa could never develop under its debt burden of $270 billion and proposed wealthy nations cancel all official debt, such as was don e for Egypt and Poland and increase their assistance to the continent (story, page 1).