News Currents

MIDDLE EASTUp to 92 Iraqi guards continued to detain a UN weapons inspection team yesterday. A protest rally had begun to erupt at the site in Baghdad. Team member David Kay, speaking on a satellite telephone, told NBC television that about 100 people with banners had gathered and TV cameras could be seen. He said that "it looks like a local organization, a well-organized local organization." The Iraqis had told team members Tuesday they could not leave unless they surrendered photographic equipment and submitted t o searches for documents they had gathered relating to Saddam Hussein's nuclear arms program. UN diplomats also said yesterday that Iraq appears to have accepted a UN demand that inspectors be allowed to use UN helicopters in Iraqi territory.... The US sent two Patriot missile battalions to Saudi Arabia yesterday, but gave no hint of any imminent military action. UNITED STATES The US Senate approved extended unemployment benefits Tuesday night of up to 20 weeks for America's jobless after rejecting a more limited Republican alternative. The legislation passed by a margin large enough to override an expected White House veto, setting the scene for a tough political debate about the state of the economy and President Bush's concern for conditions at home.... A new compromise proposal intended to break the long deadlock between Congress and President Bush on civil rights was unve iled by a group of moderate Senate Republicans, including Sen. John Danforth (R) of Missouri. The basic legislation is intended to overturn a series of 1989 Supreme Court decisions that made it harder for blacks, women, religious minorities, and disabled persons to win job discrimination lawsuits.... Shoshone Indians and the US government appeared to have headed off a range war Tuesday by agreeing on grazing rights in Nevada. The dispute, involving two Shoshone sisters, Mary and Carrie Dann, whose cattle an d horses were said to be overgrazing land in the Crescent Valley, had even brought some European moral support for the Indians.... The Senate Intelligence Committee went behind closed doors yesterday to probe charges that Robert Gates, as a senior CIA official, skewed a 1985 analysis of the plot to kill Pope John Paul II to suggest Soviet involvement. On Tuesday, two current agency officials testified that Gates, nominated to become director of the CIA, was told more about the Iran-contra money diversion th an the nominee acknowledged under oath.

EUROPE AND ASIA Relative calm returned to Croatia yesterday after fighting that has strained a three-day-old cease-fire in the rebel Yugoslav republic. But Serb, Croat, and Muslim leaders in Bosnia-Herzegovina are accusing each other of leading the volatile republic into a civil war. Members of the three communities have begun arming, raising barricades, or fleeing their homes in fear of civil war.