EVENTS
CIVIL WAR ENGULFS YEMEN Yemen plunged into civil war Thursday with northern and southern troops battling in the streets and Air Force jets pounding rival capitals. Residents said southern Air Force jets struck the international airport and the presidential palace in Sana, the capital of Yemen. The northern-based, government-run Sana Radio declared a one-month state of emergency. It ordered all Yemeni citizens to keep off intercity thoroughfares. Marxist South Yemen and conservative North Yemen merged in May 1990, forming the Arabian Peninsula's first democratic republic and its most populous nation. Differences over power-sharing, however, prevented integration of the armed forces and led to a power struggle between President Ali Abdullah Saleh, a northerner, and Vice President Ali Salem al-Beidh, a southerner. Rwanda fighting escalates
Mortar fire and tracer rounds lit up the night sky over Rwanda's capital early Thursday in what a UN official called the worst fighting yet in the battle for control of the city. UN troops trying to negotiate peace and protect civilians from ethnic slaughter in Rwanda had not been able to reach the center of the city or other parts to learn whether there were casualties. He said they were surprised by the ferocity. American teenager lashed
American teenager Michael Fay was lashed four times with a rattan cane Thursday for spray-painting cars and other acts of vandalism. The Prisons Department of Singapore said he and nine other prisoners were flogged at Queenstown Prison, where the high school senior completed his fifth week of a four-month prison term. No other details were given, and no official comment was expected from the government, which Wednesday reduced the original sentence of six strokes to four. Oppenheimer and the KGB
Russia's spy chiefs, breaking with long-standing practice, Thursday denied allegations that Robert Oppenheimer, called the father of the US atomic bomb, had leaked nuclear secrets to Moscow. Former KGB spymaster Pavel Sudoplatov had written that the Kremlin had received reports on the bomb from Oppenheimer and other scientists involved. ``Secret services usually avoid elaborating on their methods of work and sources of information,'' the foreign intelligence service press office said in a statement. ``But in this specific case, we deem it possible to state that allegations ... about the direct handover of data on the nuclear bomb to Soviet intelligence from such prominent scientists as Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard, Robert Oppenheimer are groundless.''
