News Currents
THE GULF AND MIDDLE EAST US Secretary of State James Baker III, in the Mideast on a peace tour, will meet Palestinians in Jerusalem Tuesday at the home of the US consul, said Margaret Tutwiler, his spokeswoman, Monday. She declined to identify which Palestinians would meet Baker during his two-day visit to Israel, which started Monday. Baker canceled a walking tour of Jerusalem's Old City after an Arab stabbed four Israeli women to death on Sunday.... The six Arab Persian Gulf countries, along with Syria and Egypt, said o n Sunday they backed Baker's peace plans, but they still insisted that an international peace conference was the way to settle the Israeli-Palestinian problem. Israel wants to negotiate with the Arab nations on a one-to-one basis.... Opponents of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein began a conference Monday in Beirut, conferring on ways to strengthen an uprising against him and install a new government in Baghdad.... Kuwaiti officials report that Iraqi soldiers who conquered Kuwait victimized even the animals at the Kuwait Zoo. Many animals were killed or wounded in acts of terror.
UNITED STATES AND CANADA
Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf said in a Life magazine interview published Sunday the body-count system used by the military in the Vietnam War was ``a lie'' and added, ``I was forced to participate in that lie.'' ... More than 90 percent of city residents surveyed by the Los Angeles Times said they believe police used excessive force against a motorist whose beating was videotaped and widely broadcast, and nearly two-thirds sa id they believe police brutality is common.... Twenty-one former prisoners of war returned from Iraq to a hero's welcome Sunday at Andrews Air Force Base, Md.... An early and largely unknown Vincent van Gogh painting, ``Still Life With Flowers,'' fetched $1.3 million from an anonymous bidder at auction in Chicago Sunday. An unnamed Milwaukee, Wis., family had owned it for 30 years.... Quebec's ruling Liberal Party has overwh elmingly approved a radical new policy calling for a provincial referendum on independence be held by late 1992 unless Canada agrees to nearly full autonomy for the French-speaking Canadian province.
OTHER WORLD NEWS
El Salvador's ruling rightist party claimed a ``resounding victory'' Sunday in the first elections in 11 years of civil war not sabotaged by leftist guerrillas.... OPEC's Price Monitoring Committee is meeting in Geneva amid reports the 13-member cartel was deeply divided over restoring production quotas. Saudi Arabia, to make up shortages from the Gulf war, is currently pumping about 8.3 million barrels a day,MDNM about 3 million more than its assigned quota.... A secret report by the Soviet state planning agency, Gosplan, says the country is heading into a political and economic abyss recalling the famine and repression of the Stalin era, BBC television reported.... Police failed to stop student marchers from massing in Belgrade in a predawn rally Monday denouncing the Marxist regime of the Serbian Republic.
