News Currents
MIDDLE EAST
The Palestine Liberation Organization, giving its backing to this week's multilateral Middle East peace talks, at the same time urged the US and Russia to break what it called Israel's intransigence. PLO sources in Tunis said Sunday Palestinian delegations would attend all multilateral sessions except the Washington arms control talks.... Leading arms manufacturers have flocked to Bahrain for a defense exhibition coinciding with the opening this week of the multilateral talks. It is the most wide-ranging
Middle East defense exhibition since the Gulf war. UNITED STATES
Some 4,000 US troops deployed to help quell racial violence in Los Angeles completed their pullout Sunday, leaving behind 10,000 National Guard soldiers and the L.A. police to help keep the city calm.... Anthony J. F. O'Reilly, head of foodmaker H. J. Heinz Company, was America's highest paid chief executive officer in 1991, earning $75 million-plus, Forbes magazine reported. Despite reduced corporate profits and massive layoffs, 51 percent of the 800 chief executive officers of America's largest publicl y held companies earned at least $1 million last year, up from 48 percent in 1990, the magazine said.... A relative of six people who died in a fire two years ago in Boston filed suit yesterday charging that the Philip Morris Company failed to develop a fire-safe cigarette even though it had the technology to do so.... General Dynamics Corporation said yesterday it has agreed to sell its missile business to General Motors Corporation's Hughes Aircraft Company in a deal worth at least $450 million. EUROPE AND ASIA
The government and opposition in the former Soviet republic of Tajikistan reached agreement yesterday on a coalition government to end a severe political crisis, Itar-Tass news agency said.... Armenians and Azeris reached a cease-fire Sunday in Nakhichevan, a secondary flashpoint between the two former Soviet states, an Azeri leader was reported as saying.... The head of the Anglican Church, Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey, Sunday criticized Britain's business leaders for taking huge pay increases during a recession.... An English appeals court yesterday freed a woman jailed 18 years ago for an Irish guerrilla bombing after a government lawyer conceded her conviction was "unsafe and unsatisfactory." Judith Ward was sentenced to 30 years for the 1974 Irish Republican Army bombing of a bus carrying soldiers and their families. The attack killed 12 people. Ward's appeal was the latest in a series of cases involving IRA attacks in mainland Britain to have been reopened.... The Thai opposition ended a wee k of mass protests yesterday but promised "harder, tougher" demonstrations if the government went back on a deal under which the prime minister must be an elected member of parliament.
