News Currents

EUROPE The Soviet parliament yesterday approved in principle a landmark law guaranteeing the right of most Soviet citizens to travel abroad. Deputies voted by 320 to 37 with 32 abstentions to back the law, seen in the West as a barometer of Soviet compliance with international human rights obligations.... Britain's Northern Ireland minister, Peter Brooke, yesterday renewed his efforts to get stalled peace talks for the province back on the rails. He had hoped to put unionist and nationalist politicians togethe r

at the negotiating table for the first time since 1974.

MIDDLE EAST

The US sent civilian experts and armed specialist soldiers into Dahuk, Iraq, yesterday, with Baghdad's approval, to prepare for the eventual return of thousands of Kurdish refugees. The 80-member team was to spend one day in the northern Iraqi provincial capital to examine the state of its water, sewage, and electrical services.... Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was quoted yesterday in Egyptian newspapers as saying Syria, Jordan, and Palestinians have no alternative but to hold direct talks with Israe l

after an international conference. Israel, however, opposes Arab calls for a UN-sponsored international conference.... A Kuwaiti martial-law court convicted six people of collaborating with Iraq during its occupation of Kuwait and sentenced them to prison - including a young man given 15 years for wearing a Saddam Hussein T-shirt. The verdicts were issued Sunday by a five-judge tribunal that deliberated for less than three hours after refusing to allow witnesses to testify or to allow the defendants to be

cross-examined by their government-appointed laywers - who met their clients for the first time in court.

UNITED STATES

The shuttle Columbia's four-man, three-woman crew flew to Florida for takeoff tomorrow on a nine-day medical research flight to gather data crucial for future long-duration flights to Mars.... The Iraqi Scud missile that hit a US military barracks in Saudi Arabia during the Persian Gulf war slipped through air defenses because of a computer failure, the New York Times reported yesterday. The hit on the barracks in Al Khobar Feb. 25 was the war's worst American-casualty incident - 28 dead and 97 wounded .

... Sources in Washington say the US is trying to persuade Syria to accept a scaled-down role for the United Nations at a Middle East peace conference. If Syrian President Hafez Assad were to adopt a less-hard-line position, Syria could receive Western economic help, the sources say.... A Soviet jetliner, pioneering a new Pacific route linking the Soviet Far East and the West Coast of the US, made its historic first flight but was late arriving in Anchorage. The flight Sunday from the USSR's Khabarovsk was

70 minutes behind schedule in arriving in Anchorage and more than three hours late departing for San Francisco.