News Currents
MIDDLE EASTLebanese Army troops stormed militia offices and hideouts of Muslim fundamentalists Sunday in the southern port city of Sidon as the government continues to assert its control over the region. The troops arrested 50 armed groups.... Iranian President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani has vowed to go ahead with plans to complete a nuclear power plant in Bushehr despite a decision in Bonn not to allow a German firm to help. UNITED STATES Former Pennsylvania commonwealth secretary C. Delores Tucker is expected this week to announce that she will seek the congressional seat of US Rep. William Gray III (D), who is resigning. She was the first woman and first black to serve in the state's cabinet.... US authorities who boarded 60 shrimping boats Sunday in the Gulf of Mexico found four boats in violation of a federal law requiring use of turtle excluders to avoid killing endangered species, a Coast Guard spokesman said.... An appellate court in San Francisco upheld the convictions of a Christian Science couple, Mark Rippberger and his wife, Susan Middleton, for felony child endangerment after the 1984 death of their daughter, who was being treated solely by prayer.
EUROPE Romania's Civic Alliance opposition movement elected literary critic Nicolae Manolescu Sunday as leader of its newly created political party. The alliance is committed to rid Romania of remnants of the Communist dictatorship. Romanian President Ion Iliescu is in Caracas, for a four-day visit, the first ever by a Romanian head of state. He and Venezuelan President Carlos Andres Perez will sign a bilateral agreement aimed at strengthening economic, political, and cultural ties between the two nations.... S heikh Zayed bin Sultan al Nahyan, president of the United Arab Emirates and head of the collapsed Bank of Credit and Commerce International, was expected to meet senior banking officials in London this week. In Karachi, hundreds of depositors thronged the branches of the bank there yesterday, withdrawing millions of dollars.... Lithuanian President Vytautas Landsbergis is on his way to Strasbourg, France, to address deputies of the European Parliament, the Lithuanian mission in Moscow said.
LATIN AMERICA Brazil may expel a group of US Protestant missionaries from a remote section of the Amazon jungle where they have been operating without government permission since 1982. They have been working in the area of the Poturus tribe in western Para state. The Poturus, who number about 135, had never had contact with white men before the missionaries arrived.... With half of Panama's jungles already razed, environmentalists are boosting efforts to protect the rain forest in the Panama Canal watershed. Deforesta tion can lead to erosion and sediment collection on the canal floor.
