News Currents

UNITED STATESThe space shuttle Atlantis landed smoothly in Florida yesterday at the end of a nine-day mission to deploy a $120 million communications satellite for NASA. It was the first scheduled shuttle landing at Kennedy since 1985.... Nine Thai immigrants, including seven Buddhist monks, were found Saturday fatally shot in a massacre inside a temple in the small Arizona town of Goodyear. JUSTICE Dr. Yolanda Huet-Vaughn, a US Army Reserve doctor and mother of three convicted of desertion for refusing to serve in the Persian Gulf war, was sentenced Friday at Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., to serve two and a half years in a military prison.... The attorney general of Illinois, Roland Burris, who is black, has come out against the US Supreme Court nomination of Clarence Thomas, contending Thomas embraces policies that would hurt blacks.... US lawyers are debating a proposal that would allow defense attorne ys to reveal to court officials when a client is using them to perpetrate a fraud or crime. The House of Delegates of the American Bar Association, which establishes policy for much of the legal establishment, is to vote Tuesday in Atlanta on the proposed change in the ethics rule.... A lawsuit seeking $2 billion in damages was filed Friday in Milwaukee against accused serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer by the family of one of the victims in the case. The suit on behalf of the estate of Ernest Miller seeks to obt ain profits from any publishing or movie deals Dahmer might arrange.

EUROPE Riot police in Bari, Italy, fired warning shots and tear gas yesterday as Albanian refugees, facing forced repatriation after fleeing to Italy, surged forward when policemen began to distribute food. About 10,000 Albanians landed at Bari three days earlier, packed like sardines aboard a rusty freighter, which forced its way through an Italian naval blockade of the harbor.... Two men were killed in the rebel republic of Croatia in mortar attacks Saturday night that violated a fragile cease-fire in Yugosla via's ethnic fighting. The clashes were the latest in a series undermining a four-day-old truce between warring Serbs and Croats. However, Serbs and Croats also made their first exchange of prisoners Saturday night.

AFRICA Madagascar's government said yesterday 11 people had died in an assault on the presidential palace Saturday but denied troops had shot anyone. At least 213 more people were injured. Witnesses, however, said North Korean-trained troops opened fire with rifles and threw grenades as the thousands of demonstrators marched toward the palace to demand President Didier Ratsiraka resign. The Active Forces Coalition that has spearheaded 10 weeks of strikes and massive demonstrations against the government called the march.