News Currents
EUROPEPresident Bush said yesterday the US will grant dipolomatic recongnition immediately to the Baltic republics of Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia. His decision was eased by Mikhail Gorbachev's pledge Sunday that the republics can have their freedom if they want it.... Serbia and Yugoslavia's federal presidency yesterday signed an EC-sponsored peace agreement aimed at ending the escalating civil war in Croatia, and fighting began to diminish. Communist Serbia agreed to the deal after four weeks of pressure from Western countries. EC observers, who are already successfully monitoring a cease-fire in neighboring Slovenia, will be sent to Croatia. The plan called for a peace conference on the future of the whole country and an arbitration commission to resolve border problems between Croatia and Serbia.... European nuclear-power experts began a five-day conference in Vienna yesterday to examine ways of improving the safety of reactors, with special emphasis on aging atomic plants in Eastern Europe.... Members of the Gagauz minority in Soviet Moldavia protested Sunday in Comrat against the predominantly ethnic Romanian republic's bid for independence and demanded their own separate state.
AFRICA Sudan's military government has suspended all food relief flights to the south of the country, where thousands of hungry people are stranded in a vast expanse of snake-infested marshes.... Sierra Leone voters, in 10 days of polling, have overwhelmingly approved a new multiparty constitution that would end 13 years of one-party rule. President Joseph Momoh must still approve the results of the referendum.
ASIA AND THE PACIFIC Elite North Korean and Thai soldiers will guard former Cambodian monarch Prince Norodom Sihanouk when he returns to Phnom Penh in November after more than a decade in exile, an Asian diplomat and Thai army officers said. He is due to return under the terms of a recent peace accord - yet to be signed - between the government of Prime Minister Hun Sen and the three guerrilla factions. International aid workers in Cambodia talk of spiraling anarchy and corruption after two decades of war.... Former Pakistan i Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto said Saturday Pakistan had sufficient know-how to make a nuclear weapon. She told reporters that President Ghulam Ishaq tried to fool her about Pakistan's nuclear program, which he controls, when she was prime minister for 20 months until August last year.... Gorbachev should stay at the head of a central Soviet government, retaining control over defense, taxes, and foreign affairs, former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher said in Tokyo at the beginning of a 10-day vis it to Japan.... Japan and North Korea remained far apart on normalizing relations as their fourth set of talks ended yesterday in Beijing, but they agreed to meet again in November.
