News Currents
MIDDLE EAST AND GULF
Israeli military courts for the first time allowed reporters and relatives yesterday to attend its appeal hearings on expulsion orders for 12 Palestinians. The Supreme Court Sunday had told the Army to open the hearings but ruled the Army may close the hearings when classified evidence is revealed.... Kuwaiti Crown Prince and Prime Minister Sheikh Saad al-Abdullah al-Sabah said yesterday that Iraq was rebuilding its army to invade Kuwait again.... Libya was reported yesterday to have deployed sophisticat ed early warning systems along its coastline to guard against a US attack.... Israel's government may soon buy American cars for all 20 of its Cabinet ministers, most of whom now use Volvos. A large American car would cost about $15,000 less than the Volvo and is cheaper to maintain. UNITED STATES
R.H. Macy & Co. has sent a shudder through the retailing world by telling suppliers it will be late making its January payments, the New York Times reported yesterday.... The families hurt by the 1976 assassination in the US of former Chilean Ambassador Orlando Letelier will receive $2.6 million from the Chilean government, the State Department said.... Coretta Scott King said she is disappointed by President Bush's record on civil rights but will remain neutral in the 1992 election and expects Bush to get more black votes than he did in 1988.... The manager of Swanson Chrysler-Plymouth in St. Petersburg, Fla., has fired his sales staff and is selling cars faster than ever before. He posted flat-rate discounted prices on his cars and started telling people who walked in to look around for themselves. If they saw a car they liked, he told them, they should write him a check.... Russian scientists said they have made strides in developing nuclear-propelled rockets that enhance chances for faster space trave l and will detail their work at a meeting in Albuquerque, N.M., this week. EUROPE
The Vatican yesterday officially recognized the independence of the predominantly Roman Catholic Yugoslav republics of Croatia and Slovenia, without waiting for the rest of Europe to do so.... At least 100,000 Kurds disappeared in Iraq in the late 1980s in a systematic drive by President Saddam Hussein to wipe them out, BBC television reported Sunday.... Britain began an unprecedented study of the work of its criminal courts yesterday as part of a planned overhaul of the English judicial system. The move
follows the freeing last year of six Irishmen from jail on appeal after supposed scientific evidence was later found to be faulty and on what their lawyers called "less than honest" police testimony.... Albanian police arrested 30 people over the weekend after a stone-hurling crowd of would-be emigrants stormed into the port of Vlora.... The illicit production, trafficking in, and abuse of narcotics still represents a worldwide threat to public health, the United Nation's drug-control board said in a repor t published yesterday.
