EVENTS
CORETTA KING URGES ATTACK ON RACISM
As Americans honored Martin Luther King Jr. yesterday, the widow of the civil rights leader warned that racism in the United States was allowed to flourish during the past decade. In her annual "State of the Dream" speech in Atlanta on Sunday, Coretta Scott King urged Americans to join a national march on Washington this summer to awaken "the slumbering conscience of our democracy." Mrs. King praised President-elect Clinton for appointing a diverse Cabinet, but said his administration faces a formidable task in fulfilling King's call for unity. "We go back to Washington with high hopes that the new leadership will sound the [death] knell for the age of apathy and indifference and ring in a new era of healing, hope, and opportunity," she said. Tanker on rocks
An Estonian oil tanker that ran aground on rocks Saturday four miles from Tallinn, Estonia's capital, was leaking oil yesterday and in danger of breaking apart in strong winds, officials said. Salvage operations were suspended yesterday as 60-m.p.h. winds blasted the 200-foot tanker on the Gulf of Finland. "Nobody knows if it will break up, but it certainly could," said Kalle Pedak, deputy director the Estonian Marine Board. The nine-member crew was still aboard yesterday. Russia drops controls
Russia's prime minister yesterday lifted price controls he had imposed Jan. 1 in a step that had been widely viewed as a setback for free market reforms. Deputy Prime Minister Boris Fyodorov announced the decision, but he said Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin agreed to it. Fyodorov called the original decree "a bureaucratic mistake." The reversal, however, reflected the deep divide between the new prime minister, a Soviet-era industrialist, and the young reformers in his Cabinet. Astronauts try new test
Endeavour's astronauts yesterday shut down one of the shuttle's three fuel cells, the first time such a test was carried out in space. The fuel cells use hydrogen and oxygen to generate electricity for the shuttle's electronics. The apparatus, turned off by shuttle pilot Donald McMonagle, was to remain down for about 10 hours while one of the other cells took over. Endeavour returns to Earth today.
Avalanche in Turkey
An avalanche buried 50 houses Monday in a village in northeastern Turkey, and about 300 people were believed trapped under tons of snow, the Anatolia news agency said. The disaster occurred at Ozengeli 20 miles from the provincial center of Bayburt, 500 miles east of Ankara, the agency said. Mafia in the news
France, worried about the spread of Italy's Mafia and other criminal organizations into the 12 European Community states, will propose a United Nations conference to combat the global spread of organized crime groups like the Mafia, Justice Minister Michel Vauzelle said yesterday. Italy last week arrested that country's Mafia "boss of bosses," Salvatore Riina, who has been implicated in more than 50 murders and a multibillion dollar drug operation.
