News In Brief

USSR assails report of pollution disaster

The government daily Izvestia branded dissident Soviet scientist Zhores Medvedev a renegade and enemy of the Soviet people Monday for writing about a 1983 pollution disaster in the Ukraine.

Mr. Medvedev, writing in New Scientist magazine, had said a dam-burst at a fertilizer factory last year killed all life along the Dniestr River in the Ukraine. The disaster killed millions of fish and restricted water supplies.

Medvedev, a distinguished biologist who now lives in Britain, said the accident ''could be turning into the worst ecological disaster in the country's history.''

Izvestia said the article contained nothing new and was a belated attempt to smear the Soviet Union. The paper itself carried a report on the incident in October and said there had been enormous damage to the Dniestr River from millions of tons of potassium-polluted waste water.