News Currents

MIDDLE EASTKuwait said yesterday it will resume crude oil export shipments Saturday or Sunday for the first time since Iraq invaded the emirate Aug. 2. More than half of the 600 oil wells blown up by Iraqi troops are still on fire, but about 15 fires a week are being put out, and Kuwait is pumping 140,000 barrels per day.... Germany's Foreign Ministry called a crisis meeting of experts yesterday to work out a response to an ultimatum from Lebanese kidnappers threatening violence against two German hostages. The kid nappers Wednesday gave Bonn 48 hours to disprove rumors that two Lebanese Shiite brothers jailed in Germany are not alive and well. UNITED STATES The Interior Department announced Wednesday it will sell more drilling rights next month in the Chukchi Sea, off northwest Alaska.... Yiddish storyteller Isaac Bashevis Singer, the Nobel Prize winner whose writings inspired the popular movie "Yentl," died in a nursing home in Miami Wednesday.

ASIA AND THE PACIFIC India's minority government has broken with four decades of socialist, protectionist orthodoxy, saying it aims to emerge from an unprecedented foreign debt crisis as a world economic player. In just one month in office, Finance Minister Manmohan Singh has given the economy one of its biggest overhauls since independence from Britain in 1947, reversing decades of licensing, nationalization, and subsidies.... China posted a rare budget surplus during the first half of 1991, but the country's finance minist er warned that severe structural problems still dogged the economy.... South Korea and the US initialed an accord yesterday on a troops support network in times of war, under which water, food, and many of the necessities of life would be provided by South Korea if US forces were brought in for a war.... Senior Vietnamese and US officials begin a series of meetings today to discuss a photograph said to show Americans missing in Indochina and also to consider progress toward diplomatic relations.

LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN Colombian Foreign Minister Luis Fernando Jaramillo said he expects to have a consul in Cuba within three months to reopen consular and trade relations.... Latin American drug traffickers are using bigger aircraft to ship illicit drugs. The Mexican attorney general's office said Wednesday that Mexican security forces had seized two DC-6s and a Convair used to transport cocaine recently.... Japan's international aid organization has told its 52 volunteers in Peru to prepare to evacuate after a recent spate of anti-Japanese guerrilla activities.