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THE WEEK: FEBRUARY 5-11

7 minute read
Julie K.L. Dam, Sinting Lai and Megan Rutherford

WORLD

Middle East Impasse Meeting at a joint Israeli-P.L.O. command post in northern Gaza, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and P.L.O. leader Yasser Arafat failed to reach agreement on how to begin expanding Palestinian authority without compromising Israeli security. Rabin insisted Islamic extremists must be controlled before there is any more discussion of Palestinian self-rule. And he refused to lift the three-week closure of the occupied territories that keeps thousands of Palestinians from their jobs in Israel. Another U.N. Mission The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously to send 7,000 peacekeepers to Angola to monitor the cease-fire, signed last November, in that country’s civil war. The mission is expected to cost $380 million. Hunting the Zapatistas Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo, who has been under intense pressure to end the year-old rebellion in the southern state of Chiapas, dispatched hundreds of troops and police to capture the leaders of the uprising. For the first time, Zedillo identified the elusive guerrilla commander, known as “Subcomandante Marcos,” by his full name: Rafael Sebastian Guillen Vicente. Were There Two Killers? The third special prosecutor to investigate the assassination of Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio last March is reported to be pursuing a two-gunmen theory, among others. Although Colosio had two gunshot wounds at different angles and on opposite sides of his abdomen and head, investigators had concluded that the convicted assassin acted alone. Neither prosecutor Pablo Chapa nor Attorney General Antonio Lozano Gracia confirmed that evidence has been uncovered or that the inquiry has shifted focus. Quake in Colombia A powerful 6.4-magnitude earthquake rocked western Colombia, killing at least 46 people and injuring almost 300. The quake was centered less than 300 km west of Bogota, where tremors were felt. The city of Pereira, in the country’s coffee-growing region, was hardest hit. Yet Another PM for Poland Faced with President Lech Walesa’s threat to dissolve parliament, Prime Minister Waldemar Pawlak of the Peasant Party resigned after 16 months in office. Walesa accepted the leftist-coalition government’s nominated successor, Jozef Oleksy, Speaker of the Sejm and a moderate leader of the Democratic Left Alliance. If approved by parliament, Oleksy would become Poland’s seventh Prime Minister since 1990 and the first former communist official to form a Cabinet. Wobbling in Almaty Attending the Commonwealth of Independent States summit in Almaty, Kazakhstan, Russian President Boris Yeltsin appeared unsteady as he entered the meeting hall, requiring support from two officials. The spectacle sparked anew concerns about his health and rumored drinking problem. A spokesman in Moscow said there was no reason to believe Yeltsin was ill. During his address before leaders of the former Soviet republics, Yeltsin insisted Russia is seeking a peaceful resolution to its war with Chechnya. Meanwhile, C.I.S. leaders elected the Russian President to another year as head of the alliance. Rwanda’s Tragic Legacy A report by French child psychiatrist Catherine Bonnet documents the horrifying extent of mass rapes of Rwandan women by predominantly Hutu soldiers and militiamen during last year’s ethnic massacres. “The scope of the rapes is unimaginable,” wrote Bonnet. “Virtually every woman or girl past puberty who was spared from massacre by the militias had been raped.” Rwanda’s National Population Office estimates that as many as 5,000 women were impregnated during the assaults, and health officials estimate that as many as 90% of the women do not want to keep the babies.

UNITED STATES Another Nominee in Trouble The odds against Dr. Henry Foster’s becoming the next U.S. Surgeon General seemed to grow steeper as his nomination bogged down in a controversy over the number of abortions he had performed during his career–a dispute that once again put the White House in the embarrassing position of having to explicate a sloppy vetting process. Appearing on the TV program Nightline, Foster said he had performed 39 abortions–an upward adjustment from the “fewer than a dozen” he said he had previously told the White House about. Many antiabortion Senators questioned Foster’s candor, leaving many pro- abortion rights lawmakers fuming over the White House’s failure to get Foster’s record straight from the start–an oversight that let the debate devolve into a numbers game. For his part, the President vowed to fight for Foster’s confirmation, as did Foster himself. The Battle of the Budget President Clinton formally sent his proposed $1.6 trillion 1996 budget to Congress where, as expected, it was promptly pronounced dead by Republicans, who said its $144 billion worth of cuts over the next five years were not enough; nor were its projected deficits ($200 billion yearly through the end of the century) deemed acceptable. As yet, however, the Republican Party leadership has proposed no official alternative.

Carns for the CIA President Clinton named retired Air Force General Michael Carns to head the CIA, which remains demoralized by the Aldrich Ames spy scandal. A decorated Vietnam War veteran and respected administrator, Carns was chosen in part because he is an outsider to the intelligence community. Initial reaction in Washington was positive. The Feds’ Terrorism Cases In a surprise development at the terror-plot trial of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and 11 other men in New York City, one of the key defendants in the case, Siddig Ibrahim Siddig Ali, changed his plea to guilty and agreed to cooperate with the prosecution. Stunned attorneys for the remaining defendants immediately asked for a mistrial, but the judge denied the request. In a separate but related development, Pakistani authorities captured one of the U.S.’s most wanted terrorist suspects, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, in Islamabad and returned him to the U.S. for trial. Prosecutors allege that Yousef was the mastermind of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, for which four other men have already been convicted. Yousef pleaded not guilty in New York City. Another Dropout Claiming he wanted to “put our family first,” former Vice President Dan Quayle announced he would not run for the presidency in 1996. Quayle reportedly faced bleak fund-raising prospects. The Simpson Case The prosecution moved on from the issue of O.J. Simpson’s alleged spousal abuse to the actual crime of murder. Prosecutors sought to assemble a detailed chronology of the murder night with a parade of witnesses that included Mezzaluna restaurant employees and neighbors of Nicole Simpson. Also, the first police officer to arrive at the crime scene testified as to what he saw–accompanied by grisly photos. Earlier in the week, Judge Lance Ito excused one of the jurors and replaced her with an alternate because she had been treated by a doctor who is expected to testify for Simpson. Keeping the Skies Safe Hoping to improve airline safety in the wake of a series of recent crashes, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration and the airline industry agreed to collect and share flight-recorder data from routine flights to detect possible flaws or mistakes that might later lead to accidents. To reach the deal, the faa agreed not to use the information to punish pilots or carriers.

BUSINESS

New U.S.-China Trade Talks Anxious to avert an all-out trade war with the U.S., China agreed to resume discussions in Beijing this week on the piracy of U.S.-made goods, including movies, music and computer software. The overture, which did not mention any specific proposals, came less than a week after Washington slapped stiff tariffs on Chinese products worth more than $1 billion. The levies are due to take effect on Feb. 26.

THE ARTS & MEDIA

An Existentialist’s War A long-lost notebook detailing French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s army experiences during World War II was published in Paris. The work, titled Notebook from the Phony War, describes the renowned existentialist’s boredom and exasperation with military life and contains affectionate references to “my dear Beaver”–i.e., his mistress and close companion, the writer Simone de Beauvoir.

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