News Currents

CRIME AND JUSTICE Women's rights groups held vigils yesterday at the University of Montreal, where a gunman raging against ``feminists'' killed 14 women and himself in what the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation says is the worst mass slaying in Canada's history. City leaders in Miami appealed for calm regardless of the verdict in the murder trial of Hispanic police officer William Lozano for the deaths of two blacks last January. Court proceedings began Wednesday in San Jose, Calif., in the case of a pit bull owner charged with murder after his dog killed a neighbor's young child.

DRUG WAR

In Colombia, drug cartels threatened Wednesday to escalate their war against the government unless the issue of extraditing drug-trafficking suspects to the US is put to a vote. The House of Representatives voted to put the issue on a Jan. 21 ballot, but President Virgilio Barco Vargas opposes the move. Meanwhile, authorities in the US, Great Britain, Switzerland, Austria, and Luxembourg Wednesday froze $61.8 million in assets belonging to Medell'in cartel member Jos'e Gonzalo Rodriguez-Gacha. Despite the violence in Colombia, President Bush is going ahead with plans to attend an antidrug summit there early next year. In Washington, D.C., a jury convicted Rayful Edmond III and 10 codefendents of running the city's largest drug ring.

EUROPE

In Czechoslovakia, Prime Minister Ladislav Adamec promised to name a new government by today, but said he was having trouble finding ministers. Some 2,000 demonstrators in Krakow, Poland, Wednesday night rioted for the third evening in a row at a statue of Lenin, pelting it with paint and setting a fire at its base. In the Soviet Union, Lithuania yesterday defied Moscow by changing its constitution to allow a multiparty system. Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and French President Fran,cois Mitterrand met in Kiev Wednesday to discuss the changes in Eastern Europe and German reunification.

ASIA

In Manila, Philippine rebels in the city's financial district surrendered yesterday, but others held out elsewhere (see Page 7). Non-communist Cambodian resistance groups said yesterday they had captured eight towns in western Cambodia. New Indian Prime Minister V.P. Singh visited the Sikh Golden Temple in Amritsar yesterday in a peace offering to separatists in the Punjab.

SCIENCE AND ENVIRONMENT

Tass said Wednesday that Soviet scientists had finally succeeded in docking the Kvant-2 module with the Mir space station after days of work to remedy malfunctions. The module brought supplies to cosmonauts Alexander Viktorenko and Alexander Serebrov. At Cape Canaveral, Fla., engineers readied for the maiden launch of the US's most powerful rocket, the Titan 3. The launch, scheduled for yesterday evening, will carry one British and one Japanese communications satellite into orbit.

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