News Currents

EUROPEEuropean Community peace envoys said yesterday in Zagreb they had won a written agreement in all-night talks with rival Yugoslav leaders that could bring peace to the divided Balkan state. "A step forward has been taken to avert further bloodshed and reach a peaceful solution," Dutch Foreign Minister Hans van den Broek told reporters. In Bonn, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl said that Germany would freeze all its economic aid to Yugoslavia if the crisis in the Balkan state was not solved peacefully (see st ory, Page 3).... Warsaw Pact leaders met yesterday in Prague to bury that organization, which kept Eastern Europe under communist control for almost 35 years and confronted the Western NATO alliance.... The Ukrainian government plans to introduce its own money with the letter U stamped on Soviet rubles. Prime Minister Vitold Fokin told the republic's parliament over the weekend the new U-rubles would replace the coupons now used as an interim measure before the republic can launch its own convertible curren cy.... Moscow wants to export an antimissile missile with a performance reported to be better than the US Patriot. Boris Bounkine, general manager of the Soviet scientific and industrial concern Almaza, told the aerospace magazine Air et Cosmos that it can deliver the system just 10 months after a contract is signed. UNITED STATES The Seminole Indian tribe has asked permission of the state to open gambling casinos in Florida, where voters have repeatedly rejected casino gambling in referendums.... In Illinois, an 11th-hour tax increase designed to break a three-month budget stalemate in the Legislature self-destructed, leaving thousands of poor and homeless Illinoisans without welfare benefits when the new state fiscal year began yesterday. At least 125,000 public aid checks were held up.

OTHER WORLD NEWS The military government of Nigeria expelled a Lagos-based correspondent for the British daily Financial Times Sunday, accusing him of writing articles intended to cause disharmony among Nigerians.... Colombian soldiers destroyed nine cocaine laboratories in remote Amazon jungle Friday night, military sources have announced. Bolivian police seized 27 planes and dismantled a clandestine laboratory in a weekend raid on cocaine traffickers in northern Bolivia. But word of the operation had been leaked to dru g rings and no traffickers were arrested.... The Bank of Japan announced yesterday an immediate cut in the official discount rate from 6 percent to 5.5 percent. It was the first time in more than four years that Tokyo had lowered the key rate.... The US yesterday returned control to Manila of one of the oldest US military bases in the Philippines, Camp John Hay, a rest-and-recreation center.... A cease-fire in the 12-year-old Cambodian civil war agreed on last week was broken with a Khmer Rouge guerrilla at tack on a refugee camp, US relief workers said yesterday.