News Currents
UNITED STATESTwo Arab American groups Wednesday released a video depicting Iraqi children suffering from post-Gulf war effects of malnutrition and other diseases in a bid to convince the Bush administration to provide humanitarian aid. The Arab American Medical Association and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee sent copies of the nine-minute tape to President Bush and every member of Congress.... President Bush has nominated Alan Greenspan to a second four-year term as chairman of the Federal Reserve Boa rd.... Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas told the Bush administration he experimented with marijuana while in college, the White House has revealed. The judge told the White House he believes it was a mistake and that it was never repeated. Thomas had told the FBI about the drug use during its investigations for the judge's nomination to the Court of Appeals in 1989.... The US International Trade Commission said Wednesday that Japanese automakers are dumping minivans in the US market. MIDDLE EAST A Canadian DC-8 carrying Muslim pilgrims home to Nigeria crashed in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, yesterday, killing all 263 people aboard. The plane was making an emergency landing.
EUROPE Almost 94 percent of Romania's AIDS patients are under 12 years old, more than half the total number of child AIDS patients in Europe, said Health Ministry director Nicolae Beldescu. He blamed Stalinist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu for covering up evidence of the disease, which he said was largely transmitted in hospitals in the late 1980s through blood transfusions.... The chairman of South Africa's newly recognized National Olympic Committee, speaking in Lausanne, Switzerland, urged its athletes not to rush into international competition but to allow time for the nation's sports establishment to become fully integrated.
ENVIRONMENT AND SCIENCE A boom in joint US-Soviet wildlife studies has prompted the USFish and Wildlife Service to open a special international office in Anchorage to coordinate programs on the two sides of the Bering Strait.... Despite warnings that lead is a major threat to children's health, states have done a haphazard job of testing for the toxic metal in drinking water at schools and day-care centers, the Natural Resources Defense Council charges....US administration officials and representatives from the food and chemic al industries have lined up against a bill aimed at cracking down on toxic pesticide residues in the nation's food supply. At a hearing of the Senate Labor and Human Resource Committee Wednesday, officials from the Environmental Protection Agency, Food and Drug Administration, and the Department of Agriculture criticized the measure.
