EVENTS
IRAQI CRIMES AGAINST KURDS TOLD
A report that could lay the foundation for war crimes charges against Iraq was released in Cairo yesterday. It alleged that Iraqi forces systematically destroyed a Kurdish village, conducting mass executions and herding women and children off to death camps.
The report by the New York-based Middle East Watch and Physicians for Human Rights, based in Boston, quotes "numerous accounts" that soldiers told starving and cold prisoners, "Saddam has sent you here to die." The report also documents the destruction of Koreme, Iraq, in late August 1988. Kohl promises troops
Chancellor Helmut Kohl promised yesterday to remove legal barriers this year to enable Germany to take part in armed United Nations peacekeeping missions.
Kohl said pressure from abroad for Bonn not just to help finance UN missions but also to commit troops to them had grown immensely since Germany unified two years ago. Bush, Mitterrand dine
The mounting consensus for military intervention in ex-Yugoslavia and the allied relief effort for Somalia topped the agenda for yesterday's talks in Paris between United States President Bush and President Francois Mitterrand of France. Mitterrand had requested a meeting and working dinner, after which Bush left for Washington. Pipe bomb found
A powerful pipe bomb was found Saturday under a seat in a movie theater in Dallas where "Malcolm X" was to be shown, authorities said. They said a timing device attached to the bomb had malfunctioned so that it didn't explode. A janitor found the bomb before the theater opened for the day.
Agents of the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms detonated it in the theater's parking lot and sent the fragments to an FBI lab. They said it could have killed several people. Hong Kong contracts
Lu Ping, director of China's Hong Kong and Macao Office, said China would recognize minor contracts signed by the British colonial government before China takes over Hong Kong in 1997, a Hong Kong television station reported yesterday.
On Nov. 30, Chinese officials had threatened to void, after taking over in 1997, all business contracts signed by the British colonial government that were not approved by Beijing. Aid worker killed
A British UN aid worker, Sean Devereux, killed in Somalia last week, was shot from behind by a lone gunman as he walked home in the dark, a US military spokesman and relief agency sources said yesterday. Devereux had spoken openly of constant extortion to which UNICEF and other relief agencies were subjected by their own drivers and guards and local thugs. Early sculpture
A 4,300-year-old figurine unearthed in Tell Es-Sweyhat, Syria, is the oldest known sculpture of a domesticated horse and shows horses played a greater, earlier role than previously thought in the rise of empires, according to archeologist Thomas Holland, with the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute. The clay figure is three inches high and about two inches across.
