News Currents

EUROPEThe US and its allies are working behind the scenes on ways to help the Soviet Union avoid defaulting on its $70 billion in foreign debt, a US official, who declined to be named, told Reuters.... Greenpeace said Sunday it had a report by the International Atomic Energy Agency showing that nuclear weapons or material had been lost at sea more than 30 times over the past 40 years. Greenpeace also said it had documents from Soviet authorities at the naval base of Murmansk that estimates that 26,000 people w ould be exposed to deadly doses of radioactivity if there were a major Soviet nuclear accident at sea.... Police said yesterday they arrested 32 people and seized weapons after continuing clashes in the eastern German coal mining city of Hoyerswerda, where anti-foreigner right-wingers besieged a building housing Mozambican and Vietnamese workers.... Labour Member of Parliament Ted Leadbitter called for 78-year-old Briton John Cairncross to be extradited from France, where he now lives, after Cairncross admi tted he had spied for the Soviet Union. Cairncross has long been at the center of speculation that he was the "fifth man" - the espionage partner of British turncoats Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, and Anthony Blunt.... The parliament in Tadzhikistan yesterday voted to impose emergency rule throughout the Soviet Central Asian republic and forced the acting president to resign, Tass said. Deputies took the vote after acting President Kadreddin Aslonov Sunday banned the republic's Communist Party a nd ordered the nationalization of its property. The vote may be the first move by a local Communist Party to strike back after the Soviet party was banned following last month's failed coup. AFRICA One of Mozambique's few modern doctors, on trial for running a private medical practice, says the socialist government has broken its own law by encouraging other private practitioners - medicine men. The trial of Dr. Aires Fernandes, a lecturer at the medical faculty of Mozambique's only university, is considered a test case for the country's socialist health policy and a newly independent judiciary.

ASIA AND THE PACIFIC China is encouraging large numbers of Chinese to swarm into ethnically Tibetan areas, the pro-Tibetan independence group International Campaign for Tibet said yesterday. The policy pits "advanced" Chinese against "poor" Tibetans, according to the report. More than 130 Chinese and Tibetans, including officials, soldiers, Tibetan monks, and Chinese settlers were interviewed in the western reaches of central China's Sichuan Province, a region that was formerly part of the Himalayan kingdom of Tibet.... The human rights organization Amnesty International has called for the release of political prisoners in Laos, saying some have been held without trial since the communist takeover in 1975.