EVENTS
BUSH EXPERTS MAY STAY ON A WHILE
President-elect Clinton has asked several senior Bush administration foreign policy officials to stay on at the State Department, at least temporarily, to signal his determination for continuity in Iraq and Haiti policies, transition and congressional officials say. The officials said Clinton planned to announce an array of senior State Department appointments soon. He has been criticized for being slow to round out his new team. The sources said additional Bush holdovers were likely in other areas as we ll. Clinton communications director George Stephanopoulos said the president-elect had settled on more than 110 sub-Cabinet officials and hoped to be "very close to 200 or 300 by the end of next week." Endeavour lands
Endeavour and its five astronauts returned to Earth Jan. 19 after a six-day shuttle mission that helped lay the groundwork for a planned space station. The spaceship sailed through a hazy sky and landed at Kennedy Space Center at 8:37 a.m. A red, white, and blue drag chute slowed its roll down the concrete runway. Fog at Kennedy prevented Endeavour from landing at sunrise as planned and almost forced a detour to the backup site at Edwards Air Force Base in California. Some US troops leave
The top United Nations envoy to Somalia has cast doubt on a United States plan to transfer military control to UN command by Feb. 1. "You can't say that a secure environment for the delivery of assistance has been achieved," envoy Ismat Kittani of Iraq said Jan. 18 at UN headquarters in New York, stating the UN precondition for the transfer of authorityy. But hundreds of American combat troops, as part of the current American plan to withdraw troops in coming days and weeks, left Somalia Jan. 19. Washin gton appears to be trying to prod the UN into action by announcing it is ready to make the transfer of authority. Oil pumped from tanker
A tanker that ran aground in the Gulf of Finland over the weekend was still leaking some oil Jan. 19 as salvage workers prepared to pump the remaining oil to facilities on shore. Winds reaching 60 m.p.h. had hampered efforts Jan. 18 to salvage the Estonian-owned tanker Kihnu, which is stuck just a few hundred yards off a mostly industrial section of Estonia's coast. But winds and waves died down by this morning.
IBM loses $5 billion
IBM Jan. 19 reported a record fourth-quarter loss of $5.46 billion, capping a year in which the tarnished computer leader shed more than 40,000 jobs and saw its stock price tumble. The loss was caused largely by $7.2 billion in pretax accounting charges taken during the quarter to pay for another 25,000 job cuts planned for 1993, the latest in a series of restructuring moves announced in the last year. British-Taiwanese deal
British Aerospace and Taiwan Aerospace Corporation signed a joint venture Jan. 19 for making regional jetliners a deal that angered British labor unions by moving work out of the country. Taiwan Aerospace agreed to pay British Aerospace $184.8 million for half of its money-losing regional jetliner business and will give the British company another $25 million when the first jet assembled in Tawain is delivered. Paraguay's democracy
A deadlock in Paraguay's ruling Colorado Party over the choice of a presidential candidate for May's elections is prompting widespread rumors in the country that a military coup could cut short Paraguay's fledgling democracy. President Andres Rodriguez, the army general who toppled Gen. Alfredo Stroessner in 1989 and went on to win the country's first ever free elections, is due to step down in August. Stroessner was re-elected to office seven times and became Latin America's longest serving strongman un til Rodriguez, a former Stroessner protege, put an end to his 34-year dictatorship in a coup on Feb. 3, 1989.
