EVENTS
NO WAR DANGER, S. KOREA LEADER SAYS
Prime Minister Hwang In Sung assured South Koreans yesterday that there is no danger of war despite tensions caused by North Korea's withdrawal from an international nuclear control pact. Last week, the North made a surprise announcement that it is quitting the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, reinforcing suspicions that the hard-line Communist state is developing nuclear weapons, despite its denials. Foreign Minister Han Sung Joo said US troops that came for joint United States-South Korean war games wo uld not extend their stay because of the nuclear dispute. The troops' prompt departure after the exercises is seen as an effort to defuse tensions. German bank cuts rate
Germany's central bank lowered its discount rate to 7.5 percent yesterday, a move long sought by other European countries and the United States. The discount rate had been 8 percent. High German interest rates have been blamed for the uncertainty in the European monetary system, and Washington and Germany's European neighbors had been urging a Bundesbank interest rate cut. Aussie war-crimes trial
Ivan Polyukhovich, now an Australian citizen, faced prosecution for alleged involvement in hundreds of murders in Ukraine in 1942 when Australia's first Nazi war crimes trial opened in Adelaide yesterday. He is charged in the murders of 553 to 853 Jews in his native Ukraine. He is being tried under special laws empowering prosecutors to pursue alleged World War II war criminals who migrated from Europe in the late 1940s and 1950s. Mob figures convicted
Chicago's reputed mob boss was convicted in San Diego on Wednesday along with an adviser in a failed scheme to take over gambling on an Indian reservation 40 miles north of San Diego. Prosecutors said reputed crime boss John (No Nose) DiFronzo and the others posed as legitimate contractors, misrepresented their intentions for the Rincon Indians' gaming hall and lied about where their money was coming from. L.A. passes curfew law
Los Angeles has a new stricter curfew ordinance enhancing the mayor's powers to order citizens off the streets in an emergency. The City Council yesterday closed a loophole cited by an appeals court that overturned the convictions of three people arrested for violating the dusk-to-dawn curfew imposed during the riots last year. The move to rewrite the ordinance came amid fears of renewed violence at the conclusion of the federal civil rights trial under way in the Rodney King beating. US, Vietnamese meet
Clinton administration officials met secretly in Washington on Wednesday with a Vietnamese diplomat in what the Vietnamese saw as another step toward normalized relations between the countries, the Los Angeles Times reported. Assistant Secretary of State William Clark and other US officials met with Trinh Xuan Lang, Vietnam's outgoing ambassador to the United Nations, in what could be a prelude to lifting the US trade embargo against Vietnam.
