News In Brief
Funeral services for assassinated Congolese President Laurent Kabila will be held Tuesday, unidentified sources in the nation's information ministry told news services. But the government still was not officially acknowledging Kabila's death, which reportedly came at mid-afternoon Tuesday amid a row with military chiefs whom he planned to fire from their jobs. Other than armed guards posted outside government buildings in Kinshasa and groups of people huddled in animated discussions on the street, there were no outward signs of political upheaval, reports said.
Prospects for reaching a full peace treaty between Israel and the Palestinians by the former's Feb. 6 election remain viable, Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami told journalists. He said after a hastily arranged meeting with Yasser Arafat that he believed the Palestinians "really wish to exhaust the possibilities of this process." But details of election front-runner Ariel Sharon's peace proposals, published for the first time, called for keeping all Jewish settlements in place and the ceding of no more land to Palestinians.
No township affected by last weekend's earthquake in El Salvador remains cut off from help, authorities said, as aid from international donors poured into the country and aftershocks largely abated. But in neighboring Nicaragua at least two aftershocks in the range of 5.0 on the Richter scale were reported, although without apparent injury or property damage.
The prosecutors who resigned en masse from the impeachment trial of Philippines President Joseph Estrada said they'd return if he agreed to testify. Meanwhile, newspapers in Manila published bank records reputedly from Estrada's accounts that were denied as evidence in the prosecutors' case. A senior economic planner in his government resigned in protest at indications the president would be acquitted, and riot police were ordered to prevent violence in ongoing street demonstrations and in a general strike called for today.
Judges began deliberating over their verdict in the trial of two former Libyan intelligence agents for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, suggesting they'd have an announcement by the end of the month. The trial opened last May 3 at a former US Air Force base in the Netherlands. (Story, page 7.)
To ease spreading panic among consumers, the slaughter of 5,000 cattle began in Portugal, the European country hardest hit by cases of so-called mad cow disease after Britain. Beef producers were promised compensation from the European Union for their losses.
(c) Copyright 2001. The Christian Science Publishing Society
