October 11, 1995
Web posted at: 2 a.m. EDT (0600 GMT)
UNITED NATIONS (CNN) -- U.N. Secretary-General Boutros
Boutros-Ghali announced Tuesday his special representative to
the former Yugoslavia, Yasushi Akashi, has been reassigned.
A U.N. spokesman said the move was requested by Akashi, who has been criticized in some diplomatic circles for hesitancy to approve air strikes in response to Bosnian Serb aggression.
Kofi Annan, the undersecretary general for peacekeeping, will temporarily replace Akashi as envoy to the former Yugoslavia area and liaison to NATO.
Ishmat Kattani will assume Annan's role at headquarters in New York as leader of the Department of Peacekeeping, while Akashi will take Kittani's job as advisor to the secretary general in New York.
Spokesman Joe Sills said if there were an equivalent of the purple heart for U.N. service, "Mr. Akashi should get it for his service in the former Yugoslavia and Cambodia."
MOSCOW (CNN) -- Russian President Boris Yeltsin said Tuesday
he will not declare a state of emergency in the Chechen
capital of Grozny despite several bomb attacks there.
After talks with Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, Yeltsin said the government would try to stabilize the fragile situation by other means. A bomb attack Friday severely injured Russia's top commander in Chechnya. It was the second attack on a top Russian official in three weeks.
NEW YORK (Reuters) -- Russian Garry Kasparov successfully
defended his title in the Professional Chess Association
World Championship match when he and Viswanathan Anand of
India agreed to a draw in their 18th match on Tuesday.
According to the rules, 1 point is awarded per win, while a draw garners for one 1/2 a point. The Russian finished with 10 1/2 points after four wins and 13 draws. Kasparov's prize will total almost $1 million. Anand, who won only one game, had accumulated only 7 1/2 points after 18 games. He will receive about $500,000.
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LAGOS, Nigeria (CNN) -- Nigeria reduced Tuesday a life sentence for its former head of state, Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo.
The information ministry said Obasanjo would now serve only 15 years in prison for plotting to overthrow the government in March. Nigeria's Information Ministry reported that the sentences of 41 others accused of taking part in the coup plot had also been reduced.
Nigeria's military leader, Gen. Sani Abacha, commuted the sentences in an Independence Day broadcast following widespread international protest of the earlier sentence.
STOCKHOLM, Sweden (CNN) -- A 58-year-old University of
Chicago professor has taken home the 1995 Nobel Economics
Prize. American Robert Lucas won for "having transformed
macroeconomic analysis and deepened our understanding of
economic policy," according to the Royal Academy of Sciences
citation.
The academy commended Lucas for influence on high-level economic decision making and hailed his "hypothesis of rational expectations." With the latter, Lucas demonstrated the role future expectations play on decisions by consumers, businesses and governments.
Lucas praised the current condition of the American economy in a post-award news conference. "The U.S. economy is in excellent shape," he said. "Inflation is low and the government is not trying to do things with economic policy that it isn't capable of doing."
Born in Yakima, Washington, Lucas graduated from the
University of Chicago in 1964. With this award, he becomes
the eighth Chicago professor to win an economics Nobel.
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PARIS (CNN) -- Five million public sector employees went on
strike Tuesday in France, sidetracking trains, stopping
buses, closing schools and shutting down postal service.
Tens of thousands of demonstrators joined protests against the French government's refusal to approve a civil service wage hike for the coming year. Millions of beleaguered Parisians were forced to travel by foot or sit in traffic jams. Dozens of French flights were canceled. Still, 57 percent of French people supported the strikes, according to a poll in the French paper Le Parisien.
"Today is a warning shot," Nicole Notat, leader of France's biggest union, said at an enormous Paris rally. She said protests of Prime Minister Alain Juppe's other controversial policies would come in the days ahead.
NABLUS, West Bank (CNN) -- Under the freshly minted Mideast accord, Israel is freeing hundreds of Palestinian prisoners, if they'd only leave.
Many of the inmates have refused to exit the jails in a show of solidarity for five women allegedly involved in the murders of Jewish people. The agreement between Israel and the Palestinian authority calls for the release of all female Arab prisoners, but Israelis have objected to freeing those who shed Israeli blood.
PLO leader Yasser Arafat is asking the Israeli Supreme Court to order the women's release.
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