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WTO The United States and China finally reached agreement Monday on terms for China's entry into the 134-member World Trade Organization after six days of make-or-break talks in Beijing. The agreement is a crucial victory for President Clinton's policy of maintaining warm Chinese relations, which have deteriorated badly over the past four years on a host of issues. But the president still must get the Republican-controlled Congress to approve permanent Normal Trade Relations with China. The deal has been welcomed by American major corporations, which see China as an enormous market for their exports. But the United States is running a $60 billion annual trade deficit with China and if that gets even worse it could increase protectionist sentiments with the 2000 presidential elections looming.
The agreement was crucial for China's leaders. Premier Zhu Rongji has staked his political future on open and prosperous trade relations with the United States and other nations but he has been under attack by a younger generation of rising hard-line nationalists. Now Zhu is expected to try to rush through agreements with other major WTO members to try and make China a full member of the organization in time for it to participate fully in the next round of WTO trade talks to be held in Seattle in two weeks starting Nov. 30.
RUSSIA Russian President Boris Yeltsin on Monday set the scene for a stormy confrontation between Moscow and the West at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe summit in Istanbul. The United States and many European nations have said they will raise the issue of Russia's brutal invasion of Chechnya at the 54-nation OSCE meeting. But Yeltsin said bluntly that Western nations had$?'no right' to criticize Russia for stamping out bandits and terrorism on its own territory. Yeltsin also gave more warm public support to his tough young prime minister Vladimir Putin, rebutting speculation in the Russian press last week that he was planning to dump Putin. Yeltsin's strong comments also appeared to give the lie to speculation by some western analysts that Putin and the army were pursuing their tough policy in Chechnya against his wishes and that some kind of$?'silent coup' had taken place in Moscow, robbing him of his power.
U.N. President Clinton won a crucial political victory on Capitol Hill by winning approval from House Republican leaders for nearly $1 billion in overdue U.S. payments to the United Nations, the New York Times reported Monday. The paper said agreement was reached Sunday and that Clinton, in return, would agree to Republican demands to ban U.S. financial support for any international birth control or health organization that advocated abortion. The deal would allow the Clinton administration to pay the U.N. $926 million in overdue payments over the next three years, the Times said. Hard-line Republican conservatives in the House are expected to still oppose the agreement, but they appear unlikely to prevail against the alliance of their own leadership with congressional Democrats. Had agreement not been reached, the United States would have lost its vote in the U.N. General Assembly Dec. 31.
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UKRAINE Incumbent President Leonid Kuchma won a sweeping re- election victory Sunday against his communist challenger Petro Symonenko by 56 percent to 37 percent of the votes cast. The result confirmed Ukraine's independence and continuing pro-Western foreign policy. But it also revealed the continuing serious internal divisions in the impoverished country, which badly has failed to adapt its economy to the workings of the free market. Kuchma won huge landslide majorities in the nationalist strongholds of western Ukraine. But the pro-Russian Symonenko dominated the vote in the economically depressed old smokestack industrial heartlands of eastern Ukraine.
TURKEY The death toll from Turkey's earthquake on Friday rose to well over 400 and was expected to climb further with an estimated 3,000 people injured. The quake hit a heavily populated northeastern region and measured a massive 7.2 on the Richter scale. It came less than three months after one of the worst earthquakes in Turkish and Middle Eastern history on Aug. 17 left 17,000 dead by official estimates, with possibly as many again killed, with their bodies lost and hidden under collapsed buildings. Turkish newspapers Monday expressed fears that another major quake could hit Turkey's largest city Istanbul where leaders from 54 nations, including President Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin, will gather later this week to attend a summit meeting of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
CROATIA Ailing Croatian President Franjo Tudjman is being kept alive on a hospital respirator to give his lieutenants time to establish a caretaker government that will keep control of the country, the London Observer newspaper reported Sunday. Tudjman, 77, has been reported to have been suffering for years from stomach cancer that was widely believed to have reached a terminal condition in the past few months. The Observer said there were widespread rumors in Croatia that Tudjman had lapsed into a coma last week.
OIL The U.S. government announced Sunday it would launch a probe into a huge $800 million oil deal also announced Sunday in Tehran between the giant Royal Dutch Shell corporation and Iran to develop the major offshore oil fields of Sorush and Noruz, which are estimated to contain more than 1 billion barrels of oil. Iran desperately needs the project to maintain its high oil income as its older fields are running down. But under the 1996 Iran-Libya Sanctions Act, the United States reserves the right to impose secondary sanctions on companies from other nations that make major investments in Iran, which the United States accuses of being a major sponsor of international terrorism. Shell is a Dutch and British company with enormous investments in the United States. Therefore any attempt by the U.S. government or Congress to impose ILSA sanctions on it is likely to lead to a major trade row with the 15-nation European Union that could also involve the World Trade Organization.
JAPAN Japan's ambitions to become a major spacefaring power received another setback Monday when its H-2 rocket had to be destroyed eight minutes after take-off, destroying $95 million weather and air traffic control satellite it was to put into orbit. It was the second failure in succession for the troubled H-2 booster and looked likely to increase calls to overhaul Japan's troubled $2.4 billion space program, which aims to be the third most advanced in the world after the United States and Russia.
AFGHANISTAN The United Nations imposed sanctions on Afghanistan Sunday because its Islamic fundamentalist Taliban government had refused to extradite suspected terrorist Osama bin Laden to the United States, which has accused him of masterminding the August 1998 bombing of the U. S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing more than 200 people. Thousands of Afghans chanting$?'Death to America' protested outside the U.S. embassy in the Afghan capital Kabul in response.
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