Around the world
CHARGES: General Rasheed Dostum, the most powerful Afghan general who controls northern Afghanistan, has charged that various Mujahideen groups have supplied weapons to fundamentalists in Sudan and the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan. DEATH: A 12th child musician died Friday from injuries she suffered when the van she and her fellow students were traveling in slammed into a parked truck and burst into flames in Warwick, England. The driver of the van, music teacher Eleanor Fry, and 10 children age 12 and 13 were killed in Thursday's wreck.
Across the nation
CONFESSION: A Detroit woman long suspected of killing her husband hours after he returned from the Persian Gulf War admitted her role to undercover drug agents, a federal prosecutor says. Law enforcement officials hoped the alleged admission might finally enable them to bring murder charges against Toni Cato Riggs in the 1991 shooting death of 22-year-old Army Spc. Anthony Riggs.
NOMINATION: Turning to a business expert for solutions that have proved elusive to educators, Gov. Pete Wilson of California Thursday nominated Sanford Sigoloff, a specialist in turning around failing corporations as the state's new superintendent of public instruction.
SETTLEMENT? Negotiators in Charleston, W.Va., were said to be "very, very close" to a settlement in the six-month strike by up to 17,500 coal miners in the Midwest and Appalachia. "We were hoping to make an announcement any hour," mediator Bill Usery said late Thursday. The United Mine Workers and the Bituminous Coal Operators Association, representing at least six coal companies, including some of the nation's largest, were to resume talks today in Washington.
In Washington
DENIAL: Embattled Pentagon nominee Morton Halperin, confronting Republican assertions that he is unfit for a sensitive government post, denied today he ever assisted a renegade CIA figure in publicly identifying U.S. undercover agents. "That is false," Halperin said at the outset of his confirmation hearing. "I never assisted Philip Agee in these efforts and I have condemned these efforts."