Around the world
FISHY: Hundreds of French fishermen angered over cheap fish imports clashed with police for three hours Tuesday. Seven officers were injured in the pre-dawn protest. As many as 800 fishermen from France's Atlantic ports tried to break into the central market in the southwestern city of Nantes to protest imports that undercut their prices. They also seek increased aid from the government. There were no reports of arrests or injuries among the fishermen.
SNARL: A woman fired from her job as a bus driver in Istanbul, Turkey, stole a bus, drove it to the bridge linking Europe with Asia and left it there, snarling traffic for hours, the Anatolia news agency reported. Ayse Celik, 38, sacked after just two months on the job with the Istanbul Public Transport authority, stole the bus from a depot and parked it across the entrance to the half-mile bridge, the report said. Eventually, police persuaded her to move the bus.
Across the nation
LIVER: A new type of artificial liver containing pig cells kept two patients alive until they could receive human livers, a doctor says. "This is a way of buying time for patients with very severe forms of liver failure until a donor organ becomes available for transplantation," Dr. Achilles Demetriou, a surgeon at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, said Monday. Their blood was routed out of their bodies and filtered through the external "bio-ar-ti-fi-cial liver" for six to eight hours, giving doctors as much as an extra 24 hours to find human livers, Demetriou said.
HOUNDED: A man accused of tying a basset hound to his bumper and dragging the animal to its death received a month in jail. Rodney A. Larsen, 38, pleaded no contest Monday in Menomonie, Wis., to cruelty to animals and dog kidnapping. He was also placed on two years' probation and ordered to pay $2,000 toward formation of a Dunn County humane society. Authorities said Larsen dragged a neighbor's dog from his truck at about 50 mph last May because the animal had been bothering his dog.
In Washington
PRODUCTIVITY: The productivity of American workers jumped 2.8 percent in 1992, the best performance in 20 years, the government said Tuesday. The Labor Department said the increase in productivity, defined as output per number of hours worked, was even stronger than the 2.7 percent advance initially estimated last month. It was the biggest increase since a 3.1 percent gain in 1972. Non-farm productivity rose a scant 0.5 percent in 1991.