Around the world
SLAIN: A member of Russia's parliament died of injuries he suffered in a beating near his home, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported Sunday in Moscow. It was the second killing of a member of parliament this year. Valentin Marte-myanov, a member of the Communist Party, suffered severe head injuries when he was attacked and robbed on Tuesday. He died Saturday. There were no arrests.ATTACK: Iran attacked opposition guerrillas based inside Iraq after they tried to cross the border into Iran to hit its oil installations, the official Iranian news agency IRNA reported Sunday. In Baghdad, Iraq said Iran had fired Scud missiles early Sunday into a camp used by exile Muja-hi-deen Khalq guerrillas, causing damage but no casualties.
VOTE: Albanians voted Sunday in a referendum on a controversial new constitution, marking the first major challenge to the ruling Democratic party of President Sali Berisha. Voting was generally incident-free, but a member of a local election committee in northern Albania was stabbed and killed outside a voting booth, a Democratic party spokesman said. Polling stations closed at 8 p.m. after an estimated 70 percent of the two million eligible voters had cast ballots, the central election committee said.
Across the nation
CUT OFF: NASA briefly lost contact with space shuttle Atlantis and its six astronauts Sunday because of crossed radio signals. The problem occurred as Atlantis switched from one Tracking and Data Relay Satellite to another, a routine procedure during shuttle flights. Mission Control uses the satellite network to monitor all shuttle systems and talk to the crew. At about the same time as the switch, a computer failed at the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite station at White Sands, N.M., and a backup quickly was activated.
DEAD: Rep. Dean A. Gallo, an environmentalist and fiscal conservative during five terms in Congress, died Sunday in Denville, N.J., at age 58. Gallo died at St. Clares-Riverside Hospital, where he was being treated for prostate cancer, nursing supervisor Susan Decker said. She would not specify the cause of death. Gallo, who was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1992, announced in August that he would not seek a sixth term.