Conferences

Houston Mayor Kathy Whitmire was installed Wednesday as the new president of the Conference of Mayors at the conclusion of the group's five-day meeting here. Whitmire succeeds Mayor Arthur J. Holland of Trenton, N.J.

The San Fernando Valley Unity Coalition, formed after the riots of April, 1992, to ensure that the Valley was not ignored as Los Angeles began its recovery, will hold a conference Saturday at Cal State Northridge aimed at building an even stronger voice for the region. "When the riots came and the earthquake came, a lot of the resources went to Downtown L.A.

Police defused a suspected IRA bomb Thursday at a conference on terrorism due to be addressed by British Foreign Office Minister William Waldegrave and London Police Chief Peter Imbert. Cmdr. George Churchill-Coleman, head of Britain's anti-terrorist police squad, said he believes that the bomb was planted by the Irish Republican Army just hours before the international meeting was due to begin.

John W. Gullixson, a junior at Esperanza High School, has been chosen to attend the National Student Leadership Foundation's national conference in Washington, D.C., this summer. A member of the National Honor Society and California Scholarship Federation, Gullixson said he is looking forward to the conference as a good learning experience.

In decades past, the Supreme Court met through the last week of September for what was known as the "long conference." The nine justices gathered to sift through the 1,700 or so appeals that had arrived over the summer and voted on which ones to review. Since Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist took over, however, the conference lasts but a few hours on a Monday morning. He insists that his colleagues come prepared and ready to vote in rapid succession, with a minimum of discussion.

Participants at the conference on Yugoslavia in The Hague are: * Chairman: Former British Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington.

For people in trouble with the law, there is hope. That was the message at a conference sponsored Saturday by the St. Vincent de Paul Center for Community Reconciliation. "We need to work more with prisoners who have social problems," Judge Jorge Duarte, warden of La Meza Mexican Prison, told the gathering of 50 people at Chapman University. Speaking in English and Spanish, he said that "in our prisons, we only have a portion of (the criminals) in our society. . . .

The Real Estate Conference Group's Annual Apartment Outlook on Sept. 29 will offer a forecast, overview and in-depth sessions on all facets of the Southern California apartment market. The event will feature more than 40 speakers on apartment financing and development, real estate technology, apartments in downtown Los Angeles and economics. Registration information is available by calling (310) 285-5327.

The fourth annual Ending Violence Against Women conference is expected to draw more than 1,500 people to the daylong event today at Cal State Northridge, organizers said. "We're going to provide tools to end violence," said coordinator and co-founder Jean Morrison. "We're teaching preparation. If we take time to prepare for a large earthquake that doesn't happen every few minutes, why not prepare for sexual assault and domestic violence, something that happens every minute of every day?"

The world's biggest annual biotechnology conference opens this week in Toronto, providing a forum for boosters as well as detractors of an industry where stock prices have been hammered by regulatory setbacks. The sector has had a tough year in terms of financial performance. The American Stock Exchange biotech index closed Friday at 361.90, a 44% drop from where it stood 12 months earlier.