Department Of State

Other than hearing that your policy has been canceled, it's about the worst news you can get from your auto insurer: Sorry, your vehicle has been "totaled." But if you loved that car or truck, totaled doesn't always have to be the death sentence that the term implies. A totaled vehicle isn't always a mangled mess. Sometimes it's salvageable. And even if it can't be saved--or you chose not to try--the settlement your insurer offers isn't necessarily the best you can do.

Former White House aide Oliver L. North persuaded wealthy Americans to donate millions of dollars to the Nicaraguan rebels by giving them unorthodox private briefings, once even outlining a secret U.S. plan to overthrow the Sandinistas, the congressional committees investigating the Iran- contra scandal were told Thursday. Potential contributors frequently got what Sen. Warren B. Rudman (R-N.H.

SACRAMENTO - Gov. Jerry Brown has pointed to reams of documents to make the case in court and on the stump that California's prison crisis is over, and inmates are receiving good care. But there is at least one document the administration wanted to hide. New court filings reveal that the state suppressed a report from its own consultant warning that California's prison suicide-watch practices encouraged inmate deaths. Lindsay Hayes, a national expert on suicide prevention in prisons, told corrections officials in 2011 that the state's system of holding suicidal inmates for days in dim, dirty, airless cells with unsanitized mattresses on the floor was compounding the risk that they would take their own lives.

One night last spring I lay sleepless and sweltering in the dying city of Haiphong, North Viet Nam, asking myself the question that has taunted so many young Americans caught in faraway places: "What in the hell am I doing here?" . . . Out there, in the makeshift refugee camp I had set up with U.S. Army tents, were more than 12,000 wretched, sick and horribly maimed Vietnamese, most of them either very young or very old.

Garry W. Pearson has been named a vice president in the finance and accounting department of Golden State Sanwa Bank, Los Angeles.

The Department of State and the Internal Revenue Service are studying possible methods of sharing data under new regulations approved by Congress. One proposal is that when persons apply for a passport, new or renewal, the information will be sent on to the IRS. But the target date for any such changes in the rules is January, 1988, according to the Bureau of Consular Affairs for the Department of State, not January, 1987, as reported by Eric Friedheim last Sunday in the Travel Section.

The blast at a West, Texas, fertilizer plant on Wednesday night was so massive that investigators believe it probably involved a significant amount of ammonium nitrate, a chemical that some scientists say should be regulated as an explosive. In a report filed with the Texas Department of State Health Services on Feb. 26, West Fertilizer Co. said that it had up to 270 tons of ammonium nitrate at its facility, along with up to 100,000 pounds of liquid ammonia. The exact amounts on hand at the plant are not yet known, officials said.

Once upon a time, in Europe, Jews were being slaughtered. The United States was at war with the murderers, the government of Nazi Germany. As one might expect, the United States maintained that its policy was to work out programs to save those European Jews who could be saved. History now records that this was not true. On the contrary, during half the war the Department of State actually used the machinery of government to sabotage the rescue of Jews.

The U.S. State Department has issued an updated travel warning for tourists planning to visit Mexico , adding information on drug violence on a state-by-state and city-by-city basis. The new, more detailed warning comes in response to concerns expressed by Mexico tourism officials, who worried that previous travel warnings scared off U.S. tourists by generalized about the threat of crime violence in Mexico. "The Mexico Tourism Board has long advocated for travel advisories which abide by three key tenets: context, clarity and specificity," said Rodolfo Lopez-Negrete, chief operating officer for the Mexico Tourism Board.