Fact Finding

Serbia's president on Thursday formally proposed dividing Kosovo between its independence-seeking Albanian majority and a Serb minority as the chief U.N. mediator met with government officials. Martti Ahtisaari, who was appointed this month by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and is on his initial fact-finding mission in the Balkans, said the troubled province's final status would ultimately be decided by the Security Council after his report.

Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Tuesday urged the cancellation of a U.N. investigation into Israel's occupation of a West Bank refugee camp after the Israeli government announced that it wouldn't cooperate with the inquiry. In a meeting with the Security Council, which authorized the inquiry, Undersecretary-General Kieran Prendergast said that Annan now favored simply disbanding the U.N. fact-finding team, which has been in Geneva since last week waiting to begin its mission.

A trip by two American Embassy employees to violence-racked Chiapas state this week has produced a political uproar, reflecting Mexico's persistent suspicions of its powerful neighbor. The diplomats, from the U.S. defense attache's staff, were in Chiapas on a routine fact-finding trip, said the U.S. Embassy. Their low-key trip blew up into a national issue after the pair were detained Sunday by suspicious villagers of the hamlet of Los Platanos.

The queen of Swaziland and the country's minister of health visited Los Angeles County's largest AIDS center Wednesday as part of an unusual campaign to combat a disease that has devastated their country. Health experts at the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center led Queen LaMagwaza and her entourage on a tour that proved to be partly a fact-finding mission and partly a rally seeking support for Swaziland's battle against AIDS.

A U.S. Justice Department investigation prompted by two area congressmen is being hampered because some top Immigration and Naturalization Service officials are refusing to speak with investigators without their attorneys present, officials said this week. The Justice Department's inspector general is looking into whether top INS officials attempted to deceive Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Simi Valley), Rep. Carlos J.

Allegations that political prisoners and their families are being gassed to death in North Korea prompted Los Angeles' Simon Wiesenthal Center to host a daylong conference Monday and announce plans to send representatives overseas to investigate. "We have a moral obligation to speak out," said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the center, noting what he called a "stark" parallel between Hitler's Germany and Kim Jong Il's North Korea.

Upon returning to Hollywood from a fact-finding trip to the civil war-torn areas of Somalia, "A River Runs Through It" screenwriter Richard Friedenberg found it ridiculous to hear a movie director complain about his salary, his perks and the studio's cheapness. "(The director) was paid enough salary to inoculate every single (Somali) refugee for a year. I wanted to say, hey . . . hullo?" he said. (An inoculation cost $2 per person.

Federal regulators said Wednesday that they intend to impose a settlement in the bitter dispute over the $8.9 billion that California claims it was overcharged by power sellers, but they conceded their solution will probably be challenged in court. "This is going to the circuit [court] anyway," said Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chairman Curtis L. Hebert Jr. after the commission agreed on a method for estimating alleged electricity overcharges and ordering refunds.

Secretary of State James A. Baker III arrived in the Soviet Union on Tuesday hoping to find out who is running the country--and acknowledging that the disintegrating superpower may no longer be able to act as a global partner with the United States in building a "new world order."

BARGAIN hunting for an airfare on the Web? Pay close attention because that first price you see may not be what you end up paying. Air travel shoppers on the Internet visit, on average, more than three websites before making a purchase, according to PhoCusWright, a Connecticut-based research firm. Yet websites differ greatly in how they display taxes and fees, which can make an apples-to-apples comparison difficult.