Intercede

Andre Dubus III does not look like a man on a journey. Instead, sitting at an outdoor table at the Standard Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, the 51-year-old author appears, finally, to have arrived. That may seem a stretch, especially when you consider that his 1999 novel "House of Sand and Fog" was an Oprah Book Club selection and a finalist for the National Book Award, but Dubus has never had an easy road. The son of the late short-story writer Andre Dubus, he spent the early years of his career being compared, or confused, with his father.

Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev's special envoy, Igor Rogachev, arrived in Seoul and said Moscow is willing to act as peacemaker between bitter enemies North and South Korea. Rogachev, the highest-ranking Soviet Foreign Ministry official to visit Seoul, said he hopes the two Koreas will continue peaceful discussions.

Regional transportation officials Monday asked the Interstate Commerce Commission to force the Santa Fe Railway to let commuter trains run on Santa Fe track between Los Angeles and San Bernardino, a privilege the railroad is withholding while negotiating a fee for that service.

The California Supreme Court, rejecting an unusual request from the Deukmejian Administration, refused Thursday to intercede in a legal challenge to newly enacted restrictions on state-funded Medi-Cal abortions for the poor. The justices, in a brief order issued with no dissents, declined to take over a case pending before the state Court of Appeal that was brought by civil rights and women's groups opposing funding limitations passed by the Legislature and signed into law by Gov.

A unitary tax repeal bill providing an estimated $250 million in state tax breaks for multinational corporations was approved by a key Senate committee Monday after Gov. George Deukmejian personally interceded to gain Republican support for the measure.

Overriding the opposition of the U.S. Forest Service and New Mexico state officials, a White House energy task force has interceded on behalf of Houston-based El Paso Corp. in its two-year effort to explore for natural gas in a remote part of a national forest next door to America's largest Boy Scout camp.

The legal wrangling over the America's Cup continued Friday when the San Diego Yacht Club and the Sail America Foundation--their plans to stage the next Cup regatta in 1991 being held hostage by a maverick challenge from New Zealander Michael Fay--petitioned the New York Supreme Court to intercede.

Five U.S. senators, in an unusual show of support for a constituent, pressed federal regulators at a meeting last April to wind up a then yearlong examination of Lincoln Savings & Loan Assn. and to end "unfair treatment" of the Irvine-based S&L, a spokesman for one of the senators said Monday. Lincoln is owned by an Arizona company whose president, Charles H. Keating Jr., has been a major critic of Edwin J. Gray, whose term as chairman of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board ended in June.

My proposal that the geranium (pelargonium) be named our national flower has provoked contemptuous disagreement from readers who fancy other breeds. "I certainly hope you were in jest," writes Linda Umstead of Huntington Beach, "when you mentioned the geranium as a contender for the national flower. "A geranium is a perfectly ghastly plant, barely better than a weed , and is a blight upon whatever landscape upon which it happens to appear.

The new chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and an influential Republican congressman asked Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales on Thursday to withdraw grand jury subpoenas to two San Francisco Chronicle reporters facing 18 months in federal prison for refusing to disclose their confidential sources of information about steroid use in professional sports.