United States Military

A general criticized for failing to alert his superiors to the Sabra and Chatilla refugee camp massacres was appointed Israel's military attache to the United States, the military said Friday. Maj. Gen. Amos Yaron, 46, last held an official military post as head of the army's manpower division two years ago. He has been on "study leave" since then, the army said. Yaron led the Israel Defense Forces in Beirut at the time of Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon.

Newsweek should be held responsible for damage caused by violent anti-American demonstrations that followed its now-retracted report about U.S. interrogators desecrating the Koran at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, prison camp, an Afghan government spokesman said Tuesday. Pakistan's government spurned the magazine's apology as "not enough," and the White House called for Newsweek to do more to repair the damage to America's image in Muslim nations.

Yahoo Inc. this week will be one of the first big media companies to report third-quarter results, offering an early sign of how much business may have been hurt by the Sept. 11 attacks, and how long the damage might last. Yahoo, whose Internet advertising business has been struggling for more than a year, already has said the third quarter will reflect no substantial effect from the attacks, which occurred close to the end of the quarter.

The Los Angeles City Council urged President Bush on Wednesday to grant citizenship to all immigrants serving in the United States military. "When people hear that we have men and women dying for us ... who are not yet American citizens, everyone agrees that this does not make sense," said Councilwoman Janice Hahn. Hahn said she introduced the council motion, approved unanimously, after attending the funeral of Lance Cpl.

The U.S. Agency for International Development, announcing the allocation of its $5.7-billion budget for the current fiscal year, on Tuesday earmarked nearly half the money to nine largely middle-income nations. Israel, Egypt and seven other countries that give American forces access to military bases will receive $2.8 billion, with a further $2.5 billion being divided among 70 impoverished countries, AID documents show. Most of the remaining $400 million will cover administrative costs.

The chief prosecutor of the 26 defendants acquitted last December of involvement in the assassination of opposition leader Benigno S. Aquino Jr. said Wednesday that former President Ferdinand E. Marcos put pressure on the court to dismiss the charges. According to the Philippine News Agency, Manuel Herrera said Marcos summoned him, his supervisor and one of the three judges to the presidential palace a few days before the trial began in February, 1985.

"A Piece of My Heart" suffers from an abundance of sentimentality. Based on 26 interviews with women who served in the Vietnam War, Shirley Lauro's dated docudrama, first produced in 1991, revisits "China Beach" territory. Six women and one multipurpose male earnestly perform a quick-changing series of vignettes and monologues at International City Theatre. These ultimately resemble more of a vacation slide show than a documentary film.

The U.S. Boxing team, which had 11 military members--including nine fighters--barred by the Defense Department from attending the Goodwill Games at Moscow, will try to fill the slots but is facing a Tuesday night deadline to locate the substitutes and arrange the paper work, Col. Don Hull, president of the U.S. Amateur Boxing Federation, said Friday. "We have an obligation and are committed to being represented," Hull said. "We'll have to take the next line of boxers.

Two businessmen in Taiwan have been charged with trying to smuggle U.S.-made weapons to Iran, federal authorities said Tuesday. A federal grand jury in Baltimore indicted En-Wei Eric Chang, a naturalized American living in Taiwan, and David Chu, a Taiwanese resident, on charges that they tried to buy early warning radar, Cobra attack helicopters and U.S. spy satellite photos for Iran in violation of American embargoes, officials said.