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If the Poor Countries Go Under, We'll Sink with Them

THE WORLD is on the verge of a human catastrophe and a political disaster that this country seems determined to ignore, notwithstanding the great damage it will do to America's security and welfare.While Washington's attention is riveted on whether the debt crisis in the Third World will weaken or seriously harm the banking structure in the West, developing countries are being put through an economic wringer that is undoing the achievements of several decades.

Drive west from I-95 in the heart of Boca Raton, and you are not in the pink paradise of Addison Mizner's 1920s dreams. This is the workaday world, the new Boca Raton of high-tech jobs and high finance.Glades Road tells this story: It is corporate South Florida in microcosm -- big banks and little banks, a big mall and little shops, established corporate giants and risk-taking newcomers. The buildings of Glades Road.

Robert S. McNamara, Defense Secretary in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, said yesterday that NATO should renounce the use of nuclear weapons, which "serve no military purpose whatsoever," and should rely solely on nonnuclear forces to deter any conventional Soviet attack against Western Europe.

There is a growing fear in political and financial circles abroad that the United States--still the most powerful nation in the world--is turning inward, away from its traditional leadership in world economic affairs.The recent narrow victory of a bill in the House authorizing $8.4 billion in additional American commitments to the International Monetary Fund.

Massachusetts Turnpike Chairman John T. Driscoll of Milton will be named to head a proposed new Massachusetts Development Bank (MassBank) that will finance construction and repair of state and local public facilities under an ambitious plan to be unveiled this morning by Gov. Michael S. Dukakis. The governor is also expected to announce that Driscoll and Secretary of Administration Frank T. Keefe will head a committee of businessmen.

A Fairfax Circuit Court judge refused yesterday to block prosecutors from using Alain Paul de Cock's statement to police that he killed his parents in the family's McLean home, rejecting defense motions that police illegally coerced the statement.De Cock's court-appointed attorney argued that police investigators prodded the 21-year-old suspect to implicate himself in the December slayings.

Not so many years ago, bankers labored over detailed accounting books called Boston Ledgers, manually posting every deposit and withdrawal from a customer's account and squaring each one individually with the bank's own books.By the end of this century, by contrast, a machine in your livingroom may spit out official paper that can be used like cash.

The World of Kenneth Grahame, by Peter Green (Facts on File, $17. ages 16-up). Kenneth Grahame--who nearly called his most famous book The Wind in the Reeds--led one of those multiple lives so beloved of late Victorians: Secretary of the Bank of England, contributor to the decadent Yellow Book, sweet nostalgicist of The Golden Age and Dream Days. An amateur of letters then, Grahame refused to become a professional writer

There is a land where people kill manatees, poachers sneak among the palms and mangroves, nuisance weeds clog the waterways and the alligators, crocodiles and wading birds of the marsh compete with farmers for precious water.It might sound like South Florida's Everglades, but actually, Roger Die Gbande was describing Azagny National Park, a wild, swampy preserve in West Africa's Ivory Coast.

With the world's poorer nations looking over their shoulders, the leaders of the seven major industrialized nations vowed yesterday to "halt protectionism" and to help lift "the weight of recession" from the developing countries.Third World debt-repayment problems, the trade barriers closing off richer markets and the need for increased development aid were all addressed in the final economic policy statement.

Israel today brushed aside the State Department's pledge to work for a halt to Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank as a meaningless gesture meant to encourage Jordan's King Hussein to join Middle East peace negotiations.The Israeli Cabinet discussed the U.S. statement this morning, before Hussein announced that he was bowing out at least for the moment as a potential representative of the Palestinians in negotiations based on President Reagan's.

While diplomats and politicians continue to talk about the West Bank, Erez Altschuler is doing business there. It is a good business, and Altschuler is confident that it can only get better.Altschuler, the general manager of a firm called Amcon, builds American-style homes all over Israel with materials supplied by Boise Cascade. Last year Amcon joined the rush to build homes for Israelis in the occupied West Bank.

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir publicly disowned yesterday a controversial treasury plan aimed at boosting Israel's embattled economy by linking it to the U.S. dollar - a move that both Americans and Israelis said would have been tantamount to making Israel "the 51st state."

When Bonnie Newlon campaigns door to door in the neighborhoods of north Arlington, she rarely mentions her opponent in the 48th district's state delegate race. If she alludes to the opposition at all, Newlon, an Independent endorsed by the Republican Party, says she is running against the "incumbent" and leaves it at that.

Last October, 80 U.S. businessmen flew to Istanbul for three days at their own expense to meet the people who run Turkey. They sat through seminars and speeches, but mostly talked informally with government ministers, businessmen, bankers and politicians.In February, several prominent Turkish businessmen came here for three days of meetings with U.S. industrialists, bankers and officials at the American Friends of Turkey, a Washington-based private association.

Twenty-three banks in C.H. Butcher Jr.'s City & County chain are operating under Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. cease-and- desist orders against unsound banking practices, according to published reports.The orders are similar to those issued against Butcher's brother's United American Bank before its failure, The Tennessean in Nashville said.

The Chilean government, seeking to bolster a national financial system stricken by recession and alleged mismanagement, has moved to liquidate three large financial institutions and intervened in five others, including the country's largest bank.

The U.S. economy may be stirring at last from its long, deep recession, but a return to prosperity at home is in jeopardy because of strains building beyond America's shores.The world is mired in its worst economic slump since World War II. International trade is on the decline. The global lending system is under enormous pressures from heavily indebted developing countries unable to pay their creditors.

The US economy seems to be stirring at last from its long, deep recession but a return to prosperity at home is in jeopardy because of strains building beyond America's shores. The world is mired in its worst economic slump since World War II. Internationaltrade is on the decline. The global lending system is under enormous pressures from heavily indebted developing countries unable to pay their creditors.

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