December 14, 1991

The five central Asian republics agreed to join the new Commonwealth of Independent States today, conclusively rebuffing President Mikhail S. Gorbachev's protestations and all but sealing the end of the Soviet Union. The decision, reached in a meeting in the Turkmenian capital of Ashkhabad, 1,500 miles southeast of Moscow, means that 8 of the 12 Soviet republics are now in accord on the commonwealth plan, and the 4 others have expressed interest in joining.

The Bush Administration, in a move mandated by the new civil rights law, announced today that state employment agencies may no longer raise the rankings of black and Hispanic job applicants on a federally sanctioned aptitude test to give them better job prospects. The policy of raising the rankings of minority candidates was started a decade ago to increase their representation in the work force. Today's change is expected to lead to questions over how best to evaluate applicants within state employment agencies and the businesses that had relied on the tests to screen applicants.

In the four decades since North Korea swept across the border and turned this peninsula into a scene of carnage that ended in a fearsomely armed standoff, few here could imagine a day when the two Koreas would renounce fraticidal war and promise to "cease confrontation on the international stage." But when the moment finally came at a little after 10 this morning, the event seemed oddly devoid of magic, or even much celebration. After 40 years of recriminations, assassinations, terrorism and now the fear of a nuclear-armed North, few South Koreans seem to hold real hope that the Government of President Kim Il Sung will abide by the most sweeping agreement ever reached between the two countries.

Restarting Arms Reactor After years of repairs to a nuclear reactor, the Government approved the resumption of an operation crucial in making atom bombs. Page 8. Iowans Hurt in Fraud Case Funds of many Iowa municipalities were frozen in a Federal securities fraud case, and more stringent regulation was sought. Page 35. Consumer Prices Up 0.4% Consumer prices rose four-tenths of 1 percent in November, the Government reported, but analysts said inflation was under control. Page 35.

A new study by the National Academy of Sciences has found that smog is so poorly understood that much of the nation's effort to control it may be misdirected. The study was required under the Clean Air Act passed last year and is scheduled to be issued on Wednesday. It said progress in meeting standards for smog "has been extremely slow at best," in part because of measurement problems. Among these problems, it said, is properly accounting for variations in weather.