April 8, 1992

The Changes at G.M. General Motors broke with its past when an outside director, John G. Smale, was placed in charge of a top board committee to monitor management more closely. The former Procter & Gamble chairman led the drive by G.M.'s outside directors to pursue "more aggressive management." [ Page A1. ]

Argentina and its foreign bank lenders agreed early yesterday on a plan in which the banks will forgive about $8 billion of the $23 billion they are owed and Argentina will repay its past-due interest and begin repayment of its remaining debt. The agreement, reached at 5 A.M. at a hotel in Santo Domingo, in the Dominican Republic, where bankers were attending a meeting of the Inter-American Development Bank, comes nearly 10 years after a default on repayment of bank loans by Mexico that was followed by a series of defaults by other third world countries with heavy debts from the 1970's.

The General Motors Corporation -- long known as one of America's most smug and insular companies -- has abandoned its past in placing an outside board member in charge of a top board committee to monitor more closely G.M.'s management. John G. Smale, the 64-year-old former chairman of the Procter & Gamble Company and a marketing man who flattened that company's bureaucracy, led the drive by G.M.'s outside directors to pursue, as the board said, "more aggressive management" in trimming costs, winnowing bureaucracy and possibly closing more plants.

The Libyan radio said Tuesday night that a plane carrying Yasir Arafat, the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, had disappeared from radar screens as it was crossing from the Sudan into southern Libya. The radio said the plane was approaching the Kufra air base, where it was scheduled to land, when it vanished. Helicopters attempting to fly over the area were grounded by a severe sandstorm in the remote desert region, which is about 150 miles from the border with the Sudan, the radio said.

They have abolished the ritualistic May Day parades and renamed the streets, but three years after the collapse of Communism, the former satellites of the Soviet empire are still struggling to root out the deeper psychological legacies. Communism's external characteristics -- political repression, censorship, big brotherism -- proved easier to erase than had been widely assumed. Similarly, after just a few months of reform, the most glaring flaws of the old command economy began to vanish as shops, once empty, stocked up with bananas, tuna fish, olive oil and imported cosmetics.