Aid Package

ANNAPOLIS -- Unable to agree on taxes, Maryland lawmakers shifted their attention back to the state budget yesterday, hoping they can at least get that approved before the 90-day session expires at midnight Monday.But even that effort fell apart last night.House and Senate conferees on the budget abruptly decided there was no sense in meeting because the House wanted nearly $50 million in appropriations for expanded local aid programs, while the Senate conferees did not.The aid would include a $30 million grant to Baltimore and five poor rural counties, and would provide $17 million to finance educational placements for disabled students.

Goaded by an unlikely twosome, Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon, President Bush has finally put the prestige of his office behind a $24 billion international aid package for the states of the old Soviet empire. With support from such big-gun Democratic senators as George Mitchell and Sam Nunn, Congress must now get up the gumption to enact a massive foreign aid initiative in the midst of an election-year recession.The coalition forming behind this effort is reminiscent of the consensus that pushed through the Marshall Plan in 1948, another economically troubled election year.

WASHINGTON -- President Bush, heeding warnings that he is flirting with catastrophe by delaying financial help for the former Soviet republics, pledged support yesterday for a new international aid package that would cost the United States about $5 billion.Separately, he boosted loan guarantees to the newly independent states, extending $1.1 billion in credits that can be used immediately to buy more grain from U.S. farmers and also declared that he would go to battle for controversial legislation to give $12 billion more to the International Monetary Fund for its own aid program.

WASHINGTON -- President Bush, under pressure to offer some gesture of help when he meets with Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev next week, may expand U.S. agricultural credits and technical assistance to the Soviet Union but won't announce a big aid package, officials said yesterday.The two presidents will meet in Madrid next week before jointly opening a Middle East peace conference. The Soviets cooperated in setting up the peace conference and in turn gained added stature in the Middle East by being part of it.The meeting, the two presidents' first since August's failed coup against Mr. Gorbachev, comes as the Soviets brace for winter food shortages amid the continuing collapse of their economy and the decline of the central government's authority.

PARIS -- The European Parliament suspended nearly $1.5 billion in food and technical aid to the Soviet Union yesterday, delivering a stern condemnation of Soviet repression in Lithuania and Latvia.The parliament's decision to withhold approval of the aid package came a week after European Community foreign ministers warned Moscow against further military crackdowns in the Baltics, following the Jan. 13 deaths of 14 people in the army takeover of a broadcast center in Vilnius, Lithuania.Last weekend, the Soviet army killed five more people when it stormed Riga police headquarters in a drive to reassert control of Latvia.

ROME -- European Community leaders, alarmed by the prospect that social and political breakdown in the Soviet Union could send millions of refugees fleeing into Western Europe, are putting together an unprecedented package of emergency and long-term economic aid as a sign of Western support for Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev.The 12 leaders, in Rome to launch an intergovernmental conference to turn the European Community from a trading bloc into a politically and economically united body, spent most of yesterday discussing aid to the Soviet Union.