International Aid

Harvest International Inc. will announce today whether it will defer the effective date of its lease for state-owned property in Marriottsville, where it plans to build an international aid center.Originally, the lease for the 18 aging buildings on 50 acres at the long-vacant Henryton Hospital was to have taken effect Oct. 1. In response to residents' concerns, the Owings Mills-based humanitarian organization delayed the date until today.Neighbors of Henryton, an isolated area that adjoins Patapsco State Park, are demanding a 60-day delay.

For two years, Harvest International has pursued an abandoned state property near Marriottsville with plans to renovate it as an international aid center.With the state's endorsement, the organization wants to start building its City of Hope at the former Henryton Hospital, meanwhile allaying any fears neighbors might have about its programs for the needy.The state Board of Public Works awarded Henryton, built in 1923 as a tuberculosis center, to the nonprofit, humanitarian organization Sept.

BEIJING -- China mobilized its military yesterday for rescue work and appealed for international assistance after a powerful earthquake leveled thousands of mud-walled village homes on Saturday night and killed more than 200 people in the southern province of Yunnan.Daylight yesterday revealed a vista of devastation in Lijiang and Zhongdian counties, 200 miles northwest of the provincial capital, Kunming, as rescue workers struggled to cope with 14,000 injured residents, 3,800 of them with serious injuries, the state-run New China News Agency said.

KLJUC, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- By bus, by truck and by horse-drawn cart, the land rush of western Bosnia has begun, an edgy competition endangering not only the peace process but also the lives of some of the country's most vulnerable people.Leading the territorial charge are the Croatian and Muslim armies that recently drove Serbian soldiers and civilians out of the region, except that now the ostensible allies are vying to repopulate their new holdings with as many of their own people as possible.

MOSCOW -- A small international aid organization based in Baltimore has assigned itself the seemingly overwhelming task of trying to create a viable economy for the thousands of refugees in the Russian Caucasus.The war in Chechnya is only the latest in a series of upheavals throughout the region to drive people from their homes, and there is little prospect that the turmoil will end anytime soon. Many people -- dislodged by fighting in Georgia, Ingushetia and Ossetia -- have already lived as refugees for five years.

MOGADISHU, Somalia -- Four Somali women sat half-buried i a pile of American wheat in a seaside neighborhood, guarded by U.N. soldiers stationed on nearby rooftops. And, for the first time in two weeks, they resumed the job of giving food to the beleaguered citizenry."I was afraid to come today," admitted Kadijo Hassan Mohamud, a 25-year-old mother of four. "But for food, we must trust in God. And if someone kills us, then they kill us."The food relief program, halted in much of this capital after the June 5 massacre of 24 U.N. troops and subsequent U.N. clashes with warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid, resumed this week.

MOGADISHU, Somalia -- Many Somalis expect Americans to bring a lot more than food to this famine- and war-ravaged country.They welcome the imminent U.S. military intervention's narrowly focused goal -- protecting the delivery of food aid -- as a mere sideshow to what really interests them: an end to the clan violence, economic reconstruction and political reconciliation.This mismatch in expectations -- the Somalis seeing the Americans as the economic and political salvation of their ravaged country and the Americans planning a mission designed to avoid any long-term involvement -- could turn the operation sour quickly, Somalis and international aid workers say.Educated Somalis, many of whom have been holed up in their houses in the capital for the last two years while the country has been devastated by clan fighting, say the Americans must stay for at least a year to solve the problem of the starving, disarm the population and get political and economic reconstruction going.

Human resourcefulness is one of the world's mos under-valued assets, and nowhere is that truth more evident that in the plight of the world's rural poor. For nearly 40 years, Western nations have undertaken ambitious development programs to aid poor countries around the world. In most cases, those programs have been designed to "trickle down" to the truly desperate people who most need them. All too often, however, bureaucracy, corruption and plain old greed get in the way.So it should not be a surprise that a new report from the U.N.'s International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD)

Paris -- The problem of controlling Soviet nuclear weapons is no doubt urgent, yet in a way it is unserious.It will be unpleasant if some of the ex-Soviet Union's battlefield missiles get into the hands of a Third World (or other) government, but sooner or later nuclear weapons are going to exist in Asia, if they are not there now, and the logic of deterrence will still function.The principal lesson of the Cold War, with respect to nuclear weapons, has been that these things are largely useless except as a deterrent to the nuclear threat of others.