United Kingdom

WASHINGTON -- USAir Chairman Seth E. Schofield charged yesterday that the U.S. government is holding USAir hostage, using its alliance with British Airways as a bargaining chip in the ,, on-again, off-again bilateral talks with the United Kingdom.In three weeks, the U.S. Department of Transportation is expected to decide whether USAir and British Airways should be allowed to continue linking flights, under a process known as "code-sharing."Code-sharing allows passengers traveling on both airlines to buy one ticket and have their bags transferred automatically just as if they were flying one airline.

LONDON -- At last year's G-7 meeting in Japan, British Prime Minister John Major told President Clinton that his grandfather had been a bricklayer who went to Pittsburgh to build blast furnaces for steel magnate Andrew Carnegie. Mr. Major's father grew up in Pennsylvania. The president said, next time you come over let's do Pittsburgh."And so it's come to pass," a high British official said yesterday at a government press briefing in the Foreign Office.The president and the prime minister will tour urban development sites in Pittsburgh.

International investing by Americans is on a roll, and it involves a lot more than just stock mutual funds.Trading in American depositary receipts, which represent individual shares of foreign companies, is setting records. The .. $200 billion in ADR volume in this country last year was 60 percent higher than three years ago.One hundred twenty-four ADRs were introduced in the United States last year to push the total number past 1,200, according to the Bank of New York.The opportunities are intriguing.

WASHINGTON -- Saying the United Kingdom is dragging its feet in aviation negotiations, the U.S. Transportation Department yesterday approved an expanded operating alliance between USAir and British Airways for only 60 days.The expanded arrangement, called code-sharing, will allow the two airlines to combine efforts on flights to an additional 28 cities in the United States.Last March the department approved the code-sharing arrangement for a year to an initial 38 U.S. points. In code-sharing, British Airways and USAir link their flights in reservation computers.

NEXT time you hear a lobbyist for the tobacco industry complain about the proposed $2-a-pack increase in federal taxes on cigarettes, consider this: The United States, with a federal tax of 56 cents a pack, is one of the lowest-taxing nations in the industrial world.In three countries, according to the Worldwatch Institute, taxes are now above $3 a pack -- Denmark ($3.68), Norway ($3.33) and Canada ($3.01.). In several others they are between $2 and $3, including Sweden ($2.87), the United Kingdom ($2.55)

Seven farmers in Harford County have been selected by the Maryland Agricultural Statistics Service to join 242 of their counterparts from across the state in a survey charting 1992 farm income and expenses.Bruce West, the state statistician for the Department of Agriculture, said this sample of growers will accurately reflect the state's 15,600 farmers. Similar surveys will be conducted nationwide, involving 21,000 farmers, roughly 1 percent of all U.S. producers, representing all sizes and types of operations, he said.

LONDON -- Where are you, Albert Pierrepoint, now that they need you?Dead, are you? Well, good news for Tony Teare. With the royal neck-stretcher gone to his reward, that would seem to leave nobody around to do that which Judge Deemster Callow says must be done.Will the shade of Corrine Bently have no rest? Will justice be stood up?Two weeks ago, Judge Callow sentenced Mr. Teare to be hanged by the neck until dead for having murdered Ms. Bently. It was a contract job, for money -- particularly loathsome.

LONDON -- Alex Salmond has plenty to smile about these days.He is the head of the Scottish National Party, and standing on the brink of a general election -- possibly to be called this week by Prime Minister John Major -- he sees his party's fortunes rising in virtually all polls on how the vote will go in Scotland.In a January poll, some 38 percent of Scottish voters registered approval of the central proposition of the Scottish National Party: independence from the United Kingdom and within the European Community.

In a story on SCM Chemicals last Sunday, The Sun incorrectly stated the increase in the company's titanium dioxide production capacity since its acquisition by Hanson Industries in 1986. Overall capacity has increased 73 percent; capacity per employee has increased 56 percent.The Sun regrets the errors.New York -- SCM Chemical opened its South Baltimore plant to local visitors this weekend for the first time in three decades to foster a neighborly feel.Being neighborly is far removed from the caustic descriptions often leveled against SCM's parent, Hanson Industries, a conglomerate that has bought and chopped its way to become an international power in just a few frenetic decades.

Wales is known as the land of the Celts, of vast green meadows and coal mines, of poet Dylan Thomas and actor Richard Burton, and of towns with tongue-torturing names such as Merthyr Tydfil and Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrn-drobwllllantysiliogogogoch- no kidding.Raymond Carignan and Barry Bogage are selling a different vision of Wales: It's an image of the land of Kellogg's Corn Flakes, Hoover vacuums, Ford automobiles and more Japanese manufacturing investment than in any other country outside of the United States.