Around the World

India selects Gujral as prime minister

NEW DELHI, India - Hoping to end a three-week political crisis and reluctant to call new elections less than a year after the last national vote, India's president yesterday accepted Inder Kumar Gujral as the country's new prime minister.

President Shanker Dayal Sharma gave the 77-year-old Gujral, an urbane two-time foreign minister and former ambassador to Moscow, two days to prove his United Front coalition majority in Parliament, which opens a special session today to debate the national budget. Gujral was to be sworn in today as India's third premier since elections last May.

Citing "considerations relevant to the national interest," Sharma said he decided against holding a midterm poll "so soon after the general elections held in 1996."

Gujral's appointment was widely seen as a compromise move that many hope will stabilize the shaky Indian political scene. No single political party holds a majority in the lower house of parliament, the Lok Sabha. The latest crisis was precipitated when the once-dominant Congress Party withdrew its support for Prime Minister Deve Gowda, the outgoing United Front leader.

Parisians overturn lawn-standing ban

PARIS - In one of those little revolutions that tell a lot about contemporary changes in French lifestyles, Paris authorities have been compelled to revoke long-standing, Draconian regulations that made it illegal to walk on the grass in most of the city's 413 public gardens, parks and promenades.

Officialdom has capitulated in the face of lounging office workers, Frisbee-tossing tourists and urbanites who simply want to feel the freshness of the grass between their toes.

04-21-97

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