RUSSIAN PARLIAMENT ADOPTS CONTROVERSIAL LAND CODE.

Russia’s Communist-dominated Duma has approved a draft land code that outlaws the free sale of agricultural land by anyone other than the state. The bill, adopted yesterday in the second reading, is part of an ongoing battle between President Yeltsin, who in March issued a presidential decree explicitly authorizing individual farmers to buy and sell arable land, and the Communist and Agrarian parties, which countered at the beginning of this month with a Duma bill banning such sales. Yeltsin’s representative to the Duma stated yesterday that the new land code contradicts the constitutional right to private land ownership and that the president would refuse to sign it into law in its present form. The bill has now been submitted to the Duma Agricultural Committee to be prepared for the third reading. (Interfax, April 17)

Primakov, Duma Criticize Israel.