Daily Briefing

Update

Two more people who initially survived last month's crash of a Korean Air jumbo jet in Guam have died, bringing the death toll to 228, a South Korean foreign ministry spokesman said today. Korean flight attendant Han Kyu-hee died on Saturday at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas. Another South Korean, Jung Young-hak, a passenger, died on Sunday in the same facility.

Upcoming

World chess champion Garry Kasparov and arch-rival Anatoly Karpov have agreed in principle to play a title match in Compiegne, France, 50 miles northeast of Paris, starting next month for a prize of $1.6 million, a Swiss newspaper reported today.

People

-- Fidel Castro made his first public appearance yesterday since Miami news media reported rumors - immediately denied by Cuba - that Castro could be very ill or dead. The Cuban news agency Prensa Latina, said Castro, 71, opened the school year in Cuidad Libertad. Castro, wearing an olive-green military uniform, spoke for nearly an hour to hundreds of schoolchildren, teachers and officials under a light rain.

-- Turkmenistan's president, Saparmurat Niyazov, who underwent a five-hour heart operation in Germany yesterday, will return to this desert republic at the end of the week, a Turkmen official said today. Yesterday, state television in the former Soviet republic said Niyazov was in stable condition.

Today in history

-- In 490 B.C. the marathon was born when an Athenian runner, Pheidippides, was dispatched to carry a message from Marathon to Sparta, which was 26 miles away. He was seeking help to repel the invading Persian army.

-- In 1666, the London fire started in the royal bakery. The fire raged for nearly four days, burning 13,000 homes and 87 churches. Just eight people died.