ROTTERDAM, Netherlands (AP) Ä Fidel Castro appears to be growing fatigued of fatigues.
Castro, long identified by his trademark green military togs, has called in a Dutch fashion designer to fit him for suits that would fit in even on Wall Street.
Castro enlisted Rotterdam designer Merel van 't Wout after seeing her suits being worn by fashionable Cubans. Van 't Wout visited Cuba regularly last year to fit Castro.
''He normally wears warm green,'' van 't Wout said Thursday. ''He looks great in it and I think that's fine, but my advice is something else.''
Castro won't be mothballing his famed fatigues entirely, though. Van 't Wout says the three suits she made for him are for attending international conferences.
Van 't Wout, who advises her clients on what colors suit them best, picked dark blue, grey, and Ä you guessed it Ä green.
''But a much darker green,'' she said, ''with a hint of blue.'' mid
BONN, Germany (AP) Ä Enraged by a television satire that had him asking Russian President Boris Yeltsin to do something about ''those corpses in Tazinkistan or wherever,'' Chancellor Helmut Kohl has moved to weaken Germany's largest public broadcaster.
Gov. Edmund Stoiber of Bavaria, a Kohl ally, urged Thursday that the venerable ARD network be decentralized or dismantled rather than being allowed to raise the tax that pays for most of the network.
Kohl aides for months had discussed reforming ARD because it loses money, and the state or regional networks that contribute much of its programming are more liberal than Kohl would like.
The rival ZDF public network, which has a less complicated structure than ARD, is seen as more sympathetic to Kohl's conservative government, which also has strong influence in the upstart private network SAT-1.
A Jan. 26 satire on ARD's ''Monitor'' investigative news program got under Kohl's skin.
It featured a satirical phone call in which Kohl, who has stood up for Yeltsin during the Chechnya campaign, urged his Russian friend to do something about the unsightly corpses. Yeltsin hangs up and declares, ''What an idiot.''