Date: Thu, 25 Apr 1996 09:52:13 -0400 24 April 1996 (Reuter) - Commemorations for the Chernobyl disaster's 10th anniversary move toward a climax on Thursday, with Ukraine and its former Soviet neighbours examining the costly legacy of the world's worst nuclear accident. Emotions will reach a fever pitch at 1.24 a.m. on Friday (2224 GMT Thursday) when a candlelight procession through Slavutych, the new town created 35 km (20 miles) from the plant, marks the moment 10 years ago when staff lost control of Reactor Number Four. 24 April 1996 (Reuter) - Fires in grassland near the stricken Chernobyl nuclear power station have increased radiation levels in districts in both Ukraine and Belarus, officials in both countries said. Igor Rolevich, Belarus's Deputy Emergency Situations Minister told Reuters the fires had been brought under control. 24 April 1996 (Reuter) - Dozens of protesters wearing gas masks were joined by schoolchildren in a march towards the Chernobyl nuclear power plant's exclusion zone to mark the 10th anniversary of the disaster there. About 50 members of the "For Mother Earth" group, each carrying a sign bearing the name of towns and villages evacuated after the accident, encountered the children in the town of Polisskoye, 130 km (85 miles) north of Kiev. 24 April 1996 (Reuter) - The prestigious European Particle Physics Laboratory (CERN) was accused of lax safety controls after French nuclear investigators reported finding radioactive scrap metal in ordinary, unmarked dustbins. Called in by a former CERN worker now suffering from cancer, the independent CRII-RAD institute twice secretly visited the CERN site and found abnormally high radiation counts at several points as well as radioactive elements in a nearby river. 24 April 1996 (Reuter) - The European Commission proposed stepping up its participation in the international effort to clean up North Korea's nuclear plants. It proposed that the European Union's nuclear agency Euratom should negotiate a seat on the Korean Peninsular Energy Development Organisation (KEDO). It also said the EU should put 15 million European currency units ($18 million) a year for five years into the project that began in March last year as a joint effort between Japan, the United States and South Korea to convert Pyongyang's nuclear programme to peaceful purposes. 24 April 1996 (Reuter) - Former prime minister Chandra Shekhar said that India was not interested in making a nuclear bomb, but asked western nations not to preach disarmament until they were ready to destroy their own arsenals. Shekhar, a prime ministerial hopeful in the April/May general elections, also said he would try to improve ties with Pakistan, saying it was unacceptable that the two countries had not held official talks for more than two years. 24 April 1996 (Reuter) - Bulgarian energy officials rejected an appeal from Greenpeace to shut down their nuclear plant at Kozloduy and said that its reactors conformed to international safety standards. On Tuesday the environmental group urged Bulgaria to close the plant, located by the river Danube on the Romanian border, saying its ageing reactors were an accident waiting to happen. 24 April 1996 (Reuter) - Russia will sign agreements this week on a nuclear power plant in northeastern China, although the final price had yet to be agreed, Russian Nuclear Energy Minister Viktor Mikhailov said. Construction is due to begin in 1998 on the first phase of the Liaoning nuclear power plant and would involve putting two 1,000 megawatt pressurised water reactors into service by 2004. 24 April 1996 (Reuter) - About 800 people defy government orders by living and raising food in the contaminated Chernobyl zone, a surreal world of empty houses, looters and overgrown vegetation surrounded by barbed wire. 24 April 1996 (Reuter) - Villagers evacuated from the Chernobyl "exclusion zone" after the Chernobyl disaster endured the last straw after watching their homes burn to the ground in a brush fire. Firefighters at the scene, well within the 30-km (18-mile) exclusion zone around the stricken plant, said they believed no one had died in the fire or the confused departure as they hustled the "pilgrims" back aboard chartered buses. But radiation meters showed sharply higher readings - the result of smoke, fire and displacement of dust in the highly contaminated area. 24 April 1996 (UPI) - Actors and musicians from around the world will mark the 10th anniversary of the Chernobyl catastrophe Friday with a concert in Kiev to benefit victims of the worst nuclear accident in history. American academy award-winning actor Jack Palance, rock singer Jon Anderson from the group "Yes," British vocalist Sarah Brightman from the play "Phantom of the Opera" and the Westminster Boys Choir from Britain will participate. "Chernobyl is a global problem, not simply a local misfortune," Palance told a news conference Wednesday in Kiev.