1.   Exiled dissident writers are the focus in a series of discussions that opens Wednesday night at the Miller Theater at Columbia University.

2.   Journalist groups around the world have campaigned for the release of Restano, a dissident writer and intellectual who has been in jail for three and a half years.

3.   The ministry faulted an undisclosed number of rogue intelligence agents for the serial killings late last year of five dissident writers and opposition figures.

4.   The torture of dissident writers and common thieves is clearly wrong.

5.   There are photos of Helms with President Reagan, former Polish president Lech Walesa, Russian dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Angolan rebel Jonas Savimbi.

6.   President Boris Yeltsin met Alexander Solzhenitsyn on Wednesday for the first time since the former dissident writer returned to Russia nearly six months ago.

7.   Police detained a Shanghai dissident writer shortly before his departure to the United States, but finally allowed him to go, a human rights group said Tuesday.

8.   Authorities freed a dissident writer Thursday after he spent more than a year in jail, accused of seeking to overthrow the Islamic system.

9.   Authorities in China banned an officially sponsored gathering of poets and arrested three organizers after discovering that dissident writers had been invited, a human rights group said Tuesday.

10.   Born in the Soviet republic of Azerbaijan, Rostropovich angered Soviet rulers when he helped dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn.