Israeli Military’s New Recruit No Stranger to Battle

--Natan Sharansky, who has long battled on behalf of Soviet Jews, will learn about a different kind of fighting now that he has been drafted into the Israeli military. Sharansky reported to a military base near Tel Aviv for three weeks of training, said Yuri Stern, a spokesman for the Soviet Jewry Information Center, a lobbying group. Sharansky, 40, will join Israel’s civil defense, rather than the regular army, because of his age and poor health, Stern said. He will be called up periodically for reserve duty, the army said. Civil defense reservists are trained to take charge of the civilian population in war. Sharansky “will be no more than a private in the army, while his true battlefield is the campaign for the release of Soviet Jews. That’s where he is a general,” Stern said. Sharansky, one of the Soviet Union’s most prominent dissidents, immigrated to Israel in 1986 after nine years in a Soviet prison on espionage charges.

--Sounds of singer-songwriter Bob Dylan’s 1970s song “Hurricane” filled the room before former middleweight boxing contender Rubin (Hurricane) Carter spoke at a press conference marking his freedom from the New Jersey prison system. “There is no way I can thank you enough. But thank you, thank you, thank you,” Carter said to his lawyers and supporters who threw him a bash at the Plaza Hotel in New York. Carter and another black man, John Artis, were convicted twice of killing a bartender and two patrons at the Lafayette Bar & Grill in Paterson, N.J., June 17, 1966. Carter has maintained he is innocent. The second conviction was overturned in 1985 by a federal judge who said the case was based on “racism” and “concealment.” On Friday, a Passaic County judge dismissed the murder indictment against the two. Artis is back in prison on an unrelated drug and handgun conviction.

--Rudolf Nureyev will appear as a guest artist with American Ballet Theatre in three performances of “Giselle” at the Shrine Auditorium this month, the company has announced. The former Kirov Ballet star, who last appeared in Southern California in January on a “Nureyev and Friends” program at the Bob Hope Cultural Center in Palm Springs, will dance opposite Marianna Tcherkassky on March 17 (Nureyev’s 50th birthday) and March 18, and opposite Alessandra Ferri on March 19.