News Digest May 30-June 5

By Sidney Urquhart, Michael D. Lemonick, David Van Biema, Christopher John Farley, Tom Curry, Michael Quinn, Deborah L. Wells

NATION

While President Bill Clinton's decision to withdraw law professor Lani Guinier's nomination as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights mollified moderates, it infuriated the professional civil rights establishment and made the President appear weak and incompetent. After a meeting with Guinier in the Oval Office, Clinton admitted, mortifyingly, "At the time of the nomination, I had not read her writings. In retrospect, I wish I had." The President and First Lady have been friends of Guinier's for 20 years. While claiming that he could not defend Guinier's positions, Clinton also insisted that many of them were distorted in the press. "This has nothing to do with the political center," the President said, when asked if dumping her was part of a general, recent move to the political right. "This has to do with my center." At a dinner that evening, Clinton said of Guinier, "I love her . . . If she called me and told me she needed $5,000, I'd take it out of my account and give it to her, no questions asked."

Clinton had started the week uncertainly, braving shouts of "Draft dodger!" and "Shut up, coward!" at his ceremonial Memorial Day visit to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The President, who knelt to make a rubbing of the name of a boyhood friend, James Herbert Jeffries, also received some applause.

Clinton chose the conservative Democratic city of Milwaukee as the setting for his announcement that he was willing to cut both taxes and spending in his budget plan. He asked that education and job training be spared, but appeared ready to sacrifice part of his proposed energy tax. Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen later said it might be reduced by as much as a third. Clinton also delayed a push to increase the minimum wage.

Compounding Clinton's troubles, Democrat Bob Krueger, the appointed occupant of Bentsen's Senate seat, lost the Texas Senate race to Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison. The defeat reduced the President's Democratic majority in the Senate to 56.

Secretary of Defense Les Aspin warned that the academic quality of new recruits sank slightly in the first half of this year: only 94% had high school diplomas, vs. 97% in 1991. Aspin said he would spend more money on recruiting.

Aspin caused the government to spend some money himself when he and a woman friend enjoyed four days in Venice at the Danieli, one of Europe's most expensive hotels. Aspin and his companion paid for their accommodations, but those of Aspin's 31-person retinue, some of whom also stayed at the Danieli, were picked up by taxpayers.

The Supreme Court ruled that a verdict must be voided if the judge fails to properly instruct the jury that it has to find guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. That was a relief to civil libertarians in light of the court's previous rulings that other irregularities, such as coerced confessions, can be deemed "harmless errors," which would not automatically taint a conviction.

A mysterious illness that took the lives of 11 people, most of whom lived on or near the large Navajo reservation straddling the borders of three Western states, has confounded epidemiologists attempting to determine its cause. The disease starts with flulike symptoms and rapidly causes suffocation. "I went to get a haircut today," said the editor of a local Navajo newspaper, "and somebody was saying maybe it's the end of the world."

WORLD

Scarcely more than a week after he seized power and abolished the nation's Congress and Supreme Court, Guatemalan President Jorge Serrano Elias has become ex-President and expatriate. The military, which originally supported his coup, backed away in the face of the suspension of U.S. aid and the threat of trade sanctions.

The world's newest international tunnel was unveiled triumphantly by Mexican police. More than a quarter-mile long, 5 ft. high and 4 ft. wide, it was intended for use in smuggling drugs between Tijuana and the outskirts of San Diego. The tunnel was discovered during a search for the murderer of the Roman Catholic Cardinal killed in what was thought to be a drug-war crossfire.

Bosnian Serbs lobbed mortar shells into a crowd watching a soccer match in Sarajevo, killing at least 15 people. Serbs also attacked Goradze, one of the U.N.'s "safe areas" for Muslims. In Yugoslavia, hard-line Serbs forced the ouster of President Dobrica Cosic. Meanwhile, the United Nations Security Council voted to send as many as 10,000 additional troops to protect safe havens in Bosnia and authorized the U.S. and its allies to use air power to protect U.N. troops.

German police have arrested four suspects in the fire bombing of a house in Solingen that killed five Turks, three of them children. The suspects, ranging in age from 16 to 23, were reportedly involved with neo-Nazi extremists. Despite the arrests, thousands of demonstrators continued to protest the fire bombing and demand citizenship rights for Germany's 1.8 million Turkish residents. Chancellor Helmut Kohl dismissed the episode as an isolated one, but President Richard von Weizsacker, who spoke at a memorial service for the Turks, said it was part of a "climate generated by the extreme right."

Prince Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia attempted to avert a political crisis there with his announcement that he would form a government that included both the ruling Cambodian People's Party and the royalist FUNCINPEC opposition party. But he changed his mind, apparently after his son, Prince Norodom Ranariddh, the FUNCINPEC leader, questioned the plan. FUNCINPEC won a plurality in last week's U.N.-supervised election, but the People's Party charged irregularities and threatened violence unless a new vote is held in five provinces.

In unprecedented high-level talks in New York City, the U.S. attempted to persuade North Korea to reconsider its decision to drop out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The U.S. believes that North Korea is on the verge of developing nuclear weapons and fears that it might use them itself or sell them to others.

Black and white leaders in South Africa have provisionally set next April 27 as the date for elections in which all black adults will for the first time have the right to vote. The elections will virtually guarantee that some 350 years of white-minority domination will end. Perhaps in part as a good-faith gesture to protect the agreement, the country's Supreme Court reduced Winnie Mandela's sentence for a kidnapping conviction from five years in jail to a fine; imprisoning the estranged wife of African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela could have created political tension and even provoked violence.

Nobel prizewinning novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn will end 20 years of exile in the U.S. to return to his native Russia within "a matter of months," according to his wife.

BUSINESS

After three months of stasis, unemployment fell in May to 6.9%, yielding the country's highest employment rate since the beginning of the recession three years ago. That represented new jobs for 857,000 more people, the biggest monthly increase since 1984. The major contributor to the improvement was a jump in construction jobs.

This good news was somewhat offset by a report that the country's index of leading economic indicators rose a disappointing one-tenth of 1% in April, suggesting that no boom is in the offing. The 11 indicators, which include data on consumer expectations and plant and equipment orders, had dropped dramatically the month before.

Worldwide, the recession continues. Unemployment in Western Europe is expected to rise to a postwar high next year, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The OECD predicted an unemployment figure of 11.4% this year and 11.9% in 1994.

In a deal whose major negotiations took only two weeks, MCI Communications Corp., the entrepreneurial David to AT&T's Goliath in America's long-distance wars, sold 20% of its stock to the huge British Telecommunications PLC for roughly $4.3 billion and instantly acquired access to AT&T-like capital and global reach.

Another big international transaction, signed with a subsidiary of the Dutch- owned company PolyGram, should make the Irish rock band U2 $170 million richer six albums from now. The size of the contract is reputed to be second only to Michael Jackson's with Sony.

R.H. Macy & Co., exploiting the current faddishness of anything interactive, unveiled plans to create what amounts to its own private home-shopping channel, "TV Macy's," by next year. In partnership with Cablevision Systems Corp., the department-store chain hopes, rather optimistically, to reach 20 million subscribers 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Another partner is Don Hewitt, the septuagenarian executive producer of 60 Minutes.

SCIENCE

Kids, don't try this at home: Penn State University scientists have created thin layers of diamond by the unlikely technique of cooking carbon-rich plastic, mixed with potassium and sodium and blasted with a beam of ultrasound, at low temperature in a regular home oven. The result is a low- grade but authentic form of diamond. If the quality can be improved, plastic-derived diamond could provide a cheap, strong coating for everything from airplane windows to drilling tools.

It has been confirmed that the bones of an antelope discovered in a Vietnamese forest last year belong to a new species. It's the first new species in the family that includes cows, deer and antelope to be found in at least half a century. The bones were reasonably fresh, implying that the creature is not extinct -- although no Westerner has yet seen one alive.