News Digest June 6-12

NATION

In the biggest retreat he has made so far to achieve passage of his enormous budget package, President Bill Clinton abandoned his complicated $72 million energy tax to placate Senate Democrats who opposed it. Clinton's almost instant capitulation provoked an outcry among Democrats in the House, who had already taken the political risk of voting to approve Clinton's BTU-based energy tax. "I think we've been left hanging out on a plank, and I must say I don't like it," lamented Colorado's Patricia Schroeder. Though the White House still wants some kind of energy tax, it has ceded control over the budget process to the Senate Finance Committee, where an increased tax on gas and diesel fuel gained some support. To make up the loss of revenue caused by abandoning the broad energy tax, the committee has looked to changes in Medicare that would make the elderly pay more of their own way. That has displeased the senior-citizens lobby. "They took the most conservative committee in the Senate," said its exasperated chairman, Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, "and they gave it the job of protecting social programs."

The White House continued to equivocate over its choice to fill the Supreme Court seat of Byron White. The President seemed ready to name federal Appeals Court Judge Stephen Breyer, with whom he had lunch on Friday afternoon. But after devoting most of his attention to weekend attacks against a Somali warlord, Clinton postponed his decision, saying he wanted to "reflect more." One possible reason: reports that Breyer has a "Zoe Baird problem" -- he failed to pay Social Security taxes for a domestic employee.

The Supreme Court lowered -- a bit -- the barrier between religion and public schools. A unanimous court, with White writing, said schools that permit outside organizations to meet on their property after class hours must extend the same right to religious groups. In a case involving the Afro-Cuban religion called Santeria, they also ruled that religious groups have a constitutional right to sacrifice animals in worship services. The Justices also unanimously backed the right of states to impose harsher sentences on assailants who commit hate crimes in which they choose their victims based on race, religion or other biases. "A physical assault," wrote Chief Justice William Rehnquist, "is not by any stretch of the imagination expressive conduct protected by the First Amendment."

Accusing both the Bush and Clinton Administrations of "callous and reprehensible" behavior, a federal judge in New York City ordered the immediate release of HIV-infected Haitians and their family members from a detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The White House said it would comply.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission declared that employers may not refuse to hire people with disabilities because of fears that they will raise insurance costs. Establishing its policy for enforcement of the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act, the commission opens the way for disabled workers, including those with AIDS, to sue employers whom they believe have violated the law.

How bad is the rift between Clinton and the military? This bad: the Air Force is investigating whether Major General Harold Campbell called the President "draft dodging," "gay loving," "pot smoking" and "womanizing" in a speech three weeks ago at an Air Force banquet in the Netherlands. Because the Uniform Code of Military Justice bars officers from making "contemptuous" remarks about the President or other senior government officials, Campbell could face court-martial, one year in prison and loss of $66,000 a year in retirement pay. However, the White House seemed disinclined to get into a scrape with a man who won the Silver Star in Vietnam.

A little more than a year after it was shaken by riots, Los Angeles got its first Republican mayor since 1961. Richard Riordan, a rich businessman who financed his campaign largely out of his own pocket, won 54% of the vote -- in a city where George Bush won only 22% -- to defeat city councilman Michael Woo, a liberal Democrat endorsed by Clinton. Riordan will succeed five-term Mayor Tom Bradley, who was elected by a bi-racial coalition that Woo had hoped would carry him to office as well. Riordan's base is among white voters attracted by his promise to make L.A. safe and thus create jobs. "Businesses do not want to come into a war zone," he said after his victory. Turnout was high -- helped along slightly by the state Democratic Party's offer of free doughnuts to anyone who voted.

In New Jersey another very rich Republican, Christine Todd Whitman, won the gubernatorial primary. In November she will face Democratic Governor Jim Florio, who became the object of Jerseyites' intense loathing after a $2.8 billion tax increase in 1990. A former state utilities regulator and a moderate, Whitman nearly beat New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley in an election three years ago by tying him to Florio. "We're going to be Florio-free," Whitman promises.

Six people died when a tramp freighter smuggling Chinese immigrants into the U.S. went aground just off New York City. After hundreds of the would-be immigrants jumped overboard into chill waters in an attempt to swim ashore, about 285 were treated and released into the custody of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which will decide whether the immigrants should be returned to China. Police said a Chinese gang operating in lower Manhattan organized the nightmarish 17,000-mile voyage of the Golden Venture with the intention of collecting a fee of around $30,000 a head.

Connecticut became the third state, after New Jersey and California, to ban the sale of semiautomatic, military-style assault rifles.

No sooner had Mia Farrow won her child-custody battle against Woody Allen than she went back on the attack. After describing Allen as unfit to be left alone with his own children, acting state-supreme-court justice Elliot Wilk ruled that Allen could see his adopted daughter Dylan (who has asked to be called Eliza) only if the child's psychiatrist agreed, and could have only supervised visits totaling six hours a week with his biological son Satchel.

WORLD

The U.S. and the U.N. struck back at the forces of General Mohammed Farrah Aidid in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia. The raids, the first of which began shortly before dawn on Saturday, were in retaliation for a series of attacks on June 5, in which 23 U.N. peacekeepers were killed. In his regular Saturday-morning radio broadcast, President Clinton said that the action was "essential to send a clear message to the armed gangs." That message was pounded home shortly after midnight on Sunday when a second air assault fired on an area near Aidid's private compound.

Fired two weeks ago, British Chancellor of the Exchequer Norman Lamont promised to go quietly. But the ousted official couldn't resist a 20-minute harangue in the House of Commons. As a stony-faced Prime Minister John Major listened, Lamont charged that without more clearly defined goals, his party's government "will not survive and will not deserve to survive." The last time an ex-Exchequer Chancellor (Geoffrey Howe) attacked the boss (Margaret Thatcher), the government did indeed fall.

The seven-time Prime Minister of Italy, Giulio Andreotti, has been battling charges of corruption and Mafia ties for many months. Now the wily Christian Democrat is at the center of a murder investigation, fending off allegations that he masterminded the killing of a journalist in 1979. As Senator-for-Life, Andreotti enjoys parliamentary immunity, but he has asked that this protection be lifted so that he can answer the "calumnies and falsehoods."

In France, there was yet another reminder that many French citizens collaborated enthusiastically with their Nazi invaders during World War II. Christian Didier, a sometime author who was born during the war, pumped four bullets into Rene Bousquet, a man he described as a "piece of garbage," then summoned TV reporters to explain the deed. Bousquet, 84, a successful former banker, had served as a high-ranking police official in the Nazi-friendly Vichy government and had been accused of deporting thousands of Jewish children to German concentration camps.

BUSINESS

Continuing the trend of media mergers, the New York Times Co. announced it will purchase the Boston Globe, one of the nation's last remaining family- owned dailies. In addition to paying a remarkable $1.1 billion price for the 505,000-circulation daily -- a record for the sale of an American paper -- the Times Co. said it would give the Globe autonomy in news and management decisions for at least five years.

The Producer Price index showed no increase for May, diminishing inflation fears that were set off by steep increases during March and April. The steadiness of prices should discourage any impulse by the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates to relieve inflationary pressures.

SCIENCE

After a year of the most intensive search ever mounted to detect radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations, astronomers from the University of California, Berkeley, have picked up 164 signals -- out of 30 trillion recorded -- that "bear further investigation." This doesn't mean that E.T.s have been found, only that these anomalies have not yet been otherwise explained.

Scientists have extracted tiny fragments of DNA from a weevil that lived at least 120 million years ago, when dinosaurs still roamed the earth. Like the dino-blood-carrying insect in the new movie Jurassic Park, the weevil was trapped and preserved in tree resin that hardened into amber. The weevil will not be cloned, however.