News Digest June 20-26

By Sidney Urquhart, Richard Lacayo, Michael D. Lemonick, Ginia Bellafante, Tom Curry, Alexandra Lange, Erik Meers, Michael Quinn, Deborah L. Wells

NATION

Air-raid sirens in Baghdad woke residents early Sunday morning as a flight of 23 Tomahawk cruise missiles launched from two U.S. warships converged in an attack on the headquarters of the Iraqi Intelligence Service. The raid was in response to an attempt in April to assassinate former President George Bush in Kuwait. President Bill Clinton said he approved the retaliation after receiving "compelling evidence" that Iraq had been responsible for planning the foiled assassination attempt.

Federal agents in the New York City area arrested eight Muslim extremists, including two who may have had a hand in the World Trade Center bombing, on charges that they planned to blow up the United Nations, two highway tunnels under the Hudson River and a federal building in Manhattan in which the FBI has offices. The group also planned to assassinate New York Senator Alfonse D'Amato, U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

The President's budget bill -- or at least the vaguely recognizable version of it customized by Senate Finance Committee Democrats -- managed a 50-to-49 victory in the full Senate. Earlier a G.O.P. alternative budget was defeated after a debate in which both sides pulled out Perot-style charts and pointers. The bill now goes to a House-Senate conference committee that will negotiate a hybrid version.

A federal appeals court ruled that Hillary Rodham Clinton was a de facto full- time government official. As such, the court decided, it was permissible for her to hold closed-door meetings of her government task force on health care, which disbanded last month.

In an 8-to-1 ruling, the Supreme Court upheld a controversial practice of both the Bush and Clinton administrations -- picking up Haitian refugees in % international waters and returning them home. Only Harry Blackmun dissented from the court's reasoning that the pertinent U.S. laws and treaties, which require a hearing at which refugees can argue that they are fleeing political persecution, apply only to refugees who set foot on U.S. shores -- not those stopped at sea.

Military facilities around the country took some direct hits. The Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission, which weighs Pentagon recommendations, voted to shut down about 20 facilities, including four in the San Francisco Bay area and two in Charleston, South Carolina -- a decision that, if approved by the President, will cost that city 21,300 jobs.

The President's family tree may include Henry Leon Ritzenthaler, 55, the retired owner of a janitorial-supply company in Paradise, California. He says he is the son of Clinton's father, W.J. Blythe, and Blythe's first wife, who married when they were both 18. On Friday the White House said the two men had a "warm conversation," their first, by phone, and agreed to meet in the future.

With a view to saving jobs, the House by a one-vote margin saved NASA's beleaguered space-station project -- which is now $1 billion over Reagan-era cost projections. But the House voted against more money for another big- science project, the $11.8 billion superconducting supercollider, to be built in Texas. The Senate could still restore funding, but supporters are pessimistic.

President Clinton has chosen his AIDS czar. Kristine Gebbie, a former Washington State secretary of health and a member of Ronald Reagan's presidential commission on AIDS, will coordinate the Federal Government's response to the epidemic.

A geneticist at the University of California in San Francisco and a computer scientist at Yale were critically injured by mail bombs. Federal officials suspect a shadowy person or group, sometimes known as FC, which mailed explosive devices to campuses, airlines and high-tech companies in the late 1970s and '80s, killing one person and injuring 21.

Can this marriage be saved? Claiming that her husband had raped her, a woman in Prince William County, Virginia, cut off his penis while he slept, then drove off with the severed organ and tossed it out her car window. After police found it on the roadside, surgeons reattached the penis in a rare 9 1/ 2-hour operation. Doctors were optimistic that the man would regain most functions.

The Chicago Bulls won their third straight N.B.A. championship. In what now seems a pattern after end-of-season professional sports triumphs, celebrations in Chicago turned violent, leaving three dead.

WORLD

Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic, a Muslim, would have none of it, but seven other members of his country's collective leadership met with negotiators in Geneva to discuss a geographically simple three-way partition of Bosnia along ethnic lines. At a summit in Copenhagen, the European Community urged the Bosnians to accept the plan, which would give half the country to the Serbs and a third to the Croats.

The U.N. resumed limited food distribution in southern Mogadishu after two weeks of fighting between its forces and those of Somali General Mohammed Farrah Aidid. It also issued wanted posters for the fugitive warlord, and put up a reward for his capture. Aidid, meanwhile, taunted his pursuers in a broadcast carried by NBC and the Voice of America. "You know," he said, "I am here in the city of Mogadishu and I am protected by God and my people."

After 37 years in power, Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party is disintegrating in the wake of a no-confidence vote in the parliament's powerful lower house: 44 of the party's current 512 legislators defected to form a party that could ally with opposition groups to form a new government when elections are held July 18.

Under pressure from a worldwide oil-and-arms embargo, the Haitian military junta agreed to meet with Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the elected President they ousted in 1991.

Kurdish separatists took hostages and attacked Turkish businesses and government offices in Britain, Germany, Switzerland, France, Sweden and Denmark, protesting Turkey's persecution of its Kurdish population. One Kurd was killed when protesters tried to storm the Turkish embassy in Bern, Switzerland.

Two bombs exploded in Madrid during the morning rush hour Monday, killing seven people and injuring 25. The blasts were blamed, as ever, on the Basque separatist group known as E.T.A.

BUSINESS

In a week when the Los Angeles city council voted to ban all smoking in restaurants, the tobacco industry asked a federal court in North Carolina to rule invalid a study released in January by the Environmental Protection Agency that blamed secondhand smoke for about 3,000 cancer deaths each year among nonsmokers. The suit claims that the epa's conclusion, which became the basis for smoking bans around the country, was based on a flawed method for reviewing scientific studies.

In a ruling that was a deep disappointment to business, the Supreme Court decided 6 to 3 to uphold a West Virginia court's award of $10 million in punitive damages against an oil-and-gas exploration company -- 526 times as great as the monetary damages involved.

Sluggish-economy-news-of-the-week: the Federal Reserve's latest survey of business conditions found that expectations of higher taxes and health-care costs are limiting economic growth to a "slow to moderate pace."

Partly as a result of Washington's new toughness on trade, a Tokyo meeting of trade ministers from the U.S., Canada, Japan and the European Community failed to reach agreement on measures to reduce tariffs on a variety of goods. In a separate move, the U.S. Commerce Department, responding to complaints by American firms that foreign governments subsidize steel exports, imposed high tariffs on steel from Japan, Canada and 17 other countries.