News Digest May 16-22

By Sidney Urquhart, Richard Lacayo, Michael D. Lemonick, Christopher John Farley, Ginia Bellafante, Tom Curry and Michael Quinn

NATION

As his budget proposal headed to a House vote, Bill Clinton fended off assaults in Congress from his own party. Fearing an antitax backlash among voters, moderate and conservative House Democrats demanded more spending cuts, in particular caps on Medicare, Medicaid and other entitlement programs. Clinton tried to put down the revolt at a meeting with the House Democratic caucus and the party congressional leadership. "If you'll go out on a limb," he told them, "I'll go out with you." But a more dangerous mutiny began in the Senate, where a bipartisan group led by Democrat David Boren of Oklahoma agreed on a plan to cap entitlements and kill Clinton's proposed energy tax.

On a trip through the West to drum up support for his economic plan, Clinton asked people to trust that before his first term is over he would "try to deliver on the middle-class tax cut."

The White House was taken aback by charges of cronyism after the abrupt dismissal of its seven-member travel staff, which arranges travel for government officials and receives payment from news organizations for the same service. Accusing the longtime staffers of "gross mismanagement," the Administration insisted its action was not a response to complaints by Hollywood producer Harry Thomason, an intimate of the Clintons who has friends in the charter-airplane business. Facing an uproar when a cousin of the President was named to head an interim operation, while an Arkansas travel agency -- whose owner contributed to the Clinton campaign -- was chosen to handle travel arrangements, the White House relented and temporarily put the operation in the hands of the American Express travel office.

It was a misbegotten week for the Clintons, travel arrangements-wise: Air Force One sat at Los Angeles International Airport for nearly an hour, idling and tying up two runways, while Cristophe, a Beverly Hills stylist whose going rate is $200 a head, gave President Clinton an on-board haircut.

The Supreme Court agreed to decide whether it's unconstitutional to exclude potential jurors on the basis of gender.

While it drafts tougher safety regulations for hazardous-waste incinerators, the Clinton Administration announced a de facto 18-month moratorium on the licensing of new facilities.

There's more evidence that Saddam Hussein tried to kill George Bush during the former President's victory lap through Kuwait last month. An Iraqi being held in Kuwait told FBI investigators he led an assassination team at the behest of Baghdad.

In Dade County, Florida, where Spanish is the first language for half the population, the county commission repealed a 1980 ordinance banning the use of languages other than English in official government business.

In a court settlement, the Invisible Empire Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the nation's largest Klan group, agreed to surrender its name, its 11,000-name mailing list and all its assets. "We're in effect taking over everything," said Morris Dees, whose anti-Klan Southern Poverty Law Center brought the case. The Knights were found guilty of violating the civil rights of blacks who were attacked by a Klan-led mob during a 1987 march in Georgia.

Boys who won't affirm a "duty to God" can be denied admission to the Boy Scouts, a federal appeals court ruled, because the Scouts are a "private organization" and not a "public accommodation" of the type barred by law from discriminating.

WORLD

A year ago, Danish voters narrowly rejected the Maastricht treaty, which would glue much of Europe into a political and economic unit. Now the Danes have voted in favor of the pact, thanks to major concessions: Denmark won't have to use a European currency or join in a common defense policy. The vote was greeted with riots -- almost unheard of in Denmark -- by Danish anarchists.

Britain is now the only one of the 12 signatories of the Maastricht treaty not to have ratified it. Two days after the Danish referendum, however, the House of Commons gave Prime Minister John Major a victory by voting in favor of the treaty, and final approval is expected by fall. Major said he would fight to keep Britain from surrendering too much control of its own affairs but added that "I cannot do it by standing on the sidelines of Europe throwing stones at all my partners."

After their countrymen's inevitable, overwhelming rejection of the Vance-Owen peace plan, Bosnian Serb leaders proclaimed the plan dead and scoffed at international outrage. "If they bomb me," military commander Ratko Mladic said, "I'll bomb London."

The allies proposed a plan in which the U.S. would use air power to back up European and probably Russian troops protecting predominantly Muslim safe havens around certain Bosnian cities. Still, the Serbs are unlikely to give up the territory they have already seized in the intractable conflict. And it's doubtful that the existing cease-fire agreements between Muslims, Serbs and Croats will last long.

As expected, Norway vows to hunt minke whales in defiance of International Whaling Commission rules. Norwegian whalers may kill nearly 300 whales this year.

Jacques Attali, a former special adviser to French President Francois Mitterrand, recently criticized for his spendthrift ways as president of the European Bank for Reconstruction, now has been accused of plagiarizing from interviews conducted with Mitterrand by author Elie Wiesel. Attali claims he did similar interviews but used the Wiesel material because it was better. The book's title is Verbatim.

The U.S. will recognize Angola's formerly Marxist government after years of supporting the rebel group UNITA. Despite the government's victory in U.N.-certified elections last year, UNITA is fighting on.

BUSINESS

Envisioning a future of programming and data services sent to homes via an electronic superhighway, the prospectively competitive cable and telephone industries have been warily sniffing at each other for years. Last week two companies combined forces at last. A regional phone company, U S West, agreed to pay $2.5 billion to buy more than 25% of Time Warner's movie-studio and cable-TV assets.

Reduced fears of inflation pushed stock prices to record levels for two successive days, with the Dow Jones industrial average hitting a high of 3523.28. But the consumer confidence index dropped this month to the lowest level since October.

Imports from China and Japan helped send the U.S. trade deficit to $10.21 billion in March -- up from $7.9 billion the month before and the highest level in four years.

General Motors filed a criminal complaint in Germany against Jose Ignacio Lopez de Arriortua, the former head of its global purchasing operations. The company says that when he left to join Volkswagen in March, he took confidential GM documents.

SCIENCE

Man-made chemicals are destroying the ozone layer, but so are natural ones. The 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption spewed ozone-unfriendly chlorine compounds into the air; researchers believe that these were partly responsible for the record-breaking ozone hole that opened up over Antarctica last year.

Cannabis -- marijuana -- is described in ancient Middle Eastern writings as a common medication. Now scientists in Israel have exhumed the body of a woman who died in childbirth 1,600 years ago, and found a burned material they identified as pot. It was evidently used to ease the pain of a difficult labor.

It has long been presumed that either Neanderthals were the ancestors of modern humans or they died out before Homo sapiens showed up. But new, extremely accurate radioactive dating of bones dug up in Israel shows both Neanderthals and people like us lived in the same place at the same time -- raising the interesting question of whether Neanderthals were victims of species cleansing.