May 15, 1991

Winnie Mandela, the wife of the African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela, was sentenced today to six years in prison in the kidnapping and beating of four young men in Soweto in late 1988. Justice Michael S. Stegmann, who found her guilty on Monday of kidnapping and being an accessory to the assaults, imposed consecutive sentences of five years for kidnapping and one year on the accessory conviction.

Attacking what it regards as mislabeling of low-cholesterol foods, the Food and Drug Administration yesterday assailed three large food concerns, including the Procter & Gamble Company. Just last month the agency said Procter & Gamble had misrepresented processed orange juice as fresh, and yesterday it attacked the company's Crisco Corn Oil, CPC International Inc.'s 100% Pure Mazola Corn Oil and Great Foods of America Inc.'s Heartbeat Canola Oil.

INTERNATIONAL Negotiations for a free-trade agreement with Mexico and a new round of lowering of international trade barriers were endorsed by House and Senate panels. [ Page A1. ] THE ECONOMY Retail sales rose 0.4 percent in March, the Commerce Dept. said, revising figures that had shown an 0.8 percent drop. The gain was viewed as a sign that the economic slide is halting. [ A1. ]

President Bush today gave Robert M. Gates an unusual second chance to become Director of Central Intelligence. The President chose the career intelligence analyst for a job he was denied four years ago in the face of intensive questioning about the Iran-contra affair. In selecting Mr. Gates, a veteran of 25 years in Government bureaucracy with no political profile or base of his own, Mr. Bush reiterated his view that the espionage agencies should devote themselves to intelligence gathering and remain aloof from both politics and policymaking. Mr. Bush said that was the way he ran the intelligence services when he was Director himself in 1976, although he moved into the position after serving as chairman of the Republican National Committee, as well as a Congressman from Texas from 1966 to 1970. 'He Will Do a Superb Job' "I will keep it the way it was when I was there," Mr. Bush said today. "And it will be -- he will be at the table when matters of -- or when we need the intelligence to make critical decisions on foreign affairs. He will not be a political -- trying to shape policy. But he will do a superb job as a professional intelligence officer, heading the intelligence agency. That's the way it's going to be."

The Bush Administration's attempt to rewrite the banking laws suffered a political setback today when a House panel rejected its proposals to limit coverage of deposit insurance. A House banking subcommittee removed from the Treasury Department's legislation a provision that would have restricted deposit insurance coverage to $200,000 per individual per bank.