May 25, 1991

Attack on Abortion Ruling Family planning groups said they would undertake a campaign to get Congress to overturn the Federal anti-abortion rule that the Supreme Court upheld Thursday. Page 9.

For the first time in at least a decade, fewer people are driving into Manhattan. "Without a doubt, there is less traffic," said Joseph Bierman, regional director of operations for Metro Traffic Control Inc., a private company that produces traffic reports for radio and television.

This important Kurdish center in northern Iraq today came under the protective wing of the United States and its allies, whose soldiers started to restore basic city services and to gather unexploded grenades and land mines from gullies and fields. Under an agreement reached earlier this week with the Iraqi Government, 170 technical experts, military and civilian, will set up camp here for at least three weeks to help a weary, war-pummeled city return to something approaching normal life.

Trying to seize the initiative on a politically potent issue, Senate Democrats will propose setting annual targets for national spending on health care as part of a new legislative effort to restrain soaring health costs. The proposal would also extend health insurance to the millions of Americans who have no medical coverage of any kind. The long-awaited proposal is expected to shape the growing national debate on health care as soon as a bill is introduced in Congress next month by Senator George J. Mitchell of Maine, the majority leader. The debate has been rather shapeless so far because the Bush Administration, while studying the issue, has refrained from endorsing specific proposals and has encouraged continued reliance on free market forces. A Major Issue of the Decade Democrats judge health care to be the pre-eminent domestic issue of the 1990's, an issue that may figure prominently in next year's Presidential election campaign.

The United States and its allies have decided to ease restrictions substantially on the kinds of high-technology goods, like personal computers, that the West can export to the Soviet Union and other nations considered security risks. The Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls, known as Cocom, agreed to cut in half the number of high-technology items that cannot be exported to these countries without special licenses. It is the most sweeping action yet in liberalizing high-technology trade with the Soviet Union, other Communist countries and the members of the recently dissolved Warsaw Pact.