June 15, 1991

With tweezers and scissors in hand, the county coroner in Louisville, Ky., plans to peer into the crypt of Zachary Taylor, the 12th President of the United States, soon and comb the old general's remains for clues about his sudden illness and rapid death almost 141 years ago. The cause of death, diagnosed at the time as cholera moribus, or gastroenteritis, may well have been arsenic poisoning, says Clara Rising, a Florida-based author who has been doing research for a book about Taylor. A substantial portion of her work is examining whether President Taylor, not Abraham Lincoln, was the first American president to be assassinated. Few Questions Asked Before For months, Ms. Rising has been pursuing answers to questions about President Taylor's death that almost no one was asking when he died on July 9, 1850.

Aided by new laws and an infusion of Federal money, state child-support enforcement agencies around the country have become far more aggressive at collecting child support. Since the enactment of the Family Support Act of 1988, states have become more aggressively involved in collecting court-ordered child support awards, taking in a record $6 billion in 1990. And, according to one recent survey, the average amount of court-ordered child support has increased about 50 percent, to $60 a week. New mechanisms are in place for garnisheeing the wages of parents who owe child-support payments, and most states have started issuing their own "Most Wanted" lists, or staging roundups to arrest parents who fail to pay. Such tactics generate a wave of payments not only from the people singled out but also from others who wish to avoid negative publicity.

Miles of barbed-wire fence and signs warning of live minefields still surround this tiny port city. Rolls of rusting concertina wire line beaches. Military vehicles rumble through the streets, and 30 miles to the southwest, British Phantom jets take off from a state-of-the-art air base. These are all reminders that there is still no negotiated peace, nine years after Argentina invaded and occupied these remote islands it calls the Malvinas for two and a half months, only to surrender on June 14, 1982, to a British counterinvasion.

United Nations officials said today that they had intelligence information indicating that Iraq has tried to mislead the United Nations by understating its nuclear weapons program and the amount of weapons-grade nuclear material it possesses. As a result, the special commission appointed by the Security Council to oversee the destruction or removal of Iraq's chemical and biological arms and its nuclear weapons materials has ordered its experts to make new inspections of undisclosed nuclear sites in Iraq next week.

In a significant development in a four-year investigation, a former senior Pentagon official pleaded guilty today to Federal conspiracy and bribery charges related to a conspiracy by a handful of officials, consultants and military contractors to rig the bidding on contracts and defraud the government. The former official, Melvyn R. Paisley, an assistant Navy secretary from 1981 to 1987 in charge of procurement and development of military systems and engineering, entered his plea in Federal District Court in Alexandria, Va. The plea included a statement that detailed how some of the nation's largest military contractors were eager to offer bribes for confidential information that would give them an advantage in bidding for lucrative contracts. Sentencing Set for Fall Mr. Paisley, who had been identified by prosecutors as the highest-ranking official involved, faces up to 30 years in jail and up to $750,000 in fines. He is scheduled to be sentenced before Judge Claude M. Hilton on Sept. 27.