July 20, 1991

The White House has quietly made a major change in its explanation of Robert M. Gates's role in the Iran-contra scandal, tacitly acknowledging for the first time that he played a central role in 1986 in overseeing C.I.A. aid to the Nicaraguan rebels. The Administration maintains that this aid had been approved by Congress. But even so, the new explanation marks a departure from the previous official position that Mr. Gates, Mr. Bush's choice to head the Central Intelligence Agency, had only peripheral involvement with the contras.

Rejecting a last-ditch effort by the Bush Administration to keep the $5.5 billion Shoreham Nuclear Power Station alive, a Federal appeals court ruled yesterday that the plant's owner could begin dismantling it without conducting an environmental impact study. The decision, by the United States Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia circuit, grants Shoreham's owner a new license that allows it to begin taking apart the fully operational, 809-megawatt plant. The owner, the Long Island Lighting Company, said that it would quickly move forward to decommission the plant, making the chance that it will ever operate as a nuclear plant decidedly remote.

The South African Government admitted today for the first time that it secretly gave money to the black political organization Inkatha in its often violent rivalry with the more popular African National Congress. The admission, following disclosures in a weekly newspaper, was one of the strongest confirmations of repeated charges leveled by the congress and others that the white-dominated Government of South Africa had been using its resources to bolster the congress's principal black opponent. President F. W. de Klerk said today that such covert aid had been cut off by his Government in March 1990.

If Detroit is the Motor City, then Omaha must be the Motor Mouth City. This low-key community of 350,000 people on the western bank of the Missouri River would never embrace such a saucy slogan, but the fact is that Omaha sets the pace for the world when it comes to making a living on the telephone. And that's just how the city's leaders planned it. "They put together an exceedingly effective economic development program to attract telecommunications companies at a time when everyone else was concentrating on industry," said Robert Ady, president of the PHH Fantus Corporation, a Chicago-based corporate relocation consulting concern.

Would Henry James have described "summer afternoon" as the two most beautiful words in the English language if he had been in these parts yesterday? Ha! Not if he had been among the thousands of people who filed sullenly past the intersection of Broadway and 46th Street at 8 A.M. It was hazy, already sweltering and the billowing emission from a steampipe swirled depressingly.