October 12, 1991

Confronting a disputed nomination to the Supreme Court and a boiling political furor, the Senate Judiciary Committee heard gripping but contradictory testimony today from Judge Clarence Thomas and the woman accusing him of sexual harassment. The proceedings in a jammed hearing room at the Russell Senate Office Building amounted to a political drama centered on two extraordinarily composed figures, Judge Thomas and his accuser, Anita F. Hill, an Oklahoma law professor.

Army reservists are building a 10-foot-high steel-panel fence near a border checkpoint at Otay Mesa, Calif., in the hope that it will shut down close off a popular route for smugglers who are bringing drugs and illegal aliens into the United States from Mexico. The fence, which started going up Thursday, will eventually stretch six miles east from the checkpoint and will run parallel to a road on the Mexican side that leads to an airport in Tijuana.

Russia and a majority of the other republics announced their commitment today to soon forming a new economic community devoted to free-market resuscitation of the fallen Soviet nation. President Boris N. Yeltsin of the Russian federation, the centerpiece republic in the complex plan, led the way in pressing nine other republics for a formal signing of the economic compact as early as next Tuesday.

In cities and towns across the country, Americans took time out from their workaday lives to tune into the riveting collision between Judge Clarence Thomas and Anita F. Hill. The hearing capped a week in which Professor Hill's charges became the leading topic in offices and on university campuses, in restaurants and on street corners, with many women applauding public discussion of a frequently private subject and many men wondering about their own conduct. Article, page 8.

Kiichi Miyazawa, a stalwart of Japan's governing party and one of the architects of the country's postwar economic ascent, was virtually assured election as the next Japanese prime minister tonight, ending a bruising weeklong scramble for the leadership. Mr. Miyazawa, an urbane 72-year-old politician who has held virtually every key political post in Japan except prime minister, was endorsed this evening by the largest and wealthiest faction in the Liberal Democratic Party, controlled by former Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita.