February 13, 1992

Insisting that all they wanted to do was cooperate with President Bush, House Democrats today sent a package of all his tax proposals to the floor, where they expect it to die. Then they ended a snarling open meeting with Republicans, who were angry at the sight of the Democratic majority leader, Richard A. Gephardt, introducing what he said was Mr. Bush's program. After that the Democrats went behind closed doors to check with their leaders and start working out their own alternative, which will focus on a tax cut for the middle class.

The head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Richard H. Truly, announced his resignation yesterday after a long and often losing battle with the White House over the direction of the nation's space program. Adminstration officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Mr. Truly had been forced to step down. Mr. Truly, a space pioneer and former astronaut, was chosen to head NASA after the Challenger disaster in January 1986 to try to get the space agency back on its feet. His resignation comes as the agency again faces an uncertain future.

I.B.M. plans to announce today that it is opening a laboratory devoted to designing computers that platoon hundreds or thousands of chips to gain dramatic increases in speed -- a technique known as massively parallel computing. The computers are expected to be brought to market by early next year. Such supercomputers were once considered radical experiments on the fringe of computer research. I.B.M.'s announcement signals that it believes the time has come to bring massively parallel computing into the mainstream market.

President Bush formally declared his candidacy for re-election, invoking the bedrock Republican themes of the past in an effort to blunt criticism from his party's right wing that he has abandoned conservative principles for political pragmatism.

Mayor David N. Dinkins's campaign committee yesterday appointed a new treasurer, imposed strict new spending rules and announced a major fund-raising event for April, as the Mayor struggled to get his troubled re-election effort on track. Dr. Kevin C. Greenidge, a Manhattan ophthalmologist who has been active in Mr. Dinkins's fund-raising efforts since 1985, was appointed treasurer at a meeting of the campaign's finance council yesterday, said Harold Ickes, the campaign committee's lawyer.