February 2, 1993

Yielding to international pressure and convinced that its relations with the Clinton Administration are at stake, Israel agreed Monday night to send home immediately about 100 of the Palestinians it had deported to Lebanon and to cut the exile period for the remaining 300 in half, to a year. In return, the Israelis said, they had assurances from the United States that it would block United Nations sanctions, which have been threatened because Israel defied a Security Council resolution demanding that all the deportees be brought back to the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

THE inky depths of the oceans are fast becoming transparent to all kinds of professional eyes, opening a new world of discovery as wrecks ancient and modern come to light for the first time. Lost ships have periodically given up their secrets to the public over the decades, but only when found in shallow water. With 97 percent of the planet's oceans inaccessible, deep wrecks by definition were beyond the reach of salvors and scientists.

Faced with a court order to ban many important farm chemicals, the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency said today that she would ask Congress to relax a law prohibiting trace amounts of cancer-causing chemicals in food. At issue is a provision that bans any additive in processed food that has been shown to cause cancer in humans or laboratory animals. Last summer, a Federal appellate court ordered the E.P.A. to force the withdrawal of any pesticide that caused cancer in animals and that also appeared as residues in flour, juices, baked products and other processed foods. 'These Foods Are Safe' The agency's new chief, Carol M. Browner, said today that the law at the heart of the ruling, approved in 1958, was a scientific anachronism, although she said her agency would comply with the court's strict interpretation of it unless Congress changed it.

President Clinton today ordered the Federal Government to make it easier for states to use Medicaid funds to introduce new health-care programs for the poor. His goal is to add much greater flexibility to a health-care system often constrained by Federal regulations. The red tape Mr. Clinton seeks to loosen has hindered states seeking to experiment and innovate, making it difficult, for example, to take money earmarked for nursing-home care or for care in state mental institutions and spend it instead on home care for the same patients. Many patients prefer to be treated at home, and such care is usually less expensive. Chance to Tailor Programs Mr. Clinton obtained approval for such a shift in spending when he was Governor of Arkansas.

Reaching far outside their Morningside Heights campus for someone they hope will guide Columbia University securely into the 21st century, the university's trustees yesterday named George E. Rupp, an ordained Presbyterian minister who is president of Rice University in Houston, the 18th president of Columbia. Dr. Rupp, a 50-year-old scholar originally from Springfield, N.J., will succeed Michael I. Sovern, 61, the president of Columbia for the last 13 years, who is resigning on June 30 to return to teaching law and to spend more time with his wife, Joan, who is ill with cancer.