February 18, 1993

Under sharp pressure from the United States, Mexican officials said today that the Government's main development bank would withdraw from a private investment fund set up to buy American companies and move them to Mexico to take advantage of lower wages. The announcement came almost immediately after the United States trade representative, Mickey Kantor, told his Mexican counterpart that he would not begin new negotiations on the North American Free Trade Agreement until Mexico resolved the issue of its role in the fund.

Democratic lawmakers broadly supported President Clinton's economic proposals tonight but said the plans would have to be modified to win majority support in Congress. Republicans heaped scorn on the whole package, saying it would unfairly sock the middle class with new taxes. But Ross Perot, who still seems to informally represent a bloc of swing votes Mr. Clinton will need to get his programs passed, said he thought it was "a good speech." The President was so eager for the support of Mr. Perot, who got 19 million votes as an independent candidate for President in the last election, that he briefed him on his economic proposals by telephone before delivering them to Congress.

MOST air-conditioners in American cars are running on borrowed time because production of the refrigerant they use will soon be prohibited. The cost of repairing a car air-conditioner is already rising, and in a few years repairs will be almost impossible. So a driver with a broken unit will either have to buy an expensive new one that uses an ozone-friendly refrigerant or do without. That is true even for most 1993 models, and it will be for some 94's. But in the last few months people shopping for new cars have been presented with an increasing number of models using a refrigerant considered safe for the ozone layer. The list will undoubtedly get longer in the next few months.

Bill Clinton campaigned last year on the promise of economic change. Tonight he described in detail how difficult and painful that change would be. Not since World War II has a President proposed such strong medicine. And not since Ronald Reagan 12 years ago called for a popular program of deep tax cuts and much more money for the Pentagon has a President recommended such a fundamental shift in how the Government operates.

A medical student has found what Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston says "may be the Achilles' heel of H.I.V.," the virus that causes AIDS, and has developed a novel drug strategy that eliminates the virus from human cells grown in the test tube. The strategy involves using a combination of three drugs to attack a single component of H.I.V., an enzyme that makes copies of the virus's genetic material. In test tubes, the combination of drugs has blocked the virus from growing and from spreading to other cells, the team is reporting Thursday in the British scientific journal Nature.