March 25, 1993

An Egyptian-born cabdriver, described by Federal officials as a major suspect in the bombing of the World Trade Center, returned to New York yesterday in the custody of the police and Federal agents, after being captured in Cairo and turned over to United States agents for a trans-Atlantic flight on a chartered plane. Mahmud Abouhalima, a 33-year-old New Jersey resident who the authorities said had fled with his German wife and four children after the Feb. 26 bombing, landed at Stewart International Airport in Newburgh, N.Y., late in the afternoon. He was driven to the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan for arraignment today, the authorities said.

Courtroom 341 of the State Supreme Court in Manhattan is not Woody Allen territory. It belongs to the other New York, down-at-heel and dispirited, the part of the city that never makes it into Mr. Allen's films, and presumably, until quite recently, did not take up much space in his mind. The paint is peeling, the wooden chairs creak loudly enough to make Mr. Allen's answers all but inaudible, the three yellow window shades, pulled all the way down to the sill, look like oversize flypaper. Yet it is here, very far from Elaine's, that Mr. Allen has found himself on the stand, trying to explain his complicated life, express his thoughts on child rearing, and at all costs, to avoid eye contact with his ex-lover Mia Farrow, seated with her lawyers at a long wooden table facing the judge's bench.

Democratic Senators held ranks today and defended President Clinton's economic program against a fierce volley of political potshots from Republicans. By a vote of 52 to 47, the Democrats rejected the most serious Republican threat to the Clinton budget plan, an amendment that would have scrapped the President's proposal to raise taxes on the Social Security benefits of the most affluent retirees. Only four Democrats voted against the President.

The remains of a prehistoric hunting lookout in Northern Alaska have been identified as the earliest well-documented evidence of people living in America, archeologists announced today. The discovery of some finely worked stone lance points and charcoal from campfires at the 11,700-year-old site appeared to solve one mystery of the earliest Americans: If they had indeed migrated across land then connecting Siberia and Alaska, where were the remains of this paleo-Indian culture in the Far North?

Daimler-Benz A.G., the maker of Mercedes-Benz automobiles and the largest industrial company in Germany, said yesterday that it expected to become the first German company to trade on the New York Stock Exchange. The listing would cap a bitter battle that has pitted the exchange and its chairman, William H. Donaldson, against the Securities and Exchange Commission and its chairman, Richard C. Breeden.