March 30, 1993

Opening a new season of struggle over Federal abortion policy, the Clinton Administration plans to ask Congress to lift the nearly total ban on Federal financing of abortions for poor women, White House officials say. The move will come in President Clinton's detailed budget request, expected to be made public the week of April 4, said George Stephanopoulos, the chief White House spokesman. How Congress will respond and how hard Mr. Clinton will push the issue are still unclear, say lawmakers and legislative analysts on Capitol Hill. Abortion foes say they believe they have a good chance of blocking the President. Signal of Deep Change For all the uncertainties, Mr. Clinton's decision to seek the repeal of the 16-year-old Federal prohibition, the Hyde Amendment, which applies to the Medicaid program for poor people, is a sign of the sea change in abortion politics. Both sides of the abortion issue predict that the next six months will test old positions, longstanding alliances and the power of the abortion-rights movement under a friendly Administration.

SURVEYING life's rich parade from the first single-celled beings in the primordial soup to the diverse array of organisms into which they developed, evolutionary biologists have marveled at the ever more complex cast of creatures that has continued to grace the planet. The evolution of larger brains, more efficient metabolisms and more elaborate social systems all seem to support the conventional wisdom that complexity increases during evolution. So clear is the trend that some biologists suggest that the evolutionary process is actually driving the increase in complexity, pushing the upper limit of life's intricacies ever higher. But in two of the first studies to measure these trends, based on mammals' backbones and fossil shells, researchers say they have been unable to detect any overall evolutionary drive toward greater complexity, at least over periods of tens and even hundreds of millions of years.

Gay-Troop Hearings Begin The Senate opened its hearings on homosexuals in the military by listening to legal experts. Page A18. Big Job Loss for California Hughes Missile Systems said it would move 2,000 jobs to Arizona because California was "no longer a competitive place to do business." Page D1.

After long clamoring for access to President Clinton's health-policy team, spokesmen for the elderly, doctors, dentists, chiropractors, hospital officers, insurance executives and other groups today fired a fusillade of proposals to remake the nation's health-care system. At a daylong hearing of the President's Task Force on National Health Care Reform, the witnesses offered support for the general idea of a vast overhaul. But they frequently criticized details of the ambitious plan being devised by the Administration for submission to Congress in early May.

To applause and even a tear or two, Rupert Murdoch swept into the newsroom of The New York Post yesterday afternoon to reclaim the reins of the feisty but bankrupt tabloid he was forced to sell five years ago. Mr. Murdoch's appearance, following a ruling by a Federal Bankruptcy Court Judge, Francis G. Conrad, that Mr. Murdoch "may start printing The New York Post immediately," drew the curtain on the latest act in the frequently absurdist drama to save America's oldest continuously published newspaper and one of its most impudent tabloids.