May 10, 1993

After 14 years of savagery in a civil war that has taken tens of thousands of lives, the Cambodian Government and the rebels of the Khmer Rouge have settled on a common strategy, if not a common goal. Both are using terror to try to prevent a free and fair election this month in their shattered homeland. The Khmer Rouge do not want an election at all, and the Maoist-inspired guerrillas have stepped up a terror campaign intended to sabotage the vote, scheduled for May 23 to May 28.

The fourth quarter has been the Knicks' quarter against the Charlotte Hornets. It happened in three of their four regular-season meetings. And it happened again yesterday in Game 1 of their four-of-seven-game Eastern Conference semifinal playoff series.

One of the founding fathers of the shareholder rights movement has found a new target: shareholders, or at least the class of big holders known as institutional investors. Ira M. Millstein, founder of the Institutional Investor Project at Columbia University and a New York attorney, said his project, which helped begin the shareholder rights movement that has shaken up Corporate America, would now examine the ethics and policies of major institutional shareholders -- corporate and public pension funds, bank trust departments, insurance companies and mutual funds. Growing Power Collectively, this group owns about $3 trillion worth of American stocks, or more than 50 percent of all the shares of the nation's publicly held corporations. Institutional investors' financial power has been steadily growing as stock holdings by individual investors continue to decline and pension funds have replaced individuals as the biggest buyers of corporate stocks.

The Economy The Clinton Administration has altered its proposed energy tax in response to political pressures and is now struggling to rescue the tax from the lobbyists straining to pick it apart. [ Page A1. ] The Administration is moving to revoke a multibillion-dollar tax break for mainland U.S. companies operating in Puerto Rico. The commonwealth's government says that such a change will cripple the economy for years. [ A1. ]

The Clinton Administration has altered major facets of its proposed energy tax in response to political pressures and is now struggling to rescue the tax against a horde of lobbyists straining to pick it apart. Some of Washington's most potent industry groups -- the National Association of Manufacturers, the American Petroleum Institute and the American Farm Bureau -- have vowed to kill the tax altogether, while dozens of other lobbies are mounting a major effort to amend the Administration's proposals.