September 29, 1993

As they try to make the case for Congressional approval of a free trade agreement with Mexico and Canada, President Clinton and other supporters repeatedly say the pact will raise minimum wages in Mexico and reduce the country's ability to undercut businesses north of the border with cheap labor. But by focusing on how minimum wages might rise, the Clinton Administration has put itself in a somewhat awkward position because that particular pledge is not found anywhere in the 2,000-page North American Free Trade Agreement it is meant to support. Nor is it in the special side agreements to the pact, or in Mexican labor law. A Promise by Salinas Rather it is a personal promise made by President Carlos Salinas de Gortari of Mexico that this country's minimum wage -- which can go as low as $4 a day, depending on the type of work -- will be increased in tandem with increases in worker productivity.

President Boris N. Yeltsin severely tightened the cordon around the headquarters of the hostile legislature Tuesday, deploying hundreds of troops with concertina wire and water trucks, and even mounted police, at all approaches to the building. From a yellow armored personnel carrier across the street from barricades erected by defenders of Parliament, police officers with a loudspeaker demanded that those inside surrender their arms today.

Moving quickly after Nelson Mandela, head of the African National Congress, called Friday for an end to trade sanctions against South Africa, Pillsbury said today that it would create a joint venture with a leading South African food company to make and market Pillsbury products there. Groups that have monitored American trade ties with South Africa said that Pillsbury's move was the first significant investment by an American company in South Africa since the plea by Mr. Mandela. They expect many other deals for marketing ventures and investments.

ON a recent morning at 5:45, Don Imus trudges slowly down the hallway of WFAN-AM, the all-sports radio station, toward his dimly lit basement studio like a man headed to a day of torture. His arms are full with a briefcase and a stack of newspapers. Pain from lung surgery on Sept. 3 has sapped the 53-year-old hellion's bilious, irascible wit and energy. Relief from Percoset, a painkiller, has not yet arrived. After settling in and uttering his first words on "Imus in the Morning," his talk show, shortly after 6, Mr. Imus tells Charles McCord, his newsman for 21 years: "I walked four miles along the water on the Belt Parkway yesterday, underneath the Verrazano Bridge. I wanted to see if I could jog."

Faced with the likelihood that taxes on cigarettes will soar as part of the Clinton Administration's health care plan, two leading tobacco state lawmakers, worried about declining sales, rolled a little-noticed provision into the Federal budget bill that gives American tobacco farmers -- and the nation's biggest cigarette maker -- a big lift. In the final, harried days of legislative deal-making over the budget, Senator Wendell H. Ford of Kentucky and Representative Charles Rose of North Carolina, both Democrats from major tobacco growing states, pushed through a regulation that American-made cigarettes must contain at least 75 percent American-grown tobacco. That is more than twice the amount now used in some cigarettes.