January 15, 1994

A man who authorities say struck Nancy Kerrigan on the knee two weeks ago, rendering her unable to compete in the national figure skating championships in Detroit, was arrested today by Federal agents in Phoenix. Two other men were arrested on Thursday in the attack, including the bodyguard of Tonya Harding, the Portland skater who won the gold medal in Detroit. The bodyguard, Shawn Eric Eckardt, and the other man, Derrick B. Smith, a Phoenix resident, were arraigned today in a state court, where each was charged with a single count of conspiracy to commit assault.

Women's colleges and girls' high schools are seeing a resurgence in applications unprecedented in the last 20 years, even as applications to private, coed institutions have remained stagnant. Since 1991, applications to the 84 women's colleges across the country are up 14 percent and enrollment is at a 14-year high of 98,000 students, up from 82,500 students in 1981, according to the Women's College Coalition in Washington.

President Clinton plunged into a nationally televised "town meeting" today to urge Russians to stay the course toward a free market and democracy and to find a "new definition of Russia's greatness." Clearly stimulated by candid and provoking questions from a live, youthful audience at the Ostankino television center in Moscow and similar groups linked by television from other cities, Mr. Clinton was alternatively professor, politician and preacher as he counseled Russians to "choose the future."

Arriving back home in Portland this week, Tonya Harding was asked about her thoughts on next month's Olympic Games. "To be perfectly honest," said Miss Harding, newly crowned as the American national figure skating champion, "what I'm really thinking about are dollar signs."

Adamantly defending the police as "the only victims" of last Sunday's melee at a Harlem mosque, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani yesterday moved to isolate two of the city's most outspoken black figures, the Rev. Al Sharpton and C. Vernon Mason, who had suggested in recent days that Mr. Giuliani was too quick to support police accounts of the incident. His new Police Commissioner, William J. Bratton, held an unannounced meeting with several officials of the Nation of Islam yesterday after shunning a meeting with them the day before, in part, because Mr. Sharpton and Mr. Mason had accompanied them.