February 2, 1994

The vice chairman of the Federal Reserve announced his resignation today, giving President Clinton a rare chance to fill two seats on the seven-member board within several months. The vice chairman, David W. Mullins Jr., said in a statement that he would leave on Feb. 14 to join a new money management firm led by John Meriwether, a former vice chairman of Salomon Brothers who was forced out for his role in a Treasury bond scandal in 1991.

President Clinton plans to lift the 19-year trade embargo on Vietnam within a few days, senior Administration officials said today. While the President has not yet formally signified his assent, a senior Administration official said Mr. Clinton had concluded that the time had come to begin normalizing relations with Vietnam by taking the highly sensitive step of resuming trade. Mr. Clinton's avoidance of military service during the Vietnam War adds to the political peril.

Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani is to unveil a fiscal plan today that calls for substantial increases in worker productivity and government efficiency, with a large portion of the money saved to come from the Sanitation Department. Administration officials said the Sanitation Department would be called on to achieve about $45 million of the expected $300 million in productivity savings, which would probably require sanitation employees to cover longer routes and to work full eight-hour days. Now, sanitation workers are often able to finish their routes in as little as six hours.

Japan's Government pulled itself back from the brink last week by passing landmark political reform legislation after a bitter five-year struggle, but the success only cleared the way for a battle on a potentially even more complex and divisive issue -- reviving the economy. Some top Cabinet members have already clashed over the matter, with the Prime Minister scolding his chief Cabinet secretary in public on Monday in a dispute over tax policy.

For a world that is theoretically infinite and without boundaries, cyberspace appears to be straining at the seams. In the computer-age equivalent of the Gold Rush, thousands of people are signing up each month for access to the worldwide web of computer networks and electronic information services -- known as cyberspace -- where strangers can chat, mail can be exchanged, groceries can be ordered and home banking can be done to name only a few possibilities.