May 14, 1994

In a groundbreaking legal verdict, a Napa County jury awarded $500,000 today to a father who had accused psychotherapists of conning his adult daughter into remembering childhood incidents of incest that he said had never occurred. The case, tried over two months, was the first in which a nonpatient challenged therapists who treat patients with a much-debated technique that involves the use of leading questions and other aggressive memory-enhancing procedures to prod patients into recalling events that were so traumatic that their minds repressed them.

The last Israeli soldier left this ancient town today, ending Israel's 27-year occupation and giving Palestinians control over the first West Bank foothold for their hoped-for independent state. A force of about 460 Palestinian soldiers-turned-policemen rode into Jericho, automatic rifles thrust skyward in triumph, and took over a freshly evacuated army base and fenced-in police station that had been Israel's headquarters.

By nature and personality, Judge Stephen G. Breyer, whom President Clinton named yesterday to the United States Supreme Court, is professorial. But rather than become enmeshed solely in ideas, Judge Breyer has chosen to harness his considerable intelligence to solve problems, to clean up messes. Rather than stake out fixed positions, he has built coalitions and achieved consensus. As generously endowed with political savvy, pragmatism, personal charm and energy as intelligence -- and unencumbered by any overarching ideology -- he has won a reputation for doing as well as thinking.

The Security Council agreed tonight on a plan to send an all-African force to Rwanda to protect civilians and aid workers threatened by the ethnic slaughter that began there four weeks ago. The Council is expected to approve the plan on Monday after the Clinton Administration receives details from the United Nations on how the plan will be carried out.

China today released on medical parole one of the dissidents accused of leading the Tiananmen Square uprising of 1989. Chen Ziming, 42, a social scientist and publisher, was sentenced to a 13-year prison term in February 1991. He was the second major figure from the democracy movement to be released in recent weeks.