June 21, 1994

The Lotus Development Corporation stunned Wall Street analysts yesterday by announcing that its financial results for the current fiscal quarter would not meet previous estimates. Though the company made its announcement after the stock market closed, Lotus stock plunged $8.875 a share in after-hours trading, to $42.50, as institutional investors reacted sharply to the news. Earlier, the stock closed at $51.375 in Nasdaq trading, down 25 cents.

The White House is planning to ask thousands of Americans to contribute up to $500 apiece to help pay the soaring legal bills of President Clinton and his wife, Hillary, Presidential aides said today. The fund would be the first ever set up by a sitting President, and its creation would reflect the degree to which the Clintons' legal troubles in the Whitewater matter and a pending sexual harassment suit against Mr. Clinton have proven costly financially as well as politically.

Despite economic collapse, countries are proclaiming democracy throughout Africa. With a raft of elections and sometimes a multitude of parties, their governments are beginning to tolerate a once forbidden sound -- that of the political opponent. Already the drive for political rights south of the Sahara has consigned the archetypal autocrat -- the "president for life" who rules with a fly whisk and a squadron of secret police -- to the same graveyard as apartheid, African socialism and the ships that brought the first European colonizers 500 years ago.

STILL no one knows who he was or what he was doing high in the Tyrolean Alps that day some 5,300 years ago, the day he died. No one can be sure of the quirks of nature that somehow mummified the corpse, then entombed it in a glacier and preserved it and his possessions so long in a semblance of a life only lately departed. Of one thing scientists are now certain about the naturally mummified Alpine Iceman, whom hikers discovered in September 1991 in the melting ice on the Austrian-Italian border at an elevation of 10,530 feet. In the first genetic analysis of the body, reported last week, they determined that he was European born and bred, closely related to modern northern and Alpine Europeans.

A commission appointed by Gov. Mario M. Cuomo to study the problem of rising violence by young offenders yesterday urged changes in virtually all phases of the state's juvenile justice system, including tougher penalties for youthful criminals. The panel also recommended a number of changes to prevent young offenders from slipping through the cracks of the legal system. It called for fingerprinting of all juveniles charged with serious crimes, which is done only in some cases now, and for wider access by probation and court officials to records of young offenders, which now are often sealed.