July 26, 1994

A senior Treasury official whose diary casts a bad light on the Administration's handling of the Whitewater affair will testify in Congress that his writings do not accurately reflect what occurred, Administration officials and Congressional investigators said today. In his diary, Joshua L. Steiner, the Treasury Secretary's chief of staff, wrote that White House officials had put "intense pressure" on Deputy Treasury Secretary Roger C. Altman to remain involved in overseeing the Federal handling of Whitewater. Then, when Mr. Altman told senior Clinton advisers in February of his decision to remove himself from the matter, they "told RA that it was unacceptable," the diary says.

House and Senate negotiators resolved their differences today on legislation that would remove the remaining barriers to branch banking across state lines and would subsidize small banks that lend in low-income neighborhoods. Today's deal clears away most of the obstacles to final passage in the coming days of the most comprehensive bank legislation to emerge from Congress in several years. Administration officials said that President Clinton would sign the bill quickly.

As the death toll from cholera among Rwandan refugees climbed to 14,000, relief officials started digging six new mass graves today and began burning the bodies of some victims in order to prevent spread of the disease. A moderate but steady stream of refugees began today to make the trek along hilly and curving roads from refugee camps in Zaire to return to their homes in Rwanda. Relief officials said about 3,000 refugees crossed the border today, the first full day since the border between the two countries was reopened.

There is a saying in the Talmud that the Messiah will come when he is no longer needed. And so peace between Jordan and Israel is coming because it already exists. King Hussein of Jordan and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel did not need much coaxing to come together publicly for the first time today and sign a declaration ending the state of war between their countries.

DIGGING among the ruins of a Roman villa, archeologists have made a macabre discovery about disease and death in the fifth century A.D., and perhaps even about the reasons for Attila the Hun's decision to leave his invasion of Italy unfinished and for the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. The discovery is a cemetery for infants, excavated over the last two years by an international team led by Dr. David Soren, a classical archeologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson. The cemetery overlooks the Tiber River near the town of Lugnano in Teverina, 70 miles north of Rome.