July 30, 1994

President Clinton ordered a sharply limited detachment of 200 American troops into Rwanda today to open the country's major airport for relief flights, asserting that the United States "will not cease its efforts until the dying stops" in refugee camps there and in nearby Zaire. But in a clear allusion to the military's relief effort in Somalia, where dozens of soldiers died in combat, the White House insisted that United States forces would be restricted to aiding refugees and would stay far out of Rwanda's gruesome civil war.

Russia's largest investment company virtually collapsed today as more than 10,000 outraged stockholders stampeded the colonnaded headquarters of Moscow's commodities exchange, smashing windows as they tried desperately to unload their shares in the plummeting fund. After promising on Thursday that it would begin to buy back stock for the equivalent of about $60 a share, officials of the troubled company, MMM, announced this morning that they had cut the value to almost nothing.

With no Democrat willing to come to his defense, Deputy Treasury Secretary Roger C. Altman came under blistering attack today by the Republicans who opened the Senate's Whitewater hearings by calling on him to resign for mishandling the Whitewater investigation and misleading Congress. The Republicans also released testimony by a White House official that they said contradicted statements that Mr. Altman made about Whitewater in late February to the Senate Banking Committee. At the time, he acknowledged that the White House and Treasury officials had discussed an investigation into Madison Guarantee Savings and Loan, a failed Arkansas savings and loan owned by the Clintons' partner in the Whitewater Development Company.

House Democratic leaders unveiled a national health care plan today that promises universal coverage by 1999, and they immediately embarked on what is expected to be an epic, two-week legislative struggle to assemble a Democratic majority behind it. "This bill is about the courage of this Congress," said Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, the majority leader, who urged his colleagues to step up to a moment in history, just as previous Congresses did with Social Security and Medicare.

Simpson Trial Date Set