December 24, 1994

The Muslim-led Bosnian Government and the Bosnian Serbs signed a four-month cease-fire agreement today to take effect at noon Saturday, but hesitations on both sides suggested the accord could easily unravel. The cease-fire, negotiated during a visit to the Balkans by former President Jimmy Carter and completed over the last two days by senior United Nations officials here, is supposed to last until May 1. Its application was delayed for 24 hours and its scope reduced because of disagreements between the warring sides over the text.

A company whose chairman was once the Secretary of Defense teamed up with a Canadian arms dealer and some enterprising officials in the former Soviet republic of Belarus in a most unusual arms deal, financed in secret by the Pentagon. The deal came to light when the sun rose on Monday morning on a huge Russian-made transport plane parked within sight of an interstate highway in Huntsville, Ala. Its cargo: components of the S-300, the Russian equivalent of the Patriot missile defense system. The buyer: the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon's chief military intelligence branch.

Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani yesterday vetoed a bill that would have created the first permanent, independent agency to monitor corruption in the Police Department. He said that under the City Council's bill, the panel would have had too much investigative power and might have interfered with other law-enforcement agencies. The bill has been championed by Council Speaker Peter F. Vallone, and the veto by the Mayor represents the newest source of tension in the increasingly stormy relationship between the Council and Mr. Giuliani. Council leaders say the veto will almost certainly be overridden. It is the fifth veto since Mr. Giuliani took office in January and comes just weeks after the Council took the Mayor to court in a bitter dispute over the city's budget.

Handcuffed to his hospital bed, fading in and out of consciousness from the morphine dulling the pain of his burns, the man charged with firebombing a subway train proclaimed his innocence on Thursday, his newly hired lawyer, Stephen J. Murphy, said. Edward J. Leary, the unemployed computer expert who the police say created and carried the firebomb that injured 48 subway riders in lower Manhattan on Wednesday, said he was just another victim of the explosion, Mr. Murphy said.

Gov. Christine Todd Whitman has a national reputation, a Legislature controlled by fellow Republicans and enough popularity points to make most politicians turn green with envy. Yet she is having a surprising amount of trouble mobilizing support for an issue dear to many in her party's conservative wing: school vouchers. When the State Senate adjourned on Monday and the Assembly four days earlier, voucher legislation had not even been introduced, even though the issue had seemed to enjoy considerable political momentum throughout much of this year.