July 19, 1995

PERHAPS all our mothers were right: baking soda really is the first recourse and the last resort. To most people, a box of baking soda is just a comforting cupboard staple that can perform some clever household tricks. According to industry research, 90 percent of American households keep at least one box of baking soda on hand -- to deodorize the refrigerator, leaven bread or put out grease fires. But who would have thought it could clean up the inside of the Statue of Liberty at the time of its centennial? Or be part of a solution used in kidney dialysis? Or as an additive to cattle feed, to make cows produce more milk?

CBS's stock jumped $1.25 yesterday to close at $71, as investors bet heavily that the Westinghouse Electric Company could arrange the financing for a $5 billion bid for the media giant. One person with knowledge of the discussions said an offer might come within the next week and that the Westinghouse board was solidly behind its chairman, Michael H. Jordan, in favoring an acquisition of CBS. A key question is whether Westinghouse, which is already heavily leveraged, can borrow the money for the purchase. One executive close to the negotiations said yesterday that Westinghouse's bankers in the deal, J. P. Morgan and Chemical Bank, were optimistic.

With a theatrical flourish and a few revelations, the Senate today began months of scheduled hearings about Whitewater and the personal finances of the President and Hillary Rodham Clinton. The hearings, conducted by a special committee on Whitewater, are supposed to examine the White House's handling of papers in the office of deputy counsel Vincent W. Foster Jr. after he killed himself in a Virginia park two years ago. In Mr. Foster's office were personal papers of the Clintons, including files about their investment in Whitewater, a land-development venture in Arkansas.

Claimed you were married on that tax return you filed in April, did you? Well, the Internal Revenue Service may come by your house demanding to see your marriage license. And those two children you listed as deductions? Better have birth certificates to prove when they were born and report cards to show they go to a school close enough to live with you. Otherwise, kiss those deductions good-bye. That is the kind of rigorous grilling that a few hundred thousand unlucky taxpayers can expect starting this fall. They will be selected not because they are suspected of cheating but because the I.R.S. wants to know how accurately individual taxpayers fill out their forms.

Sounding hoarse but robust, President Boris N. Yeltsin appeared on television from his hospital room here tonight to prove that while he was sick, he was not as sick as the Kremlin had led people to believe by its insistence that he was fine. Mr. Yeltsin was flushed into public view by serious questions about the authenticity of the only photograph released of the President after he was hospitalized on July 11. The picture, distributed by the Itar-Tass news agency last Friday, showed Mr. Yeltsin in an Ellesse tennis shirt seated at a desk next to a table with four telephones. It appeared identical to footage of the Russian President, wearing an Ellesse tennis shirt at a desk next to four telephones, that was filmed when he was on vacation in southern Russia last April. Mr. Yeltsin's press secretary said it was taken at Central Clinical Hospital in Moscow on Friday.