January 6, 1996

The Securities and Exchange Commission will soon bring civil fraud charges against Joseph Jett, the former Kidder, Peabody trader accused of creating $350 million in phantom profits, people familiar with the case said yesterday. The action is the first by a Government agency since Kidder accused Mr. Jett of the trading scheme in April 1994. It could result in sanctions of as much as $100,000 against Mr. Jett, the giving up of additional hundreds of thousands of dollars of bonuses and his disbarment from the securities industry.

After nearly two years of searches and subpoenas, the White House said this evening that it had unexpectedly discovered copies of missing documents from Hillary Rodham Clinton's law firm that describe her work for a failing savings and loan association in the 1980's. Federal and Congressional investigators have issued subpoenas for the documents since 1994, and the White House has said it did not have them. The originals disappeared from the Rose Law Firm, in which Mrs. Clinton was a partner, shortly before Mr. Clinton took office.

The abrupt resignation today of Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama stunned Japan and triggered a political struggle that will lead not only to a new prime minister but perhaps also to a major political realignment. The resignation of Mr. Murayama, 71, who was regarded by much of the electorate as equally honorable and incompetent, is expected to lead to a generational shift toward younger and more dynamic leaders.

Republicans in Congress insisted on Friday that by abruptly ending a Government shutdown, they were only regrouping their forces for a long and dug-in battle with the White House over how to balance the Federal budget. But outside Congress, the party's war with President Clinton over whether to balance the budget seemed for the first time to be in retreat, much in the manner of Napoleon's ill-fated assault on Moscow.

A New York-based human rights organization asserted today that thousands of children have died in China's state-run orphanages from deliberate starvation, medical malpractice and staff abuse. The group, Human Rights Watch, said it was impossible to obtain "a full accounting of the total number" and of the safety and health of China's orphan population, but based on detailed medical records smuggled out by a doctor from a large Shanghai orphanage, and on a limited set of statistics relating to nationwide orphan mortality, there is cause for great alarm about the fate of countless abandoned infants, most of them girls.