January 27, 1996

The Senate today passed and President Clinton signed stopgap spending legislation to keep the Government open for another seven weeks, at reduced spending levels. "There's no question now of the Government shutting down," Mr. Clinton said in a speech and added later in a White House statement that Congress had passed only the stopgap legislation instead of spending bills for the rest of the year.

Each morning, as the smoggy winter dawn begins to lift, thousands of women in colorful saris, some cradling infants, walk in a silent tide along the causeway leading from the Baridara slum district toward this city's growing network of garment factories. In poorly lit tenement buildings, the women sit at rows of sewing machines making clothes -- socks and shorts, windbreakers and track suits -- that trade experts say reach one in every five American homes. Last year, factories employing more than a million Bangladeshi women recorded sales to the United States of $1.5 billion, more than 40 percent of Bangladesh's booming export earnings.

Freed by the disclosure of testimony by a former tobacco company executive, CBS News last night broadcast parts of an interview with the executive that the network's legal department had previously barred its "60 Minutes" program from putting on the air. CBS announced that it would broadcast the full interview with Jeffrey S. Wigand, a former vice president of research with the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation, on "60 Minutes" on Sunday, Feb. 4.

Responding to signs of its economic recuperation and impatience in the Clinton Administration for repayment, Mexico plans to return on Monday the $1.3 billion it borrowed from the United States last year. While Mexico will still owe the United States $10.5 billion, as well as more than $11 billion to the International Monetary Fund, the planned installment on Monday underscores the Government's ability to bounce back after a disastrous economic crisis that brought Mexico to the brink of national insolvency and threatened the stability of other markets around the world.

Taxi Fleet to Grow