January 30, 1996

In a shift that could cause intense political difficulty for the White House, many leading House Republicans say they now want to pass the Senate version of a vast welfare bill, which President Clinton endorsed four months ago. If he signed the bill, Mr. Clinton would infuriate many liberals in his own party. But if he vetoed it, he would disappoint voters hoping that he would fulfill his campaign promise to "end welfare as we know it."

Gov. Christine Todd Whitman proposed an overhaul of the state welfare program that would help ease the transition to work and would let beneficiaries earn more outside income. But under the plan, benefits would be limited to five years, recipients would have to stay current with child support payments, and teen-age recipients would have to stay in school and live with an adult. [Page A1.]

Enraged at his failure to find a job as a computer technician and burdened with debt, Edward J. Leary plotted to extort money from the Transit Authority by planning a series of subway bombings, a prosecutor charged yesterday at the beginning of Mr. Leary's trial. But a defense lawyer for Mr. Leary -- who is charged with injuring 47 people in a 1994 firebombing on a subway train in lower Manhattan -- said his client's behavior stemmed from the use of a mix of drugs including Prozac and several others that were prescribed to treat his depression.

Korey Wax had behaved so badly in school that he was suspended, and when he got home, his father punished the 8-year-old further, whacking him several times across the back and chest with a three-foot rubber snake, the kind that people win in carnival booths. The incident might have gone unremarked, a private disciplinary matter within a family, but two things have made the case the talk of this close-knit village folded into a rugged pocket of the Catskills, 10 miles west of Liberty, N.Y. The father is the Superintendent of the local school system, and someone called the state's Child Abuse Hot Line, leading to the father's surrender to the police a week after the incident on charges of third-degree assault and endangering the welfare of a child.

Uncertainty about Apple Computer Inc.'s future continued to gnaw at the company today, as Apple froze most research spending, while Standard & Poor's downgraded Apple's debt rating and a selloff pushed the company's shares to a 52-week closing low. An internal memo announcing the research freeze said that Apple's management was preparing a reorganization plan that would be presented to the board within two weeks.