March 23, 1996

Washington withdrew an invitation to China's Defense Minister and informally extended the freeze on new financing of American business deals in China. Page 5.

People who live here call it the "low, flat nothin.' " It is the stretch of country due east of the refineries that light up the night around Beaumont, and due west of the vast rice fields on the Louisiana line. Interstate 10 runs dead straight for miles and miles through here, a lost highway decorated, here and there, with a stark, white cross. The crosses are almost always alongside the westbound lanes, and mark the places where teen-agers, weaving home from honky tonks and bars across the Louisiana border, run off the road, crash and die. Wanda Grimes, a substitute teacher in Beaumont whose 19-year-old son was killed by a drunken driver coming home from Louisiana in 1992, calls it "our Blood Border."

After a nightlong celebration of their extraordinary march to democracy, millions of voters flooded more than 12,500 polling stations today to select their president for the first time by popular ballot. With American aircraft carriers steaming offshore to monitor threatening Chinese military maneuvers along China's southeastern coast, voters appeared oblivious to the threat and set about -- almost giddily -- exercising their new franchise.

After an abrupt two-day campaign, House Republicans voted today to repeal the 1994 ban on the manufacture of 19 semiautomatic weapons and high-capacity ammunition clips. The repeal passed by a comfortable margin of 239 to 173, but Democrats warned that the decision would haunt its supporters in November, even though the Senate was unlikely to act. In two hours of often furious debate, advocates of repeal said the ban had done nothing to reduce violent crime and had made it harder for innocent Americans to defend themselves. Representative Gerald B. H. Solomon, Republican of upstate New York, said, "The way to stop crime is to put criminals in prison, not take away from law-abiding citizens the right to protect themselves."

Workers began returning to two General Motors brake factories this afternoon, ending their 17-day strike with local disputes resolved but not critical national issues between the company and the United Automobile Workers. The national issues are sure to come up again this summer when negotiations begin before the expiration on Sept. 14 of the U.A.W.'s three-year national contract. But for now, both sides have paid a stiff price for a strike that paid off mostly for the local workers. G.M. lost considerable production, and by the end of the strike, 177,775 U.A.W. members were laid off.

Crown Heights Reversal

Even when he was young, his neighbors knew that Richard Sacchi Jr. was trouble, someone they had best stay away from. When he was 15, he held a switchblade against the throat of a 9-year-old, Anthony Piacquadio, in the nearby schoolyard for no apparent reason. A year later, he took Anthony's new birthday gift, a mountain bike, and threw it down a flight of schoolyard stairs, damaging it.

The United Nations' criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia today issued its first indictments for crimes against Serbs, charging three Bosnian Muslims and a Bosnian Croat with murdering, torturing and raping Serbian prisoners at a detention camp in 1992. Of the 53 people who had been charged with war crimes up to now, 46 are Serbs and 7 are Croats -- all charged with atrocities against Muslims.

The quadrennial judge-bashing season was proceeding nicely, as Republican Presidential challengers outdid one another in their professed eagerness to save the country from liberal judges, when the Clinton Administration suddenly did the unexpected. It stepped on the Republicans' lines. The White House raised the possibility of asking for the resignation of Judge Harold Baer Jr. of the Southern District of New York if the judge does not see his way clear to overturning an evidentiary ruling that allowed a suspected drug dealer to go free. By making clear its disapproval of the ruling by Judge Baer -- whom President Clinton named to the bench less than two years ago -- the Administration no doubt hoped for a neat pre-emptive strike that would keep the judge from becoming the negative icon of 1996, as Willie Horton was in the 1988 campaign.

An article in Business Day yesterday about plans by Tenneco Inc. to spin off its Newport News Shipbuilding unit referred incorrectly to the company's earnings goal. The company has said it wants to increase earnings per share by an average annual rate of 15 percent; it does not expect to earn $15 a share.

An obituary on March 4 about Meyer Schapiro, art critic and historian, misidentified the settlement house in Brownsville, Brooklyn, where he attended an evening art class. It was the Hebrew Educational Society, not the Hebrew Settlement House.

President Ernesto Samper, who has spent much of his presidency fending off accusations that Cali drug dealers financed his campaign, opened the way today for his resignation by raising the prospect of early elections, perhaps before the end of the year. In a speech made as he signed a law lifting judicial secrecy from the proceedings of the Congressional Committee of Accusations, which is hearing evidence against him, the President broached several possible "political options to overcome the crisis." They included a Government of national unity, shortening his term as President or submitting his mandate to a popular referendum.