June 4, 1996

The Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation has quietly begun selling a powerful data-scrambling chip set that is likely to undermine the Clinton Administration's efforts to restrict the export of the fundamental technology for protecting secrets and commerce in the information age. The existence of the two-chip set, which will have broad potential application for local computer networks, the Internet and telephone switching networks, was disclosed here in a speech today at a public policy workshop by the chief executive of RSA Data Security, a Silicon Valley-based company that has frequently dueled with the Administration over its export-control policies.

In the tradition of ordinary people who wage crusades against big business, Anne Marie Mueser may set a new standard of stubbornness. To fight a pipeline, she put aside just about everything for 10 years, including, she says, cleaning her rickety farmhouse and painting her dilapidated barn. Her target was a company that built one of the largest utility projects in the Northeast in years, the Iroquois Pipeline, which brings Canadian natural gas through New York State and Connecticut to Long Island.

Stephen Flatow, the father of a New Jersey woman killed last year in a terrorist bombing in the Gaza Strip, awarded scholarships yesterday to five Jewish students to study in Israel this summer, The Associated Press reported. Among the recipients of the Alisa Flatow Scholarship awards were Bonnie Goldberg of Elizabeth and Erika Illyes of West Orange. TERRY PRISTIN

Pentagon officials said today that NATO peacekeepers in Bosnia were not stepping up their efforts to catch accused war criminals, despite the insistence of Secretary of State Warren Christopher on Sunday that the troops would start conducting more aggressive patrols, increasing the likelihood of arrests. The Pentagon officials said, in fact, that NATO commanders remained reluctant to become involved, fearing that arresting war crime suspects could imperil peacekeepers.

The Senate Judiciary Committee approved a bill yesterday that would require a life sentence with no parole for anyone convicted of murdering a child under the age of 14 during a sexual assault.