June 8, 1996

Monitor Resists Deadline For Election in Bosnia

Nelson Strobridge Talbott 3d, Deputy Secretary of State, Russia expert, renowned journalist and graduate-school classmate of Bill Clinton, stopped dead in front of a television. With the June 16 first round of the Russian election approaching fast, the puffy face of Boris N. Yeltsin was on the screen.

Health insurance legislation, hailed six weeks ago by Senator Bob Dole as proof that Congress could overcome election-year stress to help ordinary Americans, foundered today on sharp disputes among Republicans and between Republicans and Democrats. The unpredictability of late-session Congressional behavior means that the measure is still barely alive. But today's developments appeared to doom the first serious effort at the kind of incremental health care change that politicians of both parties proclaimed would be preferable to the sweeping changes President Clinton proposed and Congress killed in 1994.

Employers added twice as many workers as had been expected to their payrolls in May, Government figures showed today, giving new signs that the economy has been picking up momentum. The report sent interest rates soaring and raised fears on Wall Street that the Federal Reserve might move soon to slow growth to prevent a jump in inflation. Business activity was so strong that economists were increasing their growth forecasts for the second quarter. And more than a half million additional people were drawn into the labor force. But since only two-thirds of them promptly found jobs, the unemployment rate edged up to 5.6 percent, the midpoint of the narrow range in which it has drifted since late 1994.

Giving the strongest hint yet that he might want to compete for the Presidential nomination of Ross Perot's Reform Party, former Gov. Richard D. Lamm of Colorado yesterday urged Coloradans to sign petitions that would give a candidate from the third party a line on the 1996 state ballot. Even though Mr. Lamm has yet to decide whether he will seek the nomination of Mr. Perot's nascent party, his advice to Coloradans reinforced his status as the first well-known national political figure to flirt openly with the idea of making a run for the Presidency under a Perot-backed banner.