June 15, 1996

Four weeks after President Clinton endorsed Wisconsin's radical proposal to abolish welfare, citing it as an example of the "quiet revolution" in social policy occurring across America, Administration officials say they now have doubts and concerns about some of its most important provisions. The officials said they still believed that the Federal Government and the State of Wisconsin could ultimately reach an agreement permitting the state to transform its cash assistance program into an elaborate job program for poor people.

A month ago, the Government's effort to settle a standoff with extremists in Montana seemed hopeless until leaders of the far right abandoned the group. Article, page 10.

For five hours on April 22, Secretary of State Warren Christopher held intense discussions with President Hafez al-Assad of Syria at his presidential palace in Damascus to end the fighting between Israel and Muslim guerrillas in southern Lebanon. While Mr. Christopher paid court, a few miles away at Damascus International Airport an Iran Air 747 unloaded Katyusha rockets and other military equipment for delivery via Syrian military trucks for those guerrillas, American intelligence officials believe.

Detectives said yesterday that they persuaded John J. Royster to confess early Thursday to the murder of a woman on Park Avenue and the near-fatal beating of another woman in Central Park by playing on his love of Asian martial arts and philosophy, and by bluffing about evidence they did not have. After three hours of questioning on the Park Avenue case, in which they could not get him to admit to a role in the killing, detectives said Mr. Royster slipped up, betraying his fear that they might have linked him to the Central Park case. Until that moment, they said, he had been a suspect only in the Park Avenue killing.

The Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation said today that he and the bureau had been "victimized" by improper requests from the Clinton White House for files on more than 400 people, most of them employees of prior Republican administrations. In issuing a report on the bureau's inquiry into the episode, the Director, Louis J. Freeh, said the White House and the F.B.I. committed "egregious violations of privacy" when the bureau delivered summaries from those files to Presidential aides, beginning in late 1993 and continuing for several weeks.