Administration

WASHINGTON -- In a stinging rebuke to President Bush, Earvin "Magic" Johnson resigned yesterday from the National Commission on AIDS, complaining that the administration has "utterly ignored" the panel's work and saying that the epidemic "cannot be fought with lip service and photo opportunities."In his resignation letter to Mr. Bush, Mr. Johnson wrote: "I am disappointed that you have dropped the ball, and that your administration is not doing everything that it must to fight this disease.

WASHINGTON -- Facing political and economic pressures more intense than any surrounding recent environmental debates, the Clinton administration is feverishly searching for a way to hold close to the stringent air standards it proposed six months ago while softening the impact of their implementation.With environmental officials refusing to give in to pressure from congressional Republicans, manufacturers and others to relax the proposed standards, administration aides are predicting that efforts to resolve the conflict will focus on attempts to make cleaning up the air less costly.

WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration has decided to launch a major diplomatic initiative toward Vietnam, offering American's former wartime adversary a series of trade and economic benefits and new steps toward a normalization of ties with the United States if Vietnam helps to bring about a quick peace settlement in Cambodia, U.S. sources say."The administration would like to lay that [Vietnam] era to rest," one senior administration official told the Los Angeles Times yesterday. "What the administration is trying to do is to give Hanoi and Phnom Penh every incentive to cooperate."

Baltimore City Council President and incoming Mayor Sheila Dixon named four Cabinet-level positions yesterday for her administration, which will begin when Mayor Martin O'Malley becomes governor next month. Dixon selected Christopher Thomaskutty, 29, to head the CitiStat program. Citi- Stat, started under the O'Malley administration, uses data to hold city agencies accountable. Thomaskutty began working for the program in 2003 and oversaw an initiative to root out waste in the city school system.

WASHINGTON -- The government's senior auditor, Charles A. Bowsher, said yesterday that a new prediction of a savings and loan bailout costlier and longer than officially recognized suggests that the administration may be putting off its true costs until after the presidential election next year."

WASHINGTON -- President Bush, in his first response to families hit by the subprime mortgage crisis, plans to announce several steps today to help Americans who have credit problems to meet the rising cost of their housing loans, administration officials said yesterday. The officials said Bush would call on the Federal Housing Administration to raise the ceilings on what it can charge for federal mortgage insurance, a move that they said would let an additional 80,000 homeowners with spotty credit records sign up, beyond the 160,000 likely to use it this year and next.

WASHINGTON -- The White House has ordered the dismissal of an undersecretary of commerce for telling Congress Monday that the administration ignored warnings to limit the export of U.S. technology to Iraq before the invasion of Kuwait, administration officials said yesterday.One official said that Commerce Secretary Robert A. Mosbacher Sr. was told by the office of John H. Sununu, the White House chief of staff, that Dennis E. Kloske, undersecretary for export administration and one of the top half-dozen officials in the department, should be removed from the payroll by June 1.The White House and the Commerce Department denied that Mr. Kloske's resignation had been requested.

WASHINGTON -- President Clinton has decided to lift the 19-year-old trade embargo against Vietnam, and could announce the move at a White House ceremony before the end of the week, according to administration officials.The decision, which would mark a historic step of reconciliation, follows a formal recommendation by Secretary of State Warren M. Christopher late last week, which in turn capped long deliberations by the administration over the highly emotional issue. The White House is expected to attach no conditions to the ending of the trade ban, officials said.

President Clinton took office determined to boost childhood immunization rates that had slumped so badly they ranked among the worst in the hemisphere. Unfortunately, in devising a way to vaccinate more young children against common childhood diseases, the administration targeted the wrong enemy.Instead of focusing on simplifying a complicated vaccination process, it decided that cost was the primary barrier and set out to provide shots free of charge to as many children as possible. The result is a program that has drawn scathing audits from the General Accounting Office.

WASHINGTON -- Democratic and Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee assailed the Clinton administration's drug strategy yesterday.Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., D-Del., committee chairman, and Sen. Dennis DeConcini, D-Ariz., warned the administration's top drug officer that Congress could refuse to renew his office when its five-year term runs out next month unless President Clinton restores resources and strengthens its authority.The unusual threat came as Lee P. Brown, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, outlined the administration's interim strategy against illegal narcotics.