Clinton Administration

REPUBLICANS in Congress are getting the message that Americans resent President Bush's attitude toward the environment. The House vote last week to tighten arsenic standards for drinking water was the latest rebuke to the White House. GOP moderates couldn't stand by a president seen to oppose cleaner public drinking water. In truth, the vote won't likely affect the move to reduce arsenic levels in water or the time frame to require the cleanup. The White House pledged to lower the current 50-year-old standard for the poison and wanted only a short delay for further scientific study of the standards set by the Clinton administration as it left office.

ATLANTA - President Bush's fine romance with the oil, mining, timber and power industries is not playing well either popularly or politically, not even, lately, within his own party. In a surprising series of votes last week, as many as 70 House Republicans, bucking their leaders, joined Democrats to enact sharp restraints on some of Mr. Bush's most aggressive despoliations. The House voted to block his plans for gas and oil drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico and in national monument lands.

WASHINGTON - Scott Evertz likes to joke that he is the first director of the White House Office of National AIDS Policy who is openly Republican. It's a play on his unofficial title: first White House appointee in a Republican administration who is openly gay. The quip speaks to the awkwardness of Evertz's position as he moves between the many battling interests in the AIDS debate. From AIDS activists, Evertz faces skepticism that a Republican in a budget-cutting administration can fight effectively for their cause.

SECRETARY OF STATE Colin L. Powell's four-country tour of Africa reflects his personal priorities, not his president's. The Bush administration campaigned for election with an implied promise almost not to have an Africa policy. Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld ruminates about reducing even the small role in military training that exists. But Mr. Powell makes clear he cares, is engaged and hopes to offer U.S. resources to help African efforts in behalf of health, democracy, peace, law and order.

WASHINGTON - The General Services Administration has found that departing members of the Clinton administration did not vandalize the White House during the presidential transition, as unnamed aides to President Bush and other critics had insisted. Responding to a request from Rep. Bob Barr, a Georgia Republican who asked for an investigation, the GSA found that nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. "The condition of the real property was consistent with what we would expect to encounter when tenants vacate office space after an extended occupancy," according to a GSA statement.

BERLIN -- Europe's reaction to President Bush's plans to build a missile defense has been remarkably positive even though the allies have bitterly criticized his administration for acting unilaterally and pursuing policies that are unnecessarily aggressive. This is a change from less than two years ago when the Clinton administration briefed the same European allies about its proposal for a missile defense -- a system that was far less ambitious than the one Mr. Bush envisions. The Europeans then were apoplectic.

WASHINGTON - EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman rescinded yesterday a Clinton administration decision that would have reduced by 80 percent the amount of arsenic allowed in the nation's drinking water. Critics said the move, combined with other recent actions, signals a tendency by Bush administration officials to appease industry rather than safeguard public health and the environment. But Whitman, while acknowledging that arsenic levels permitted under current federal regulations are too high, questioned the level that would have been allowed under the Clinton ruling.

WASHINGTON - Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose debut as senator has been overshadowed by the controversies of the outgoing Clinton administration, said yesterday that she never knew that her brother had been hired to lobby for two felons who won pardons from her husband or that he had been paid $400,000 to do so. "I did not know my brother was involved in any way in any of this," she said of the disclosure that her brother Hugh Rodham had been paid to...

WASHINGTON - Musician Ry Cooder, who was once fined by the U.S. government for traveling to Cuba without permission to collaborate with the acclaimed musicians known as the Buena Vista Social Club, is back in Cuba recording music. And this time, thanks to last-minute intervention from top Clinton administration officials, he's legal. Cooder, a singer, guitarist and songwriter, who with his Cuban colleagues won a Grammy award in 1998, received U.S. permission to make new recordings in Cuba after Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and Samuel R. Berger, President Bill Clinton's national security adviser, weighed in on his behalf in the last days of the administration, U.S. officials say. Although his newest project is probably good news for fans of Cuban music, the high-level attention given to his case within the government raises new questions about the Clinton administration's final days in power.

PRESIDENT CLINTON gave Baltimore quite a farewell present: one-time federal grants totaling $28.8 million that will enable the city to hire 200 more police officers and provide drug treatment for 1,000 additional addicts each year. "We are going to save lots of lives with these dollars," a jubilant Mayor Martin O'Malley said when the grants were announced Thursday. That aid couldn't have come at a more propitious time. Policing strategies introduced last year have finally started to temper the runaway homicide rate, which had been among the nation's highest.