G V Sonny Montgomery

The House gave its final approval of the Clinton Administration's first military budget, a $261-billion measure for fiscal 1994 that is down about 4% from the comparable 1993 bill. Setting post-Cold War priorities, the bill (HR 2401) reduces active-duty strength to 1.62 million troops toward a goal of 1.4 million by 1999.

Presidential politics overtook the House today when Democrats killed a Republican proposal to begin each day with the Pledge of Allegiance, then came back with a plan to recite the pledge twice next week. Rep. John G. Rowland (R-Conn.), using one of GOP nominee George Bush's frequent campaign themes, started it all with a resolution calling on the Speaker or his designee to lead House members in a daily recitation of the pledge.

--John C. Stennis, 87, Senate president pro tem and third in line for the presidency, received a fond farewell from 250 Mississippians who gathered in the Senate Caucus Room. Stennis, after 41 years in the Senate, is retiring to De Kalb, his hometown, where, his staff members said, he will spend much of his time persuading young people to enter public service. "John Stennis has served longer and better than any man in the history of this country," Rep. Jamie L. Whitten (D-Miss.

Impassioned pleas for a constitutional amendment banning flag desecration were met Thursday with equally passionate warnings that the proposed amendment is a dangerous reaction and what one senator called "a crass competition about who loves the flag more." The chairman of the subcommittee that heard testimony on the amendment, which has been endorsed by President Bush, urged caution. "The Constitution . . .

In an indirect show of support for U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf, the House voted Wednesday to approve a 5.4% cost-of-living increase in benefits paid to disabled veterans and their survivors. The vote was 421 to 0. Several advocates said that passage of the bill would send a reassuring message to the troops participating in Operation Desert Storm that Congress will not forget them when the war with Iraq is over.

Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.) and three California congressmen Wednesday opposed Administration plans to sell 155 acres of Veterans Administration land in the San Fernando Valley and West Los Angeles. The proposed fiscal 1987 budget calls for sale of 109 acres at the Veterans Administration hospital in West Los Angeles for an estimated $350 million and 46 acres at the VA hospital in Sepulveda for about $10 million. Cranston and Reps. Howard L.

President Bush, using the statue of the nation's most famous flag-raising scene as a backdrop, today urged passage and ratification of a "simple, stark and to-the-point" constitutional amendment to ban burning of the American flag. Bush spoke before a hastily assembled crowd at a ceremony at the Iwo Jima Memorial, the statue of five Marines raising the flag on a Pacific island during World War II. The audience was made up mostly of Administration officials and Republican members of Congress.

The bodies of five American servicemen killed nearly 40 years ago in the Korean War were returned to their countrymen Monday in an emotional Memorial Day ceremony marking them as heroes. It was the first return of U.S. Korean War dead from Communist North Korea since 1954. More than 8,000 Americans from the 1950-53 conflict are still unaccounted for. Five brown caskets and five small boxes containing buttons, dog tags, boots and pieces of uniforms were turned over to eight U.S.