WASHINGTON INSIGHT

WELFARE VOID: For months, President Clinton has been prodding businesses to stop complaining about welfare recipients and start hiring them. Now, a Washington-based group that helps low-income communities organize is turning the tables and finding the White House a bit slow to heed its own rhetoric. Writing to Clinton last week, the Center for Community Change urged him to “demonstrate leadership . . . by placing a welfare recipient” on the payroll. No current or former welfare recipient now serves in the executive mansion or its offices, although the Office of Personnel Management has considered such a hire. Some of welfare reform’s biggest proponents on Capitol Hill fare no better: House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) have said it would be a swell idea to hire someone off public assistance. But six months later, neither leader has found a job for one of the nation’s roughly 4 million recipients.

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NEW ERA: Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, for decades shunned by American officialdom, was so awash with events in his honor during his three-day visit that on Monday night he had to juggle two dinners--and a reception. The first dinner was for about 200 people, while the second was a cozier affair for 150 where Arafat exchanged kisses on both cheeks with Gen. Colin L. Powell and virtually nestled the head of a laughing Larry King.

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$40,000 QUESTION: Do automobiles and cities mix? As most anyone stuck on the San Diego Freeway could tell you, the answer is: only up to a point. The World Bank, however, spent $40,000 to study the question. The finding from researchers studying data from 37 cities around the world: “After a certain point the diseconomies associated with car use growth and low-density suburban sprawl are draining cities of wealth compared to cities with more balanced transport systems and less dispersed urban land use.” Translation: only up to a point. So why did the World Bank spend $40,000 to learn the obvious? “That’s the reaction I get from a lot of people,” said Peter Newman of Murdoch University in Perth, Australia, one of the report’s authors. But, he added, “the experts all find it very hard to understand.”

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OFFICIAL FUMBLE: It isn’t often that a U.S. vice president gets to become the father of a new country, but Al Gore seemed to be doing just that when he signed a letter to the “Council of Khalistan” about goings-on in the state of Punjab. The letter came as a big surprise to India, which had been pretty certain that the United States considered the territory--where Sikhs want to create their own state--to be part of India. State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns says the letter was an error by Gore’s staff and the Clinton administration has apologized to India. “Sometimes we have a perfect foreign policy and sometimes we have minor mistakes,” Burns said. “In this case there was a mistake. . . . Of course, we do not recognize a republic of Khalistan. We recognize the Punjab to be part of India.”

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ALARMING SILENCE: The ideas emanating from the nation’s nuclear weapons labs didn’t end with the arms race. The Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico was cited by Energy Department inspectors for a violation of federal safety rules committed by bomb scientists who grew weary of hearing an alarm on monitors designed to signal leaks of radioactive tritium. The scientists assumed, although never verified, that the alarm was false. So they silenced it with a contraption made from an empty blueberry muffin mix can, a respirator filter and a Styrofoam cup.