The New York Times reveals today, on the day in December when Newt Gingrich admitted bringing discredit on the House, his lawyer told Republican leaders that the speaker had promised an ethics subcommittee not to use his office and his allies to orchestrate a Republican counterattack against the committee’s charges. That was part of the price for the subcommittee’s agreement to accept his admission of guilt and spare him the potential humiliation of a full-scale public trial. But that same day, even before the charges had been made public, Gingrich held a telephone conference call with other House leaders in which he made suggestions for a statement that the leaders would issue immediately after the subcommittee’s charges were disclosed. A source familiar with the tape confirmed to The Washington Post its existence last night and said it could be construed as Gingrich breaking the agreement. Gingrich and his top lieutenants could be heard plotting possible responses to expected Democratic attacks. The tape was made by people who intercepted a cellular telephone transmission with a police scanner.

Also last night, Congressmember Nancy Johnson, the Republican from Connecticut, chair of the House Ethics Committee, abruptly and unilaterally postponed next week’s public hearings in the case of Newt Gingrich, scuttling an agreement reached with committee Democrats just hours earlier and once again throwing the case into partisan turmoil. The plan that unraveled last night had called for as many as five days of televised hearings into Gingrich’s acknowledged ethical violations, but envisioned committee special counsel James Cole turning in his report after the House voted on the speaker’s punishment. Although both sides had signed off on the arrangement after 14 hours of negotiations, it quickly fell apart in a flurry of bitter exchanges.

Texaco’s decision to punish four executives caught on tape belittling African Americans shows that the company is serious about ending discrimination, this according to the Reverend Jesse Jackson. Civil rights leaders halted a nationwide boycott of Texaco after the oil giant pledged to give women and minorities better treatment and settled a $176 million race discrimination suit. Jackson, who helped lead the boycott, said the executives cost the company a lot of money.

In other corporate news, Michael Eisner got 10 years and 8 million stock options worth $195 million in a new contract as chairman and chief executive of Walt Disney Company. Eisner also has stock options he can exercise at any time, that Disney valued at $303 million as of September 30, when the new contract took effect. The company valued additional options he cannot yet exercise at $61 million.

President Clinton is meeting with business leaders today to enlist them in a campaign to make welfare reform work. Clinton wants businesses to hire recipients whose federal benefits run out under the new Republican welfare legislation. Earlier this week, he said the same thing to church leaders.

Condemned killer Billy Wayne Waldrop smiled and sang “Amazing Grace” just before he was executed in the electric chair early today for shooting a 72-year-old man during a 1982 arson and robbery. Just hours before Waldrop was killed, he professed his innocence and Christian faith on a radio station in Alabama.

A much-rumored episode about the TV character Ellen letting her audience know she’s a lesbian is in the works. Ellen is ready to come out, but will the episode ever air? Jamie Tarses, president of ABC Entertainment, said yesterday that an episode which reveals Ellen DeGeneres’s character as a lesbian is being worked on; however, she said, it’s wait and see whether the episode will be shown.

Doctors treating Boris Yeltsin said the Russian president was breathing more easily after his admission to a hospital with pneumonia, but there has been no dramatic improvement in his condition.