Fire gutted a Black church on Maryland’s Eastern Shore early this morning, in the latest of a series of blazes to affect predominantly Black congregations. President Clinton is to meet with Southern governors at the White House today to outline steps to fight the epidemic. Yesterday, fire gutted two Black churches a few miles apart in Mississippi. Blazes were also reported at a Black church in North Carolina and at the former sanctuary of a white congregation in Georgia. In response to the fires, the U.S. House of Representatives unanimously passed legislation yesterday that would broaden federal authority to prosecute crimes against religious property. Meanwhile, a white volunteer firefighter was arrested yesterday and charged with arson in the May 25 burning of the Pleasant Hill Baptist Church, a Black church in Robeson County, North Carolina. And the county in Maryland where the church just burned is the subject of a continuing voting rights lawsuit. The Supreme Court is expected to decide in coming weeks whether to hear the suit. The county last year elected its first Black county commissioner under a voting system ordered by a federal judge. A city councilman, the American Civil Liberties Union and the county’s branch of the NAACP filed suit against county officials in November of '92 alleging the county's at-large voting system discriminated against Black candidates.

Ending a bitterly divisive 14-month investigation, Senate Democrats concluded yesterday that President and Hillary Rodham Clinton were blameless in Whitewater, while Republicans suggested the first lady hid misdeeds and presidential aides lied. The Special Whitewater Committee issued two reports, one from each party’s senators, that disagreed on nearly every major issue, in an event cast in a long shadow of the presidential election. The panel’s 10 Republican senators suggested Mrs. Clinton was responsible for the disappearance of her law firm billing records, which turned up inside the White House living quarters two years after they were subpoenaed by prosecutors. A powerful motive, the GOP concluded, was fear that the public might learn of Mrs. Clinton’s role as a private attorney advising a fraudulent savings and loan development called Castle Grande. But the committee’s ranking Democrat, Paul Sarbanes of Maryland, decried his Republican colleagues’ venom directed toward the first lady.

President Clinton could spend $6 million per month before becoming the Democratic nominee in August, while Bob Dole’s campaign says it plans to squeeze by on $440,000 per month. Neither campaign is short on cash, but Dole is bumping up against the legal limit on campaign spending during the presidential primary. Clinton remained $18 million away from the spending gap at the end of May.

And “60 Minutes” has fired commentators Molly Ivins, Stanley Crouch and P.J. O’Rourke, less than two months after they began appearing on the show.