CAN'T afford summer air fare to London? Then take a cheap seat in the living room section for telly nights on public channel WLIW, where broad English accents are as common as fund-raising drives and the sensibility is equal parts London and Long Island.
WLIW, which is based in Plainview, L.I., has grown into one of the most highly watched public television stations in the United States, in part by eschewing most traditional Public Broadcasting System programming.
Instead, this 27-year-old station offers a popular diet of how-to shows, American film classics and English characters more comfortable in Liverpool than Long Beach. There is the bumbling Mr. Bean who finds and loses a baby in a pram carried aloft by a bouquet of helium balloons. And there is the hero of ''Chef,'' a gruff drill sergeant of gastronomy who introduces himself simply as: ''I am Gareth Blackstock I am seriously unpleasant.''
The station's populist approach to programming is largely dictated by its own competitive circumstances WLIW, the fourth-rated public television station in the United States, shares its metropolitan New York viewers with the top-rated public station: New York-based WNET.
And despite its Long Island roots, more than half of WLIW's prime time audience lives in New York City.
''The New York market is diverse enough that it should have two quality stations,'' said Terrel Cass, the president and general manager of WLIW. ''Our programming is diverse enough that we're giving people choices among dozens and dozens of other channels that look the same.''
During the day, cooks and their caring knives clearly reign supreme over the station's 1.7 million viewing households. More than 21 percent of the channel's programming is devoted to how-to-shows, which are dominated by chefs offering recipes for lamb curry marinade and the cooking secrets of the Culinary Institute of America.
But prime time is reserved for Mother England. British journalists based in London deliver the news of the world on ITN. Then English comics and mystery detectives take over the screen with old staples like ''Are Your Being Served?'' and newer showslike the drama of a village doctor in ''Peak Practice,'' or the misadventures of tabloid journalists in ''Nelson's Column.''
Mystery shows blike ''Taggart'' and the ''Ruth Rendell Mysteries'' have proved to be particularly successful with the traditional public television audience, which ranges in agef rom 35 to 65, according to Christopher Funkhouser, director of programming for the station for the last four years. WLIW is also broadcasting a British thriller called ''Crime Story,'' rather unconventional public television programming. The station describes the show as a weekly re-enactment of ''horrific murders, tragic family hatreds, greedy swindles, foreign intrigue, blind love.''
''We have tried to take a popular approach by providing shows with wide appeal: comedy, films, how-to shows,'' said Mr. Funkhouser. ''We have done it without offering the more traditional PBS fare of high culture and period-costume pieces.''
To obtain a steady supply of untraditional programming, WLIW formed the Program Resources Group in 1992 to seek first-run shows that are not available through PBS. Finding original programming was particularly important for WLIW, which devotes only about 25 percent of its schedule to typical PBS programming like ''Nova.''
About 20 other public television stations subscribe to the programming group, which has helped to build a loyal American following for British material. With pooled resources, the public television stations can afford the rights to programming that they could not pay for on their own.
Mr. Funkhouser travels to England to screen the programs, which he studies carefully for the telltale signs of a Yankee hit. ''It's not as simple as having a British accent,'' he said. ''It really depends on the writing, the actors and the synergy.''
Typically, the audiences are small for new British programs but then build up over time with a bare minmum of promotion. The world news report from ITN started with a base of 2,000 viewers in 1992 and has grown to more than 26,000.
When WLIW began the show about its huaghty, social-climbing heroine, Hyacinth, ''Keeping Up Appearances'' drew only 16,000 viewing households during an average week in 1993. But by this year, the figure has risen to 89,000 and the show has become an important source of fund-raising pledges.
''People have really taken to it,'' Mr. Funkhouser said. ''Everybody can see a little Hyacinth in their family, someone pretentious. It's attracted kind of a cult following. People who love British comedy turn to this station on Friday nights. We don't do any paid advertising. We don't do a lot of promotion. It's just a very limited ad budget.''
If there is any criticism about the diversity of WLIW's schedule, it is that its taste for foreign shows is limited to territory on one side of the English Channel. Station officials say that it is difficult to buy programs from France or Italy because they would require translation. But they note that they are scheduling a program about art history filmed at the hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia.
In its own backyard, WLIW has turned to the old neighborhoods for inspriation with their production of an original series called ''New York the Way It Was.''
Their nostalgic look at Brooklyn was an important fund-raising program not only for the Long Island station but for a Florida staiton that bought the program as well. In the works are more shows about the Bronx, Central Park, the Jewish roots of the Lower East Side and a program tentatively titled ''Long Island Summer.''
Station officials credit the current mix of British comedy, how-to shows and nostalgia programming to a 23 percent rise in the average viewing audience for their prime-time schedule this year.AFTER Bill Kurtis quit as anchor of ''The CBS Morning News'' in 1985, discouraged by the nonjournalistic track the program was taking, he all but disappeared from national screens. ''I wanted to climb the mountain,'' he says now, ''but the mountain had changed.''
A three-and-a-half-year stint was at an end, and viewers could be forgiven for wondering, ''What happened to Bill?''
This is what happened to Bill: He went back to WBBM, the CBS station in Chicago where he had come to network attention, and negotiated, in his own words, ''one of the very best contracts in television.'' His training as a lawyer at the Washburn University School of Law in Kansas showing, he added, ''I get probably more joy at crafting changes in the boilerplate contract CBS puts out.''
As a direct result, Kurtis can again be seen by a wider audience, in two programs a week on A&E and one each month on PBS.
Although he continues to be the anchor of WBBM's 6 P.M. news, once he has ful-filled his obligations at the station he is free to pursue his independent work.
''I don't know of anyone else in television with that arrangement,'' he says, talking now as the head of Kurtis Productions, the company that is producer and co-producer of ''Investigative Reports'' and ''American Justice'' for A&E and ''The New Explorers'' for PBS.
''I'm where all the big corporations would like to be,'' he adds, maintaining a core staff of 10 and hiring freelance cameramen, sound technicans, graphic artists and other specialists. ''I'm also where people in the business would like to be, doing what they want to do when they want to.''
His company produces eight programs a year in Chicago. A&E commissions producers a year in Chicago. A&E commissions producers to work on other shows for ''Investigative Reports,'' although Mr. Kurtis still acts as A&E's ''editorial watchdog'' on those programs. ''American Justice'' is produced for A&E by Kurtis Proudctions and Tower Productions of Chicago. The network also documentaries from Britain and, as Mr. Kurtis puts it, ''I will Americanize them.'' ''The New Explorers'' is a co-production with WTTW in Chicago, but in every production that bears his name, Mr. Kurtis, as host and executive producer, maintains control.
In the case of PBS, he even throws himself into fund raising.
Because of what he calls his ''very high likability and recognizability factors'' in Chicago, Mr. Kurtis pursues sponsors. He calls corporations, attends presentation meetings and goes to concept meetings with advertising agencies. And, of course, he comes up with the shows' ideas.
''It's a massive amount of work,'' he says.
His work of A&E has included ''Sins of the Father,'' about sexual molestation by priests: ''The Gander Crash,'' on the 1985 crash in Newfoundland that killed 250 American servicemen, and ''Newt Gingrich and the Republican Revolution.''
In May, ''Investigative Reports'' showed a videotape secretly made in prison by a fellow inmate of Richard Speck, the man responsible for the murders of eight student nurses in Chicago in 1966. The tape, in which Mr. Speck spoke in chilling detail about the crimes, caused alarm in the prison system and set off four separate investigations.
Tonight, from 8 to 11 P.M. on A&E, parts of that tape are used at the beginning of a special three-hour ''Investigative Reports'' that looks at prisons housing some of the most dangerous convicts in the world.
Starting with a day in the life of Cook County Jail in Chicago, it looks at prison issues and inmates from Shanghai to Colorado, Moscow to Budapest and Israel to Texas.
''It's what I want to do,'' Mr. Kurtis says of his busy days, offering his formula for running a successful company: ''Create a product, pre-sell it to raise the money and make sure you have distribution.''
It's a prescription that works for him.
SIGNOFFWhen Bill Clinton took office, many supporters were hoping he would quickly begin undoing a major legacy from 12 years of Republican control of the White House: the remarkably successful effort of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush to remake the nation's Federal courts by selecting judges known for their conservative views.
At the time of Mr. Clinton's inauguration, 15 percent of the nation's judicial slots were open, and fellow Democrats were in control of the Senate, which confirms or rejects nominees to the bench. It was a politically enviable situation if the President wanted to move the ideological pendulum in a new direction.
But it quickly became clear that Mr. Clinton had little interest in trying to do so.
He has appointed a record proportion of women and members of minorities to the Federal bench, and one of his two choices for the Supreme Court -- the first High Court appointments by a Democratic President in 26 years -- was a woman, Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
But what may be most notable about Mr. Clinton's judicial appointments may be reluctance to fill the courts with liberal judges.
''Our mission is not to counteract the conservative appointments of the Reagan and Bush years,'' said John Quinn, the White House counsel.
''The fact is that this President is a moderate, who brings mainstream, Main Street values to the job of selecting judges,'' Mr. Quinn said.
A recent statistical analysis by three scholars confirms the notion that the ideology of Mr. Clinton's appointees falls somewhere between the conservatives selected by Presidents Bush and Reagan and the liberals chosen by President Jimmy Carter.
Prof. Donald R. Songer of the University of South Carolina, an author of the study, said Mr. Clinton's judges were ''decidedly less liberal than other modern Democratic Presidents'.''
The ideological fingerprints of the Clinton judges, Professor Songer said, most resemble those of judges selected by President Gerald R. Ford.
Eleanor D. Acheson, an Associate Attorney General who has been involved in judicial selections throughout the Clinton Administration, said the President's priority had generally been to promote diversity while nominating highly qualified nominees. His achievement of those goals is generally borne out by statistics.
More than half of Mr. Clinton's 196 appointments so far have been women or members of minorities or both, almost twice the proportion among those chosen by President Bush. About 30 percent of the Clinton appointees have been women and 33 percent have been minorities.
Sixty-two percent of the Clinton nominees were rated by the American Bar Association as ''well qualified,'' the highest grade available, while the figure was 52 percent for Mr. Bush's choices.
Still, Ms. Acheson acknowledges, ''we know that many people expected us to do the mirror-image of what the Republicans had done, that is fill the courts with young liberal and progressive candidates in order to bring the courts back from their lunge to the right.''
Nan Aron, the head of the Alliance for Justice, a coalition of liberal groups that monitors court appointments, said in an interview, ''While the Administration deserves much credit for both the excellence and diversity of its judicial appointments, it is clearly disappointing that the President failed to address the issue of correcting the imbalance of the courts from the previous Republican Presidents.''
In their study, Professor Songer and his colleagues categorized thousands of decisions by judges named not only by Mr. Clinton but also by his five predecessors, Presidents Bush, Reagan, Carter, Ford and Richard M. Nixon.
The study, published in March, ranked decisions by judges appointed by all six Presidents in the categories of criminal justice, civil liberties and economic regulation. Professor Songer and his colleagues, Robert A. Carp of the University of Houston and Ronald Stidham of Appalachian State University, then tabulated the decisions and concluded that among district court judges, President Carter's appointees rendered liberal decisions in 53 percent of their cases. Mr. Clinton's judges were rated at 46 percent, followed by Mr. Ford's at 44 percent, Mr. Nixon's at 39 percent, Mr. Bush's at 37 percent and Mr. Reagan's at 36 percent.
In studying the appeals courts, the level below the Supreme Court, the study found that Carter judges rendered liberal rulings in 43.6 percent of all cases and Clinton appointees in 36.5 percent. Judges selected by Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Bush were all rated at about 30 percent.
In their 12 years in the Presidency, the Republicans raided the nation's law schools so they could fill many of those appeals court slots with aggressively conservative scholars. Mr. Clinton, in contrast, has selected few judges from academia.
Mr. Reagan and Mr. Bush frequently put forward nominees who were so aggressively conservative that confirmation fights resulted, some of which they lost (Robert H. Bork) and some of which they won (Clarence Thomas, though narrowly).WHEN William Sofield and Thomas O'Brien, the team behind Aero Studios in SoHo, broke up their partnership this spring, everyone in the design industry wondered what would happen to downtown's hottest young firm. The answer is beginning to emerge. From SoHo to 57th Street, the former partners are giving new meaning to the dictum ''Divide and conquer.''
On Sunday, the SoHo Grand Hotel on West Broadway will welcome its first guests. The amber mirrors and velvet drapes had yet to materialize last week, but Mr. Sofield seemed relaxed touring the $6 million interior, his biggest post-Aero project.
''I wanted to celebrate two great periods of SoHo, the 1870's and the 1970's,'' he said, wending his way up a two-story staircase rising from the ''mudroom'' to the lobby, with its mercury-mirrored ceiling. This is not an entrance for the agoraphobic. Suspended by cables, its iron vertebrae flanked by a bronze-work balustrade, the staircase looks like a grand fire escape: the intersection of ''Sunset Boulevard'' and ''Hester Street.''
Four blocks north, in the conference room of Aero Studios on Spring Street, Mr. O'Brien is juggling three big projects: the new Emporio Armani flagship store on Madison Avenue -- ''more like the old Hermes in Paris, kind of a fantasy thing'' -- plus a glamorous new restaurant on East 46th Street and the DKNY Men's Store at Bloomingdale's, all to open in September. As Aero's sole proprietor, he is too busy to linger over a meal prepared by the pastry chef poached from Chanterelle.
For four years, Aero was the design world's best-kept secret. The team tweaked modernism, putting a knowing spin on classic design and offering a welcome alternative to the reigning frugality. Working out of their gallerylike downtown loft, the partners were equally deft at whipping up the perfect fete for Tina Brown, a funky artist's residence or a luxe penthouse for corporate entrepreneurs.
Now, with a half-dozen commercial projects under way, Mr. Sofield and Mr. O'Brien, both 35, will soon be familiar to a wider public. ''It's too bad they split up, but I'm happy for their success,'' the hotelier Ian Schrager said. ''They are both doing equally high-profile jobs. I think they are the two most exciting designers to come out of New York in a while.''
The two former partners have not really spoken with each other since Mr. O'Brien bought out Mr. Sofield's shares of Aero in May. Mr. Sofield and his new company, Studio Sofield, are now ensconced in a beautifully appointed loft on East Fourth Street, above his new home.
''It was like two parties going on in one house, but they weren't kind of flowing together,'' Mr. O'Brien said. And Aero's exponentially increasing projects could no longer be efficiently -- or pleasantly -- handled under a single umbrella.
Mr. Sofield and Mr. O'Brien met in the 1980's while working on Ralph Lauren/Polo's Home Collections. They founded Aero Studios in 1992, at the height of the recession. Despite their inauspicious timing, they won a fistful of high-profile projects, designing Peter Morton's Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas, Nev., and realizing David Barton's fantasy of a sexy attic within a Madison Avenue gym and Ken Aretsky's dream for a cozy bistro, Butterfield 81.
Urbane and dapper, the team became poster boys for a burgeoning atelier movement. Their design studio combined showroom and antique shop, where clients could find Aero furnishings or mix and match to create the retro-modernist Aero look.
''Their design was fresh and modern and clean, zeroing right into the future,'' said Marian McEvoy, the editor in chief of Elle Decor. ''They had such an aura of confidence that people couldn't resist them.''
But Aero was not just a studio, said Alfredo Paredes, who worked with the pair as the vice president of creative services at Polo. ''It was a destination, a happening,'' he said.
Mayer Rus, the editor of Interior Design, recalled: ''It was a fun, fabulous, sexy idea, having this luxe studio cum salon, especially flying in the face of the recession, when things were so dour in the industry. But in the end it was just too hard to maintain that kind of esprit, especially when the personalities don't jive.''
Their sharply different sensibilities were apparent. ''Their offices said it all,'' observed James Danziger, the photography dealer whose gallery; Bellport, L.I., country home, and family apartment in Manhattan were decorated by Mr. O'Brien. ''Thomas's office was retro-elegant -- he likes to give new life to old objects. And Bill's office was like a 60's play den.''
Mr. Sofield, a tall man with stylishly cropped hair and bright blue eyes, studied architecture at Princeton University, then honed his yeoman Craftsman style while apprenticing at a woodworking shop in Manhattan. He said he ''ate sawdust for five years'' before working on Mr. Lauren's Polo Country Store in East Hampton, L.I., and the Laurens' homes and building the Home Collections' seasonal displays.
The slight, Byronesque Mr. O'Brien studied painting and photography at Cooper Union. He collaborated on the design and furnishing of Mr. Lauren's country homes in Montauk, L.I., and Bedford, N.Y., absorbing a great deal of the Lauren signature style. ''Thomas takes things and recontextualizes them in time,'' said Howard Read, the director of the photography department at the Robert Miller Gallery.
Mr. Schrager compared the two designers' relationship to his 1980's partnership with Steve Rubell, counseling them: ''Do everything together and always fight.''
It was Mr. O'Brien who came up with the idea for the quilted leather lobby of Mr. Barton's gym on the Upper East Side, and Mr. Sofield who found subtle ways to incorporate musical references into his design for rooms at the Hard Rock Hotel (a chandelier in the shape of cymbals; guitar-patterned upholstery). A year ago, Aero opened a ground-floor retail shop that stocks an ever-changing array of offbeat items, from candles to 1950's chairs to a silver-plated garbage pail. Mr. O'Brien, a true Lauren disciple, was eager to diversify, even spinning off a fleet of satellite stores.
Mr. Sofield had other interests, including continuing teaching at Parsons School of Design. ''I didn't want to be sort of Harry Winston, an Aero in New York, Paris, and Beverly Hills, just developing an anonymous product line,'' he said. ''And I do have a different sense of priorities. I don't need another country home. Thomas is much more of a businessman than I am. I wanted to concentrate on creating a body of work.''
The two partners competed head to head for at least one plum project, the consultancy for new Gucci stores in New York, Paris and Beverly Hills, Calif. (Mr. Sofield got it). But dividing Aero's turf proved relatively simple, since each partner was already working individually with specific clients.Raising the specter of a sharply divided Republican National Convention next month, two of the party's leading moderates, Gov. Pete Wilson of California and Gov. William F. Weld of Massachusetts, said today that they would press delegates to substitute an abortion rights plank for the party's anti-abortion one.
Both men argued that while the debate over such a change would undoubtedly be hotly charged, the change would in the end help the fall campaign of the party's likely nominee, Bob Dole of Kansas.
''We are pro-choice -- and also pro-Dole,'' Mr. Wilson said. ''This is what a responsible party should be advocating.'' $(In an Op-Ed article on page A27, Governor Wilson calls for the Republican Party to reconsider its platform language on abortion.$)
Mr. Weld said the proposed substitute would be submitted first to the platform committee, which will hold meetings before the convention begins on Aug. 12.
''If we don't get anywhere in committee,'' he said, ''then we'll try to take the fight to the floor. We think we have enough votes to do that for sure because all you need is a quarter of the platform committee or six state delegations.''
In recent months, Mr. Wilson and Mr. Weld have been in contact with other party moderates about the abortion issue, among them Gov. Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey. Asked how many other governors and leading party moderates could be expected to join the fight for the substitute plank, Mr. Wilson replied, ''We'll begin to see now that we have a plank to propose.''
Governor Whitman's office said she was on vacation in Alaska and would have no immediate comment.
Mr. Wilson said that the Dole campaign was told earlier this week of the plan to offer the substitute, but that ''I don't know what they intend to do with it.''
Mr. Dole, after considerable backing and filling, recently tried to head off any embarrassing convention split on abortion. He proposed that the party retain its long-standing anti-abortion plank but also add a tolerance plank, which would welcome party members who have ''deeply held and sometimes differing views on issues of personal conscience like abortion.''
After the wording of the suggested substitute plank was released today, the Dole campaign released the following statement: ''Bob Dole's long and consistent pro-life record is as strong as his belief that the Republican Party is an inclusive party. The issue of platform language is one that will ultimately be decided by the platform committee.''
Backers of the anti-abortion plank predicted that the Wilson-Weld proposal would be defeated. But they warned the fight might hurt Mr. Dole politically.
''If they want to bring this type of dissension into the convention, they certainly don't have Senator Dole's best interest at heart,'' said Colleen Parro, director of the Republican National Coalition for Life, an organization based in Dallas that is deeply involved in keeping the anti-abortion plank.
''It's just the same old abortion industry approach,'' Ms. Parro added. ''What these people don't understand is that this is not a political issue to a majority of delegates. This is a matter of life and death.''
The moderates' proposed plank, written primarily by Mr. Wilson, says Republicans are committed to ''significantly reducing the number of abortions in America.'' Then it adds that the reduction ''will be far better achieved by persuasion of individuals to choose -- as a matter of individual conscience -- behavior that will not produce unwarranted pregnancies, than by governmental mandate and invasion of privacy.''
The language already proposed for the party's 1996 abortion plank states strong opposition to the procedure and calls, once again, for a Constitutional amendment and Federal laws to outlaw it.
''The unborn child has a fundamental right to life, which cannot be infringed,'' the proposal says.
Most polls indicate that a majority of Americans, including Republicans, favor abortion rights, a point that party moderates contend underscores a need to adopt a moderate platform.
But surveys of the delegates headed for the convention indicate that a majority oppose abortion and come from the intensely active conservative wing of the party that has dominated the Republicans' national conventions for many years.
By some informal counts, almost 20 state delegations will be controlled by hard-line anti-abortion delegates, and many of the remaining ones will also be anti-abortion, though less vehemently.
Still, Mr. Weld predicted that abortion rights supporters would control at least 7 delegations and perhaps 10. Among those state groups he listed as solidly in favor of abortion rights were California, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Vermont.JON DRUMMOND was 15 years old and a sophomore at Overbrook High School in Philadelphia in 1984, when Carl Lewis turned the Los Angeles Coliseum into his personal playground and lighted an Olympic fire that burned for 12 medal-filled years, all the way to Monday night. Lewis has been the biggest name in track for as long as Drummond can remember, his Michael Jordan, and now he was in a position, put there by Lewis, of having to say that Lewis should take his long jump gold medal and just go home.
Drummond came to a news conference yesterday with the United States track coach, Erv Hunt, to address the controversy of whether Lewis should be put on the heavily favored United States 4x100-meter relay team he wouldn't try out for, so he may finish his Olympic career with a perfect 10 in gold medals.
Hunt repeated what he said Tuesday: Only an injury to Drummond, Leroy Burrell, Mike Marsh or Dennis Mitchell would make him consider Lewis. That, or one of the four starters stepping aside, a possibility as long as Lewis doesn't have the good taste to let this story die.
''It would be an honor for me to lead off a relay and have Carl Lewis anchor it,'' Drummond said. ''It has been my dream since I was a little boy to run on a relay with Carl. He is definitely a legend, a living legend, but that's not the issue right now. The case is that you have four people who have worked diligently and committed themselves to four years of preparation to come here and perform.
''So what is it? Give Carl a 10th gold medal, or deny somebody else fulfilling their dream?''
This raging Lewis debate is really a commentary about celebrity, about fame, about power and privilege. It is about an inflated sense of entitlement.
I win, therefore I am. I am more important than you, you, you and you. Now which one of you will do your national duty and get out of the way, so Saturday's relay may transcend the pedestrian status of a mere Olympic sprint?
We already have too much of this in America, a country driven by the almighty Nielsen rating, by a compulsive need to authenticate everything with a star. We have become Dream Team Nation.
Lewis gave us two memorable nights this week when he dramatically rallied Sunday to qualify for the long jump final, then won his ninth gold medal 24 hours later. It was a feel-good story, Lewis's 12-year wait to be destiny's darling, the Olympian who overcame the odds. But Lewis didn't know how to make a graceful exit, and now he comes off sounding much less like a man with a righteous cause than one with a egomaniacal curse. Good marketing move.
''People want me to run the relay, and they think I have the right to run,'' Lewis said, sounding as if marches on Atlanta were being organized on his behalf. Stumping the talk show circuit yesterday, he even provided instruction for his breathless constituency. ''What you can do is go to the stadium and talk to people and call the Olympic people,'' he said.
According to a poll conducted on the ESPN Internet site, 65 percent of the respondents said they believed Lewis should be added to the team. But here is a better question for ESPN to ask: If your son or daughter made the local town tennis finals, what would you say if the kid who had won the last four years walked up and said: ''I didn't feel like playing until today. Get lost.''
Lewis, who skipped a pre-Olympic training camp, told Hunt that he was neither interested in qualifying nor in running the Olympic heats.
Drummond, the one member of the relay team who didn't win a gold medal on the 4x100-meter team that won the gold with Lewis in Barcelona, Spain, four years ago, tried his best to be diplomatic about the whole thing. At one point early on, he communicated the defensive and unfair position Hunt and the whole team is in when he said, ''I hope this doesn't hurt me saying this. . . .''
But Drummond, with more than a little Gary Payton in him, eventually got on a roll and soon the quote of the Olympics, at least in English, was spilling out.
''Bob Costas says, 'I can't believe you win the long jump and now they're not going to put you on the team,' '' he said. ''Well, he won the long jump. That's not 100 meters. He got butt-naked last at the trials.''
The room erupted in laughter, and Drummond -- laughing too -- held up a hand and said: ''I'm sorry, Carl. I'm sorry.''
No apology necessary. Lewis had it coming.
Sports of The TimesKansas
A Senate Primary Mirrors G.O.P. Split
Kansas Republicans are less than a week away from choosing their nominee for the Senate seat that Bob Dole left in June to run for President. And in its waning days, the contest for the nomination has turned both bitter and exceedingly close.
That became clear on Monday, when Senator Sheila Frahm, the Republican Lieutenant Governor who was appointed to the vacant Dole seat last month, broadcast what is perhaps the contest's harshest television advertisement against her chief opponent, Representative Sam Brownback. The commercial asserts that Mr. Brownback, one of the Republican freshmen who swore in 1994 to slash a bloated Federal Government, is really a closet big spender who has written but one bill in two years. And it accuses him of scheming to abolish that most sacred tax break of all, the Federal deduction for interest on home mortgages.
Mr. Brownback, who spent much of July accusing Ms. Frahm of raising state taxes by $500 million, responded with an advertisement accusing the Frahm campaign of spreading untruths in a final effort to avert defeat.
Ms. Frahm may not lose -- experts call the race a tossup -- but Mr. Brownback has clearly gained ground in a race whose significance goes beyond a single Senate seat. The two candidates mirror the ideological divide among Republicans: Mr. Brownback, the populist, anti-abortion conservative from the rising new right, versus Ms. Frahm, the abortion rights moderate in the tradition of Kansas's other retiring senator, Nancy Landon Kassebaum.
Ms. Frahm has the backing of party leaders, including Gov. Bill Graves, who appointed her. Mr. Dole tacitly signaled his preference by inviting her to the stage at a rally. And Ms. Kassebaum, probably the state's most-adored public figure, endorsed Ms. Frahm on Tuesday, saying that she normally did not choose sides in primaries but ''these are not normal times.''
Mr. Brownback has a fervent antiabortion political network on his side. Kansans for Life, the state's largest anti-abortion group, began blanketing the state this week with a telephoned, recorded endorsement of Mr. Brownback by William Bennett, the party's purveyor-in-chief of conservative values.
The vote is Aug. 6. The weather could decide the outcome.
''If the turnout's low, he wins. If it's high, she wins,'' said Charles Cook, a political seer in Washington. ''It's that close.''
Pennsylvania
A Convention Role Hinted for Casey
In building his base for re-election, President Clinton has skidded rightward on issue after issue. So will he allow Bob Casey, the former Governor of Pennsylvania who most observers say was blocked from speaking at the 1992 Democratic convention because he opposes abortion, address his fellow Democrats in 1996 in Chicago?
''I wouldn't rule it out,'' a top Clinton Administration official said.
Or in, for that matter. In an interview from his home in Scranton, Pa., Mr. Casey said an intermediary, whom he declined to name, asked him a week ago to meet with Democratic officials in Washington to discuss a speech. He said he declined because ''it was all very fuzzy and iffy.''
White House officials said they have made no specific overtures to Mr. Casey. They have always said that had he not declined to endorse Mr. Clinton in 1992, he would have been allowed to speak to the convention.
Senator Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, general chairman of the Democratic Party, clearly dislikes the idea of an invitation to Mr. Casey this year.
''I made a number of calls to him,'' Mr. Dodd said, ''and I've not heard from him in 18 months. Now all of a sudden he wants to be heard. It's terribly presumptuous on his part.''
He added: ''There are certain thresholds you've got to meet, and returning phone calls isn't a bad way to start.''
Mr. Casey, 64, stands ready if summoned. He said his undelivered speech of four years ago remained ready for delivery. He added that his own brush with death in 1994, when he underwent an extremely rare heart-and-liver transplant, had given him insight into what he called the Democratic ethos of protecting the powerless. Now, he said, all he needs is a good time slot.It's the time of the year to nestle in a beach chair with the sun, a tan and the great American novel of the nanosecond. But the problem with that old-fashioned rite of summer is that books by the thousands are instead washing back to publishers in a mighty tide of rejected literature known wearily in the trade as returns.
For some titles, discarded books are spewing back to publishers at rates as high as 40 percent of gross sales, a sobering trend that comes during a sluggish summer season when certain titles have piled up in Manhattan bookstore aisles in untouched stacks the size of large dogs.
''This is one of the slowest periods in a long time in terms of sales activities,'' said Alberto Vitale, the chief executive of the Random House unit of Advance Publications. He speculated that the soft market might be a result, in part, of ''titles that have not been as exciting as possible.''
The issue of boomerang books is a sensitive topic for top publishing executives, who are loath to discuss losses publicly. Privately, however, they concede that returns are mounting.
Long an occupational hazard of publishing, the rejects have increased in the last five years as the landscape of the publishing industry has been reshaped with the growth of super-bookstore chains and mass-market outlets like Price/Costco's warehouse clubs.
To stock the vast stores, publishers are producing more titles, shipping out more books and thus -- when their business bets lose -- facing a higher volume of returns of new front-list titles. These are the offerings that are not literary hits, the titles that fail to ascend to the upper tier of national best-seller lists.
''The issue has become like the emperor's new clothes,'' said a publishing executive who insisted on anonymity. ''No one wants to talk about what everyone knows in the privacy of their own offices. It's not been a good year.''
Another high-ranking executive was even more blunt about the summer season, which traditionally is a time of voracious demand for books. ''This is the worst sales summer anyone can remember,'' he said. ''People are nervous, very nervous. If this continues, there's going to be a lot of publishers trying to get their hermetically sealed windows to open.''
As in the movie business, there is an internal industry debate about the growth of the trade: Is there a glut with too many titles and too many copies, both of which have multiplied to justify sizable author advances and industry egos?
Publishers are well aware that even a best seller can turn into a financial dud with an overpaid author and a big print run. Over the last five years, print runs for best-seller candidates have been inflated from an average minimum of 50,000 copies to at least 100,000, and the shelf life of some other books has been compressed from four months to as little as four weeks.
''At times, it's like a big pyramid scheme where we keep shipping out the books and trying to hide the fact that there's a lot of dead titles,'' said Irwyn Applebaum, the president of Bantam Doubleday Dell, which is owned by Bertelsmann A.G. ''Everybody is on such overdrive to make do and grow and expand that they don't stop and study this. I think that an adjustment is going to have to come. But it's a lot like nuclear disarmament. Just because you reduce your books doesn't mean that the other publishers are going to reduce their copies.''
Returns are the most significant barometer of the financial success of a book, a measurement more critical than a ranking on a best-seller list because rejects cut directly into profits. Historically, publishers have agreed to take back returns and absorb the loss to entice bookstores to stock their titles.
Many of the major publishing houses report that their companies have managed to escape the phenomenon relatively unscathed, with returns -- as a percentage of gross sales -- that are either flat, declining or slightly above average.
However, figures from their own trade group, the American Association of Publishers, indicate that in the last five years the losses from returns have expanded far faster than gross sales, which are essentially the books that are shipped to bookstores. From 1990 to 1995, the industry's losses for rejected hardback books increased by 60 percent, to $531 million, while gross sales increased by 47 percent, to $1.64 billion.
Although the figures show that more money is coming in, the system leaves publishers at increased risk. More books are being shipped out, according to publishers, and more books are being returned. They are coming back in such consistent, rapid cycles that it has given rise to a debate about the efficiency of the industry.
At Random House, Mr. Vitale would say only that ''returns are higher than we would like them,'' although the gossipy industry is rife with talk about books coming back to the publisher by the truckload.
Michael Naumann, the new chief executive at Henry Holt & Company, a unit of Holtzbrinck G.m.b.H., is more frank, particularly after a startling wave of bookstore returns -- Windows 95 computer books that flopped and came back to the company at a rate of 50 percent.
''It's staggering,'' Mr. Naumann said. ''I don't think the readership is shrinking.'' He added that generally returns could be linked to the quality of available titles. ''Where are the big books of quality that send droves of students into the bookstores?'' he asked. ''There was a time when Le Carre was new or Marquez was new. Where are the Hemingways? What can you say when a No. 1 book is by a basketball player?''
High returns tend to come from the most heavily promoted new titles, the hardback and paperback books that were acquired with six-figure advances and promises of sizable print runs. After the debut of a book, three to nine months usually elapse before the discards come trickling back to publishers.
So vexing is the trend that the Ingram Book Group, the country's largest book distributor, has formed a special group to study the root causes and to propose solutions.Britain plans to destroy more than 3,000 unclaimed human embryos from fertility clinics today, in keeping with a law that has stirred horror and religious outrage among some segments of society and ethical and practical questions as well.
The microscopic eggs were fertilized in vitro and frozen. The frozen embryos, consisting of four cells each, would not develop further unless they were implanted into a woman's uterus. Unless their donors ask to have the embryos saved, any that have been stored for five years will be destroyed.
The embryos are being stored in 33 clinics, which were scheduled to begin to remove them from freezing containers sometime after midnight Wednesday, allowing them to thaw, and then administering a few drops of alcohol to destroy them, officials of the Fertilization and Embryology Authority said. The embryos will then be incinerated.
Although embryos have been destroyed before, this is the first time such a procedure has been required by law and carried out on such a large scale. The newness of it all, combined with the delicate issues involved, have inspired suggestions ranging from the ''adoption'' of the embryos to a demand that they be given ''a proper funeral.''
The action is ordered under the Human Fertilization and Embryology Act, which became effective on Aug. 1, 1991, and stipulated the five-year time limit. As the deadline crept up, the once-quiet debate quickly became public and dramatic.
Some officials in the Catholic Church have referred to the event as ''a prenatal massacre.''
Italian doctors have offered to pay to ''adopt'' the embryos, with the intention of having them transferred to Italy and implanted there. Anti-abortion groups have appealed to Prime Minister John Major for a six-month delay.
At a news conference on Wednesday, John Scarisbrick, a spokesman for Life Campaigns, a British anti-abortion group, called today ''a day of national shame,'' arguing that letters that went out in the past 10 weeks to the egg and sperm donors of the embryos warning of the action failed to explain other options, including offering them for adoption.
But a spokeswoman for the Health Ministry said on Wednesday that come midnight, ''under present laws and guidance on patient consent, nothing can be done but for those embryos to be allowed to perish.''
She added that authorities, however, have asked the clinics ''to be reasonable about the timing,'' suggesting that the midnight ring of the clock does not have to be observed fanatically.
The embryos scheduled for destruction are part of a total ranging from 6,000 to 10,000 that were fertilized and frozen since 1991 but whose donors have failed to respond to inquiries about what they wished done with them.
Of those who did respond, some donors asked that their embryos continue to be preserved. Many opted for destruction, which was done quietly before the deadline came up, but clinics refuse to give actual numbers.
In the United States, Dr. Joseph D. Schulman, director of the Genetics and IVF Institute in Fairfax, Va., a large private infertility center, said that while certain states might have laws that apply to different embryo storage situations, there is no national policy on what becomes of unclaimed embryos in the United States.
''As a matter of policy in virtually all in-vitro fertilization centers,'' he said, ''decisions are made by the individual couples. They indicate at the time the embryos are frozen what would be done with them in the event they are no longer needed for the couple. The options include anonymous donation, which is encouraged, or destruction. If the couple is unreachable, the institution would normally try to follow their wishes as last indicated.''
What seems to have troubled most opponents of the law in Britain is that so many couples, perhaps as many as 650, did not respond to inquiries about what they wished to do with the embryos. Some have moved or changed addresses without informing the clinics. As a result, the Government said, about 3,300 embryos have been tagged for destruction.
''This is the first time that, in effect, under a legal time limit, a number of embryos which many people regard as humans have to be destroyed,'' noted Harry Coen, acting editor of The Catholic Herald, in a conversation in London.
Protesters clustered outside several churches in candlelight vigils on Wednesday as midnight approached.
The Church of England has taken no position on the issue, leaving it up to individuals in various parishes.
The Roman Catholic Church has opposed the move, albeit not vehemently, arguing that if the embryos must be destroyed they should at least be treated with dignity. Others, including the Catholic Church leadership here, insist the embryos be given ''a proper funeral.''
''The fertilized ovum,'' Cardinal Basil Hume of Westminster said, ''should be given the unconditional respect which is morally due to the human being.'' He said in several newspaper interviews that the embryos ''shouldn't be flushed down the toilet.''Patrick J. Buchanan said today that he accepted the Republican Party's decision to deny him a speech before its convention, adding that he still planned to attend it -- and hoped to leave it -- as a Republican.
But Mr. Buchanan said again that he would fight efforts by Bob Dole, the party's presumed Presidential nominee, to incorporate a ''tolerance plank'' into the platform that would specifically refer to abortion, and he released his own preferred versions of Republican planks on abortion, trade and other issues.
As he has for months, Mr. Buchanan continued to threaten that he might run as a third-party Presidential candidate if Mr. Dole and the Republican Party's platform veered from his conservative agenda.
''I am more committed to a lot of these ideas and issues than I am to any party,'' Mr. Buchanan said, in a briefing with reporters here.
That is the stance Mr. Buchanan has taken since he shifted his Presidential campaign into low gear after losing the California primary at the end of March. Indeed, although details have been filled in, remarkably little has changed in the political standoff between the two remaining Republican Presidential campaigns since then.
Mr. Buchanan generally refrained from criticizing Mr. Dole today, although he expressed frustration that the Dole campaign seemed uninterested in his platform ideas. He said that his sister, Angela Bay Buchanan, had tried to telephone ''one of the quote grown-ups'' in the Dole campaign to discuss the planks, but that he had declined to speak with her.
Mr. Buchanan said that he would watch three factors over the next couple of weeks before he would decide whether endorse Mr. Dole: the cast of convention speakers; the character of the platform, and the politics of Mr. Dole's Vice-Presidential pick.
He said that he did not think Mr. Dole would pick a running mate who supported abortion rights, but that conservatives did not appear to be well-represented among the convention speakers.
Mr. Buchanan said that, while he would hold a rally in San Diego the night before the convention begins, he would not speak outside the convention hall while the convention was under way. ''That would be disruptive,'' he said.For months, Bob Dole's advisers have had a potent television commercial in their heads: ''President Clinton vetoed welfare reform not once, not twice, but three times. Action speaks louder than words.''
But today, the President did act. He said he would sign legislation that would overhaul the welfare system, and in the process he deprived Mr. Dole of what his advisers had hoped would be a central issue in his campaign for the White House.
For all of Mr. Clinton's agonizing over the bill's provisions, for all the risk that he would be condemned by the left for signing it, Republicans and Democrats agreed today that Mr. Clinton's signature on the measure would win him many more votes than it would cost him.
An overwhelming majority of Americans say they want some form of welfare reform, and by backing the legislation Mr. Clinton fulfills his 1992 campaign promise to ''end welfare as we know it.''
The move also strengthens Mr. Clinton's drive to position himself as a ''new Democrat'' whose sympathies lie with more moderate swing voters, not with liberals who have no alternative but to back him for re-election.
''It's brilliant,'' said Jim Pinkerton, a domestic policy adviser in the Bush White House. ''The danger for Clinton was that 'to end welfare as we know it' would be to him what 'Read my lips -- no new taxes' was to Bush, the one promise that people could remember. And the one that he spectacularly broke. Clinton has avoided that pitfall.''
So rather than attack Mr. Clinton for standing in the way of welfare reform, all Mr. Dole can do is say, essentially, that Republicans forced Mr. Clinton to do it. As Mr. Dole asserted today: ''I commend him for finally climbing on board the Dole welfare reform proposal.''
Kevin Phillips, a respected Republican analyst, explained Mr. Dole's latest dilemma: ''The Dole campaign doesn't have enough stature to make the 'you stole it' issue work. Clinton has vetoed two previous bills, so he's shaped the debate enough. It's just another example of how the Republicans, by taking all these fringe positions on things like gun control and abortion and the balanced budget have cut their legs of in terms of more centrist issues which Clinton has pre-empted.''
The chief political downside for Mr. Clinton is that his move will rip apart the fragile peace that now exists among factions of the Democratic Party, enraging liberals who for decades have been among the most reliable of the party's constituencies.
But judging by the tempered reaction today, it seemed that even they would be reluctant to harshly repudiate a President who is 20 points ahead in the polls. Even Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, an authority on welfare, refrained from criticizing his party's standard bearer.
''The President will take some heat on this,'' said Geoffrey Garin, a Democratic pollster. ''But the fact is, half the Democrats voted for the bill when it left the Senate. Clinton's not isolated in the Democratic Party on this position.'' If that argument fails, Mr. Garin said the President can always contend that his vetoes saved the country from a more extreme bill. ''Clinton can argue he made a bad situation much better,'' he said.
Or, as Fred Greenstein, a professor of politics at Princeton University, said, ''Clinton can say, 'I held out until I got something which wouldn't be unkind to children.' He can use it to claim credit to being true to his centrist principles.''
It is possible, though not likely, that many Democrats, lamenting the turning back of the Great Society, will be so disappointed in Mr. Clinton's stand on welfare that they will sit out the election.
Still, the bottom line is that liberals have no place to go. ''It's not ingenuous or a new strategy,'' said Robert M. Teeter, a pollster who headed Mr. Bush's campaign in 1992. ''The liberal base is not going to vote for Perot or Dole.''
Mr. Clinton's move not only takes a traditional Republican issue from Mr. Dole, but could help incumbents in Congress who have been hungry to pass some substantive measure that they can trumpet to voters who are sick of gridlock.
The action is probably less a political plus to Mr. Clinton than a detriment to Mr. Dole. Campaigning in Nashville this afternoon, there was frustration in Mr. Dole's voice as he told a business audience: ''There's not a dime's worth of difference between the bill he talked about today and the one he vetoed a few months back. The only difference is that it's 97 days before the election.''
But it might have been easier for Mr. Dole to use the ''slippery'' label on his opponent if Mr. Clinton had broken his vow to restructure the welfare system.
In his news conference today, Mr. Clinton did his best to anticipate -- and knock down -- Mr. Dole's efforts to claim credit for prodding him to enact welfare legislation. The President said he had been championing welfare reform ''a long time before it became a cause celebre in Washington or anyone tried to make it a partisan political issue.''
As Mr. Dole's advisers shelve their own idea for a welfare commercial, Mr. Clinton's media consultants could be heading for the editing rooms. ''I guarantee you Clinton will be doing ads on this,'' Mr. Pinkerton said. ''His ads will say he did something that five Republican Presidents including Ronald Reagan failed to do: End the welfare system as we know it -- while protecting kids.''
THE WELFARE BILL: THE CAMPAIGNThe Federal Reserve took a step today to loosen the Depression-era law that limits banks from competing in the securities business, proposing new regulations that would allow some of the largest banking companies to expand greatly the business they conduct on Wall Street.
The proposals represent a clear if limited victory for many of the nation's largest banking companies, including J. P. Morgan, Chase Manhattan, Citicorp, Bank of America and Nationsbank.
The most important change would allow the securities subsidiaries of bank holding companies to generate as much as 25 percent of their revenue from underwriting and dealing stocks and many types of bonds, up from a limit of 10 percent.
The Fed also proposed ending or scaling back some of the ''firewalls'' it had required banking companies to establish between banking and securities operations. Among the biggest changes would be easing the restrictions on sharing employees and directors and ending the ban on banks helping to market the activities of the securities subsidiary.
Banking industry executives said they expected the proposals to be adopted. The Fed requested comments from the affected industries on the revenue proposal by Sept. 30 and on the other proposals by Sept. 3. The Fed was expected to make final decisions within a matter of months.
Banks had been pushing for the rules to be eased as part of legislative changes to the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which divided up the financial industry to shield Federally insured banks from what was seen as the riskier ethos of Wall Street. But the attempt to remove the barriers in Congress broke down this spring amid feuding within the financial services industry.
Since then, banks, supported by the chairman of the House Banking Committee, Jim Leach, a Republican from Iowa, have been pressing the Fed to use its power over bank holding companies to accomplish some of the same ends.
The Fed has allowed bank holding companies to establish so-called Section 20 securities subsidiaries for the last nine years, and there are currently 39 American and foreign banks that have done so. The subsidiaries are permitted to underwrite and deal in securities that banks are otherwise barred from. Banks are permitted to trade some securities, like United States Government bonds.
''We are in total sync with the Fed on where banks need flexibility in their operations, so we commend the Fed for proposing that flexibility and doing it in such timely fashion,'' said Larry LaRocco, the managing director of the ABA Securities Association, an affiliate of the American Bankers Association, which represents the 20 big American banks with large securities operations.
''It means that some of the banks that are bumping up against the revenue limits can move forward with their underwriting activities, and it means they will no longer be hamstrung by regulations on cross-marketing and sharing employees,'' Mr. LaRocco said.
Bank executives said, however, that the Fed proposals should not slow efforts to overhaul or repeal Glass-Steagall.
''While we fully support this modest step, we think the time is long overdue for the full dismantling of the artificial constraints of the Glass-Steagall Act that are relics of markets and thinking more than 60 years old,'' said Alan S. MacDonald, Citibank's executive vice president and global head of corporate finance.
But the Securities Industry Association, which represents Wall Street firms, said that the Fed's action could undercut efforts to forge a consensus on repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act by giving big banks much of what they want.
The association said the Fed should grant only temporary relief to Section 20 subsidiaries that are reaching the regulatory limits on the amount of business they can do as a way of spurring banking companies to negotiate a legislative solution.
''While clearly there is a need for a temporary solution for those Section 20 bank affiliates that have bumped up against the current 10 percent limit based on their revenues,'' said Steve Judge, the Securities Industry Association's senior vice president for government affairs, ''for the Fed to propose allowing a generous and long-term solution, as they did today, just puts us one step back in our efforts to hammer out an approach to modernize existing Federal laws and regulations covering the financial services industry.''
In releasing its proposals, the Fed said the securities subsidiaries of the banking companies it regulates ''have operated in a safe and sound manner without adverse effects on their affiliated banks or the public, and have provided additional competition in the securities market.''
The Fed said it believed ''that this increase in the revenue limit would not give rise to the potential dangers to commercial banks from general underwriting activities that motivated Congress to enact the Glass-Steagall Act.''In a decision that refines the rules governing community notification under ''Megan's Law,'' New Jersey's Supreme Court today upheld the state's method of judging the danger posed by paroled sex offenders.
The court also ruled that prosecutors can consider unproven charges in calculating the risk each offender brings to his community after his release from prison.
But in a unanimous decision that heartened some defense lawyers, the court broadened sex offenders' rights to challenge the numerical system that the State Attorney General's office devised last fall to determine risk.
The ruling dealt exclusively with the evaluation system, called a risk assessment scale, used by New Jersey's 21 county prosecutors to classify offenders as low, moderate or high risks. The calculation determines how widely information about the offender is distributed. Details about offenders with low risks go only to the police. Schools, women's shelters, camps and youth groups are told about moderate risks. Those organizations, plus immediate neighbors, are informed of high risks.
All such notifications have been blocked by the Federal courts since mid-March pending a ruling on the constitutionality of the sex-offender law, enacted in 1994 after a 7-year-old girl, Megan Kanka, was raped and murdered in Hamilton Township. Prosecutors charged a convicted sex offender who lived across the street. He has not yet been tried.
Although the State Supreme Court upheld the law a year ago, the constitutional issue is now pending before the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Philadelphia. Since the March ban, prosecutors have been calculating the risks raised by hundreds of paroled offenders and determining the breadth of community notification they face if ''Megan's Law'' is upheld in the Federal court system.
The ruling today left intact the 13 categories in the risk-assessment scale, which include the type and frequency of assaults, the victim's age and the offender's history of drug use and response to therapy. The highest rankings are given to the seriousness and frequency of assaults.
The decision called the scale a reliable, useful and rational tool in calculating an offender's risk of committing a new crime. While it rejected the New Jersey Public Defender's contention that the system was arbitrary and therefore improper, the court did not find that it was scientific. As a result, it said for the first time that state trial court judges hearing offenders' appeals of their classifications are not bound solely by the prosecutors' ratings.
''Any classification based on the scale should not be viewed as absolute,'' said the decision, which was written by Justice Marie L. Garibaldi. It allowed the hearing judges to call in their own experts or use other ''subjective evaluations'' to determine an offender's risk.
The state's new Attorney General, Peter Verniero, praised the decision, saying it ''brings us over yet another legal hurdle.'' But the Public Defense, Susan Reisner, expressed disappointment and said the risk assessment scale remain flawed and ''fundamentally unfair.''
Another critic of the law, John Furlong, a private lawyer who represents several paroled sex offenders, said he believed the ruling was ''very favorable'' to offenders. For the first time, Mr. Furlong said, those challenging their classifications can now bring evidence about their rehabilitation and witnesses to hearings.
The ruling stemmed from the appeal of a paroled sex offender, identified only as C. A., who admitted in a plea-bargain deal in 1992 to sexually assaulting a woman. As part of the agreement, the authorities dropped a 1991 charge that he had assaulted another woman. The authorities have classified C. A. as high risk -- subject to the broadest notification -- because of the dismissed charge. Today's ruling upheld the state's use of the dropped charge in ranking C. A. as high risk.
Although the language in the law does not explicitly permit use of unproven charges in risk calculations, the court said the State Attorney General has the statutory and constitutional power to do so.
But to protect C. A.'s rights to seek a reduced risk assessment, the court said he could call the woman in the 1991 case to a court hearing to challenge the validity of her account.After nearly three decades of Republican dominance of the issue, President Clinton has scrapped his party's traditional approach to crime and criminal justice, embracing a series of punitive measures that have given him conservative credentials and threatened the Republicans' lock on law and order.
Mr. Clinton's anti-crime efforts have sprung from his willingness to set aside decades of Democratic orthodoxy that emphasized the rights of criminal defendants and to adopt attitudes more sympathetic to the rights of crime victims.
That has led him to endorse expanding the Federal death penalty, limiting death-row appeals and spending billions for prison construction. In what Republicans acknowledge was Mr. Clinton's master stroke, he translated a catchy campaign promise to give cities money to hire 100,000 new police officers into the $8.8 billion COPS program, enacted in the 1994 anti-crime bill.
Some of the President's critics and even some supporters say programs like COPS, which scatters officers through departments around the country, are politically appealing but unlikely to have much lasting impact on crime. But the COPS program has allowed Mr. Clinton to campaign on crime as a central pillar of his Presidency -- even though some Democratic aides concede he was slow to grasp the issue during his first year and got behind it only after the effort on his primary goal, overhauling the country's health-care system, began to lose steam.
As one of only a few solid legislative accomplishments in his first two years, Mr. Clinton warmed to the issue. Since then, he has signed a broad anti-terrorism bill that expands the Government's power to investigate terrorist suspects. And in the wake of the destruction of T.W.A. Flight 800 and the bombing at the Atlanta Olympics, he is seeking even broader Federal authority against terrorism.
He has issued a ''one strike, you're out'' rule for people who commit a violent crime or drug offense while living in public housing. He has praised community curfews, supported uniforms for public school students and lectured the entertainment industry about drugs and excessive violence. He signed into law a measure requiring states to notify communities when a convicted sex offender moved into a neighborhood and has endorsed in principle a constitutional amendment on victim's rights.
In his crime-fighter mode, Mr. Clinton presents himself in socially conservative tones, as an ally of law enforcement, a strict disciplinarian and a leader committed to strong families, safe schools and community values. Over all, the issue has helped define his shift to the middle of the political spectrum.
In his wake, Mr. Clinton has caused consternation in Republican ranks and in Bob Dole's campaign for the Presidency.
''We say habeas corpus, they say sure,'' one Republican expert on criminal justice said, referring to restrictions on death-row appeals. ''We say prisons; they say sure. We say more firearms prosecutions; they say sure.''
He added gloomily, ''The best Dole will probably be able to play to is a draw.''
But Mr. Clinton's success in keeping Republicans off balance has also frustrated some Democrats, primarily civil libertarians, who were especially upset by Mr. Clinton's embrace of the anti-terrorism bill, which they believe gutted a bedrock principle of constitutional law, the right of death-row inmates to appeal their convictions in Federal court.
''I have absolutely no faith that constitutional principles matter to this President when they emerge in a criminal-justice context,'' said Laura W. Murphy, the legislative director of the American Civil Liberties Union. ''There has just been a total collapse when it comes to criminal-justice issues.''
Mr. Clinton's defenders say he is making a good-faith effort to find a middle ground on an issue where ideological factionalism is the norm.
''Individual rights are an important, but not the only, component to the criminal-justice area,'' said Representative Charles E. Schumer, a Brooklyn Democrat who is an Administration ally. ''There needs to be balance, and the President and the Democrats are groping to find that balance.''
Mr. Clinton can, in fact, be ambidextrous. While embracing Republican positions, he has also turned to traditional Democratic thinking for ideas long endorsed by his party's liberal wing. For example, he has strongly advocated gun control, supporting a waiting period for buying a handgun as well as a ban on the sale of certain types of semiautomatic assault weapons.
Mr. Clinton's performance on crime seems to have paid political dividends. Fifty-four percent of those surveyed in a poll conducted by The New York Times between June 20 and June 23 said the President had made a real effort to reduce crime.
Attorney General Janet Reno sees the Administration's record on crime as a balancing of interests. ''I think it's trying to put pieces together to make an effective whole,'' she said in an interview. ''Its putting a piece here and a piece there and building and balancing punishment and prevention.''
A Careful Course After Initial Stumbles, A Steady Emphasis
Across America, crime rates have been falling in recent years. Yet crime continues to have considerable political resonance. And while battling violent crime is largely the responsibility of state and local governments and beyond the President's control, a President can nonetheless command a powerful symbolic presence as a crime-fighter,
Even Mr. Clinton's critics acknowledge that he has done just that. They express admiration for his skill in weaving anti-crime measures into his broader Presidential message, extracting political gains by identifying with the public's fears about crime. For 4 of 5 Americans, The Times poll found, those fears are more about the erosion of quality of life than about personally becoming a crime victim, and many of Mr. Clinton's crime-fighting proposals have spoken directly to such concerns.Regional legislators in Bavaria, Germany's most Catholic state, approved maverick laws today that tighten restrictions on abortion, reviving debate on an issue that, unlike the situation in the United States, had been widely viewed as settled.
The new state law conflicts sharply with federal legislation in two key areas. It requires women to give a reason for seeking to terminate pregnancy, and it sets a limit of 25 percent on the proportion of their income doctors may earn from abortions.
The law was approved after a long, fierce debate in Munich in which one legislator, Thomas Zimmermann, called a gynecologist in the public galleries a ''mass murderer of unborn life.''
The legislation drew protests from opposition parties in Bonn that labeled it unconstitutional and said it resulted from disproportionate Roman Catholic Church influence in Bavaria, where, last year, a Constitutional Court ruling forbidding the display of crucifixes in classrooms was defied.
The legislation also produced an anomaly for Chancellor Helmut Kohl, whose Christian Democratic Union supported the federal law, approved in June 1995, while its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, led the fight for Bavaria's new legislation.
It was not immediately known if the Bonn Government would challenge the new law in Germany's highest court, the Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe.
But Christine Roth, a lawyer, said at least two Bavarian doctors planned to seek a Constitutional Court ruling because doctors acting legally in the performance of abortions under federal law could be jailed for one year under Bavarian law. The opposition Social Democratic Party said it would support the doctors' action. The new law is to take effect in September.
Abortion became one of the most agonizing issues in German reunification. Communist East Germany permitted state-financed abortion on demand, while West Germany approved the procedure in a far more restrictive way.
The Parliament in Bonn sought to find a compromise between the two with legislation in 1992, which the Constitutional Court struck down one year later on the ground that it ran counter to constitutional guarantees to the protection of life.
A second compromise was approved last year, maintaining the overall unlawful status of abortion that had prevailed in the former West Germany, but setting out the conditions under which abortion would not be punished provided women sought prior medical counseling in the first three months of pregnancy.
Last year's law did not oblige women to give a reason for seeking a termination of pregnancy or place limits on doctors' income from performing abortion. It also provided for state financing of abortions among the poor.
The compromise was never fully accepted by the conservative Bavarians.
''The state has a special duty to protect the unborn child,'' said Alois Gluck, a senior Christian Social Union politician. ''Abortion is no different from murder and yet it is still not viewed as a criminal offense.''
Two opposition parties, the Social Democrats and the Greens, immediately registered opposition to the legislation and predicted that it would not endure because it contradicted both federal law and the spirit of previous Constitutional Court rulings.
''The debate is certainly not over,'' said Renate Schmidt, the Social Democratic leader in Bavaria. ''This pressure on women to give reasons for abortion is against the spirit of the Constitutional Court ruling and the federal law.''Two years after comprehensive national health insurance died in Congress, House and Senate leaders tonight announced agreement on legislation that would allow workers to take their health insurance coverage from job to job.
Supporters contend it would free 25 million to 30 million Americans who have pre-existing medical problems from fear of losing health insurance if they change jobs.
Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat who co-sponsored the bill with Senator Nancy Landon Kassebaum, a Kansas Republican, said at a news conference tonight, ''This agreement means help is now on the way to 25 million Americans.''
Mr. Kennedy said it would end ''the worst abuses of the private health insurance industry'' by providing portability and limiting exclusion for pre-existing conditions.
Mrs. Kassebaum, chairwoman of the Labor and Human Resources Committee, said: ''I'm just thrilled that we have achieved health insurance reform. It's been a long time.''
Mrs. Kassebaum, who is retiring this fall after 18 years in the Senate, said the bill ''is going to help give many millions of Americans a sense of security, that they can lose a job or leave a job without losing their insurance.''
Representative Dennis Hastert, the Illinois Republican who serves as Speaker Newt Gingrich's point man on health issues, said the agreement was proof that ''health care is so important to the American people that it can't be just a Republican bill or a Democratic bill.''
The agreement, reached after three months of wrangling over differences between House and Senate bills, provides portability by curbing exclusions from coverage because of pre-existing medical conditions.
Insurers would be barred from denying coverage because of health problems that had existed for more than 12 months. If someone had been continuously insured for that long or longer, he or she would have to be accepted immediately by his new employer's insurer, or with an individual policy and with no pre-existing exclusions.
The bill also allows creation of up to 750,000 tax-sheltered medical savings accounts, an experimental version of a market-driven program that conservative legislators demanded.
The legislation is all but assured of final passage, perhaps this week. One obstacle to quick action remains. The negotiators agreed to delete a Senate provision requiring health insurers to cover mental health problems the same as physical health. Senator Pete V. Domenici, Republican of New Mexico, attacked business for its opposition to that provision and said he would try to delay passage.
President Clinton has supported the bill for months and has promised to sign it.
''Today we have apparently achieved a long-overdue victory for the millions of Americans who live in fear of losing their health insurance when they change or lose their jobs, or because of pre-existing conditions,'' the President said this evening. ''I hope all Democrats and Republicans will work together to pass this important legislation before the Congress begins its August recess.''
After the collapse of President Clinton's 1994 effort to legislate national health insurance coverage for all Americans, leaders from both parties said they would move promptly to deal with health care issues step by step. This bill, which also includes an experiment with tax shelters for medical savings accounts, is the first fruit of those promises.
But three issues delayed agreement after the House passed its bill by a 267-to-151 vote on March 28 and the Senate followed with a 100-to-0 vote on April 23.
The most serious battle was over the tax-sheltered medical savings accounts, under which individuals can put money aside, tax free, to pay most medical costs -- while buying insurance policies with high deductibles to cover serious illnesses. The House bill allowed them; the Senate bill did not.
Supporters like Representative Bill Archer of Texas, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, contended that the accounts would give individuals greater freedom in choosing care and encourage cost-consciousness in medical care because the money could be withdrawn without penalty after the age of 65.
Opponents like Mr. Kennedy said the policies would be sold mainly to the young and the healthy, raising insurance rates for everyone else.
Ultimately they agreed to a four-year experiment, limited to 750,000 policyholders, after which Congress would decide whether to let the program expand.
That issue was settled last week, but it was not until today that aides to Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Archer, and then the two lawmakers themselves, worked out details on how to carry out the guarantee that individuals who lost their jobs would be allowed to buy private insurance policies without exclusions for pre-existing conditions.A fierce thunderstorm that lashed the metropolitan area yesterday spawned floods that immobilized hundreds of thousands of subway and commuter rail travelers and caused inconvenience from the suburbs of New Jersey to the far reaches of Brooklyn and Long Island.
The storm, which left as much as three feet of water in some parts of the subway system, caused the cancellation of service on parts of several lines as water cascaded onto tracks, disabling the electrified third rails.
The rainfall also played havoc with the midday timetables of the Long Island Rail Road and segments of the New Jersey Transit rail and bus network.
The commuter rail and bus lines had recovered completely by last evening's rush. But the Transit Authority had too much water to pump out of its tunnels and too many earlier train cancellations to make up for to avoid significant rush-hour delays.
At day's end, the multiple problems caused by the storm raised questions about whether the subway system was too vulnerable to the elements.
For one, should the Transit Authority be spending more of its limited resources on better drainage systems and pumps, or was the flooding the fault of public officials long since gone to their pensions or their graves who did not spend enough on the aging subway system? Or was it just the rain?
One meteorologist for the National Weather Service, George McKillop, termed it ''torrential, not your garden-variety thunderstorm.'' At its heaviest, the rain fell at close to three inches an hour, twice the velocity of a normal summer storm, Mr. McKillop said.
''It just came too fast,'' agreed Joseph E. Hofmann, the Transit Authority's senior vice president in charge of subways. ''We haven't had such a deluge in a short period of time in a long time.''
That was indisputable. While the Weather Service said the storm set no records, it was certainly one to tell the children about, if not the grandchildren.
And it was capricious: it left less than an inch of rain in Central Park but 3.31 inches at Kennedy International Airport and 4.34 inches near Coney Island.
The Weather Service said there was a good chance of more showers today, possibly some localized, heavy ones, though nothing like the amounts that fell yesterday from about 9 A.M. to noon.
The Transit Authority's problems yesterday were many and widespread. Many of its busiest subway lines were hobbled or knocked out altogether from about 11 A.M. to 2 P.M. The disruptions were worst in Brooklyn and Queens, the boroughs where the most rain fell.
In Brooklyn, most service on the IRT line was suspended from late morning to midafternoon. The No. 2 line from Nevins Street to Flatbush Avenue; the No. 3 from Nevins to New Lots Avenue; the No. 4 from Atlantic Avenue to Utica Avenue, and much of the N line were casualties.
So was the A line between West Fourth Street in Manhattan and Jay Street in Brooklyn, the C line between 168th Street in Manhattan and Euclid Avenue in Brooklyn, and the No. 5 from Bowling Green station in Manhattan to Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn.
Significant delays were reported on the F line in Queens between Continental Avenue and 179th Street, on the J and Z lines in Queens and lower Manhattan and the Q and R lines in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens.
A Transit Authority spokesman, Robert Slovak, said an A line train was stranded in a tunnel under the East River for about 45 minutes late in the morning because there was flooding on the rails ahead. The passengers still had lights and air-conditioning, however.
The Metro-North Commuter Railroad reported no rain-related delays, perhaps because so many miles of its rails are above ground.
But for two hours or more, the Long Island Rail Road had big trouble. Flooding along the tracks, and the occasional lightning bolt that worked mischief with the signals, forced suspension of service on the main line between Pennsylvania Station and Mineola.
That, in turn, caused suspensions on the Oyster Bay, Port Jefferson and Ronkonkoma branches, Michael Charles, a railroad spokesman, said.
High water and lightning also scuttled service on some of the Far Rockaway branch, Mr. Charles said, and a washout in East Rockaway left a four-foot hole around the tracks and halted trains on the Long Beach branch.THEY are being given time they never imagined they would have for the journey. Now all they have to figure out is where they are going.
People with AIDS whose lives are being extended through new drug therapies are hearing terms like ''chronic manageable disease'' for the first time. And many are facing decisions they once thought they might escape. Professional choices that were moot now seem pressing. Complex and expensive medical regimes loom. Nest eggs that were being spent are again being conserved for the long term.
Mostly, those taking the new drugs are trying to cope with the fact that there may be a long term. After years of preparing to die, they find that a readjustment of such magnitude is wrenching, no matter how welcome.
''For many people who are dealing with a terminal illness, death can become a major safety valve,'' said Frank Moore, 43, an artist with AIDS who divides his time between Manhattan and Deposit, N.Y., near Binghamton. ''It promises a release and a cessation of pain. On the other hand, you might find out that you're going to be fine for the indefinite future and say, 'What am I going to do now?' ''
As good as it is, such news can throw people off balance, said Dr. Robert P. Cabaj, a psychiatrist in San Francisco who specializes in AIDS-related issues. ''Suddenly, all the emotional work involved in getting ready to let go has to reverse itself,'' he added.
Carol Siporen, 50, of Alameda, Calif., believed that this would be the year of her death.
''In 1990, when I found out I had this disease and tried to judge how much longer I had, I gave myself six years,'' she said. And last year she retired on disability from a job at the Oakland (Calif.) Naval Supply Center.
But in January, Ms. Siporen began taking a combination of antiviral drugs, including a protease inhibitor, in a type of therapy that captured world attention at last month's AIDS conference in Vancouver, British Columbia. Soon, she was again able to walk up to her third-floor apartment, rather than taking the elevator; to mail letters herself instead of asking friends to mail them, and to wake up much earlier than 2 o'clock in the afternoon, the way she used to.
She even thought about going back to work. But then came reminders, like a bout with the flu, that her health was still precarious and that the reprieve might be finite. ''It threw me off the cloud,'' she said. ''I had to realize this may not be forever.''
Adam K. Sternberg, 41, an associate producer for ABC News Productions in Manhattan, began taking a protease inhibitor in March. He confessed to a feeling almost like disappointment when his carefully laid plans for the final days of life were upset. ''I've produced the trip,'' he said. ''Now they're telling me it's postponed, some would say canceled.''
That calls for new plans. Mr. Sternberg is at the point in his career when he could go all out for the next rung on the ladder: the title of producer. He feels a natural impulse to advance but fears that the increased stress and responsibility could jeopardize his health.
''Maybe it has to be enough to be an associate producer,'' he said.
Phill Wilson, 40, a resident scholar at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, said the time he had gained would change the nature of his job, assembling a social-policy archive on AIDS. Earlier this year, he had planned to jump in and accumulate material, ''letting it happen as it would happen,'' he said. Now, he is going to spend a year learning how to be an archivist first.
Other priorities remain to be sorted out. ''The choices I'd make for two or three years are one thing,'' Mr. Wilson said. ''The choices I would make over 5 to 10 years are quite different. The blessing comes with a high degree of stress.''
Stress is also weighing on Curt Sanburn, 41, who was once a reporter for Life magazine and is thinking about resuming his career as a writer. He lives in San Francisco and has received Social Security disability payments for two years, since suffering two AIDS-related illnesses.
''There seem to be a whole lot of people who are looking otherwise healthy and are on disability,'' he said. ''And I wonder when is the government or the general public going to look at that and say, 'Wait a second -- you're going to have to pull your own weight.' ''
Mr. Sanburn has also been pondering some of the personal leeway that illness afforded him. ''For a long time it gave me an excuse for a lot of things,'' he said. ''I relied on that in terms of people's patience with me.''
As he looks ahead, Mr. Sanburn worries that so little is known about the new drugs. He takes seven different medications a day, 21 pills in all. ''I can't help but think that this level of medication has some consequences,'' he said. ''I wonder whether we're going to be like walking pharmacy cabinets that aren't healthy in any normal way.''
Zahra Abdur-Rahman, an advocate for people with AIDS who lives in the Bronx, shares some of Mr. Sanburn's doubts. She is on a protease inhibitor called ritonavir and two other antiviral drugs. ''My taking ritonavir and D4T and 3TC has allowed me to be in the occupation of guinea pig,'' she said, ''because that's exactly what I feel like. The lab work looks really great, but no one can say what happens a year or two from now.''
Protease inhibitors demand discipline and caution. Ms. Abdur-Rahman suffered debilitating side effects two weeks ago when she did not take the drug on a full stomach. Because ritonavir must be kept cold, she said, she has to pack her supply in dry ice for any prolonged trip or make sure there is a refrigerator wherever she goes.The New York State Power Authority, seeking major improvements at the nuclear plants it operates in Westchester County and on the shore of Lake Ontario, said yesterday that it planned to hire a New Orleans company to manage the plants.
Under a preliminary agreement, power authority officials said the Entergy Corporation, which has won the nuclear industry's praise for its management of five plants in the South, would take over the Indian Point 3 plant in Buchanan and the James A. Fitzpatrick plant in Scriba under a five-year contract.
Officials said details of the management contract, including how much Entergy would be paid and how many of the power authority's workers would be cut, remained to be determined, pending an analysis by Entergy of the operations at the two plants. The plan requires the approval of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
At a news conference, senior executives of the power authority said the private management proposal, untested anywhere else, was necessary because of both the poor performance at Fitzpatrick and Indian Point 3, and the heightened demands expected with deregulation of the electrical utility industry.
''This alliance will help to create and save jobs in New York State by lowering the cost of electricity,'' said C. D. Rappleyea, the power authority's chairman.
But analysts responded to the plan yesterday with mixed reviews, saying it was a step toward resuscitating two nuclear plants that rank among the country's worst, as measured by safety and efficiency, but a step that may not be go far enough.
The most troubled of the plants is Indian Point 3, which was included in June by Federal regulators on a ''watch list'' of the nation's worst nuclear plants. That came less than three months after the plant reopened after a 29-month overhaul, and prompted calls by citizen groups that it be closed.
Although Fitzpatrick has performed better during the last two years, it too was included on the Federal Government's list of problem plants and taken out of service in 1992 and 1993.
On Wall Street, Michael Worms, a utility industry analyst for CS First Boston, said the management agreement with Entergy ''looks like a good fit all around.'' Citing the company's strong track record at nuclear plants in Louisiana, Arkansas and Mississippi, he said, ''There is no reason to assume that they are not up to the job'' of turning around the New York State plants.
But others said the New York power agency may simply be postponing the inevitable closing of plants that cannot compete with less costly, non-nuclear electrical power production.
''Even if major improvements are made at these two plants, they probably can't compete,'' said Ashok Gupta, an economist with the National Resources Defense Council.
The plan provoked protests from some who have been advocating for years that the Indian Point 3 plant, 35 miles north of New York City, be closed.
''How many times do you have to see that a plant is a failure before you stop pumping in public subsidies?'' asked Richard Brodsky, a Democratic State Assemblyman from Westchester County and chairman of the Assembly's Committee on Environmental Conservation.
Although New York State legislators hold no direct oversight over the power authority, he said he would call for a legislative hearing to try to find ways of blocking the contract with Entergy.
Senior executives of the power authority acknowledged yesterday that Entergy will face challenges in making improvements at the two plants, particularly because of moves toward deregulation within the electrical utility industry that have already begun to realign customers and their power suppliers.
In New York State, which has been a leader in utility industry deregulation, the state's public service commission ruled in May that electrical customers must be given complete choice over whom they buy their power from by early 1998.
That means customers can select from utilities across the state or elsewhere in the country. Although the state power authority's two nuclear plants have contracts to sell all their power to New York City, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and other government entities, as well as businesses receiving state power subsidies, they could soon be underbid by other utilities and lose business as industry deregulation takes hold.
''Being average won't be good enough in the new world of competition,'' said Robert G. Shoenberger, president of the New York Power Authority.When the steel and concrete outlines of a new four-story school began rising from the east side of Webster Avenue in August of 1991, residents of the Bedford Park section of the Bronx were hopeful that relief would soon come for their overcrowded schools.
By 1993, the year that Public School 20 was due to open, reports surfaced that the building was sinking into the landfill on which it was built.
Yesterday, the day the school was supposed to be ready again, carpenters were still drilling, hammering and cleaning, and 100 angry parents and children -- joined by elected officials, including the Bronx Borough President, Fernando Ferrer, and the City Comptroller, Alan G. Hevesi -- showed up to express their dismay at yet another delay. Officials of the city's School Construction Authority, which is building the school, have set and missed seven deadlines since construction began on the terra cotta building.
Public School 20 is intended to house 1,100 students from kindergarten through eighth grade. Community School District 10, in which the school is situated, is one of the most crowded in the city. Some of its schools have triple sessions despite many students' being bused out of the district.
In the years since the P.S. 20 project began, the cost of the project, originally estimated at $35 million, has increased to $50 million.
''We are not surprised that it is not finished today,'' Lois Harr, a parent and a director of the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition, told the crowd of angry, placard-waving parents gathered in an unfinished hallway of the school. ''The S.C.A. has wasted too much money, delayed too many schools and left too many children in overcrowded classrooms,'' Ms. Harr said.
P.S. 20 is one of four new schools in the city that are to open this fall in an attempt to help ease a critical shortage of classroom space in a city school system with more than one million students. The city's student population is expected to grow at a rate of 20,000 students a year. The new schools, along with additions to existing schools and the use of new leased space, will mean an additional 9,785 seats.
Leonard Supp, the interim president and chief executive officer of the School Construction Authority, which has undergone leadership changes in the last few months, took the megaphone from Ms. Harr to assure the skeptical crowd that the school would be ready for occupancy soon. ''This has been a problem project for us, there's no denying it,'' Mr. Supp said. ''But you can see that we are making an effort. There is no question that the last six months of progress have been remarkable, and I can assure you that this school will be ready and functional by the opening day of school.''
''Don't hold your breath,'' one man shouted from the crowd.
''Seeing is believing,'' another woman yelled.
Several parents said they did not want school officials to rush the opening of the new school if the building was not yet safe for children. They recalled that last September, officials opened Public School 15, a new school in the University Heights section of the Bronx, which also was way behind schedule, when it was not completely finished. The telephone system, for example, was not working, plywood sheets lined many unfinished hallway floors, and ventilation ducts were exposed.
Mr. Supp said in an interview yesterday that many of the P.S. 20 delays began under the original contractor, Koren-DiResta of Manhattan, which had been awarded contracts to build both schools.
Koren-DiResta's contract was terminated early in the project after it was determined that the school was sinking because the material the contractor used as landfill did not meet building codes, Mr. Supp said. He also said the company seemed to have too many other commitments to focus on the school projects.
Other contractor problems followed, he said. Most recently, a lighting contractor stopped paying his subcontractors, even though the authority was paying him, again delaying the project, he said.
But each delay has apparently chipped away at the trust that school officials have in the School Construction Authority.
''I told the S.C.A. in April, you have to make me a believer, because P.S. 15 was a disaster,'' said Irma Zardoya, the Superintendent of District 10. ''They assured me that this school would be ready today. Well, they have not made me a believer.''
Schools Chancellor Rudy Crew, who was not at the school yesterday but who is one of the three trustees of the construction authority, said in a statement that he too was concerned about the delays.
''This should not happen again,'' he said, adding that he would work ''to insure that the S.C.A. works more vigorously and effectively to accomplish the timely completion'' of new schools.
Yesterday at Public School 20, parents and their children made their way through the unfinished corridors, marveling at what appears to be the framework of a modern, streamlined building. But they shook their head at the auditorium that still has no seats, the exposed radiator pipes, wires sticking out in exterior walls where borders have yet to be applied, and the dust of construction everywhere.
''They have one month to finish it?'' asked Madeline Higgins, 16, whose younger brother and sister will be attending the school if it opens in September. ''That's very tight. I'm sorry, it's irresponsible. It should have been done three years ago.''Stepping up its fight against serious outbreaks of food poisoning, Japan's Health and Welfare Ministry decided today to invoke a century-old law that gives the Government emergency powers to set up quarantines and take other stringent steps to fight epidemics.
Government officials stressed that they had no intention of isolating people who have been infected with the bacterium, E. coli O157:H7, which causes bloody diarrhea and can lead to kidney failure and death.
However, by designating the bacterial infection as a serious communicable disease under the anti-epidemic law, the Government will be able to compel people deemed to be at risk to be tested for infection. The Government will also be able to disinfect homes and workplaces and to require people who are infected to stay away from certain jobs, like food preparation.
Nearly 9,000 people have been infected since May and 7 have died, according to Government figures. The cases have occurred throughout Japan, though the most serious outbreak was in Sakai, a city near Osaka where more than 6,000 elementary school children were sickened, presumably by contaminated school lunches. But even as they announced the sterner measures, some health officials were hopeful that the outbreaks are subsiding.
''I think we will soon have passed the peak,'' Tomohisa Shimoda, director of the health sciences division at the Ministry of Health and Welfare, said in an interview today. He warned, though, that the situation must continue to be watched closely.
The number of new cases is climbing slowly now. The number of people hospitalized nationwide has dropped to 440, from a peak of 595 on Saturday. In Sakai, the number of elementary school children in serious condition has dropped to 17, from more than 90 a week ago.
One lingering concern is that people who are infected can infect others. In addition, Sakai officials, by offering free tests, have found more than 284 people who are infected but show few or no symptoms, suggesting that there might be healthy carriers of the infection.
The national Government and some local governments, such as in Sakai, have been criticized by citizens for not reacting quickly enough when the first food-poisoning cases were reported, and the Government is now becoming more aggressive.
Still, there were concerns raised today that the invoking of the 1897 law, intended to battle epidemics like cholera and dysentery, would lead to discrimination against infected people and abuse of their rights.
''The law doesn't take much account of human rights and is concerned only with prevention,'' Health and Welfare Minister Naoto Kan was quoted as saying by Kyodo News Service. ''We must be very careful in applying the law.'' The official invoking of the law is expected as early as next week.
The bacterium, first recognized as a pathogen in the United States in 1982, lives in the intestines of cattle. Many infections are caused by under-cooked ground beef.
Japanese officials have been unable to find the source of most of the outbreaks, including the one in Sakai. But today, officials reported some clues from analysis of the genetic makeup of the bacteria. Officials said the bacteria involved in outbreaks in seven prefectures, mainly in western Japan, were genetically similar, suggesting there might be a common cause to those outbreaks. But the bacteria found in Sakai were different, suggesting a different source. There were also bacteria found that seemed genetically different from the other two groups.
Experts on the bacterial infection from the United States Government conferred today in Tokyo with Japanese authorities. The American officials had come to Kyoto over the weekend for a previously scheduled international conference.
Dr. Stephen M. Ostroph, an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told the Japanese experts that there were no ''magic bullets'' for treating the infections and noted that food products are distributed widely, so that contamination can affect a lot of people quickly. ''This is the future of food-borne disease,'' he said.Silicon Graphics Inc. said today that Thomas A. Jermoluk had resigned as president and chief operating officer, effective immediately.
Mr. Jermoluk, who is 40, will become chairman, president and chief executive of the @Home Corporation, a start-up company based in Palo Alto, Calif., that is developing technology to deliver Internet services over cable television lines. Mr. Jermoluk succeeds Will Hearst, scion of the Hearst publishing empire and a partner in the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which, along with Tele-Communications Inc., provided @Home's initial financing. He will become vice chairman of @Home.
Silicon Graphics said Edward R. McCracken, the company's chairman and chief executive, would assume Mr. Jermoluk's duties. Following its acquisition of Cray Research Inc. in March, Silicon Graphics reorganized into five separate business units, each with its own head, who will now report directly to Mr. McCracken.
Silicon Graphics also reported earnings for the fourth quarter that were stronger than expected. The company announced its earnings and the resignation after the stock market closed. In after-hours trading, shares of Silicon Graphics surged $2.50, to $26.
But analysts said the resignation of the company's president could only be a negative.
''A senior guy leaving is never good news, no matter how you couch it,'' said Doug van Dorsten, an analyst with Hambrecht & Quist. He noted that Silicon Graphics had gone through a series of difficult transitions. ''Every quarter for the last four, S.G.I. has lowered guidance,'' to the Street, he said. ''Growing at the rate they have been, at their size, is hard.''
But Mr. McCracken said that although Mr. Jermoluk would be missed, personally and professionally, the company had a new structure in place that did not require a chief operating officer.
Mr. Jermoluk said in a telephone interview that Silicon Graphics had simply grown too large for the kind of hands-on management he preferred. With just 100 employees, and no products or profits at this time, @Home presented an opportunity to be directly involved, he said.
''When I started with S.G.I. 10 years ago, we were a little start-up and I was an engineer and I had a lot of fun doing that,'' Mr. Jermoluk said. ''I really enjoy having a small band of bright people when you can personally understand what each one needs to do.''
COMPANY REPORTSTelevision stations and newspapers do not usually identify someone connected with a crime until the authorities have spoken on the record about their suspicions, or until the person has been arraigned, arrested or taken into custody.
But the name and face of Richard A. Jewell, a 33-year-old security guard in Atlanta, were inescapable even before the authorities had set up camp outside his apartment.
On Tuesday evening, Mr. Jewell's face dominated television newscasts; yesterday morning his name was on the front pages of newspapers from coast to coast as a suspect in the bombing that killed a Georgia woman and wounded 111 people at Centennial Olympic Park.
In a dozen interviews yesterday with producers and editors at various news organizations, it became clear that their nearly unanimous decision to report unnamed law-enforcement officials' suspicions about Mr. Jewell was in most cases accompanied by a vigorous wringing of hands.
The decisions of many news executives boiled down to this: So many people had already been informed that Mr. Jewell was a suspect, or would soon be, that there was no sense in avoiding or suppressing this news.
The events raise important questions about the ability and inclination of news organizations to act responsibly when a news event sets off intense competition, said media experts, producers and editors.
''It's a worrisome thing,'' said Ed Turner, executive vice president of the Cable News Network, which instantly broadcast a report about Mr. Jewell by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in a special edition on Tuesday afternoon. The news that Mr. Jewell was a suspect was thus put into the public domain.
''He's going to have one hell of a time living a normal life if he is innocent,'' Mr. Turner said. ''We were damn sure concerned that the writers and editors emphasized the suspect element, but I'm not sure that's altogether cleansing.''
Jim Naughton, the president of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, said news decisions were made so quickly today -- and in a business environment rendered all the more competitive by cable news and the Internet -- that it was growing more difficult to adhere to the most clear-cut ethical standards.
''I'm from the old school: You don't accuse someone of a crime until you have pretty good reason to do so,'' Mr. Naughton said. ''I don't know that this guy did it, and we ought to all be troubled by that possibility.''
Rochelle Bozman, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's assistant metropolitan editor in charge of coverage of Olympic security, said one factor that cinched the newspaper's publication of the news was that talk about Mr. Jewell as a suspect had become so widespread among Atlanta police officers that it was seeping into the public.
''The information was out there,'' Ms. Bozman said. Yet she acknowledged that the newspaper's report, which lacked the names the officials who identified Mr. Jewell as a suspect, was unusual, and she confessed to competitive concerns.
''If the Atlanta Police Department knows about it, local TV stations know about it, and we're going to be sitting here with egg on our faces,'' she said. ''I was emphatic about not getting beat on this story.''
Mr. Turner said that CNN was getting its same report ready even before the special edition of The Journal-Constitution was distributed, and that executives were debating how and when to report it. Once The Journal-Constitution special edition appeared, the network rushed its report directly onto the air, naming the newspaper as a source until CNN reporters had their own confirmation from the Federal Bureau of Investigation that Mr. Jewell was a suspect.
The producers at the ABC News program ''Nightline,'' watching the news gather momentum, decided to devote the half-hour program to the suspicions about Mr. Jewell.
''At first, there was a huge discussion,'' said Tom Bettag, the program's executive producer. ''But the momentum of the story was such that by the time we got to air, it was not that tough a call.''
At The Chicago Tribune, the top editors were pondering what to do. The news about Mr. Jewell came to them on CNN and the Associated Press wire in the middle of their front-page meeting, said Bill Parker, a senior news editor, and they soon decided that the report should go on the front page.
But discussions of precisely where on that page it should be presented, and how cautiously it should be written, Mr. Parker said, were myriad and prolonged.
''There were gnawing concerns,'' he said. ''Why hadn't they arrested him, why didn't they charge him, why didn't they hold him?''
The Tribune decided to print the report at the top of page one, naming Mr. Jewell, because, Mr. Parker said, ''The story was already so loudly broadcast and ubiquitous.''The United States and Saudi Arabia agreed today to split the estimated $200 million cost of moving nearly 4,000 American soldiers stationed in Saudi Arabia to other bases to protect them from terrorist attacks.
The agreement, reached during talks in Saudi Arabia this week between Defense Secretary William J. Perry and his Saudi counterpart, was prompted by a bombing last month in eastern Saudi Arabia that killed 19 American servicemen.
Under the agreement, about 4,000 of the 5,000 American troops stationed in Saudi Arabia will be moved to an isolated air base at Al Kharj, about 50 miles southeast of Riyadh, the capital.
They will include virtually all the 2,500 Americans who had been living near Dhahran in an apartment complex known as Khobar Towers, the site of the bombing on June 25. Many of the nearly 1,500 troops stationed in Riyadh will also be moved. Five Americans and two Indians were killed in a bombing last November of an American-run military training center there.
''Some of the moves have already started,'' Kenneth Bacon, the Defense Department spokesman, said in announcing the agreement today. ''We anticipate that we will start moving tents down to Al Kharj in a week or so.''
Defense Department officials said that Secretary Perry did not formally announce his trip to Saudi Arabia in advance in the hope of preventing any public dispute between the countries over who would pay for the redeployment.
A Pentagon official said that the negotiations between Mr. Perry and the Saudi Defense Minister, Prince Sultan bin Abd al-Aziz al-Saud, conducted in the western Saudi seaport of Jidda, had gone well, and that the Saudis ''did not put up a fuss'' when asked to share the cost, which would include the construction of housing for the American troops.
''Prince Sultan pledged his full support for the enhanced security measures,'' the Governments of the United States and Saudi Arabia said in a joint statement released in Washington. ''These moves will be initiated immediately and completed on an urgent basis, without interrupting ongoing operations.''
In a separate statement released at the White House, President Clinton said the agreement highlighted a strong spirit of cooperation between the United States and Saudi Arabia. ''These bonds of friendship will not be broken by terrorism in any form,'' the President said.
Two weeks ago, Mr. Perry announced ''dramatic changes'' in security measures to protect the nearly 20,000 American troops in Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Middle East from terrorist threats. Pentagon officials said Mr. Perry wanted to act quickly because of intelligence reports suggesting that another terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia was likely.
Most of the Americans stationed in Saudi Arabia are assigned to the air base in Dhahran and are involved in enforcing the no-flight zone imposed after the 1991 war in the Persian Gulf on southern Iraq to protect anti-Government groups there. The operation, which includes British and French troops, will now be moved to the sprawling air base at Al Kharj.
Defense Department officials said a small contingent of American troops would remain in Dhahran, assigned to batteries of Patriot ground-to-air missiles, used during the gulf war to defend the King Abdul Aziz Air Base there from attack by Iraqi Scud missiles. The Americans will be housed on the base.
During his visit to Saudi Arabia this week, Mr. Perry inspected the Al Kharj base. Pentagon officials said they were planning a large-scale construction project at the base, which was used by the United States Air Force during the gulf war, in order to provide housing for the thousands of Americans who will arrive later this year.
Mr. Perry flew from Saudi Arabia to Kuwait, where he visited American troops stationed in the emirate and met with the Emir, Sheik Jabir al-Ahmed al-Sabah.
The official Kuwait News Agency reported today that Mr. Perry had said American troops in Kuwait were ''very, very well protected, and there is no reason to move them from this area for protection reasons.'' American troops have been stationed there since they forced out the Iraqi military in 1991.EMANUEL STERN understands perfectly the sociological process that has made possible his dream of building the first hotel in SoHo in a century.
''Artists constantly stake out underutilized real estate on the fringes, and by doing so are a cultural vanguard,'' he said. ''They come in and make it attractive -- and then the blue suits come in.''
Mr. Stern, 33, is enough the wry post-modern hotelier to acknowledge that, as the developer of the SoHo Grand Hotel, which is to open on Sunday at 310 West Broadway, between Grand and Canal Streets, he himself is a blue suit. In the eyes of many neighbors, he understands, he is a Visigoth from New Jersey, the latest despoiler of an artsy Eden that has become choked with camcorder-wielding tourists.
The construction of the 15-story hotel in a neighborhood of mostly five- and six-story buildings inspired more than the usual community opposition, including lawsuits, the wrath of the local City Councilwoman and a protest march at last year's groundbreaking.
But Mr. Stern, the son of Leonard Stern of Hartz Mountain Industries, which owns The Village Voice and millions of square feet of real estate in the Jersey Meadowlands, insists he is a different kind of blue suit.
Rather than build a cookie-cutter hotel and turn it over to a chain like Ramada, he has worked to create a stylish, affordable hotel in the mold of midtown's Royalton or Paramount, complete with a restaurant that will play techno chill-out music and an interior that reflects the famous cast-iron architecture of the neighborhood.
SoHo's industrial past is evoked at the entrance by a metal staircase embedded with bottle glass of the kind once used to light workshops below street level. In the guest rooms, desks are inspired by drafting tables and night tables resemble sculptors' stands. Even the mini-bar munchies have been chosen to match the sensibilities of a certain anticipated guest: Terra Chips, nonfat popcorn and, for those bleary downtown mornings-after, a vitamin pack.
The hotel interior is the work of William Sofield, a former partner of Aero Studios, whose previous projects included a David Barton gym and a Giorgio Armani store.
Mr. Stern seems to be counting on a chic atmosphere to distract guests from the eyesore of a parking lot across West Broadway and the smog of Canal Street, in one of SoHo's least charming enclaves. The seeds of the present hotel were in an earlier design for a youth hostel, and some might say that it shows. The red-brick building, designed by David Helpern, resembles a New York University dormitory.
Technically, the hotel is just outside the SoHo-Cast Iron Historic District, which is why the developer was able to build such a big structure, with 367 rooms.
''This will act as a magnet to extend SoHo down to its natural boundary,'' Mr. Stern said. ''It's just a matter of time before stores start to develop around here.''
That is precisely what some area residents fear. SoHo artists, many of whom acquired their lofts years ago for a song, are adamantly opposed to development that makes the streets noisier, more crowded and, heaven forbid, reminiscent of a mall.
The American Fine Arts Company, which is within view of the hotel, has mounted a show called ''SoHo So Long,'' for which the gallery's window is soaped over and adorned with a parody sign announcing the coming of an Old Navy store.
''I see the hotel as another advance down the slippery slope of change in character for the neighborhood,'' said Kathryn E. Freed, the City Council member for SoHo. She conjures up a vision of a SoHo Apocalypse in which the neighborhood is overrun by shops peddling T-shirts and Elvis on velvet.
But others welcome the hotel. Jeffrey Deitch, an art dealer, bought an old lumberyard facing the hotel in June and plans to open an exhibition space.
''For me the opportunity to have a gallery right opposite this hotel, where I think many people from the art world, fashion world and publishing are going to stay, is a tremendous advantage, and I'm just delighted,'' Mr. Deitch said. ''There is no good hotel downtown that has any style. Basically, the art world goes to the Gramercy Park Hotel, which is quite rundown.''
Many of the scourges predicted by hotel opponents seem improbable. A year ago, there was speculation that the hotel would be used by prostitutes from Canal Street and by bus tours booked by Chinatown travel agents.
It seems unlikely that either clientele would feel at home with the ''dog bar'' in a 17th-century French stone basin at the front door, or in the minimalist Canal House restaurant, whose chef, David Shack, was formerly at the Sign of the Dove.
Mr. Stern said he has already signed contracts for 30,000 room nights with corporate clients from Wall Street, fashion and Hollywood. ''I've gone after modeling, fashion and entertainment,'' he said. ''I want to have the right mix.''
With such talk, he sounds as much like a club promoter as a developer. Some wonder if his entry into the world of boutique hotels was planned as a way to raise his social profile, to vault into the ranks of celebrity-schmoozing hoteliers like Ian Schrager, owner of the Royalton, and Andre Balazs, who for years has been trying to open a rival SoHo hotel.When President Clinton and a dozen of his top advisers sat down in the Cabinet Room to discuss the welfare bill this morning, everyone knew he faced the biggest domestic decision of his Presidency. Though they were prepared to close ranks behind him, the President's advisers knew this was their last chance to be heard on an issue on which there was no middle ground left.
By turns they spoke and their leader listened. But as he often does, Mr. Clinton ended the two-and-a-half-hour meeting without tipping his hand. Instead, he repaired to the Oval Office with Vice President Al Gore, who aides said encourged the President to sign the bill, and his chief of staff, Leon E. Panetta, who urged a veto.
About 15 minutes later, Mr. Panetta emerged to order speechwriters to finish the draft announcing a ''yes.''
The bustle of those few moments capped years of work on the issue by Mr. Clinton, months of legislative back-and-forth with the Republican-controlled Congress and thousands of hours of wrenching policy debate within the Administration itself. And as Mr. Clinton stepped to the lectern to make his announcement, he did so not only with an air of pride in having helped shape the debate, but of clear trepidation about its result.
''I think we all have to admit here, we all need a certain level of humility today,'' Mr. Clinton said. ''If this were an easy question, we wouldn't have had the two-and-a-half-hour discussion with my advisers today and we'd all have a lot more answers than we do. But I'm convinced that we're moving in the right direction. I'm convinced it's an opportunity we should seize.''
That was the official line at the White House today, and no sooner had Mr. Clinton finished talking than the most forceful opponent of the bill in the meeting, Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna E. Shalala, and its most articulate defender, the domestic policy adviser Bruce Reed, joined together to repeat it to reporters.
But Ms. Shalala was uncustomarily flustered. At one point she rebutted criticism from a fellow Democrat, Representative Charles B. Rangel of New York, by referring to him as ''my good friend Charlie Brown.''
Unofficially, emotions ran high, and were complex.
''Oh, I don't know,'' one Presidential aide mused a bit wistfully when asked about the White House mood. ''You know, there are a lot of liberals around here.''
Hillary Rodham Clinton, a former board chairman of the Children's Defense Fund, which has bitterly opposed the bill, was at the Olympics in Atlanta, and her chief of staff, Maggie Williams, who usually represents her at such gatherings, did not even attend the final meeting.
The debate arrayed advisers like Mr. Panetta, George Stephanopoulos and Harold M. Ickes, who favored branding the bill extreme, against Dick Morris, the President's political adviser, Mr. Reed and Rahm Emmanuel, a political aide who led the charge to sign it as a way of delivering on Mr. Clinton's 1992 promise to ''end welfare as we know it.''
In the end, aides insisted, it was not politics that was uppermost on the President's mind today, but history. ''It's a big deal,'' Mr. Stephanopoulos said. ''I think everybody was leavened by the sense of historical moment. Everybody knew how big this was.''
Another White House aide said that seven-eighths of the final discussion involved policy, and that when talk turned to politics at the end, Mr. Clinton said he was confident that he could win either way. Indeed, several other aides said that while Mr. Clinton would have doubtless suffered a 5- or 6-point drop in the polls because the public so favors welfare reform, he could have made a strong case that he vetoed the Republican bill for the same reasons that he vetoed earlier plans to cut growth in Medicare spending: it was too extreme.
How Mr. Clinton went from proposing a welfare plan that would have added about $10 billion more in spending on the poor to embracing one that would cut about $55 billion during the next six years is a tale of missed opportunies and electoral realities. More than anything, it reflects the seismic shifts in the political landscape unleashed first by his own pledge to end welfare, and then by the backlash at his attempt to overhaul the health care system two years ago, which helped put the Republicans in charge of Congress, with far harsher proposals than his own.
Having got the welfare ball rolling, aides said, Mr. Clinton simply felt that he could not walk away from the issue, especially after the Republicans softened some of the bill's sharpest provisions in recent days.
''I think he really thinks the stars don't align that often, and we were going to lose the opportunity,'' said one adviser who opposed the bill.
Mr. Clinton himself acknowledged today that ''there was significant disagreement among my advisers about whether this bill should be signed or vetoed.
''But,'' he added, ''100 percent of them recognized the power of the arguments on the other side.
''It was a very moving thing,'' Mr. Clinton said. ''And today the conversation was almost 100 percent about the merits of the bill and not the political implications of it, because I think those things are very hard to calculate anyway. I think they're virtually impossible.''
Still, political arguments on the issue divided a White House not marked for its unity in the first place. In recent days, as it became clearer which way Mr. Clinton was leaning, the ranks of those arguing for a veto dwindled, but both sides arrayed their arguments for one last seminar this morning as Mr. Clinton asked detailed questions about the bill, and particularly whether the bill's work incentives would work.Under sharp cross-examination by the defense in the trial of three men accused of plotting to blow up American jetliners in Asia, a Philippine police official conceded yesterday that one of the defendants had been jailed in Manila without having been arrested, advised of his rights or arraigned before a judge, as Philippine law requires.
The official, Alex Paul Monteagudo, the head of a police counter-intelligence unit in Manila, also conceded that the unit had searched the apartment of the defendant, Wali Khan Amin Shah, without a warrant, and that items seized there had not been subjected to forensic analysis.
The cross-examination came after prosecutors focused this week for the first time on Mr. Shah, who has been a peripheral defendant since the trial got under way two months ago in Federal court in Manhattan. Most of the evidence has pointed to the other men, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef and Abdul Hakim Murad, who prosecutors say used Manila as the base to prepare for attacks on a dozen jetliners early last year. Mr. Yousef is to stand trial later on separate charges that he masterminded the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993.
Mr. Shah's lawyer, David S. Greenfield, hammered away yesterday at testimony by Superintendent Monteagudo, who on Tuesday described taking Mr. Shah into custody nearly five days after investigators say Mr. Murad was caught and Mr. Yousef fled. The superintendent told of finding seven foreign passports and other papers on Mr. Shah and in an apartment that he shared with a Filipina woman in Manila.
Mr. Greenfield suggested that some of the papers seized in Mr. Shah's apartment -- including recent receipts for a television table and other home furnishings -- did not indicate a terrorist on the run.
So far, the case against Mr. Shah has been tied primarily to two cellular telephone calls that investigators say he made to Mr. Yousef before and after a device that the authorities say was a practice bomb exploded in a Manila movie theater, and to a photograph of Mr. Shah scanned into Mr. Yousef's laptop computer.
The computer, which prosecutors say contained details of a plan to blow up American jetliners, was found on Jan. 7, 1995, in a apartment where the Philippine police say Mr. Yousef and Mr. Murad were mixing explosives. Mr. Shah was not picked up until Jan. 11.
By attacking the veracity of the Philippine police, who have provided the central evidence against the three defendants, defense lawyers hope to persuade the jury that the Philippine investigation went beyond the law and may have been subject to tampering.Like millions of Americans, I am pro-Dole and pro-choice. I am pro-Dole, because of a conviction that America needs Bob Dole's strong character, personal courage and moral leadership. I am pro-choice because of a fundamental belief that no government should have the power to coerce a woman to make so personal a decision against her will or beliefs. Keeping government out of a decision that should be made instead by a woman with her family, doctor and pastor, priest or rabbi is consistent with the heritage of a nation founded by people fleeing intrusive governments and with the conservative traditions of a political party committed to limiting the scope of government.
The Republican Party should reconsider its platform language on abortion. The current plank calls for a constitutional amendment that would deprive women of the right to an abortion under absolutely any circumstances. It does not even reflect the views of the man our party will nominate in San Diego. Bob Dole supports the right to abortion in cases of rape, incest or when a woman's life is in jeopardy.
But the constitutional amendment proposed by the 1992 Republican platform would not permit these exceptions. Even many conscientiously pro-life Republicans concede that such an amendment has no chance of being enacted because it is overwhelmingly unpopular.
In no way am I suggesting that any pro-life Republicans should abandon their firmly held convictions. But I respectfully suggest that their goal of significantly reducing abortions -- a goal I and many pro-choice Republicans share (being pro-choice does not mean being pro-abortion) -- could be far better achieved by means other than a plank advocating a constitutional amendment that will never happen.
Mr. Dole and the Republican Party should offer a realistic plan to reduce unwanted pregnancies, which last year resulted in a shocking 1.6 million abortions in America. The primary role and responsibility, of course, belongs to parents. Government cannot replace parental guidance but it can reinforce it in several ways.
If Republicans in San Diego are to have a plank on abortion, then let us -- while respecting our differences -- see whether we can agree on an approach that holds the promise of preventing abortions more effectively, without infringing on the right of every citizen to be free of government intrusiveness.
I propose that Republicans replace our existing language with a ''personal responsibility plank'' that acknowledges our reverence for life and our belief that the traditional nuclear family is the best way to provide children with the love, moral values and the sense of duty that all children need to become responsible adults. The language must also acknowledge that a decline in abortions will be far better achieved by persuading individuals to choose -- as a matter of individual conscience -- behavior that will not produce unwanted pregnancies.
That means teaching children premarital abstinence. It also means making it clear that men and women who are unprepared for parenthood should practice effective contraception. Government must encourage abstinence among young people, and contraception among adults unwilling or unable to accept the responsibility of parenthood.
We must vigorously prosecute statutory rape, enforce payment of child support, reform laws that reward irresponsible behavior and otherwise create strong disincentives for irresponsible sexual behavior. For children who lack the love and guidance of a responsible parent, government should promote adoption or encourage the influence of an adult mentor.
All Republicans, whether conscientiously pro-life or pro-choice, should be able to agree on and accept these proposals.
Pete Wilson is Governor of California.Through four years of war, the people of Sarajevo prided themselves on their solidarity. They picked up their dead from the streets, they embraced the wounded, they grieved in cathedrals, churches and mosques.
But now, as the city adjusts to peace, that bond has worn thin, say some who were left gravely wounded or paralyzed by the war. For the most part they are treated like outcasts, left in institutions or at home without help.
Faruk Sabanovic, 21, who was felled by a sniper on a street in central Sarajevo last year, must now use a wheelchair. From his seat, he is trying to jolt his city into understanding that it should live up to its reputation as a pluralistic society by accepting rather than excluding those permanently afflicted by the war.
''It's strange,'' said Mr. Sabanovic, a paraplegic who slaloms along the rutted sidewalks or down the streets, going about his business in his Quickie, a state-of-the-art, lightweight wheelchair. ''I was walking normally like anybody else. A few days after I was wounded, I was meeting the same people, and they treated me differently. There's something in people's minds that makes them think because we are in wheelchairs, we are weird.''
A one-year conscript in the Bosnian Army who was a civilian when he was shot, Mr. Sabanovic, a former physics student, says he feels anything but weird. Life in a wheelchair can be good, he says with a soft smile.
The shooting of Mr. Sabanovic was more dramatic than others. It was filmed by a cameraman who also captured on video a nearby United Nations peacekeeper doing nothing to help as Mr. Sabanovic lay limp on the ground. His case caught the attention of the International Rescue Committee, an American organization, which helped him seek treatment in the United States.
Mr. Sabanovic was told by doctors in New York that he would not be able to walk again, but he received treatment at the Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation in New Jersey, where the actor Christopher Reeve was treated after an equestrian accident left him a quadriplegic. Since then Mr. Sabanovic has become a one-person advocacy campaign for people disabled by the war.
Nobody is quite sure how many paraplegics there are in Bosnia as a result of the war. The Rescue Committee estimates there are about 250 paraplegics, and more than a thousand people in wheelchairs in Sarajevo. Many more are scattered around Bosnia.
About one-quarter of Sarajevo's population was wounded in the war, said Mark Bartolini, the project director of the committee here. Most have recovered and are able to resume the lives they led before.
But those who have not recovered have received scant attention from the Government. Before the war, people like Mr. Sabanovic were kept in hospitals or even warehoused in mental institutions, a common practice in Central Europe under Communism. Attempts to break down such attitudes in the medical profession, and in society, now that there are many more paraplegics have been slow, Mr. Bartolini said.
Financial support is meager. Wounded war veterans, who receive the most generous benefits, get a monthly stipend of about $50. They are also supposed to be provided with housing. Mr. Sabanovic, because of the year he operated a mine sweeper in the army, was awarded an apartment three months ago, but he cannot live there because it needs extensive reconstruction, including a ramp so he can get in the front door. For now, he remains in a four-bed room at the paraplegic center at Kosevo Hospital.
Civilians disabled during the war receive much less than veterans.
Sefika Skorupan, whose spinal cord was injured three years ago by shrapnel and was back in the paraplegic center for treatment, said she was entitled to $10 a month, a can of meat and a kilo of sugar.
Mrs. Skorupan, 29, who keeps her upper body in shape by lifting weights, said she was luckier than most: her husband was very supportive. But other disabled women she talks to on an informal telephone network face life alone. ''One woman has not been down in the city since 1992,'' she said. ''She lives up on a hill, doesn't have a car, and her husband ignores her.''
Mr. Sabanovic said the last thing people in wheelchairs need is pity -- like that offered by the Government War Veterans Association, which recently held a lunch, took pictures and offered platitudes. ''Nobody cares about the problem, and like any other government, they are trying to avoid support,'' said Mr. Sabanovic.
So he persuaded the central post office that a wheelchair ramp was needed. With $10,000 from the Rescue Committee, the ramp, Sarajevo's first wheelchair access, was completed this month.
He has applied for funds to install wheelchair ramps as part of the reconstruction of the university's school of physics, where he was a student, and he plans to campaign for similar access as other buildings are patched together.
His next step will be to open an information center to teach paraplegics and others in wheelchairs concepts of self-reliance that are considered basic in the West. These include how to change jobs to a career that is compatible to life in a wheelchair. Mr. Sabanovic is trying to decide, for example, whether to go back to physics, concentrate on his love of music and film, or study social services.
In the New Jersey recuperation center, Mr. Sabanovic said, he learned that life in a wheelchair offers zest and promise. ''That's what I'm trying to make here,'' he said, spinning around so that the inscription on the back of his T-shirt became clear. It read: ''You may say I'm a dreamer.''President Clinton's decision yesterday to transform the nation's welfare system left both local officials and welfare advocates gasping at the enormous new costs of public assistance they say will have to be borne by city and state taxpayers.
Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and his staff, who unsuccessfully lobbied the White House for weeks and all day yesterday against the welfare bill that the President decided to sign, said that by 2002, the bill could add as much as $720 million in new costs to the city's $31 billion-plus annual budget. State officials also predicted hundreds of millions in new welfare costs, although they could not confirm an estimate by Senate Democrats in Washington that New York State would receive $1.3 billion less because of the bill.
The main reason for the new costs, state and city officials said, is a provision unusual to the New York State Constitution that requires the state to provide for the ''aid, care and support of the needy,'' as determined by the State Legislature. Because the new welfare bill would deny some benefits to legal immigrants and impose five-year lifetime limits on assistance to adults, the state and the city would have to replace the lost assistance in many cases, the officials said.
''This is going to cost the city of New York a good deal,'' Mr. Giuliani, a Republican often at odds with his party on welfare and immigration issues, said at a City Hall news conference. ''The State Constitution has its own provisions regarding care for the needy, so the state and city would have to make up that difference. And because the city of New York is really just a better place than a lot of other places in terms of caring for people and understanding the worth of human beings.''
City officials said they had heard no discussion of changing the constitutional provisions -- an extremely cumbersome, multiyear process -- but noted that determinations of who is needy and what amount constitutes minimal state support could well wind up in court.
In general, they said, it was still too early for the city to know how it plans to deal with the new welfare landscape.
Local welfare advocates, who have often been at odds with Mr. Giuliani over his initiatives that have removed 155,000 people from the wel fare rolls and put many welfare recipients to work, said they agreed with the Mayor that the State Constitution continued to obligate the city to cover those who would otherwise be thrown off welfare rolls because of the national bill. But they were far less confident that the state and the city would pick up the new costs without a fight.
''The impact on people in the city will be beyond what anyone has attempted to think about,'' said Liz Krueger, associate director of the Community Food Resource Center, an advocacy group. ''This will give the state free rein to cut enormous amounts of state money in addition to the Federal cuts.''
Gov. George E. Pataki said yesterday that he was pleased with a number of elements in the bill, particularly the five-year time limits and the requirements that half of welfare recipients work for their benefits by the year 2002. The Governor has himself proposed five-year time limits on the main welfare program for families, but has been blocked by the Democratic-controlled State Assembly.
Mr. Pataki, however, said he opposed the provisions that cut off welfare and Medicaid benefits to many legal immigrants, which he said would cost the state ''hundreds of millions.''
City officials were far less sanguine. With one million residents on public assistance, New York City would be hit harder by the bill than any other American city, and local officials said they had no idea where the additional money would be found in an already strapped budget.
Richard Schwartz, a senior adviser to Mr. Giuliani on welfare policy, said the bill failed to provide enough money to pay for child care when parents are required to work for their benefits. That alone would cost the city $380 million a year, he said.
In addition, the city's cost of creating new jobs for workfare participants could be $100 million a year, he said, and once the time limits are imposed in 2002, the city would have to pay $108 million a year for those removed from the rolls but still considered needy.
''This version of welfare reform shifts significant costs to cities and states,'' Mr. Schwartz said. ''This will be especially onerous for a state like New York, which already receives far less from the Federal Government than it sends in each year.''
Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the New York Democrat, who plans to vote against the bill, said that under the new welfare system, the state would lose $1.3 billion in the first year in Federal money for welfare and Medicaid. He said it was clear that the state and its localities would never be able to make that up.
''That is not going to happen,'' he said. ''They can't find the money.''
Because no other state has a constitutional provision quite like that in New York, there was less concern elsewhere in the region about the impact of the bill.
In Connecticut, Gov. John G. Rowland, a Republican, said, ''Better late than never,'' when asked about the President's decision.
He said the new law would allow him to enact two provisions that had previously been blocked by the Clinton Administration: a two-tiered system of benefits that would pay welfare applicants who have lived in the state less than one year 90 percent of what long-term residents would receive, and a significant cut in the overall monthly benefit to all recipients.
He said the new flexibility would compensate for any decline in Federal aid.The fiery ending of T.W.A. Flight 800 cast a harsh light into various corners of the aviation business. But some key data for investigating the disaster came from a tiny industry niche here that the National Transportation Safety Board never knew existed.
The morning after the July 17 disaster, John R. Keller called directory assistance and asked for the New York City headquarters of the F.B.I. ''I have a radar map of the accident,'' Mr. Keller told the agent who answered the phone.
Mr. Keller is vice president of engineering for the Megadata Corporation, which was able to provide air-traffic records of the seconds before and after the Paris-bound Boeing 747 disappeared from radar screens more quickly and flexibly than the Federal Aviation Administration could.
The data helped investigators determine which other aircraft in the vicinity had the clearest eyewitness view of the disaster and its immediate aftermath.
Tiny Megadata's role in the investigation highlights a chink in air-to-ground communications that is not widely recognized by the public but is apparent enough to some airline and airport officials, and the company has been able to make a business of plugging the gap.
Clients include United Airlines, which uses Megadata's technology to coordinate ground crews in five cities during the last few minutes of incoming flights -- a period when the F.A.A. limits communications with planes to essential conversations between cockpit and controllers.
Other Megadata clients include airports -- though none in metropolitan New York -- whose managers need to know which planes were where and when should disputes arise over noise violations and the like.
In essence, Megadata, based in an industrial park near Long Island MacArthur Airport, produces a $250,000 system that eavesdrops on radio transmissions between the F.A.A. and commercial airplanes.
Using computers and software more advanced than anything available to Federal air controllers, the Megadata system massages information and converts it to an instant, real-time view of all aircraft and their flight paths within a 150-mile radius. A data base is able to instantly reproduce air-traffic records that might take the F.A.A. days to compile.
''It's a completely clandestine operation; they don't even know we're there,'' said George B. Litchford, an engineer who holds the system's patent. Mr. Litchford has been licensing the technology to Megadata since 1989. Megadata is thought to be the only company in this business so far. It is hardly a gold-mine business. Megadata, whose stock is thinly traded on the OTC Bulletin Board, has revenue of less than $2 million a year from a range of communications products, and it lost money last year. The shares closed at 50 cents today, down 37.5 cents each, after spiking upward Tuesday on word of the company's involvement in the plane-crash investigation.
Though the National Transportation Safety Board was unaware of Megadata's existence before the crash, the F.A.A. has known about the company but typically ignored it.
Megadata's services may be useful to airlines for efficiently moving people on the ground, said Bill Jeffers, the F.A.A.'s director of air traffic. But ''it doesn't have to do with the safe and efficient movement of aircraft,'' which Mr. Jeffers said was his agency's concern.
Yet, in the case of the T.W.A. crash, Megadata's records proved invaluable to Federal officials.
After Mr. Keller's phone call, safety board investigators and agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation went to Megadata's office to view charts and determine what other aircraft were in position to see the final moments of Flight 800. Eyewitness reports are considered by aviation experts to be extremely unreliable, and the Megadata information helped establish whether the other pilots were in positions to see what they claimed to see.
Based on scans from an F.A.A. radar in Riverhead, L.I., Megadata's charts showed that two aircraft -- an Air National Guard helicopter and airplane -- were indeed in position to have seen the fireball.
F.A.A. radar systems of the type used in Riverhead send out pulses of energy that are reflected off metal objects in the sky, creating blips on a screen. The systems also send out electronic queries, asking the identity and altitude of planes with transponders -- special radios that can respond to F.A.A. queries by emitting electronic identification codes a millionth of a second later.
Subtracting that microsecond and dividing by the speed of light, the F.A.A. knows the range, or how far away the plane is. By keeping track of precisely where the circular-scan radar beam is pointed when it asks the question, the F.A.A. knows the direction, or bearing, of the aircraft.
The system tracks only signals emitted by aircraft; it does not recognize small planes that have no transponders, or other objects in the sky. It would not have seen a missile.
Megadata's system simply eavesdrops. The main components are a receive-only antenna about 5 feet high, which can be miles from the nearest airport, and a work station to process the data.
Though the company is searching for more customers, the reason clients have been willing to pay the price for a Megadata system can be traced to the tight F.A.A. strictures on air-to-ground communications.An Ohio state court yesterday upheld the constitutionality of a program based in Cleveland that allows students to use public money to pay for private and religious schooling, handing a major victory to school choice supporters.
If upheld, the ruling could make Ohio the first state to allow parents to use government-issued vouchers to pay for their children's tuition at private religious schools. The country's only other voucher program, a six-year-old initiative in Milwaukee, still awaits a court ruling on whether the vouchers can be applied not just to private, but also to religious schools.
The Ohio ruling by Judge Lisa L. Sadler of the Franklin County Common Pleas Court, was being closely watched by school, parent, religious and rights groups. Any ruling in the case, however, is expected to be appealed as high as the United States Supreme Court.
Judge Sadler's ruling was welcomed yesterday by educational and some religious groups that support vouchers as an important alternative to public education.
''This decision is a huge victory for school choice and a major breakthrough for the hopes and opportunities for low-income children,'' Clint Bolick, litigation director of the Institute for Justice, in Washington, said in a statement. The institute has helped defend the program.
The Ohio program opens the way for about 1,500 public school students in kindergarten through third grade to be given up to $2,250 to spend at local private and religious schools this fall. The program is expected to cost about $5.25 million, which is to come from the state's Disadvantaged Pupil Impact Aid program.
Critics of voucher programs say they are a reckless experiment that siphons money from public schools as well as a dangerous breach of the separation of church and state.
''We think the use of vouchers, as applied to religious schools, is unconstitutional,'' said Edd Doerr, executive director of Americans for Religious Liberty, a church-state separation group based in Silver Spring, Md., that was part of a coalition that filed a brief in the Ohio case.
The Cleveland program was challenged in court by two Ohio teacher unions and the American Civil Liberties Union as unconstitutional.
''The precedents, are so horrendous, we will move as quickly as possible'' to appeal, Ron Marec, president of the Ohio Federation of Teachers, told The Associated Press.
Still, vouchers, as well as other forms of school choice, have become a rallying point for conservative educational groups as well as many politicians, including Bob Dole, who has made the call for vouchers part of his Presidential campaign.
Two weeks ago, Mr. Dole announced his support for a $5-billion-a-year proposal that would allow parents to used the government-issued vouchers to pay their children's tuition at whatever school they chose, private, public or parochial.
He described the drive for school choice as ''a civil rights movement of the 1990's.''
President Clinton has opposed the voucher program.
A week after the Wisconsin Supreme Court halted a plan providing state vouchers for religious-school students in September, a private fund-raising drive began, generating almost $1.4 million so that some 2,300 students could remain in religious schools while the case made its way through the courts. The Milwaukee program goes to trial in Madison later this month.After hours of suspense and soul-searching, President Clinton said today that he would sign a bill that reverses six decades of social welfare policy and touches the lives of tens of millions of people.
The bill emerging from Congress would affect most of the 12.8 million people on welfare and almost all of the 25.6 million people who receive food stamps. It would alter the benefits paid to more than one-fifth of the families in America with children. And it is expected to save $55 billion over six years as it dismantles a welfare program created by Democrats in the New Deal.
After President Clinton endorsed the bill, the House promptly approved it by a vote of 328 to 101.
Democrats had waited anxiously for the President to announce his decision, perhaps the most important he has made on any domestic issue. The President's stance emboldened many Democrats to cross over and vote yes.
Mr. Clinton said the measure was ''significantly better'' than two similar bills that he vetoed in the last eight months. But at a news conference he conceded that his advisers had been deeply divided over whether he should sign it.
House Democrats were divided as well, with 98 voting for it and 98 opposing it. Despite the President's endorsement of the bill, the House Democratic leader, Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, and the Democratic whip, David E. Bonior of Michigan, voted against the measure.
With today's action, Mr. Clinton fortifies his credentials as a ''new Democrat'' and strengthens his political position going into this fall's Presidential election. But he disappointed many Democratic Party loyalists, civil rights advocates, labor union leaders and religious organizations.
Announcing his decision, Mr. Clinton said: ''I will sign this bill, first and foremost, because the current system is broken; second, because Congress has made many of the changes I sought, and third, because even though serious problems remain in the nonwelfare-reform provisions of the bill, this is the best chance we will have for a long, long time to complete the work of ending welfare as we know it, by moving people from welfare to work, demanding responsibility, and doing better by children.''
The bill would eliminate the 61-year-old Federal guarantee of cash assistance for the nation's poorest children, abolishing the program known as Aid to Families With Dependent Children. It would give states vast new authority to run their own welfare and work programs with lump sums of Federal money. It would establish a lifetime limit of five years for welfare payments to any family and would require most adults to work within two years of receiving aid.
Mr. Clinton said he would ask Congress later to modify some of the bill's provisions, including its cuts in food stamp benefits and its ban on most forms of public assistance and social services for legal immigrants who have not become citizens.
Mr. Clinton said that the food stamp cuts and the restrictions on benefits for legal immigrants had ''nothing to do with welfare reform'' and were simply intended to help balance the Federal budget. Republicans said that these provisions accounted for 75 percent of the $55 billion in savings projected under the bill in the next six years.
Mr. Clinton's likely opponent in this year's Presidential race, Bob Dole, commended Mr. Clinton for ''finally climbing on board the Dole welfare reform proposal,'' but said the President had ''stymied every attempt to pass meaningful welfare reform'' until now. Mr. Dole has repeatedly denounced Mr. Clinton's earlier vetoes, saying they showed that he had abandoned his 1992 campaign promise to ''end welfare as we know it.''
Welfare has been a major issue in this year's Presidential campaign, and Republicans were ready to pounce on the President if he vetoed the new welfare bill.
Haley Barbour, chairman of the Republican National Committee, said today, ''Welfare reform would never have happened without the Republican Congress.'' Mr. Barbour asserted that the President had been forced to sign the bill ''rather than risk his re-election.''
Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, who has studied welfare policy for decades and led opposition to the bill, said: ''The President has made his decision. Let us hope that it is for the best.'' In an interview just before the President spoke, Mr. Moynihan said: ''The Cabinet is against the bill. The pollsters are for it. This is a defining event in his Presidency.''
Among the Democrats dismayed by Mr. Clinton's decision was Representative John Lewis of Georgia. Just before the House approved the bill, Mr. Lewis addressed the chamber in anguished tones. ''Where is the compassion?'' he asked. ''Where is the sense of decency? Where is the heart of this Congress? This bill is mean. It is base. It is downright lowdown. What does it profit a great nation to conquer the world, only to lose its soul?''
But Representative John R. Kasich, the Ohio Republican who is chairman of the Budget Committee, summarized the case for the bill this way: ''People are not entitled to anything but opportunity. You can't be on welfare for generations.''
Congressional Republicans gave Mr. Clinton several of the changes he had requested. They increased the money available to provide day care for the children of welfare recipients. They preserved the Federal guarantee of food stamps for poor people, with uniform national standards. They dropped a provision of the House bill that would have allowed states to redesign the food stamp program by setting their own eligibility criteria and benefit levels.
Republicans also granted Mr. Clinton's request to guarantee Medicaid coverage for people who are denied welfare because of strict new eligibility standards for cash assistance. People on welfare are now automatically entitled to Medicaid. Under the bill, states could set tougher standards for welfare, but would have to guarantee Medicaid for anyone who now qualifies. Congress also agreed to allow states to provide Medicaid for legal immigrants who are already in the United States and have not become citizens.
But Congressional Republicans rejected many of Mr. Clinton's requests. They retained the cuts in food stamps and in benefits for legal immigrants. They largely disregarded his request to let states use Federal welfare money for vouchers to provide diapers, clothing and other necessities for children whose parents lose welfare. On this point, the President claimed a victory because states could use money from other sources for vouchers, but Administration officials said the bill fell short of what they wanted. In addition, the Republicans rejected the President's request to soften stringent work requirements that could terminate food stamps for large numbers of unemployed workers.The part about having to work after two years on the Federal welfare rolls does not faze Kristin Nichols.
''If I could get a job before the two years, I'd be off A.F.D.C. quicker than you can imagine,'' the 20-year-old woman said, speaking of the main cash benefits program, Aid to Families With Dependent Children.
But like many of the people in Congress, Miss Nichols has a quarrel with the whole Federal welfare system -- just a different one.
Pregnant and penniless and back on the streets that have often been her home since she ran away from her parents in Pensacola, Fla., at 14, Miss Nichols said her problem would not be finding work, but finding work that might pay well enough to shield her and her unborn child from the vagaries of a harsh world.
''Nobody wants me, because I don't have a high school education,'' she said this afternoon, a few hours after President Clinton announced that he would sign a new law ending guarantees of Federal aid to the poor. ''I don't know how I'm going to get that. People like me who want to make themselves better -- they're just going to cut us off anyway and send us back out there.
''Bill Clinton hasn't lived in this situation,'' said Miss Nichols, a soft-spoken woman who seemed too young for motherhood until bitterness began to harden her words. ''He's sitting fat, running around the world in a big jet. He's never come down here and talked to us.''
The notion of a need for drastic change in the Federal welfare system elicited no surprise today among the men and women slumped in the colored plastic chairs at San Francisco's main welfare office.
They did not use words like ''dependency'' and ''underclass.'' But one after another, they told the same sort of story about having only one way to go in their lives, and no clear way to get there. They said they had heard nothing in the talk about overhauling welfare to make them think that their odds would now improve.
Jewell Bibbs, a 21-year-old single mother, suspected that the ''work'' that legislators were promising would end up being one more government myth about how, with enough effort and hope, things turn out for the best. Ms. Bibbs said she was a veteran of California's innovative welfare-to-work program, Greater Avenues for Independence.
''They made it sound so good,'' she said of her experience in the program. ''They help you with child care. They help you with bus fare. But they tell you you can find a good job. And to them, a good job is any job. You can get one of them and you're still going to be poor.''
Ms. Bibbs said she was scheduled to enroll at San Francisco State University on Aug. 19 to begin studies to become a nurse's aide. She was back at the Department of Human Services for the City and County of San Francisco for the third time in her young life, she said, because she had lost her latest job and needed some help in the meantime.
How each state will implement the new mandates that Mr. Clinton said he would approve remains to be seen; a central goal of the legislation is to give the states wider latitude in designing their own programs.
Aid recipients in states like California, which ranks fourth in the amount of benefits it provides to needy families after Alaska, Hawaii and Vermont, are expected to feel the pinch of tighter money less than others. But the legislation would not provide any specific money to the states to help people find or train themselves for better-paying jobs.
Inspired in part by the modest success of the California program in getting people off welfare rolls and into the work force, the new law is expected to continue the shift toward a strategy of getting welfare beneficiaries into ''jobs first'' and away from longer-term education and training programs.
To people waiting their turn in the plastic chairs, doing their best to hold down the children trying to squirm out of them, that would be one of the problems.
''People get stuck because they don't give you the resources,'' said Raquel Simian, 27, who said she was seeking A.F.D.C. benefits because she had come to the end of her contract as a technical support worker at a bank and was going to have to wait for weeks to begin receiving unemployment insurance.
''There are a lot of resources out there,'' she said. ''But in this office they're never going to lead you to them. Nobody's teaching these people how to do Word Perfect or Power Point or just some basic thing to be a receptionist or a secretary.''
Others, like Maria Jauriqui, 25, and her companion, Robert Herrera, 32, seemed to view the threatened aid cuts as merely one more bump in their bumpy road.
Mr. Herrera said that he had been earning about $250 a week as a security guard until last week, when an argument with his his landlord had left the couple and their two children living in their 1963 Dodge. He had stopped going to work, he said, because he was afraid to leave his wife and children alone there. Then, on Tuesday, the car was towed.
''If worse comes to worse, we can always go back to Fresno,'' Mr. Herrera said, meaning the place where their parents live and the one they had always tried to get away from. ''Other people have it worse.''For years, many doctors, teachers, politicians and reporters have been able to do something that most New Yorkers could only dream about: park legally in an illegal space. Yesterday, the City Council voted to create a new category of privileged parkers: the clergy.
The Council unanimously passed a bill that would allow clergy members to park next to their places of worship for up to four hours, and near hospitals or funeral parlors for up to three hours -- allowing them to avoid the time-honored tradition of driving first one block beyond their destination, then two, then three or more, just to find a legal spot. Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani is expected to sign it, making New York what Council members say is the first city in the nation to extend parking privileges to the clergy.
Clergy members from a variety of denominations had lobbied the Council for years for the privilege, complaining that they were constantly getting tickets while doing their jobs. They argued that since doctors and dentists could do it, why not them? After all, they said, doctors may heal the body, but the clergy heal the soul.
Council members concluded that because the clergy often have to respond to emergencies, they should not have to circle block upon block looking for parking spaces.
''It is difficult when you are called to go to a hospital in the middle of the night and you can find no place to park, or you conduct a funeral and come out to find your car has been towed,'' said Wendell Foster, a Bronx Councilman who is also a senior minister at the United Church of Christ on Forest Avenue. ''This is a necessary bill.''
Mr. Foster said he had tried to introduce a similar bill more than 10 years ago, but backed off when conflict of interest questions were raised because he is a part-time minister. But he said the new bill defined ''clergy'' narrowly enough to make him ineligible for a clergy permit. (Of course, as a City Council member, he has a special permit that allows him to park in illegal zones when he is on ''official business.'')
Under the bill, only full-time clergy members whose primary source of income is their religious work would be eligible for the parking privileges. The Department of Transportation would issue permits to officially recognized houses of worship; each permit would cover up to three clergy members affiliated with that house of worship.
City officials said they expected that the restrictions would limit the number of clergy permits to ''a couple hundred'' -- only a fraction of the thousands of ministers, imams, rabbis and priests in New York City.
The specifications are intended to guarantee that only legitimate clergy members ministering to the sick, dying, or bereaved would get the parking privileges, and to weed out church volunteers who want to park illegally while dropping off a pot of spaghetti for a church social.
''We tried to work it out so there would be no abuse,'' said Noach Dear, a Brooklyn Democrat and chairman of the Council's Transportation Committee. ''Because, of course, I was concerned about issuing another permit,'' he added, rolling his eyes.
Council members said they also tried to define houses of worship carefully enough to make sure that enterprising New Yorkers do not suddenly decide to start calling their bedrooms places of prayer to get free parking in front of their apartment buildings. The bill explicitly excludes residences. Any church, synagogue, temple, or mosque also would have to be used principally for ''divine worship'' and be registered at the city Buildings Department as a place of assembly to be eligible. But the bill does not specify which religious denominations it applies to.
For Rabbi Larry Sebert, who lobbied the Council for the bill on behalf of the New York Board of Rabbis, the bill's passage was welcome news. ''On any given day, I'll have to do a funeral, three hospital visits, the whole gamut,'' he said, noting that he is ticketed a few times every month and received a $55 ticket on Tuesday for parking in front of his synagogue during morning services.
The combination of parking fines and hefty garage fees to avoid tickets was a hardship for many clergy members, he said. ''Being able to stop quickly at the hospital is certainly a tremendous help, both for the clergy, and I believe, for the congregants,'' Rabbi Sebert said.
Councilman Martin Malave-Dilan, a Brooklyn Democrat, introduced a more sweeping bill in early 1994, but no decisive action was taken until recently, when the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York and leaders of Protestant and Jewish groups started lobbying Mr. Dear.
The bill passed yesterday was significantly narrower than the original version, which would have allowed unlimited parking near houses of worship, hospitals, funeral homes and jails.
''We made sure this is not just a new, free parking spot for them,'' Mr. Dear said. ''But it was the right thing to do, because they're God's messengers and this is a way to show respect for what they do in a practical way.''Lyudmila Engquist of Sweden won the Olympic 100-meter hurdles tonight by an eyelash, four years after she competed in the Summer Games with a different name, a different nationality and considerably different luck.
Engquist's sinuous road to a gold medal began in Russia and snaked around many blind curves involving performance-enhancing drugs, suspension, marital estrangement, deceit and injury. Tonight, she found redemption before 82,839 spectators at Olympic Stadium as the first Swedish woman to win a gold medal in track and field.
The attempt by Gail Devers of the United States to win a rare sprint-hurdle double essentially ended in the starting blocks, where she languished too long after the gun sounded. If anyone got a poorer start than Devers, it was Engquist, but she made a miraculous recovery over the 10 hurdles and outleaned Brigita Bukovec of Slovenia at the tape by the slim margin of a hundredth of a second.
Engquist's winning time was 12.58 seconds. Bukovec took the silver in 12.59. Patricia Girard-Leno of France won the bronze in 12.65 seconds. Devers finished an unthreatening fourth in 12.66 seconds.
Engquist's victory came on yet another unpredictable day of track and field. The world record-holder Sergei Bubka of Ukraine left the pole-vault qualifying competition with an inflamed Achilles' tendon. The world record-holder Kim Batten of the United States was defeated in the women's 400-meter hurdles. After complaining that the hard track sapped his legs in winning the 10,000 meters, Haile Gebrselassie of Ethiopia scratched from the 5,000 tonight, ending his chance at a double victory in distance running.
In the men's 800 meters, Vebjoern Rodal of Norway overtook a bold front-running effort by Johnny Gray of the United States to win in 1 minute 42.58 seconds, an Olympic record. Hezekiel Sepeng became the first black South African to win an Olympic medal by taking second place in 1:42.74. Fred Onyancha of Kenya won the bronze in 1:42.79. Gray faded to seventh.
Missing was the world's top half-miler, Wilson Kipketer, a native of Kenya who has not lived in Denmark long enough to get his citizenship and become eligible for the the Olympics.
Bubka wasn't the only favorite to face disappointment today. Deon Hemmings became the first Jamaican woman to win an Olympic gold medal in track and field when she upset the American favorites Batten and Tonja Buford-Bailey in the 400-meter hurdles in 52.82 seconds.
Hemmings, who attended school at Central (Ohio) State and trains at the University of Texas, took the lead after the second or third hurdle and drew away from the Americans as they sprinted for the finish line. Her time was an Olympic record and the fifth-fastest in history. Batten, who owns the world record of 52.61 seconds, ran 53.08 today to take the silver medal. Buford-Bailey won the bronze in 53.22 seconds.
There were no such surprises in the first two rounds of the men's 200 meters or the decathlon. Through five events of the decathlon, the world record-holder Dan O'Brien of the United States held first place with performances of 10.50 seconds at 100 meters, 24 feet 10 inches in the long jump, 51-4 1/2 in the shot put, 6-9 1/2 in the high jump and 46.83 seconds in the 400 meters. His total of 4,592 points puts him 134 points ahead of Frank Busemann of Germany.
The world record-holder Michael Johnson, who will attempt on Thursday to become the first man to win both the 200 and 400 meters at the same Olympics, easily won his quarterfinal heat today in 20.37 seconds. Mike Marsh, the defending Olympic champion, ran 20.27 in the first round and 20.39 in the quarterfinals, winning both of his heats.
Devers, 29, of Los Angeles, won the women's 100 meters last Saturday, just as she had done four years ago at the Barcelona Olympics. Tonight, she was attempting to become the first woman to win the sprint-hurdle double since Fanny Blankers-Koen of the Netherlands won the 100-meter dash and the 80-meter hurdles at the 1948 Summer Games.
Four years ago, Devers led the hurdles race until she clipped the final barrier, stumbled and fell across the finish line in fifth place. Tonight, her chance at the sprint-hurdle double took a similar tumble as Devers finished fourth.
''I never found my speed,'' Devers said.
Engquist has made the most of a change in nationality and a change in international eligibility since she won the 100-meter hurdles at the world championships five years ago. Then, she competed for the Soviet Union and was known as Lyudmila Narozhilenko.
In 1993, she tested positive for muscle-building anabolic steroids and was banned from competition for four years by track and field's world governing body. Her estranged husband, Nikolai Narozhilenko, later admitted to spiking Lyudmila's protein powder with the performance-enhancing drugs. The case ended up in Russian courts, and finally, last December, the ban on her was lifted.
Engquist, 32, began competing again in the spring, and has not lost a race in 12 meets this season. She had moved to Sweden in 1993 and had later married her coach and manager, Johan Engquist. She received her Swedish citizenship on June 19, but, according to Olympic rules, she needed the permission of the Russian Olympic Committee to compete for the Scandinavian country at the centennial Games. The approval did not come until July 5.
At the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, Engquist and Devers had been expected to meet for the gold medal. But Engquist, still competing as Narozhilenko, strained a hamstring in the preliminary rounds and withdrew from the semifinals. This time, she ran the fastest time in the world this year, 12.47 seconds, in Monday's semifinals, and it became apparent that Devers would have extreme difficulty getting her double victory.
''It was very difficult,'' Engquist said. ''I didn't compete for a long time, three and a half years. It was not easy. I'm not too young. I was very tired.''
She met Johan Engquist in 1991, and sometime later, he said, ''we felt there was something more than business.'' But Lyudmila was banned in 1993, and eventually she stopped training for almost two years. Last year, she underwent two knee surgeries, and it was not until November that Engquist began training seriously for the Olympics.The Federal Give-and-Take. And Give.
Commissions for public art, even those from Government agencies, are not always as solid as they seem. But neither are the Government's stop-work orders.
About a month ago, two American sculptors, Martin Puryear and Keith Sonnier, were startled to receive an order from the General Services Administration in Washington to suspend work for 90 days on giant sculptures they had designed for the new Federal Triangle Building there.
''I've been working on this sculpture for four years,'' Mr. Sonnier said. ''It's my largest project in America.''
Robert A. Peck, the commissioner of public building services for the General Services Administration, said his decision on the art had been entirely a financial one. ''I was concerned about the budget,'' he said. ''I did a review of the numbers carefully to see what could be put on hold. The art was not the first thing to be thrown out; I suspended other costs, too.''
Situated on 11 acres on Pennsylvania Avenue at 13th Street N.W., the $700 million, multi-use building was designed by James Ingo Freed, the architect of the Holocaust Museum in Washington. It is to be named the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center and is to open in June.
Mr. Puryear's sculpture, a 40-foot-tall abstract bronze, is to be placed in the building's Woodrow Wilson Plaza. Mr. Sonnier's, also 40 feet tall, is a neon work made of red, yellow and blue glass and is to stand in an atrium. The two commissions, $1 million for Mr. Puryear and $700,000 for Mr. Sonnier, are among the largest by the Federal agency.
When the news reached the Community Arts Panel, made up of the six local arts professionals who had selected the artists, it demanded a meeting with Mr. Peck. None of the members had been notified of the order by his agency. A meeting was convened on July 25, but before the panel members could state their case, Mr. Peck announced that he had lifted the stop-work order.
Speculating about why the order was imposed to begin with, most people close to the project said they suspected that the reasons were more political than financial. ''Who knows,'' said one member of the panel, who would speak only on condition of anonymity. ''There are many reasons why this could have happened: It's an election year, this is a Reagan building, the G.O.P. didn't want to spend the money, the art is abstract. These are a few theories.''
Among those at the meeting was J. Carter Brown, director emeritus of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, a panel member who is also chairman of the Commission of Fine Art in Washington. ''We were all ready to pound the table and chew the carpet,'' Mr. Brown said. ''We had reviewed the plans and approved them. I felt strongly the projects should go ahead as planned.''
Both artists, while relieved that the stop-work order has been lifted, say the experience has made them more aware of the uncertainties surrounding public commissions. Mr. Puryear said: ''It's typical that art can be seen as the icing on the cake. It's made me realize how tenuous these kinds of commitments really are.'' Mr. Sonnier said, ''What you learn is that in situations like this the artist is really a contractor.''
Artworks to Fill Up the New Tate
Now that work is under way on the Bankside power station in the Southwark section of London, which will be the Tate Gallery of Modern Art when it opens in the year 2000, Nicholas Serota, its director, is worrying about how to fill its 100,000 square feet.
Last week, he announced that the museum had been given six works -- including paintings and sculpture by Dubuffet, Brancusi and Hodgkin -- by the family and executors of E. J. Power's estate. Mr. Power, a pioneer in the communications industry who died three years ago, was a prominent collector of modern art in the years after World War II. The gift was made in lieu of inheritance taxes in an agreement with the Heritage Secretary in Britain.
The Stuttgart collectors Anna and Josef Froehlich have agreed to lend the Tate their 320-work collection of postwar American and German art for a minimum of four years. It will be integrated into the Tate's collection for now, and then displayed at the new museum.
''The arrangement was inspired by the new building,'' Mr. Serota said. ''There is every hope on both sides that the arrangement will be made more permanent.''
Saul Steinberg Selling Off Old Masters
There's nothing Sotheby's likes more than to capitalize on a name, whether it's Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Elton John or that of a serious collector like Saul Steinberg.
The auction house has announced that in January it will auction eight Old Master paintings belonging to Mr. Steinberg, the chief executive of Reliance Group Holdings, a Manhattan insurance and investment conglomerate. Sotheby's estimates that the paintings, all Dutch, will sell for more than $7 million.
Mr. Steinberg, one of the biggest buyers of Old Master paintings in the early 1980's, had a stroke last year; a spokeswoman in his office said, ''While he's better, Mr. Steinberg is rethinking his priorities.''A prisoner who showed signs of torture by the Palestinian police died late Wednesday, setting off angry protests today in Nablus, on the West Bank, and a stormy debate among Palestinian legislators that echoed mounting public resentment over abuses by Yasir Arafat's security forces.
The prisoner, Mahmoud Jumayel, 26, was hospitalized in a deep coma last weekend with a fractured skull, his body covered with bruises and burn marks. He was the seventh prisoner to die in police custody since the start of Palestinian self-rule more than two years ago.
In a speech on Wednesday to the Palestinian legislative council, Mr. Arafat announced that three officers involved had been summoned for investigation, and he assured the lawmakers: ''We will not forgive anyone who has committed an offense under any circumstances.''
But many Palestinians seemed unmoved by Mr. Arafat's pledges, reflecting growing skepticism about the Palestinian Authority's commitment to the rule of law.
In Nablus, the West Bank's largest city and Mr. Jumayel's home town, hundreds of demonstrators marched on police headquarters, shouting slogans denouncing the officers who had held Mr. Jumayel at the Juneid prison on the outskirts of town. His body was later carried through the the streets in a cortege as mourners shouted, ''With spirit and blood, we will redeem you, Mahmoud!''
The city of 120,000 was paralyzed by a general strike, a protest tactic often used during a seven-year uprising against Israeli occupation, now turned for the first time against the Palestinian Authority.
In Bethlehem, the Palestinian legislative council formed a committee to investigate Mr. Jumayel's death after angry lawmakers demanded that the torturers and their top commanders be brought to justice.
''There are more than 30 people in this council who suffered in the prisons of the occupation for long years,'' said Husam Hader, a representative from Nablus. ''I myself was arrested 23 times. But I doubt if there is a single one among us whose rights were violated through the kind of torture and interrogation that goes on in the Authority's prisons.''
Mr. Hader was interrupted by the speaker of the council, Ahmad Korei, who rebuked him, ''Don't compare!''
But Mr. Hader shot back: ''We must compare! There is an organized repression whose aim is to degrade this people. The legislative council must take a firm stand, because tomorrow we could be killed by such agencies and irresponsible individuals.''
Abdel Jawad Saleh, a member of Mr. Arafat's cabinet, said: ''There are seven who have died under torture in the prisons, and there are a few more, I don't know how many, who have been killed through violence and deceit in the streets. We haven't heard about verdicts against these people.''
Azmi Shueibi, a lawmaker from Ramallah, said, ''Not only should those carrying out the policy in the prisons be put on trial, but those responsible for these agencies should be punished.''
The outrage may have been heightened by the fact that Mr. Jumayel was affiliated with Mr. Arafat's Fatah faction in the Palestine Liberation Organization. A member of an armed wing called the Fatah Hawks, he was arrested shortly after the Palestinian police entered Nablus last December.
He had been jailed without charges in Jericho until his transfer to Juneid last Friday. He was hospitalized under a false name the next day, and transferred to another hospital in Ramallah without official notification to his family, which only learned on Monday of his condition. He was finally transferred to an Israeli hospital in Jerusalem, where he died on Wednesday night.
Palestinian and Israeli human rights groups say that several hundred prisoners are being held without trial in the jails of the Palestinian Authority, and that violence against inmates is common. Many detainees are members of the militant Hamas and Islamic Holy War groups who were rounded up after a spate of suicide bombings in Israel in February and March.More than 25 years after he fled the United States to avoid Federal charges of fraud and began enjoying the life of a well-heeled and well-connected fugitive, the financier Robert L. Vesco went on trial in a Havana courtroom today, charged with similar offenses against the Cuban Government.
In the first day of what is expected to be a brief proceeding, prosecutors said Mr. Vesco, 60, had organized a complex scheme to bilk Cuba's Health Ministry and other investors in a miracle drug that could supposedly cure ailments ranging from cancer to arthritis.
They said Mr. Vesco wrongly represented himself as acting on behalf of the Cuban Government, pocketed investment funds and sought to market the drug abroad before clinical tests of its efficacy were finished. He is pleading not guilty.
Also charged in the fraud case is Mr. Vesco's Cuban wife, Lidia Alfonso, with whom he was living in a villa in Atabey, an upscale, beachfront Havana neighborhood, when both were arrested on May 31, 1995.
If convicted, Mr. Vesco faces a 20-year sentence in a Cuban prison and Ms. Alfonso, who diplomats said was a former employee of a state tourism agency, 12 years.
At the time Mr. Vesco was arrested, the Cuban Foreign Ministry said he had been taken into custody ''under suspicion of being a provocateur and an agent of foreign special services,'' or intelligence agencies. That raised the possibility that he might be tried on charges of espionage and sabotage, for which the maximum penalty is death.
But Mr. Vesco has instead been formally charged with ''fraud and illicit economic activity'' and ''acts prejudicial to the economic plans and contracts of the state.''
The Cuban Government, chronically short of foreign exchange and eager to attract foreign investment, has provided no explanation for the change of direction in its case against Mr. Vesco, who is said by American officials to have long enjoyed the personal protection of President Fidel Castro.
One of the partners Mr. Vesco is accused of having deceived in the effort to develop the miracle drug, called Trixolane or TX, was a Cuban medical laboratory known as Labiofam, diplomats in Havana said. The director of that state-owned drug research company, they said, is Jose Antonio Fraga Castro, the son of Mr. Castro's sister Angela.
Initially, Mr. Vesco's American business associate and longtime friend and house guest, Donald Nixon Jr., a nephew of former President Richard M. Nixon, was also taken into custody.
Mr. Nixon was released last July, and later said Cuban investigators questioning him had expressed the belief that the drug project was actually a front for a Central Intelligence Agency operation and had also involved money laundering and drug trafficking.
Mr. Vesco fled the United States in the early 1970's to avoid charges that he had cheated investors in a Swiss-based mutual fund of $224 million in what was then the largest financial fraud in history.
He spent the next decade on the run in Costa Rica and the Bahamas before being granted ''humanitarian refuge'' in 1982 in Cuba, where, American officials said, he put his financial acumen to work helping the Cuban Government evade the American economic embargo.
''If he wants to live here, let him live here,'' Mr. Castro said at a news conference in Havana in 1985. ''We don't care what he did in the United States.''
But as Cuba started opening its economy to the outside world, Mr. Vesco become less useful and apparently fell out of favor.
In 1989, a Federal indictment in Jacksonville, Fla., accused Mr. Vesco of cooperating with Carlos Lehder Rivas, leader of the Medellin cocaine cartel, to persuade the Cuban Government to allow planes loaded with drugs to fly over the island. Mr. Vesco denied the charges. He still faces charges of making an illegal $200,000 contribution to President Nixon's 1972 re-election campaign.
In contrast to its usual practice when dissidents are on trial, the Cuban Government allowed some public access to today's proceedings, with news agency representatives permitted to attend but other foreign reporters barred. Two consular officials from the American Interests Section in Havana also sat in on the trial, witnesses said.
Since late last year, Mr. Vesco has been a patient at a military hospital in the Havana area, suffering from what diplomats describe as a serious stomach ailment. Appearing in court, he was described as bearded, looking haggard and wearing a gray shirt and pants that appeared to be a prison uniform. American officials say that they had sought Mr. Vesco's extradition to the United States, but that the Cuban Government, after encouraging discussions about that possibility, decided not to hand him over.The Government said today that scientific experimentation had shown that so-called mad cow disease, which had been thought to be transmitted through contaminated feed, could also be passed directly from a cow to her calf.
The findings from a seven-year study did not pinpoint the means of direct transmission, but they could complicate efforts to eradicate the disease, called bovine spongiform encephalopathy, which has crippled the $6.5-billion-a-year British beef industry after being linked four months ago to a similar fatal brain disease in humans.
They explain why cows in Britain have continued to develop the disease despite a ban on potential contaminants in cattle feed that went into effect in July 1988. The Ministry of Agriculture says that 28,402 cows born since then have come down with the disease.
Up to now, the Government has explained new outbreaks of the disease by suggesting that farmers may have ignored the regulations by continuing to use old stocks of feed.
The new data indicate that even more stringent culling of Britain's 11.8 million cattle herd may be needed to wipe out mad cow disease. Until now, the Government's strategy has been based on the killing of older cows, which had been deemed to be more at risk of getting the disease.
Seeking to alleviate fears from the study, the Government emphasized today that the rate of direct transmission was low and that measures now in place should be sufficient to contain it. Agriculture Ministry officials insisted that there was no evidence that humans are at a greater risk of contracting the human equivalent -- Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, also a fatal brain disorder -- by drinking milk from an infected cow.
''It is important to keep this information in perspective,'' Agriculture Minister Douglas Hogg said in a statement. ''There is no case for changing recommendations in relation to milk, meat, blood or any other product which is currently permitted.''
On March 27, the European Union reacted to an admission by the British Government of a probable link between mad cow disease and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease by imposing a worldwide ban on exports of British beef and beef products. Since then, Britain has been at odds with its main trading partners, arguing that the ban is not justified by scientific evidence and resisting demands for strict measures to curtail the epidemic.
The latest news is bound to be another blow to the British beef industry, which is still reeling from a consumer scare from the earlier disclosures.
In an effort to curb the disease, the Government has been killing off cattle over the age of 30 months. Since the program began March 20, according to the Ministry of Agriculture, 257,000 cows have been killed.
The Government has not yet begun a secondary program to cull herds most afflicted with mad cow disease. That program is scheduled to start in autumn and is scheduled to include 120,000 to 140,000 animals.
The number of cows to be killed has been the subject of a lively debate between Britain and the rest of the European Union, which has been pushing for stronger measures to restore consumer confidence in European beef. The issue has been among the most divisive the alliance has faced in recent years.
Some critics of the Government's handling of the crisis disagreed with its assertion that the new findings meant little new danger. The evidence suggested that the disease could be transmitted through the blood, said Richard Lacey, a microbiologist at Leeds University who years ago warned that the disease might affect humans.
''If it's in the blood, it means that all beef products are dangerous,'' he told Reuters. ''This means there should be a total ban on beef products in this country and we should slaughter all infected herds. It is going to be devastating.''Almost three years after Prudential Securities agreed to repay every client it defrauded in the largest investment scandal in history, some of those customers are accusing the firm of cheating them all over again.
Lawyers for a group of former Prudential clients filed a motion yesterday asking a Federal court in Washington to allow a lawsuit that contends that the firm cheated those investors out of full compensation from a restitution fund.
The fund was established in 1993 as part of Prudential's settlement with Federal and state securities regulators of charges that it had systematically defrauded hundreds of thousands of investors in the sale of more than $8 billion worth of limited partnerships. Many investors were assured by Prudential brokers that the risky partnerships were a conservative investment, and were misled about the investment returns.
At issue in the new legal dispute is the way in which Prudential Securities, a unit of Prudential Insurance Company of America, treated certain tax and accounting issues in determining how much money to award certain partnership investors. Without the knowledge of those investors, the motion contends, Prudential ''systematically engaged in efforts to reduce allowable damage awards by overstating tax benefits'' the investors received.
Susan Atran, a Prudential spokeswoman, said that the firm had not yet seen the court papers. But she said that Prudential had properly accounted for tax issues and that the firm had followed the directives of the court-appointed administrator of the settlement fund, and had hired an outside accounting firm to assist in calculating all tax matters.
Ms. Atran added that the partnerships involved in the dispute were all tax shelters sold before 1986, and that the number of investors affected were a small portion of the 340,000 people who put their money into Prudential partnerships.
Irving Pollack, the fund administrator, said that he had not seen the motion but scoffed at the notion that Prudential could have overstated tax benefits when outside accountants were reviewing those calculations. ''The suggestion that Pru did something here deliberately when they hired outside people to do it seems prima facie to be off the wall,'' he said.
The motion was filed in the Federal District Court that is overseeing the settlement between Prudential and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Through the motion, the lawyers are seeking to intervene in the case and bring a class action on behalf of investors who say they were shortchanged.
The motion and accompanying affidavits say that when Prudential calculated the maximum possible award, it subtracted the value of tax deductions taken by investors, even in cases when the tax obligation was simply deferred to a later year and subsequently paid.
In several instances, the court papers say, lawyers were able to obtain worksheets that showed Prudential's miscalculations and persuaded the firm to reverse its position.
But in subsequent cases involving the same investments, the papers say, the same miscalculations reappeared. Often, those miscalculations were substantial. For example, the court papers cite the case of Carroll Glaser, who invested $153,000 in an airplane partnership. After submitting a claim form to the settlement fund, Mr. Glaser was told by Prudential that he would receive no compensation, because by the firm's calculations, he had earned a $104,723 profit on the investment. Mr. Glaser's lawyer obtained the firm's worksheet, and brought in an outside accountant, who said that the firm had miscalculated tax benefits. The firm subsequently agreed, saying that Mr. Glaser had a loss of $36,288, a change of more than $140,000.The General Motors Corporation's sales fell by 2.3 percent in July from a year earlier while the Chrysler Corporation's sales surged 18.8 percent, as overall demand for vehicles appeared to cool and shift toward mini-vans, sport utility vehicles and pickup trucks instead of cars.
Nearly three-fifths of G.M.'s vehicle sales in the United States come from cars, while two-thirds of Chrysler's sales come from light trucks, which the industry defines as including mini-vans and sport vehicles. So the shift toward light trucks has particularly benefited Chrysler.
Sales fell sharply for Honda, Nissan, Isuzu and Mitsubishi while rising for Volvo and Toyota and staying roughly flat at Suzuki.
While the Ford Motor Company will not announce its July sales until Monday, the results so far suggest that overall industry sales will be as much as 3 percent below the levels of July, 1995, said David M. Garrity, analyst at Smith Barney.
Jack V. Kirnan, an auto analyst with Salomon Brothers, cautioned that it would have been easy for G.M. and particularly Chrysler to show strong gains because neither did well a year ago. ''This is against a very weak comparison for a year ago,'' he said. G.M.'s car sales fell by 4.9 percent while light-truck sales climbed by 1.6 percent. At Chrysler, generous rebates produced a 10.7 percent increase in car sales while light-truck sales soared 23.3 percent.
Economists and analysts had been skeptical that auto sales would continue to grow at the same brisk pace that they maintained during the first half of the year, and played down Chrysler's success in July.
''What we see at Chrysler is a temporary aberration, not a long-term trend,'' said Sung W. Sohn, a senior vice president and chief economist at the Norwest Corporation, a bank holding company in Minneapolis. Even Chrysler officials had warned a month ago that sales would likely cool at some point after a brisk first half of the year. They welcomed today's sales.
''The July numbers show that Chrysler is maintaining the momentum that pushed us to sales records in the year's first and second quarters,'' said James P. Holden, the company's executive vice president for sales and marketing.
A combination of strong consumer confidence and brisk increases in the disposable income of many households has left more Americans with the money to buy new vehicles, said David L. Littmann, a senior economist at Detroit-based Comerica Bank. The rising disposable income is mainly the result of strong increases in the number of Americans working, rather than higher wages, Mr. Littmann added.
Foreign auto makers showed a wide range of results in July, with Toyota's sales soaring 18 percent while Nissan's sales dropped nearly 22 percent, a plunge that the company attributed to its strong sales in July, 1995.
Honda's sales plunged nearly 12 percent last month, partly because the company virtually ran out of its popular Civic sedan. Honda said this week that it would begin importing four-door Civic sedans because its factory in East Liberty, Ohio, could not produce them fast enough.
Percentage calculations are based on a daily selling rate because there were 26 selling days last month and only 25 in July, 1995.
Alan B. Helfman, a Chrysler and Plymouth dealer in Houston's wealthy River Oaks neighborhood, said that the redesigned Jeep Wrangler and the new Sebring convertible were particularly popular. The dealership sold close to 20 Wranglers last month, and could have sold twice as many if the factory were able to produce them faster, Mr. Helfman said.
The new Sebring convertible is also much more popular than the Chrysler LeBaron convertible which it replaced. The dealership sold 20 Sebring convertibles last month, Mr. Helfman said, adding, ''The LeBaron got down to where we weren't selling any, or one or two a month.''
John P. Peterson, a Pontiac and GMC dealer in Bloomington, Minn., a Minneapolis suburb, said that the Pontiac Grand Prix was selling well, regardless of national trends in G.M.'s car sales. The Grand Prix was introduced on June 26, the first of G.M.'s four new midsized sedans to reach the market.
''We've received eight and we've delivered every one of them'' to customers, Mr. Peterson said. ''They come off the truck and they're not here two or three days before they're gone.''
Chrysler announced its sales figures before the close of trading while G.M. did so after the close. In a rising stock market, Chrysler's shares rose 87.5 cents, to $29.25; G.M.'s shares climbed $1.50 to $50.25, and Ford's shares increased $1.375, to $33.75.In a rare attack on the Federal Bureau of Investigation, House Republicans investigating the White House's handling of background files strongly criticized the agency today for a series of actions they said served the political interests of the Clinton Administration and undermined the bureau's independence.
The criticism focused mainly on Howard M. Shapiro, the bureau's general counsel, and steps he took in connection with the improper acquisition by the Clinton White House of confidential F.B.I. files of as many as 900 people.
The bureau is rarely criticized by Congress, but at a hearing before the Committee on Government Reform and Oversight, Mr. Shapiro faced hostile questioners.
In a report earlier this year on the file controversy, the bureau's Director, Louis J. Freeh, said the agency had been ''victimized'' by the White House. But Representative William F. Clinger, the Pennsylvania Republican who heads the panel said Mr. Shapiro had helped the White House ''use and abuse'' the bureau.
Mr. Clinger complained about Mr. Shapiro's decision to send two agents to interview a central figure in the files issue at his home on July 16, nearly a month after the files matter had been formally turned over to Kenneth W. Starr, the independent counsel for Whitewater-related matters.
Mr. Clinger also said it was wrong of Mr. Shapiro to have given a ''heads up'' to the White House about what investigators for the Republican majority on the committee had found in the bureau's files.
Both actions had been previously disclosed. Today Mr. Clinger added two new counts to his complaint that the bureau had tried to curry favor with the White House. He revealed that in February, Mr. Shapiro gave the White House a copy of a book by Gary Aldrich, a former F.B.I. agent, that was harshly critical of the Clinton White House. (The bureau screens writings by former agents for any sensitive information.)
When the book was published in June, the White House responded with a well-planned and largely successful campaign to discredit it.
Mr. Clinger said that he also recently discovered that a letter relating to the files, written by John C. Quinn, the White House counsel, to Mr. Freeh, was reviewed by Mr. Shapiro to include his input about its political tone.
At today's hearing, Mr. Shapiro was alternately contrite about what he had done and defensive about his intentions. He said his actions had no ''malicious or partisan motive'' but instead were part of an effort to have the bureau remain even-handed as the Republican-controlled Congress and the White House jousted over the files matter.
Underlying the dispute are unanswered questions about the whole episode, which Clinton aides have described as an innocent, if regret able, mistake. Republicans say the White House and F.B.I. have been working together to thwart an investigation into whether the Republican files were gotten for nefarious purposes.
The files were obtained by the White House personnel security office, which was run by Craig Livingstone, a former political advance man with no law-enforcement experience. Mr. Livingstone resigned his position in June during a hearing before Mr. Clinger's committee at which he said he did not know who was behind his hiring, an important question in assessing the motive behind acquiring the files.
Mr. Freeh invited Mr. Clinger to read Mr. Livingstone's confidential file at the bureau last month to help learn who had hired Mr. Livingstone. On July 15, F.B.I. officials screened the file and discovered a memorandum from an agent, Dennis Sculimbrene, of an interview he had conducted in March, 1993, with Bernard W. Nussbaum, who was then White House counsel.No question about it, the factory wasn't working right anymore -- outdated and inefficient. The medical product it made was getting more expensive to turn out and, even though it had for more than six decades sustained millions of American lives, it was very often ineffective, sometimes addictive. The stockholders wanted something better for their investment and were muttering about downsizing, beginning at the top.
So the C.E.O. and the board of directors went before a stockholder meeting with a plan: Tear down the place right away and start retooling to turn out a different product. Some crank got up and asked if there was a blueprint for the new plant. While the old one was closed down, what would happen to consumers who did happen to depend entirely on the product? Exactly what was this new product?
Don't know the details, the C.E.O. answered, but we will take the money you gave us to run the old plant and turn it over to 50 people around the country. We will tell them to spend it to try to come up with some answers.
The citizens of America, who hold the voting stock, jolly good-hearted folk that we be, applaud like mad and are about to give the C.E.O. and the board new contracts.
Welfare needs deep reform. But the reformers are not reforming -- just killing the current system without knowing what a new system would be like or if there will be a system at all or just 50 independent state welfare duchies. And they are creating an untermenschen class in America by denying even food stamps to non-citizen immigrants who are in the U.S. as legally as anybody born here.
I do not like welfare. You do not. He does not. We do not.
Myself, I go around with a button on my mental lapel -- ''Born poor, living proud, never took a dime.'' The only thing that prevents me from being quite as hard-hearted as the President and Congress is that I have another button pinned on my mind: ''Born lucky, still grateful.''
People like me were born into families where taking welfare was not conceivable for us or our forebears. We were born into a time and tradition without drugs and when you were not only expected to work but could get work. Unmarried girls not only did not have babies, but they did not even, you know, do it.
Family, family, family -- if through the death of a parent you did not have a complete family, you were still part of a universe of families.
Now pregnancy out of wedlock destroys family, which helps destroy the kind of society Americans thought they had and want back. I do begrudge unmarried teen-agers with children the support that welfare gives them. My problem is: I do not begrudge it to their children. Welfare-destroyers duck that. They talk of forcing unwed parents to live with relatives. Many teen-age mothers had babies to get away from those relatives -- usually themselves unwed and miserable.
The way out of the cycle is indeed work. But before we take sustenance away from children we should make sure that jobs are reasonably available for their parents -- public or private jobs, immediately or with some training. This ''welfare plan'' does not.
It is not a plan at all but a giant cop-out -- turning over responsibilities to states that have no plans themselves. It is a voyage into the wilderness, the unknown, which we have no right to take for others.
Is this what Mr. Clinton meant when he promised to end welfare as we know it? If not, he never should have announced that he would sign the bill. He should have used his large political lead in the Presidential campaign to fight for a workable makeover -- not just to make the lead larger. His ethical sin was to block voters from a choice, because he knew Bob Dole offered nothing better.
And both men knew that whoever was elected this year would not have to carry the burden of the 1996 welfare botch-up. A few years will probably pass before Americans really understand that children are being deprived of their right to have society care for them if their parents do not.
By then somebody else will be running for President. For the children of America's poorest and those who care about them, the welfare bill of Congress and the President is a shame and sorrow. But for Mr. Clinton and Mr. Dole it is a political cop-out that brings applause at once and penalty never -- the ultimate triumph of political cynicism.
On My MindThree and a half years after reporting that a former Moscow bureau chief for The Washington Post might have accepted money from the K.G.B., Time magazine apologized to the reporter in High Court here today and agreed to pay him $262,000 in damages.
Time's apology came as the magazine announced it was settling a libel suit brought by the correspondent, Dusko Doder. In addition to the damages, Time agreed to pay Mr. Doder's legal fees, which ran into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
In its statement, Time did not say that the article was inaccurate, but expressed its ''sincere regret and apologies to the plaintiff for any distress that he has been caused.'' Moreover, said Peter Carter-Ruck, Time's lawyer, ''the defendants now accept without reservation that any disparagement of the plaintiff's reputation and professional integrity is withdrawn.''
Mr. Doder said he had ''achieved complete vindication today.''
It is considered unusual for Time to settle a libel case, particularly for such a large sum.
In its issue of Dec. 28, 1992, Time published an article titled ''A Cold War Tale,'' in which it was suggested that Mr. Doder had been co-opted by the K.G.B. when he was The Post's Moscow bureau chief from 1981 to 1985.
The article, by Jay Peterzell, who has since left the magazine, stemmed from an investigation of Mr. Doder in 1986 when he returned to the United States and was assigned by The Post to cover the intelligence beat.
The article described how Vitaly Yurchenko, a K.G.B. official who ostensibly defected to the West in August 1985, but who returned to the Soviet Union three months later, told the C.I.A. that Mr. Doder once accepted $1,000 from a K.G.B. agent.
Mr. Doder vehemently denied the allegation and questioned the use of Mr. Yurchenko as a source of information. But Mr. Yurchenko's accusation raised suspicions, Time reported, and the F.B.I. and C.I.A. began studying Mr. Doder's reports from Moscow to establish whether he had written articles sympathetic to the Soviet Union in exchange for exclusive information.
Among other things, Time reported, the articles included ''details of Central Committee and Politburo meetings as well as secret information about the health of Soviet leaders, which was normally restricted to the highest levels of the K.G.B. and the Communist Party.''
On Feb. 10, 1984, for example, Mr. Doder reported -- before anyone else -- that Yuri Andropov, the Soviet leader at the time, had died. American officials in Moscow ridiculed the report, which turned out to be true.
In the end, the F.B.I. found no grounds for prosecution and dropped the matter, Time reported. At the same time, The Post declared its support of Mr. Doder and gave him a ''clean bill of health.''
In his 1995 memoir, ''A Good Life,'' Ben Bradlee, former executive editor of The Post, characterized the investigations: ''Doder wrote something that embarrassed the C.I.A., and when the agency thought they saw a chance to get even, they took their shot. It's rare to catch them in the act.''
Mr. Doder left The Post soon afterward for a job in China with U.S. News and World Report. When the Time article was published, he was based in Europe writing for American and European newspapers.
Mr. Doder, now 59, said that he had decided to bring his case in England rather than the United States because British libel laws are more generous to plaintiffs, and because he and his wife had family ties and owned an apartment here.
Mr. Doder's lawyers interviewed some of his journalistic competitors, who said that his exclusive articles from Moscow were the result of good reporting, not special favors.
As part of the settlement today, Time agreed to publish a fair report of the libel action. It reads, in part: ''Time had no evidence, and did not mean to suggest, that the K.G.B. exercised control over Doder's reporting from Moscow. Time's article was intended to be a critical examination of the difficulties in which even the very best journalists may find themselves when operating in a dictatorial system.''
Mr. Peterzell, the author of the article, left Time in September 1994 for a fellowship at the University of Michigan and opted not to return to the magazine in order to pursue book ideas, according to Robert Pondiscio, the public affairs director at Time. Mr. Peterzell could not be reached for comment today.
Mr. Doder, who was born in Yugoslavia, now lives in Washington, where he is a senior fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace, a Government-financed educational organization. He is planning to write a book on Bosnia.
''I am happy that this nightmare is over,'' he said. ''I have gone through a horrendous experience, and I need a few weeks to get away from it all and get on with my life.''FOR those of you who have not played Trivial Pursuit in a while, here's a blast from the past that could win the game. What 1960's group was Lee Weiner part of?
Not sure? Try these seven clues: John Froines, Rennie Davis, David Dellinger, Tom Hayden, Bobby Seale, Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman.
If you haven't figured out by now that we are talking about the defendants in the Chicago Eight conspiracy trial (later the Chicago Seven, after the judge ordered Mr. Seale to be tried separately), then either you are admirably young or you were in some other galaxy in 1968, when chaos engulfed Chicago and the Democratic National Convention that was being held there.
Mr. Weiner, 57, now lives in New York City, running direct-mail operations for the Anti-Defamation League. Is he bothered that his name rings fewer bells than those of other defendants? Not at all.
''I worked hard to achieve that lack of notoriety,'' he said the other day. After the trial, he found that even fleeting celebrity interfered with the community organizing in Chicago that was his life then.
''I remember crossing a street,'' he said, ''and some traffic cop pointing his finger at me and saying, 'Hey, Lee, we haven't forgotten.' That was it -- out of Chicago! I couldn't go back to what I was doing. I would be bringing down all kinds of trouble on people who had nothing to do with it.''
CHICAGO and the Democrats, street battles between antiwar protesters and Mayor Richard J. Daley's police, the raucous conspiracy trial that followed and the ultimate exoneration of the Eight -- all were touchstones of a seething, rebellious era about to come alive again.
In late August, the Democrats will convene in Chicago for the first time since 1968, led by a President who shared many things with those who once took to the streets (except perhaps for joints, to take at face value that Mr. Clinton never inhaled). With a new Mayor Daley in office -- Richard M., son of Richard J. -- the stage is set for bops down memory lane. Maybe they'll even produce a Chicago '68 CD-ROM. At least the music would be good.
But Mr. Weiner, the only New Yorker among the six survivors of the Eight, wants no part of it. He'll watch it on CNN, thank you, from his apartment in Tudor City.
''I don't know what it means,'' he said, ''that I should get a call from Tom'' -- that's Mr. Hayden, now a California state senator -- ''and that he should say to me that he's busy inventing an alternative, media-focused event in Chicago, because otherwise they're going to show those terrible pictures from 1968 of people lying in the streets.'' Indeed, Senator Hayden and Mayor Daley have met to discuss possible gestures of healing during convention week. A tree-planting was mentioned.
''Hello?'' Mr. Weiner said. ''They're going to plant a tree? He and Richard Daley? Give me a break.
''You're not going to supplant the imagery of that time. It's what Abbie used to say: 1968, they don't make years like that any more.''
They sure don't. And thank goodness, many would add.
STILL, compare the zestful antics of the Chicago defendants with the humorless ramblings of ''the Billings 24,'' the right-wing Freemen in Montana. Like the leftist radicals of the 60's, the Freemen are trying to make anarchy of a Federal courtroom, with shouted insults at the judge and other disruptive tactics.
But whom would you rather have for companions? Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, were they only alive, or gun-toting hatemongers denouncing the ''Zionist-occupied Government?''
''Was it the Dadaists who said that the first time it's art, the second time a cliche?'' Mr. Weiner asked. ''We were prettier, and we were funnier. I think these guys actually take themselves very seriously, which I don't think we ever did.''
Time, of course, slogs on, and no doubt the coming retrospectives will show that few refugees of the 60's are exactly as they were. Mr. Weiner makes no bones about having changed. He remains involved in ''a struggle against racism, bigotry and anti-Semitism,'' but politics no longer consumes every moment, as it still does for some.
''The last time I saw Dave Dellinger he was trying to convince me that Abbie was killed by a C.I.A. plot,'' he said. ''This is someone who has not really made a successful transition.''
''Now I have other things,'' Mr. Weiner added. ''I've even got a sport: diving. I mean I'm like a real person. I do Italian cooking.
''Did I know I'd be an adult?''It was, as they used to say around Shea Stadium, Baseball Like It Oughta Be -- competitive, passion-inspiring and nerve-rackingly suspenseful. As one fan exclaimed in mid-game: ''Baseball'll kill you, I swear to God.''
Played on a swath of green in Battery Park City (with a garden intruding on deep right field), against the spectacular backdrop of the skyscrapers of lower Manhattan, it was a game that had everything -- clutch hitting and sparkling plays in the field, crucial strikeouts and runners thrown out at the plate, a tense dramatic arc that divided the very partisan fans and came to its denouement with the bases loaded and two outs in the final inning.
''This is tough, very tough,'' said Sandi Berkins, a dental hygienist from Staten Island who was taking off work to watch the game. ''These are two damn good teams and only one is going to win. I hope it's us.''
Happily for Mrs. Berkins, whose son Scott played first base, and who was wearing a baseball shirt that had ''Berkins's Mom'' emblazoned on the back, it was.
In the end, when Joe Carrubba, 12, scored from third on a wild pitch, Staten Island South Shore defeated Rockville Centre, L.I., 5 to 4 yesterday to claim the New York State Little League championship for the second straight year. The team advances, along with 10 other northeastern state champions, to the regional championships in Bristol, Conn.; the winning team there advances to the Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pa., beginning on Aug. 19.
It was the first time in the 50-year history of the Little League tournament that the state championships had been held in New York City, a weeklong double-elimination event among four teams that had resulted, before yesterday, in three extra-inning games, including an eight-inning victory by Rockville Centre over Staten Island on Tuesday that forced yesterday's championship game. (A regulation Little League game is six innings.) Upstate teams from Fairport and Colonie were eliminated over the weekend.
As usual with Little League, most of the aplomb was exhibited on the field, most of the nail-biting and gut-wrenching in the stands. The weather -- it was a little damp -- kept the crowd down (in Tuesday's sunshine, a substantial number of suited Wall Streeters wandered over on their lunch hour), but the parents were out in force, the opposing camps warily amiable with one another but not overly friendly.
The Staten Islanders stood grouped along the first base line and in right field, many wearing T-shirts, like Mrs. Berkins's, identifying them as players' relatives (''Aboussleman's aunt'' read one), and frequently engaging in group cheers: ''Here we go, South Shore, here we go,'' whenever a rally seemed imminent, And ''Stevie D! Stevie D!'' each time center fielder Stephen D'Esposito came to the plate.
To a local Little League aficionado, the organized togetherness would not be surprising. There's a substantial tradition of Little League excellence on Staten Island; in addition to winning the state championships last year, the South Shore team, an all-Star squad chosen from a six-team league, has gone all the way to Williamsport twice since 1985. And in 1964, a team representing a mid-Island league was the only team from New York City ever to win the whole shebang.
The key to the success, said Joe Carrubba Sr., a Wall Street consultant who walked over from his office to watch his son play, is the dedication of the coaches and parents. He said the coaches, who are all volunteers, stick around for years, long after their own children have outgrown the Little League. During the summer, the tournament teams practice five hours a day or more.
''It's their summer job,'' Mr. Carrubba said, meaning the players. And as for the parents, as inconvenient as it is to stick around all summer, forgoing family vacations for the duration of the tournament, ''most of us are so fanatical about it it doesn't matter.''
Mrs. Berkins concurred. ''This is Scott's first year playing for South Shore,'' she said. ''To have been picked for the All-Star team was like making Harvard University.''
The Rockville Centre supporters were a bit less organized, but no less ardent. They gathered behind the center field fence, where they kept keen watch on the calls of the home plate umpire.
''What, are you joking?'' cried Francis Feehan, a New York City firefighter whose son Patrick plays for Rockville, when the ump widened the plate on a Rockville hitter. ''Come on, Blue, you're killing us.''
Mr. Feehan, a wiry, good-natured man who was chain smoking throughout the game, was able to laugh at his uptight nervousness, but he couldn't help himself.
''You know what kills us?'' he said, watching the Staten Island pitcher, Rob Cogliano, throw a precocious assortment of curveballs and off-speed pitches. ''Junk pitching. Our kids can hit fastballs all day long, but this slow stuff, they don't know what to do.'' And with the winning run on base in a tie game, when Staten Island walked Rockville's best hitter, Terence Leary, intentionally, Mr. Feehan grumbled.
''They shouldn't take the bat out of his hands that way,'' he said. ''It's good baseball, but bad Little League.''
Even in defeat, however, he was, like most of the parents on both sides, delighted with the tourney, the opportunity for the children to play in the grand setting.
''It doesn't get any better for the kids,'' he said, adding with a grin: ''They stayed in the Downtown Athletic Club for four or five days. They're already banned from the pool.''
The game itself was nothing short of thrilling. Rockville rallied from a two-run deficit in the top of the fifth inning on a clutch double by Peter Lennon, but were kept from taking the lead when the next batter grounded to second and Rich Fiel threw home, nailing the sliding runner at the plate.The president of Adelphi University told a state panel yesterday that he had concealed his rapidly rising pay and benefits from public view for five years by ordering his staff not to file a Federal disclosure form that is required from nonprofit institutions. The Internal Revenue Service fined the university $11,500 for not filing the forms.
The president, Dr. Peter Diamandopoulos, said he withheld the report about him and other top university officials to avoid giving ammunition to the faculty union in contract negotiations.
''You were afraid it might make people wild in the streets?'' asked Amy Gladstein, a lawyer for a coalition of critics that has asked the State Board of Regents to remove the institution's trustees, including the president, because of mismanagement. Dr. Diamandopoulos replied that ''subsequent developments showed a lot of things'' had occurred in reaction to the disclosure of the information.
Dr. Diamandopoulos, who was hired in 1985 for $95,000, makes $330,750 plus numerous benefits, including the use of a $1.15 million condominium he selected in Manhattan that he has an option to buy for $905,000 and the presidential home at the campus in Garden City, L.I. In the most recent comparison of college and university presidents, he ranked No. 2 in total compensation, with pay and benefits totaling $523,000 in 1993-1994. No. 1 was John R. Silber, who was then the president of Boston University and who is on the Adelphi board.
Dr. Diamandopoulos's compensation became a central issue for his opponents, including professors, former trustees and administrators, students and parents, who formed the Coalition to Save Adelphi. The group's petition to the Regents accused the trustees of wasting money on Dr. Diamandopoulos and of allowing conflicts of interest in which board members conducted business with the university.
In the first few years of withholding the compensation-disclosure forms, Dr. Diamandopoulos testified, he never sought board authorization to violate the law. Nor did he inform the board of what he was doing.
''This wasn't a big deal in your mind?'' Ms. Gladstein said. Dr. Diamandopoulos replied, ''I did not interpret it as an issue.''
At first, Dr. Diamandopoulos failed to inform the trustees of the I.R.S.'s notification that it had found the university in violation and had imposed fines, Ms. Gladstein indicated. She also introduced a document to show that he had allowed the board to be informed wrongly that there was no problem. A 1992 report to the full board from the finance committee -- on which Dr. Diamandopoulos serves -- said, ''An audit by the I.R.S. resulted in a clean report for the university.''
Ms. Gladstein asked Dr. Diamandopoulos if he made any effort to alert the board that the report was wrong. ''I did not correct anything beyond what was reported in the finance committee,'' he answered.
Eventually the board was told of the I.R.S. problem, and it was decided to comply with the law, file the forms and pay the fines.
Yesterday's session, the third day of the proceeding, also dwelled on what critics say is Dr. Diamandopoulos's undue sway over the board, on which he sits.
Of the board's 18 other members, only three predate Dr. Diamandopoulos's hiring. Policy disputes led to the resignations of at least two: William H. Borten, who protested that as chairman of the finance committee, he was refused essential data on sharp increases in administrative hiring and pay, and Sheldon Weinig, who complained that Dr. Diamandopoulos declined his help on the business school and investments and his offers to finance fellowships.
To show the president's relationships with trustees, Ms. Gladstein introduced evidence about George Andreas, of Vienna, Va., a former trustee who owns an art gallery and a Mercedes dealership. He loaned Adelphi a Mercedes for the president's use. Later, Adelphi leased the car, then bought it for $34,000, then traded it in for an $82,314 model.
The hearing's format has so far put Dr. Diamandopoulos on the defensive, since he was called as a witness by the coalition. His lawyers have tried to get court orders to stop the hearings, but they say Dr. Diamandopoulos has a strong record to present when he gets a chance.SIX years ago, the Southland Corporation and its chain of 7-Eleven convenience stores filed for bankruptcy protection. The home of ''Slurpee'' and the ''Big Gulp'' was bloated and inefficient, and its image among consumers was largely that of a corner mart frequented by working-class men loading up on cigarettes and beer.
But in the last few years, the nation's largest convenience store chain has been overhauling its image -- widening its aisles, modernizing its premises and associating with marque sports and entertainment figures to give it greater appeal with customers.
This summer, for instance, 7-Eleven is promoting a series of collectible prepaid telephone cards featuring Cal Ripken Jr. and 11 other Major League Baseball stars (The chain claims it is the largest retailer of prepaid phone cards.) The television spots, created by J. Walter Thompson in Chicago, a unit of WPP Group, feature Mr. Ripken and are being shown on Fox Television.
While the phone card series is not new for 7-Eleven -- there were National Football League cards last fall -- the campaign indicates how aggressively the chain is refocusing its marketing and advertising efforts on sports and entertainment figures, hoping to cash in on what Nike and McDonald's have known for some time.
''We're really going after our core customer,'' said Marva Cathey, director of advertising and promotion at Southland in Dallas.
Ms. Cathey added that focus groups and market research indicated that 7-Eleven's core customers were 18- to 34-year-old males interested in movies, television and professional sports.
As a result, 7-Eleven has given up on print ads geared toward price promotions and sponsorship of Nascar racing in favor of in-store salutes to sports stars like Dan Marino and Ken Griffey Jr. While 7-Eleven says its ad spending has not increased dramatically, it ran network television spots for the first time this year to promote its National Hockey League coffee mugs.
''They're changing advertising and changing merchandise,'' said Jonathan Ziegler, an analyst with Salomon Brothers, who said the company had been turning a healthy profit. ''They were the home of the Slurpee and now they want to broaden it.''
Through a complicated series of agreements with the N.F.L., N.H.L., Major League Baseball and Fox Television, which has broadcast rights to dozens of N.F.L., N.H.L. and Major League Baseball games, 7-Eleven has received rights to promote Fox Sports and league insignia on store merchandise -- coffee mugs, soft-drink containers and prepaid phone cards. The chain is even displaying the Fox Sports banner outside many of its 5,400 outlets nationwide.
''Fox is looking for viewers of sports and our customer demographic is right in line with their viewers,'' said Ms. Cathey at Southland. ''They want our six million customers a day to see their logo and be aware of the N.F.L. on Fox.''
Meanwhile, 7-Eleven can associate itself with the leagues at what probably amounts to a discount. Through its agreement with Fox, the chain has been able to promote the network's sporting events at a much lower price than becoming an official sponsor of the leagues. Though the chain has to be careful about its use of league icons, it does plan to sell merchandise and perhaps piggyback on big league sponsors like Budweiser and Gatorade.
''It's almost a backdoor way of associating yourself with a major sport without paying the full freight,'' said John Carroll, president of Carroll Creative Inc., a marketing consulting firm in Brookline, Mass. ''If 7-Eleven can look like an official N.F.L. sponsor, that's a great synergistic relationship.''
Victor Copello, president of Promotional Resources Group in New York, an agency that does marketing for 7-Eleven, said the deals gave the chain instant status. ''It provides a national umbrella with a local execution,'' he said. ''There's the national perspective of the N.F.L. and the Super Bowl. But then it turns into the local level with the Miami Dolphins.''
Mr. Copello said one of 7-Eleven's goals was to get as many vendors as possible involved with in-store promotions and merchandise. ''We're kind of promotionally like McDonald's and retail-wise like Kmart,'' he said. Although McDonald's has product tie-ins, like the Little Mermaid series, Mr. Copello said the hamburger chain does not sell trading cards or apparel, while 7-Eleven's do.
Meanwhile, 7-Eleven is also using television and film personalities to promote its new look and products, under the tag ''So Many Changes, It's Not Even Funny.'' It just concluded showing television spots featuring the comedienne Brett Butler, and earlier this summer the chain had products tied to ''The Phantom'' and Jim Carrey's film ''The Cable Guy.''
Of course, Fox also sees this as a great opportunity to promote, not simply the N.F.L. -- the rights to which has cost it $1.6 billion so far -- but other programs as well. Last year, 7-Eleven created cups for ''The Simpsons,'' a Fox show, and put Fox's N.H.L. schedule on 72 million cups of coffee.
By promoting itself in 7-Eleven stores, Fox is also hoping to secure its place as a leading network. ''It's not just the N.F.L. being promoted, it's the Fox name and the Fox brand,'' Mr. Carroll said. ''That is what's being reinforced. The more they can associate their name with established companies the stronger they make their brand.''
THE MEDIA ADVERTISING -- AdvertisingGov. George E. Pataki today signed a bill scheduling a November referendum on a $1.75 billion bond act intended to preserve open spaces, clean up waterways, close landfills and pay for other environmental projects.
In signing the bill, he expressed confidence that New Yorkers ultimately supported what the bond act seeks to do. But he also acknowledged that he and other supporters of the measure would have to campaign on its behalf. Voters have already defeated environmental bond acts twice this decade in New York State.
''Today, we are asking the people of New York State to join us in our commitment to reclaim New York's rightful place as a national leader in environmental protection,'' he said.
Introduced by the Governor in June and eventually passed after a fierce battle in the Legislature, the bond act emerged as one of Mr. Pataki's top legislative victories of this year. If the bond act is defeated, it would be a major blow for the Governor, who has been trying to burnish his image as a friend of the environment.
But it will not be easy to persuade voters of the need to borrow money when they are wary of excessive state spending. In fact, a number of conservative anti-tax groups who normally support Mr. Pataki have expressed strong opposition to the measure.
This presents a peculiar quandary for Mr. Pataki, a fiscal conservative himself who vowed to shrink the size of state government when he took office. By aggressively campaigning across the state for the bond act, as his aides say he plans to do, he runs the risk of alienating his more conservative supporters.
''The Governor came into office on a platform of reducing government expenditures,'' said Robert L. Schulz, president of the All-County Taxypayers Association, an anti-tax group. ''Instead, he has gone off in the opposite direction with this proposal.''
Mr. Pataki is going up against a recent trend among voters to reject similar measures because of concerns that the state has already amassed too much debt. Two environmental bond acts proposed by Gov. Mario M. Cuomo -- one for $1.98 billion in 1990 and the other for $800 million in 1992 -- were both rejected.
There have only been two environmental bond acts approved in the last 25 years, authorizing a total of $2.7 billion in spending. Those acts authorized the closing of hazardous-waste sites, the construction of sewage treatment plants and the buying of open land for preservation. But critics complained that the acts were full of pork-barrel projects.
Nevertheless, Mr. Pataki has managed to forge a diverse alliance of groups to support this measure, from business leaders and local politicians to enviromentalists.
''We intend to work with municipal officials, labor leaders and business leaders with the message that this is both good for the environment, good for our children and a well-thought-out financial plan,'' said Jeff Jones, a spokesman for Environmental Advocates, a conservationist organization.
The act would set aside $790 million to be used on water projects, like cleaning up Onondaga Lake in central New York, the only lake in the country that is an inactive hazardous-waste site, and Lake Champlain, where high levels of phosphorous have been found. The money would also help upgrade sewage treatment plants along Long Island Sound, where nitrogen waste endangers the fishing industry and wildlife habitats.
The plan would allocate $175 million to help close Staten Island's Fresh Kills landfill, the world's largest unlined landfill, as well as landfills in the Adirondacks and other rural sections of the state. Communities would also receive money to build their own recycling centers.
Under the bond act, cities around the state would share $200 million to clean up industrial sites that are not dirty enough to qualify as toxic-waste sites under the state and Federal Superfund program, but lie barren because they are too spoiled to lure developers. The act also seeks to establish a $300 million revolving loan fund for municipalities to use to improve drinking water supplies. The plan also provides $100 million in direct grants for poor communities seeking to improve their water supply systems.
In addition, the state would spend $200 million to buy land to protect the state's water supply, refurbish state parks and help cities and towns renovate their own historic sites and parks.
Correction: August 3, 1996, Saturday
An article yesterday about a November referendum in New York on a $1.75 billion environmental bond act inaccurately described an $800 million bond act that was defeated by voters in 1992. That bond act was aimed at financing job creation in the state, not environmental projects.In a verdict that was bitterly condemned across the Italian political spectrum, a military tribunal in Rome yesterday threw out a case against a former SS captain charged in the 1944 massacre of more than 300 civilians outside Rome, after concluding that the statute of limitations had run out.
Stunned by the findings of the three-judge panel, members of the victims' families filled the corridors outside the courtroom wiith angry shouts of ''Fascists!' and ''Shame!'' as the captain, Erich Priebke, an 83-year-old German, smiled and shook hands with his lawyer. Scuffles broke out between the protesters and the police, and at least five officers were injured.
But then, early this morning, Mr. Priebke was rearrested, just eight hours after the military court ordered him set free, Reuters reported, quoting his lawyer, Velio di Rezze. He is expected to be held pending a decision on possible extradition to Germany, Reuters said.
The ruling yesterday, supported by two of the three judges, found that Mr. Priebke was guilty of ''complicity in violence with multiple homicide against Italian citizens,'' as he had admitted during the trial. But the 30-year statute of limitations on those charges expired 15 years ago under the military penal code, and the panel found Mr. Priebke not guilty of ''cruelty and premeditation,'' which have no statute of limitation and carry a penalty of life in prison.
In this way, the tribunal found the defendent guilty but at the same time set him free, at least for a few hours.
''I'm ashamed of my country, of Italy,'' said Giovanni Gigliozzo, chairman of an association of victims' families that had been civil plaintiffs in the case. The lawyer for the victims, Marcello Gentili, called the verdict ''a victory for compromise and amnesia.''
''It is legal chicanery,'' said Shimon Samuels, European director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. ''It is a total betrayal of the whole purpose of bringing Priebke to trial.''
The reaction from Italian politicians, on the right and on the left, in Government and out, was unanimously outraged. Prime Minister Romano Prodi issued a statement expressing his ''extreme bitterness'' at the verdict before going to place flowers at the place of the massacre, the worst committed during the German occupation of Italy.
The Mayor of Rome, Francesco Rutelli, ordered the lights at public monuments turned off last night as a gesture of protest.
The plan to arrest Mr. Priebke again was announced overnight by Justice Minister Giovanni Maria Flick in part as a response to the outporing of protest.
The case against Mr. Priebke, a former SS captain who served in Rome during the Nazi occupation, was expected to be Europe's last war crimes trial dating from World War II.
In Italy, the massacre in the Ardeatine Caves, which took place on March 24, 1944, has remained a vivid national memory. In all, 335 men and boys were rounded up, taken to the caves south of Rome and shot in the back of the head.
The executions had been ordered in reprisal for the killing the day before of 33 German soldiers in a bomb attack by Italian Partisans on a Rome street.
The retaliation, which exceeded by five victims the usual German formula of 10 civilians for each dead German, was said to have been ordered by Hitler himself, and executed by Herbert Kappler, then the Gestapo chief in Rome.
Kappler, captured after the war, was put on trial before an Italian military court in 1948, found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment for his role in the massacre. In the late 1970's, he was smuggled out of an Italian military prison in a suitcase by his wife, and died in Germany.
In the same trial, five of Mr. Kappler's subordinates were acquitted on the grounds that they were obeying orders, a defense that Mr. Priebke's lawyers said would have worked for him as well at the time.
In his closing arguments this week, Mr. Priebke's lawyer, Mr. di Rezze, asked for an acquittal, saying Mr. Priebke should not be punished for following orders. Yesterday, Mr. di Rezze called the verdict ''a victory for Italian justice.''
Mr. Priebke, who had escaped from a British military prison after the war, was not found until 1994, when an American television crew discovered him living in the Andes. Italy began extradition proceedings soon afterward, and in a decision now believed to have been critical, sent his case to a military court to maintain continuity with the 1948 cases.
During the three-month proceedings, both the military prosecutor, Antonino Intelisano, and the lawyers for the civil plaintiffs attempted to have the military judges disqualified, in particular for remarks made by one judge who allegedly said Mr. Priebke should be cleared.
''I would say this court is not culturally or historically equipped to handle a case of these proportions,'' said Tullia Zevi, president of the Association of Italian Jewish Communities. ''These are judges who are used to evaluate petty offenses within the small world of the armed forces.''In Montreal, they're still paying off Olympic i.o.u.'s that shot past $1 billion. While Barcelona pulled off one of Europe's grandest waterfront restorations and made a small operating profit, it also wound up with debts of $1.4 billion. Los Angeles made a profit, too, but gained little in jobs or other economic benefits.
Atlanta politicians and business executives are determined to do better. They are parlaying the Games into this self-promoting city's greatest corporate recruiting tool ever. Their immodest goal: grab enough new offices, factories and corporate headquarters to complete Atlanta's transformation from regional outpost to global business nexus.
For the Olympics, Atlanta has reupholstered its hard sell with cushy treatment, including prime Olympic tickets, tables in the best restaurants, rooms in the nicest hotels and constant cossetting from business and political leaders. Georgia's government and corporate officials have endowed hundreds of visiting executives and their spouses with privileges usually reserved for heads of state. For the triumph of the American women's gymnastics team last week, ''We had better seats than President Clinton,'' said Susan Mills, who arranges high-tech alliances and other deals at Technology Marketing Partners in Berkeley, Calif.
Just where the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games ends and the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce begins is impossible to say: Andrew Young, the former mayor, United Nations delegate, civil rights leader and minister, is both co-chairman of the committee and chairman of the chamber.
''I'm not just interested in how much economic growth we add right now,'' he said Tuesday night at a reception for local and visiting executives and friends. ''I'm interested in sustained 5 percent growth. It's what's required to sustain good race relations. If Yugoslavia had 5, 6, 7 percent economic growth, there would be no war in Bosnia.''
For Atlanta's leaders, snatching up companies and jobs from other states and nations is all but a moral crusade. Hours before the opening ceremonies, Bernard Marcus, the chief executive of Home Depot Inc., an Olympic sponsor that is based here, joined Gov. Zell Miller of Georgia in addressing the top executives of 40 of Home Depot's largest suppliers. Over brunch in the Governor's colonnaded mansion, Mr. Marcus drove home a point that Governor Miller had only begun to make. ''The Governor's message is subtle,'' he said. ''Mine is not. If any of you need to consider a new location, this is where you should be.''
Judging the results will take years, but early returns show some promise. Among the more formal efforts, Operation Legacy, organized by the state government and the Georgia Power Company, entertained 300 executives, most with their spouses, on pre-Olympic tours, with 200 more visiting during the Games. Executives from 15 companies who came before, including Komatsu, Conagra Inc., the Fisher-Price unit of Mattel Inc. and the AMR Corporation, the parent of American Airlines, have already decided to bring Georgia another 2,000 jobs. Other business and government campaigns have won pledges from investors including Prince Charles of Britain, who will give $800,000 toward a monument to international athletics.
Local business leaders concede that many of the new jobs would have come without their efforts. Atlanta has, by some counts, led the nation in employment growth for each of the last three years, partly due to the Games but also because of its enduring attractions for business.
''It's a perennial favorite,'' said Charles Galloway, an executive vice president of the Moran, Stahl & Boyer relocation agency. His firm reports that in Atlanta prime office space costs less than $20 a square foot and the corporate income tax is 6 percent; in New York the lease rate is $35 a square foot and the corporate tax 17.85 percent. In recent years, Atlanta has raided the New York area for the headquarters of companies and organizations like United Parcel Service and Care, the international charity group.
Few executives visiting the Olympics fault their hosts for packed subways, inflated costs and lost bus drivers. Their handlers, however, do their best to insulate them. And while the Centennial Park bombing chilled them, the visitors say it could have happened anywhere.
Thomas J. Cunningham, a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, sees an economic slowdown after the Games lasting only a few months as hospitality and retailing cut back and hamburger flippers no longer command $10 an hour. Then, he predicts, the area will resume growing at least 1 percent faster than the nation.
Almost every Olympics host city has gained civic improvements. But Atlanta has gained so much that even some members of the International Olympic Committee have bristled. Los Angeles, charging corporate sponsors of the 1984 Olympics $4 million each, made do mostly with existing stadiums and arenas. Atlanta, charging sponsors $40 million each, got corporations, ticket buyers and broadcasters to pay nearly $700 million for new stadiums, parks and an Olympic village that will become college dormitories.
Let other cities wrestle with rebellious taxpayers to build new stadiums for sports teams that threaten to leave. To replace its own aging ball park, Atlanta will simply convert the Olympic stadium into a new home for the Atlanta Braves.
But the best measure of a host city's success might be long-term development and new jobs. By this standard, others have faltered. In Los Angeles, Peter V. Ueberroth finished the Olympics with a surplus of more than $200 million that financed new amateur athletic programs. But the region's economy collapsed a few years later following big cuts in military spending. And when the city exploded in riots in 1992, even Mr. Ueberroth, assigned the task of rallying corporations to the inner city, was unable to lure many jobs.
As much fun as the 1984 Games were for residents and visitors, said Larry J. Kimbell, director of the University of California at Los Angeles's business forecasting project, in economic terms ''it was about the biggest nothing that's ever been.''
Barcelona took the opportunity to rebuild and fortify tourism, courting tour operators long before the 1992 Games. But there, taxpayers rebelled as lingering debts raised taxes and deepened a recession.
Montreal's Olympic committee finished with a healthy operating surplus but huge cost overruns contributed to debts of about $1.5 billion including $400 million still outstanding. ''What a nightmare,'' said John Derepentigny, controller for the agency that manages Montreal's Olympic facilities.
Atlanta's Olympic Committee still says it will break even on a $1.7 billion budget. About $1.1 billion in security costs and local improvements will leave public debts of $150 million.
Well worth it, Atlantans say.
''We are using the Olympics as a marketing tool to attract businesses to our state,'' Randy Cardoza, chief of the state's Department of Industry, Trade and Tourism, said. The Olympic tours his department helps organize add a day in Savannah, the North Georgia mountains or other business sites to the Altanta circuit.The Federal Communications Commission issued its long-awaited rules on local telephone competition yesterday, and nobody was more relieved than the chiefs of the local phone companies.
For the regional Bell companies, GTE, and other local telephone companies, it was a case of getting the bad news over with. As expected, the F.C.C. said that it would use a firm lever to pry open the local phone monopolies and allow competition from AT&T and other new rivals.
But by releasing 700 pages of rules and analysis, the commission dispelled much of the uncertainty that has enshrouded the telephone industry since Feb. 8, when President Clinton unleashed a competitive free-for-all by signing the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
''Now I've got the rules in hand,'' said Richard C. Notebaert, the chairman and chief executive of the Ameritech Corporation, which offers local service in five Great Lakes states, ''There are two or three things in there I would have done differently. But at least I know now how to do business.''
Before Wall Street knew what the rules of engagement were going to be, many investors were so spooked that they simply abandoned the shares of the Bell companies. Between Feb. 8 and Aug. 1 -- a period in which the Standard & Poors index of 500 stocks was down nine-tenths of 1 percent -- an index that tracks the stocks of the seven Baby Bells and GTE fell a full 11.8 percent. This decline came even though the Bells reported robust second-quarter results.
''It's just amazing that the good news that came throughout the quarter got completely overshadowed by big regulatory issues,'' said Daniel Reingold, an analyst at Merrill Lynch & Company.
Yesterday, however, on news of the F.C.C. action, the shares of the Baby Bells promptly came back to life. Ameritech's stock rose $1.375, to $56.875, while Bell Atlantic jumped $1.625, to $60.75. The shares of AT&T and MCI, which also suffered because of the regulatory uncertainty, revived as well, though not quite as dramatically.
In its rules, the F.C.C. stipulated in elaborate detail how the Bells and other local providers must open their networks to competition. It also established a range of discounts that local companies must offer to long-distance companies who want to offer local service by leasing capacity on the Bells' networks, rather than constructing their own systems.
In a victory for the local phone companies, however, the F.C.C. ignored the pleas of long-distance carriers to tackle the issue of access charges -- the fees that Bell companies charge AT&T and other carriers to complete their long-distance calls. The commission has said it intends to reform access charges, but yesterday it deferred the issue to a proceeding later in the fall.
The long-distance carriers pay the local telephone companies an estimated $25 billion a year in access charges. So the F.C.C.'s decision to defer that issue was a windfall, said Edward D. Young 3d, the associate general counsel for the Bell Atlantic Corporation.
To some extent in recent months, the aggressive lobbying of the Bells aggravated their woes on Wall Street. In hopes of winning sympathy from the F.C.C. rule makers, the local phone industry issued calamitous warnings about the financial impact that strict regulations would have on the industry. The trouble was, shareholders sometimes took these warnings at face value.
On July 15, for example, the BellSouth Corporation predicted that if the F.C.C. were to reduce access charges, it would slash the revenues of the local phone industry by $10 billion to $12 billion a year. The shares of BellSouth and other Bell companies promptly swooned, and the next day, BellSouth retracted much of its statement.
A spokesman for BellSouth said yesterday that the company had merely received new information from the F.C.C. But executives at other Bell companies were angry because they felt that BellSouth had been overzealous in its effort to keep access charges out of the current F.C.C. proceeding.
One senior Government official described the Bell companies as having danced a ''Washington-Wall Street two-step.'' On the one hand, they lobbied the F.C.C. ferociously to get favorable rules. At the same time, they sought to assure investors that whatever the shape of the rules, their companies would thrive.
Knowing that its regulations have a tremendous impact on the performance of telephone company shares, the F.C.C. said it had tried to keep Wall Street informed throughout the deliberations. And yesterday, as soon as he finished speaking to the news media, Reed E. Hundt, the chairman of the F.C.C., held a briefing for securities analysts.
''The ultimate judge of our competition policy is the capital markets,'' Mr. Hundt explained in an interview. ''If they don't invest in competition, we won't get competition.''
Mr. Hundt also noted that the states would retain an important role in setting the new rules. For example, although the F.C.C. has established a method for calculating discounts, state regulators will set the actual discount rates.
Industry executives predicted that this would open the door to a fresh barrage of lobbying by the Baby Bells. ''You've never seen posturing like what you're going to see at the state level,'' said Gerald Taylor, president of the MCI Communications Corporation.
To be fair, the Bell lobbyists will no doubt be matched step-for-step by the long-distance carriers at both the state and Federal levels. Already yesterday, executives from AT&T and MCI were laying the groundwork for the coming clash over access charges.
''The Bells were able to intimidate the F.C.C. into maintaining a system of onerous access charges,'' said Gerry Salemme, the vice president of government affairs at the AT&T Corporation.Twice in the last two years, the Army Corps of Engineers has worked for days and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to restore sand to a 500-foot strip of oceanfront in front of three high-rise condominiums in Monmouth Beach. Both times, a few months later, storms washed the beach back into the Atlantic in a matter of hours.
Now for the first time, a corps official says that the effort to save that one stretch of beach, part of a much-debated $1.7 billion project to rebuild 21 miles of Monmouth County's rapidly eroding coastline, may be a losing battle.
''It could be that we may not be able to maintain the width in that part of the beach,'' William F. Slezak, the chief of civil projects in the corps's New York office, said on Wednesday. ''We may just accept the fact that this one small area will not have sand in front of it.''
Mr. Slezak emphasized that the project is not yet completed and that writing off the beach would not even be considered unless other remedies fail.
But the comment marks the first time the corps has openly doubted the feasibility of any part of the biggest beach restoration project ever attempted in this country, one that critics have long said amounted to an expensive and ineffective welfare program for waterfront property owners.
And while Beth Milleman, executive director of the Washington-based environmental group Coastal Alliance, called the remark ''a big 'welcome to reality,' '' Mr. Slezak's words angered state officials and residents with whom the corps has a 50-year agreement to maintain the beaches.
''I'm surprised at that kind of a comment,'' said Bernard Moore, the state's chief coastal engineer. ''I'm a strong believer that with the technology out there we can find a solution to that problem and I would not take the position that we just have to abandon it. I don't think that's even an option.''
Mr. Moore noted that the state is paying for a quarter of the project (the corps is paying 65 percent and local governments the remaining 10 percent), and that it would have considerable input in any decision about the fate of the affected stretch of beach, which has cost taxpayers nearly $900,000 so far.
''My predecessors in this position and myself have been pushing for this project for many, many years,'' Mr Moore said, adding he was not ''giving up the ghost that quick.''
No one is sure why sand will not stay in what engineers call the ''hot spot,'' where Hurricane Bertha last month scoured away all but a few feet of what had been a 150-foot-wide beach in front of the condominiums.
Many factors are suspected. The project is designed around the theory that the ocean current that sweeps sand off a beach will wash some of it ashore again just to the north, and the hot spot is near the south end of the completed portion of the project. Another problem is that the spot juts farther into the ocean than neighboring stretches of coast, leaving it less protected from currents.
Mr. Slezak said he hoped that when the next beach south, at Long Branch, is completed in 1998, it would ''feed'' the hot spot and slow the erosion. This process, he said, is already taking place to the north and even, to some extent, at the hot spot itself.
''This is a mid-construction condition,'' he said. ''There is no question that until you have the entire beach constructed, you're not having littoral drift work as a system.''
If that fails, he said, the corps might build more jetties to trap the sand, or perhaps deposit yet another load of sand. Or, he said, the corps might let nature take its course.
''We'd have to look at the cost-benefit analysis,'' he said.
Mr. Slezak added that the problems in Monmouth Beach do not invalidate the rest of the project, which calls for depositing 23 million cubic yards of sand from Sea Bright to Manasquan to stop the flooding that has plagued the heavily developed shore for decades.
Of the five miles of artificial beach that have been completed so far, he said, the 500-foot stretch in Monmouth Beach is the only area that is eroding much faster than expected. (The corps's schedule calls for the beaches to receive a new infusion of sand every six years.)
But Mr. Moore, the state coastal engineer, said that there would be no way to abandon the hot spot without affecting the entire project. ''If we give up that one beach, then what do we do when erosion occurs to the north and to the south of this particular area?'' he said.
Robert Saphro, a resident of the 12-story Shores complex and past president of the condominium association, echoed Mr. Moore's concerns. ''It would really be anything but desirable,'' he said. ''If they have a gap where I am located, they will eventually have gaps all along the beach.''
Such concerns may be moot if, as some experts say, the sand-redistribution theory that underlies the entire project does not apply on the coast of Monmouth County, where the beach drops off much more steeply just offshore than in other parts of the coast. Dr. Norbert C. Psuty, director of the Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences at Rutgers University and head of a team the state has hired to reassess its shore master plan, said that too much of the sand the corps is depositing is simply disappearing.Gov. George E. Pataki said yesterday that he might call a special session of the State Legislature to wrestle with the impact of the far-reaching Federal welfare bill on New York State's poverty programs, long the most generous and expansive in the nation.
Mr. Pataki said he was concerned that some provisions of the bill would shift hundreds of millions of dollars in costs from the Federal Government to the state. His criticism came as many officials and advocacy groups prepared for a bruising battle over the many changes that the Federal bill would require the state and localities to make in welfare and Medicaid.
Welfare was already one of the most combative issues in Albany, even before President Clinton announced on Wednesday that he would sign Republican-sponsored legislation that would end the Federal Government's guarantee of aid to the nation's poorest children.
Yesterday, the feuding flared again. Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, the most powerful Democrat in the Legislature, brushed aside the idea of holding a special session, saying that Mr. Pataki was overstating the effects of the Federal legislation.
But other Democratic Assembly members disagreed with the Speaker, maintaining that the Federal bill would be devastating to the state and New York City.
The State Senate majority leader, Joseph L. Bruno, a Republican from Rensselaer County, acknowledged the difficultly in writing new welfare regulations.
''It's going to be contentious, certainly,'' Mr. Bruno said.
The New York Legislature meets annually between January and July, but the Governor has the authority to call it into session at any other time. Special sessions are unusual, but they do happen occasionally, officials said.
The debate in New Jersey and Connecticut was more muted yesterday, mostly because Gov. Christine Todd Whitman and Gov. John G. Rowland have already proposed or pushed through their legislatures the kind of strict rules and time limits that are to be mandated nationally by the Federal bill.
New York is one of the only states with no time limits on welfare, largely because of opposition from the State Assembly.
The Federal measure also transfers to the states much more authority over welfare, so New York leaders have much more to decide on than in previous fights over these programs.
Under the bill, states must establish a five-year lifetime limit on welfare for single mothers with children, known as Aid to Families With Dependent Children. As a result, Mr. Pataki and legislative leaders are likely to approve a similar limit on Home Relief, a welfare program run by the state and localities for able-bodied, childless adults.
There are now 1.2 million people in the family aid program and 287,000 on Home Relief in New York, officials said. Last year in New York, the Federal, state and local governments spent nearly $4 billion on welfare and $20 billion on Medicaid, which pays for health care for the poor. About 70 percent of New York State's welfare recipients live in New York City.
State leaders must also grapple with a sharp drop in Federal aid that is expected to result from sections in the Federal bill that deny most Federal benefits to legal immigrants who are not citizens.
Those rules have angered Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who heads a city that has more welfare recipients than most states have. Mr. Giuliani stepped up his attacks on the Federal bill yesterday, asserting that it would cost New York City hundreds of millions of dollars by the end of the decade.
Mr. Giuliani also said the Federal bill might violate the United States Constitution because under the new rules, immigrants might not be treated the same in all states. Some states could choose to deny immigrants benefits like Medicaid; others might keep them.
''Remember, immigration is entirely a Federal matter,'' Mr. Giuliani said. ''Immigration, is something that should take place under uniform principles which are enacted by the Federal Government. The Federal Government should not allow states to have different rules that apply to immigrants.''
Mrs. Whitman also said she was opposed to cutting off aid to immigrants, though she did praise aspects of the bill that give states more power over welfare.
William Waldman, Governor Whitman's Human Service Commissioner, said New Jersey would try to pick up the costs of benefits for the 20,000 immigrant families in New Jersey now receiving Aid to Families With Dependent Children.
''It is one of those things that we are very concerned about,'' Mr. Waldman said.Trying to move up toward the price levels that prevailed in 1994, three major steel companies announced yesterday that they would raise prices by 3 to 5 percent for steel used for such things as cars, trucks, appliances and home construction. But steel is now so small a part of the economy that the price increases, if they stick, are not expected to be inflationary.
The pricing announcements came from the USX-U.S. SteelGroup, the nation's largest steel maker; the LTV Corporation, the third largest, and the smaller AK Steel Holding Company. The increases ranged from $15 to $25 a ton, effective in most cases in late September, but for USX, partly in September and partly in January.
Other major steel companies, including the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, the second largest, are expected to join the third attempt this year by the industry to raise steel prices. The first two, in April and July, ''stuck in part,'' said Thomas Ferrall, a USX spokesman.
The new increases are likely to follow a similar pattern, said Walter Carter, a steel expert at DRI-McGraw Hill, an economic consulting company near Boston. ''Demand for steel is strong, but no longer rising,'' he said, ''and the pressure from imports is likely to keep pricing soft.''
The increases would affect mostly spot purchases of steel. Auto makers and appliance companies, in contrast, buy steel under long-term contracts, and the contracts are already in place for the steel that will go into 1997 model cars and into appliances, including air-conditioners, which are piling up in warehouses because of an unusually cool summer.
''The percentage of air-conditioners that have been shipped and actually sold is only about 70 percent,'' said Joel Prakken, chairman of Macroeconomic Advisers, an economic consulting and forecasting company in St. Louis. ''Normally it is 85 percent to 90 percent.''
Still, the increases would play a role in the next negotiations with appliance makers and in talks with the auto industry next March for contracts to buy steel for 1998 model cars.
But even if the latest price increases are entirely successful, sheet steel prices will still be 10 percent or more below their levels in the fall of 1994, when they reached a peak for the 1990's after several major increases, and then began a decline that did not bottom out until the first quarter of this year.
Despite the price runup in 1993 and 1994, the inflation rate for the economy as a whole was only 2.7 percent in each of those years, a bit less than the annual rate today.
One major reason is that domestic steel today, selling at an average price of under $500 a ton, represents less than 1 percent of the nation's nearly $7 trillion economy, down five percentage points or so over the last 30 years.
''Cars used to sell for $3,000 and the steel in one was $300 or 10 percent of the price,'' said Bernard Lashinsky, director of steel consulting for AUS Consultants in Moorestown, N.J. ''Now a car costs $20,000 and the steel is around $500 so you are talking 2.5 percent and the same sort of shrinkage is happening in construction and in many other products, where the added cost comes from plastic or electronic components or other nonsteel items.''
The American steel industry produces about 110 million tons of steel a year, down from 118 million at the peak in 1974-1975, when the national economy was roughly 55 percent of its present size.
The price increases announced yesterday, which varied somewhat from company to company, were for hot-rolled steel, up $15 a ton to about $340; for cold-rolled steel, up $20 a ton to about $478, and coated steel, up $25 to $557 a ton.
In January, hot-rolled steel was at a low of $300 a ton, cold-rolled steel, $430, and coated-steel, $480.A disastrous explosion that flattened much of a major natural-gas refining complex last week ruined what had been shaping up as a triumphal announcement today of a 22 percent gain in pretax earnings for Petroleos Mexicanos, Mexico's petroleum monopoly.
Instead of basking in the glow of the higher profits in the first half- year, Adrian Lajous, Pemex's president, spent his time in a news conference at company headquarters here detailing an emergency plan aimed at replacing critical natural-gas refining capacity destroyed in the blast, defending the company's maintenance procedures and brushing aside Congressional calls for his resignation.
The July 26 blast, a result of a gas leak, killed six workers and turned to ashes much of the Cactus gas refining complex, near the town of Reforma in the southern state of Chiapas. It reduced Mexico's natural-gas processing capacity by 35 percent and has seriously disrupted production of some petrochemicals for which gas is a raw material, as well as of natural gas itself.
Mr. Lajous announced today that since the disaster, Pemex had negotiated emergency contracts worth about $700,000 a day to import natural gas from the United States. The company has also scrambled to reduce production and exports of butane, naphtha and other petroleum products, and to accelerate construction of new processing plants, he said. Pemex's first damage estimates approached $240 million, but Mr. Lajous said today that those figures now appeared too high. The Cactus complex was insured, he said.
Sounding beleaguered, Mr. Lajous also appealed for understanding from a chorus of Congressional critics who plan hearings next week on Pemex's maintenance procedures.
''This is not a moment for precipitous judgments,'' Mr. Lajous said. ''We all need to help make informed and intelligent criticism, so that it leads to the general goal of strengthening Pemex, not of weakening our company through glib, poorly founded or exagerrated accusations.''
Mr. Lajous said the blast was probably caused by poor execution of standard maintenance procedures. A technocrat from an influential family in Mexico's ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, Mr. Lajous has enjoyed a reputation for efficiency and modern thinking. But his star has seemed to fall in recent months, as Mexico's much-publicized privatization of its secondary petrochemical industry has stalled in a swamp of political wrangling and legal challenges.
A senior Mexican official said today that President Ernesto Zedillo continued to have ''complete confidence'' in Mr. Lajous's leadership. ''This was an unfortunate accident, but it was an accident,'' he said.
Pemex announced the planned privatization of four large petrochemical complexes and six smaller plants last year, attracting the interest of such foreign companies as Exxon, Dow Chemical, British Petroleum, Chevron and Sumitomo. But this spring, the Mexican Government excluded foreign buyers from majority ownership of the petrochemical plants, plunging the selloff into confusion. No clarification has been forthcoming.
Pemex also scheduled, and then canceled, a selloff of its secondary petrochemical industry in 1993.
The Cactus explosion led to the virtual shutdown of three ammonia plants in the Cosoleacaque petrochemical complex, in the gulf state of Veracruz, one of those that has been offered for sale. That cast doubt on Pemex's reliability as a raw materials supplier to the petrochemical plants to be sold off.
Mr. Lajous dismissed suggestions today that the blast would further complicate the petrochemical privatization.
But Victor Bermudez, a lawyer in Mexico City for Dow Chemical, which had originally voiced tremendous enthusiasm about the petrochemical selloff, said that ''the Mexican Government is really losing credibility.''
''After this explosion, everybody has the right to have concerns about other plants where similar accidents might occur,'' Mr. Bermudez said. ''Any company that's participating in the privatization process will pay special interest now to safety and environmental conditions, because nobody wants to buy into another Cactus.''
INTERNATIONAL BUSINESSThe economy boomed in the spring but it may now be easing to a more sustainable pace, according to new figures issued today. They gave a sharp lift to financial markets and touched off a daylong spate of campaign-related argument in Washington.
The Commerce Department reported that the gross domestic product, the most widely cited indicator of the nation's economic pulse, rose at a 4.2 percent annual pace during the April-June quarter, the fastest in two years. This compared with a 2 percent growth rate during the first three months of the year. There was little sign of accelerating inflation.
Then, at least temporarily alleviating fears that the Federal Reserve will raise short-term interest rates soon to try to rein in the economy, the managers who make buying decisions for American industry reported a broad weakening in July.
Wall Street fixed on that evidence of slackening activity, which is more recent than the report on gross domestic product, and the bond and stock markets rallied smartly. Interest rates fell across the board, while the Dow Jones industrial average jumped 65.84 points, to 5,594.75.
Another report today showing a sizable drop in the number of first-time claims for unemployment benefits last week was mostly ignored. And despite the enthusiasm in the markets over the soft purchasing managers report, sentiment could shift quickly if the July employment survey, to be issued on Friday, indicates unexpectedly rapid growth. Four of the last five monthly employment reports have spurred steep selloffs in the markets after they came in much stronger than expected.
Politicians of both parties seized on the growth figures for a back-and-forth that appeared to be a warm-up for election-season debates to come.
The White House, in an unusually energetic effort to take credit for economic success, assembled eight Cabinet and other ranking officials to stand beside President Clinton in the Rose Garden. The President proclaimed that the new figures were confirmation of what he called ''the strongest economy in a generation'' and cautioned against ''dramatic'' policy changes that could undermine budget discipline.
''This economic news shows that our strategy is working, the economy is growing, our nation is moving in the right direction,'' Mr. Clinton said.
Responding to a question, Mr. Clinton said a broad tax cut, like Bob Dole is expected to propose next week, would have a ''very adverse'' economic impact if it led to a swelling of the budget deficit.
Mr. Dole, set to become the Republican Presidential nominee, charged that the President first broke his promise of a tax cut for the middle class and now ''steps forward to crow about reigning over the first recovery since World War II to leave the American worker behind.''
And Senate Republicans, led by Pete V. Domenici of New Mexico and Connie Mack of Florida, took an hour out from the debate over welfare to join in attacking the economy's performance during the Clinton Administration. They contended that the current business expansion, which began in 1991, was the weakest in more than a century. They pointed to stagnating wages and family incomes, a slump in savings they attributed partly to the 1993 tax increase and a trade deficit they calculated as three times as large as under President George Bush.
But while the G.D.P. report, which slightly exceeded recent expectations, brought about today's debate, it was regarded by private economists as more about the past than the future. Much more important for deliberations at the Federal Reserve, whose main policy arm is scheduled to meet Aug. 20, will be the employment survey on Friday and today's purchasing managers report, which strongly suggested that manufacturing activity had started to slow.
The index from the National Association of Purchasing Management fell to 50.2 from 54.3 in June, with all the major components, especially new orders, moving down sharply. Employment fell as well. And the rate at which suppliers fill orders -- a gauge closely watched at the Federal Reserve to see if bottlenecks are emerging that could lead to inflation -- also speeded up significantly.
The Commerce Department's tally of the national output showed the second-quarter surge reflecting gains in all major components except trade and spending on nonresidential structures.
''The economy was certainly on the move,'' said Robert G. Dederick, economic consultant to the Northern Trust Company of Chicago.
Consumers were particularly vigorous, lifting personal consumption to a 3.7 percent pace after an already brisk 3.5 percent for the first quarter, the report showed. Spending on cars and other long-lived goods climbed at a 14.1 percent pace, though much of this unsustainable strength reflected recovery from the first-quarter strike at the General Motors Corporation.
Indeed, one department official was said to have calculated that had there been no strike, overall G.D.P. would have grown at a 3.2 percent pace in the first quarter and 3.1 percent in the second.
Inflation, gauged by the price index for gross domestic purchases, ran at a 2 percent rate in the latest quarter compared with 2.3 percent in the first part of the year when the Northeast blizzard magnified the result because Government employees were being paid when they could not work.
In current dollar terms, G.D.P. grew at a 6.1 percent pace in the spring after a rise of 4.2 percent in the winter.
Today's report included a ''limited'' annual revision of national income and products accounts back through the first quarter of 1993 but the changes were small. Real growth was one-tenth of a point higher in 1993 than previously calculated and no quarterly change was larger than two-tenths of a point, the amount by which the first quarter of 1996 has now been reduced.Carnival Air Lines and Pan American World Airways have called off their short-lived plans to merge. Reuven Wertheim, the chairman of Carnival Air Lines, said in a statement yesterday that the two parties could not come to terms.
Two weeks earlier the carriers said they had reached a tentative agreement to merge, but under an arrangement that essentially would have amounted to a Pan Am purchase. The price of the proposed transaction was known to have been about $100 million, roughly half in Pan Am stock.
''We agreed on terms, we started our due diligence, we went back to adjust the terms and we couldn't agree,'' Martin R. Shugrue, one of the two principals in Pan Am, said yesterday.
The other principal in the Miami-based airline is Charles Cobb, a former Ambassador to Ireland and Under Secretary of Commerce for travel and tourism, who bought the Pan Am trademark for $1.3 million in 1993.
Two years earlier the original Pan Am abruptly shut down and declared bankruptcy, a casualty of a domestic-route system inadequate to feed its international operations and a corporate casualty of the terrorist bomb that destroyed the airline's Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, with a loss of 270 lives.
For now, Pan Am exists only on paper, but Mr. Shugrue said it would be airborne soon, with daily flights between Miami and New York and Miami and Los Angeles.
''We're extremely confident we'll get our D.O.T. clearance very soon,'' he said, referring to the Department of Transportation, which must issue the necessary flight certifications, ''and we will be flying before Labor Day. We already have one plane, a second scheduled for delivery next week and a third 10 days after that.''
While Pan Am had regarded the Carnival transaction as an opportunity, Mr. Shugrue said, ''We never stopped getting Pan Am's basic game plan ready.'' That plan entails also serving Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and eventually San Juan, P.R.
Carnival, founded in 1988 and based in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., flies 60 daily scheduled departures among cities in the Northeast, Florida, California and the Caribbean. Its revenue last year was about $250 million.
Asked if the termination of the deal was irrevocable, Mr. Shugrue replied, ''Nothing is irrevocable.''After months of pursuing possible buyers, the Rockwell International Corporation announced today that it had sold its aerospace and weapons businesses to the Boeing Company for $860 million in stock tax free.
Boeing will also assume $2.165 billion in Rockwell debt and retiree liabilities.
The companies said that the long-awaited deal had been specially designed, using a popular merger method known as a Morris Trust. Such deals are structured when an acquirer wants only part of another company and the seller wants to avoid capital-gains taxes, which in this deal might have been several hundred million dollars.
While the Clinton Administration had indicated earlier this year that it was trying to cut back on such tax-free deals, the companies said today that they thought this transaction would be accepted by the Internal Revenue Service.
Analysts said the deal would provide several benefits to Boeing. Boeing is by far the largest manufacturer of commercial aircraft, but it has been seeking to expand its weapons and space-related businesses.
$(But Boeing's core business continues to rake in large orders. On Friday in Tokyo, the Kanematsu Corporation announced that it would buy 10 planes from Boeing for $500 million, while a unit of the Itochu Corporation said it would buy 12 jets for $600 million, the Reuters news service reported. The two Japanese trading houses are buying Boeing's most advanced B737-800 model.$)
The Rockwell divisions that Boeing is acquiring have manufactured everything from space shuttles to strategic nuclear missile components.
''Rockwell did not get a great premium, but the terms were mutually acceptable. This substantially expands Boeing's space-related business, and that is a plus,'' said Wolfgang Demisch, an analyst with BT Securities.
One conspicuous aspect of the deal is that it denies the Rockwell units to the McDonnell Douglas Corporation, which had looked at them.
Boeing will offer Rockwell's shareholders $860 million in new stock. When the deal is completed Rockwell will emerge almost debt-free, and with $800 million in cash. Rockwell also announced that it would begin a $1 billion stock buyback.
Shares of Rockwell surged $2.75 today, to $55.25, while Boeing shares rose 62.5 cents, to $89.125. The Wall Street Journal had reported Wednesday that a sale was imminent.
Following the harsh influence of the stock market, Rockwell had long ago decided that it would enjoy a higher stock price if it focused on its rapidly growing semiconductor and factory automation businesses and unloaded the weapons and aerospace units. So Rockwell will cut loose about 21,000 employees who produce revenues of about $3 billion a year.
Philip Condit, the president of Boeing, said in a telephone interview that there would be ''very, very few'' layoffs, but that some people would be asked to move. He emphasized that the company was enthusiastic about the deal because it complemented Boeing's existing businesses.
''It is the strategic fit that was important,'' Mr. Condit said. ''We're looking to grow those businesses.
''We're looking to work with them rather than sending in the shock troops.''
Mr. Condit said that Boeing had no specific targets in mind, but that it would consider other acquisitions in its efforts to grow.
The transaction follows a series of deals in the last few years as weapons manufacturers have come under pressure because of a shrinking Pentagon budget. The consolidation has created a small number of huge military contractors, forcing medium-sized and smaller concerns to consider selling to survive.
Rockwell's reliance on weapons production had already tumbled, dropping to 16 percent in the fiscal year that ended last Sept. 30 from 51 percent in the 1986 fiscal year.
Rockwell will be left with four principal businesses: factory automation, automotive equipment, semiconductors and avionics and communications.House and Senate Republicans cleared the way today for a vote on overhauling immigration law, resolving a sharpdispute over how to educate children who are illegal immigrants.
If passed, the legislation would tighten the nation's borders and clamp down on millions of illegal immigrants living and working here.
But critics contend that the compromise on the education provision could throw thousands of children onto the streets.
''Our goals are to do all we can to discourage the unchecked flow of illegal immigration and to encourage those illegal immigrants already here to go home,'' said Representative Elton Gallegly, a California Republican who championed the education provision.
The bill's best chances for passage before lawmakers take a monthlong recess are in the House, where the leaders are expected to put the legislation on a fast track for a floor vote by Friday or Saturday. But Democrats opposed to the education provision could block Senate approval.
Earlier this year, both House and Senate gave overwhelming approval to similar bills, which would nearly double -- to almost 10,000 -- the number of Border Patrol officers, stiffen penalties against document fraud and provide ways to verify that employers hire only legal workers. About 300,000 foreigners a year enter the country illegally or overstay their visas, many vanishing into the underground economy.
Reconciling the two bills hit a snag beginning in May, mainly over a provision that the House included but the Senate did not, that would allow states to deny public education to children who are illegal immigrants.
The ban is particularly popular in California, where the Republican Governor, Pete Wilson, has been a fervent supporter. The state spends $1.8 billion a year to educate more than 350,000 children who are illegal immigrants.
But school administrators and law-enforcement officers have condemned the measure, saying that by putting children out of school and onto the streets, it would jeopardize public health and safety. President Clinton has promised to veto any bill that includes the education measure. Several prominent Republicans including former President George Bush and Gen. Colin L. Powell oppose the measure.
The education compromise hammered out over the past several days by Senate and House Republicans, without Democrats' participation, would allow illegal immigrants now enrolled in elementary school to stay without penalty so long as they did not change school districts.
But once these children advanced to the seventh grade, local school districts could require that they pay annual tuition costs of more than $5,000 a student through the 12th grade. Opponents of this measure say that parents unable or unwilling to pay the tuition would pull these children out of class, a step that would almost certainly identify the family as deportable by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Illegal immigrant children now in grades 7 through 12 would not be affected.
The provision would take effect in the 1997-98 academic year, permitting states to deny public education to any illegal immigrant who arrived from then on.
Republican negotiators struck a final deal today after Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, insisted that the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, assess the measure's impact on children two and a half years and five years after the provision takes effect.
Senior Administration officials criticized the compromise as still leaving children out on the street. ''We don't want to create a farm system for gang leaders and drug dealers to recruit from,'' said Rahm I. Emanuel, an aide to Mr. Clinton who follows immigration issues.
House and Senate Republican negotiators, working without bipartisan participation, as is customary in conference committees, resolved several other differences in the bill before presenting it to Democrats as a done deal.
The House had sought to make gaining asylum status more difficult for immigrants who lack valid travel documents and who say they are fleeing persecution. The House would have had a lone immigration officer determine the foreigner's fate, without a judicial review. The compromise allows immigrants a hearing before an immigration judge and a reasonable time to prepare for it.
The House wanted to require that an immigrant's sponsor earn at least 200 percent of the Federal poverty level for a household that included the sponsor's family and the immigrant, a level that would preclude nearly half of all Americans from sponsoring a foreigner. The Senate proposed 125 percent. The compromise was 140 percent if the immigrant was the sponsor's spouse or child, and 200 percent for anyone else. The current level is 100 percent.
The Senate had proposed directing the immigration service to test several mandatory pilot programs in states with many immigrants to find one that best allows employers to verify the legal status of people whom they want to hire. The House wanted to make the programs voluntary, fearing that using a national data base to verify a worker's status could lead to a national identification card. The compromise was to conduct three voluntary pilot programs.A Federal jury today handed a major setback to the Whitewater independent counsel's office when it acquitted two Arkansas bankers of four felony counts, including charges that they conspired to conceal large cash withdrawals by Bill Clinton's 1990 campaign for Governor of Arkansas.
The jury deadlocked on seven other counts of conspiracy and misapplication of bank money in the trial against Herby Branscum Jr. and Robert M. Hill, the two owners of the Perry County Bank, prompting a Federal judge to declare a mistrial on those charges.
The jury was unable to decide whether the two men had improperly reimbursed themselves from their bank for contributions to the 1990 campaign. One juror said tonight that a majority of the panel had leaned toward acquittal on all counts but had deadlocked after highly antagonistic deliberations.
The verdicts today represented the first defeat for the Whitewater independent counsel's office, which had begun its investigation of the bankers two years ago.
But the decision was a political victory for the White House, particularly because one of the charges on which the bankers were acquitted involved Bruce R. Lindsey, a deputy White House counsel who had been named an unindicted co-conspirator in the case. Prosecutors charged that Mr. Lindsey, the treasurer of the 1990 campaign, had directed the bankers to conceal the cash withdrawals by failing to file a currency transaction report required by the Federal Government as an anti-money laundering measure.
''The President is happy to learn the news that a jury has acquitted Herby Branscum Jr. and Robert Hill of significant portions of the independent counsel's case against them,'' the White House said in a statement tonight. ''Today's not-guilty verdicts on all of the so-called 'C.T.R. counts' confirm what we already knew: Bruce Lindsey acted properly.''
Before the verdict, Presidential aides had tried to distance any outcome from Mr. Clinton by handing out a briefing book to reporters that quoted excerpts from news articles and court transcripts in which others had said the President had done nothing improper. Still, the prosecution had argued that Mr. Branscum and Mr. Hill broke the law to curry favor with Mr. Clinton and win state patronage jobs.
While prosecutors in this case, as in the McDougal-Tucker trial, had emphasized that Mr. Clinton had not been charged with any wrongdoing, the President was drawn into the case, as happened in the other trial, as a witness for the defense.
The jury's decision today that there was no conspiracy to conceal the cash payments appeared to signal that Mr. Lindsey would wind up not being charged with any wrongdoing.
During the case, after the prosecution rested, Judge Susan Webber Wright ruled in a sealed finding that a preponderance of evidence indicated Mr. Lindsey's deep involvement in the scheme. Asked today about what happens to Mr. Lindsey, both the independent counsel, Kenneth W. Starr, and E. Hickman Ewing Jr., the lead prosecutor in the case, declined to comment. But then Mr. Ewing added: ''The judge's finding on Mr. Lindsey was by a preponderance of the evidence. In this court, the standard for finding guilt is beyond a reasonable doubt. That is a much tougher standard.''
The defendants expressed relief at the partial acquittal. ''It's been two years of what I felt like was a persecution of me and my family for political reasons, because I was a friend of Bill Clinton's,'' Mr. Branscum said, moments after the eight men and four women on the jury were escorted from the courtroom by Federal marshals. ''I always felt like if we got this before a jury, we would be exonerated.''
Officials from the independent counsel's office said that they had not decided whether to retry the two men on the seven counts on which the jurors could not reach agreement.
''Obviously we're disappointed but we must respect the decision of the jury and the fact that they worked hard,'' said Mr. Ewing, a deputy Whitewater counsel. Mr. Ewing also said the jury's decision would have no effect on other areas of inquiry.
The prosecutors continue to examine not only the Clintons' finances, but also the dismissal of the White House travel office staff in 1993; the circumstances surrounding the suicide of Vincent W. Foster Jr., the White House deputy counsel, and the possibly improper handling by White House officials of hundreds of sensitive files of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The prosecutors had already won a major victory on May 28, when a jury in the first Whitewater-related case found James B. McDougal and Susan McDougal, the Clintons' former business partners, and Gov. Jim Guy Tucker of Arkansas, guilty of 24 felony counts.
The 22-day trial of Mr. Branscum and Mr. Hill offered a rare window into the gritty world of politics in a small Southern state that was dominated by one political party, a Governor with Presidential aspirations and a handful of powerful business interests. The trial also illuminated part of a pattern that has drawn the attention of Whitewater prosecutors: Mr. Clinton's reliance on obscure Arkansas banks to help finance his political and personal interests.
During the course of the trial, it was disclosed that the Clintons had actually borrowed significantly more money from the Perry County Bank than they had previously reported. The bank is about an hour's drive northwest of Little Rock in Perryville, a town of 1,141 people. Records introduced at the trial showed that the Clintons had personally borrowed $285,000 from the bank to finance the 1990 campaign, some $105,000 more than they had initially disclosed, at a time when the couple said their net worth was $226,000.
Prosecutors had accused Mr. Hill and Mr. Branscum of conspiring with the 1990 Clinton campaign to conceal large cash payments that they suggested were used to make improper payoffs on the weekends before the primary and the general election. The bankers were also charged with improperly reimbursing themselves from the bank for political contributions, and using friends and relatives to circumvent the limits on such donations. The prosecutors had said the two had broken the law to curry favor with the campaign and win plum patronage positions.
The two men, and Mr. Lindsey, all denied the accusations. Mr. Hill and Mr. Branscum accused the prosecution's chief witness, Neal T. Ainley, a former president of the Perry County Bank, of failing to report the cash withdrawals to the Government.
As part of its case, the prosecution introduced evidence that in a Dec. 14, 1994 meeting in the state capitol, Mr. Hill and a bank auditor, Kent Dollar, handed Mr. Clinton $15,500 in contributions. The money was given to Mr. Clinton shortly before a deadline for contributions. The money was used to help repay some of the personal loans the Clintons had received from the bank.A Brooklyn man was convicted yesterday in Federal District Court in Brooklyn of defrauding more than 400 elderly people of more than $500,000 in a series of fraudulent telemarketing schemes.
During a 10-day trial, prosecutors outlined the way in which Santos Escotto, 33, and other fast-talking accomplices called elderly people across the country and enticed them to send money for the chance to win prizes ranging from new Mercedes-Benz automobiles, $50,000 cash bonuses and Hawaiian vacations. But in fact, no prizes or awards existed.
Mr. Escotto was one of two owners of the fake operation, which moved from place to place in Brooklyn between October 1993 and December 1994 and used the names Golden Star Enterprises, Enigma Enterprises and Platinum Industries.
He faces up to five years in prison on the telemarketing fraud conspiracy charge. His partner, Patrice Lambert, pleaded guilty to the same charge on the first day of the trial.
''This should serve as a warning,'' said Stephen D. Kelly, an assistant United States attorney. ''If you get a call and it sounds too good to be true, it is. In this case, it's an example of how certain senior citizens fought back, by cooperating with authorities. Without them, we would not have been able to accomplish this.''
The prosecution of Mr. Escotto was part of a two-year Federal and state joint undercover investigation -- code-named Operation Senior Sentinel -- into telemarketing fraud that victimized the elderly throughout the United States and Canada. Six people, including Mr. Escotto, have been convicted so far for participating in the fraudulent schemes in the Brooklyn operations.
As part of the investigation, volunteers from the American Association of Retired Persons began working with F.B.I. agents in the summer of 1994. The volunteers notified the F.B.I. about suspicious telemarketing solicitations conducted by Enigma Enterprises.
An F.B.I. agent then secretly recorded workers at Enigma and Platinum making fraudulent high-pressure telephone sales pitches. F.B.I. agents and postal inspectors interviewed numerous victims, who reported that they had each paid Golden Star, Enigma or Platinum as much as $10,000 in response to various promotions, and had received nothing in return.
In addition to the high-pressure sales pitches, the callers from Platinum posed as lawyers working for the Consumer Protection Agency or the Department of Justice. They called victims who had previously paid money to fraudulent telemarketers and offered to help with restitution. The salesmen then asked the elderly people to pay more money for lawyers' fees and taxes.Four years ago, candidate Bill Clinton issued a ringing promise to ''end welfare as we know it,'' to ''empower people with the education, training and child care they need'' to escape the trap of dependency. As President, he proposed to increase welfare spending by $10 billion to accomplish those goals.
On Wednesday, Mr. Clinton stood at a lectern in the White House and said somberly that he would sign Republican welfare legislation that would cut nearly $55 billion in spending and give states vast new powers to remove people from welfare rolls.
The bill, he said, ''has serious flaws.'' But, he added, ''This is the best chance we will have for a long time to complete the work of ending welfare as we know it.''
In endorsing the Republicans' bill, Mr. Clinton was acquiescing in the most sweeping reversal of domestic social policy since the New Deal -- and in a remarkable retreat from the vision of welfare that he had outlined in 1992. This decision marked the end of a tortuous four-year journey that, in many ways, is emblematic of the way the President has often defied the orthodoxies of his party.
Mr. Clinton had cast himself as a New Democrat with his own welfare plan, but its failure epitomized the missteps of his first two years. He decided to push his overhaul of health care above all, found himself derided as a big-spending old Democrat and wound up being unable to get either proposal passed, even in a Democratic Congress.
Then, after the Republicans gained control of Congress in the 1994 elections and began pressing their conservative social agenda, Mr. Clinton found himself increasingly tangled in a political paradox: He was seeking to take credit for a welfare revolution that he was simultaneously -- and not altogether successfully -- trying to rein in.
In Washington, Republicans and many Democrats were trying to take credit for welfare reform yesterday. But welfare reform did not really start in Washington: out in the states, it has been unfolding on Mr. Clinton's watch and with his sometimes reluctant approval, pushing the national welfare debate in directions that are tougher and arguably meaner than what he talked about in the 1992 campaign.
Long an absolute guarantee of cash benefits for the poor, welfare is already assuming a new shape, in which ''recipients'' are now ''participants'' or ''clients.'' They visit ''transitional assistance'' agencies, where they sign ''personal responsibility agreements'' and are told to get jobs, or else.
From Boston to Austin, Tex., and Madison, Wis., to Sacramento, Calif., much of this charge is clearly being led by the states themselves, often by Republican governors, and many of those leaders insist that the White House has been too slow and insufficiently bold in confronting welfare reform. And in state after state, the idea of extensive job and skills training has been replaced by a blunter policy that can best be summed up this way: get a job, any job.
Moreover, many states have sought the authority to cut people off of welfare after two years even if they have not been able to find or keep a job, an approach that Mr. Clinton once resisted but is now encapsulated in the Republicans' bill.
The deep divisions in his Administration over how to reform welfare -- indeed, the shifts in Mr. Clinton's own mind -- have been evident in the tortuous negotiations with Congress over the welfare overhaul as well as in the waivers his Administration has granted to more than three dozen states to try new work-focused approaches to welfare.
Some of his allies on his original welfare proposal argue that President Clinton made a fundamental mistake in deciding to push for his health-care plan first. Had Mr. Clinton done welfare reform first, they say, he might have cemented his credentials as a New Democrat and even gained a foothold that might have brought him success on health care.
Perhaps he had that in mind on Wednesday when he spoke of the ''duty to seize the opportunity'' on welfare. Two years ago, Mr. Clinton's hopes on health care reform were dashed, in part, because he resisted negotiation on a compromise bill when an alternative measure might still have been possible.
But despite that failure, and despite his vetoes of the first two Republican bills, even some of his critics give him credit for establishing a national dialogue on welfare that put the issue on the political agenda and eventually resulted in an overhaul that was all but unimaginable during 12 years of Republican control of the White House.
''It's Nixon in China,'' said Douglas J. Besharov, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative research group in Washington. ''If Clinton had been a Republican, the Democrats in Congress would have stopped these waivers in their tracks.''
Measured statistically, the changes in the welfare system to date are small. From 1980 to 1993, when President Clinton took office, the welfare population had grown from 10.6 million to 14.1 million. It has since dipped to 12.8 million.
Federal and state spending for Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the principal welfare program, has stabilized at about $25 billion, which is equivalent to about 14 percent of Medicare spending or 9 percent of the Pentagon's budget. The Department of Health and Human Services says an average of 650,000 of 4.5 million welfare parents worked each month last year, 140,000 more than in 1992. Nonetheless, the face of welfare has changed markedly, and pressure on recipients to get a job is sweeping the system.
''The main focus here is jobs, jobs, jobs,'' said Mary L. Pike, a senior counselor in the Pensacola office of Florida's Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services, where half of the area's welfare clients are routed into a state-mandated work program.
In view of Mr. Clinton's changing positions and of his letting the states take the initiative, many Republicans say it is absurd for him to assert that he has led the charge on welfare reform, especially after his vetoes of the two Republican bills.
''An element of political skill is to recognize a wave when you see it,'' said Gov. Michael O. Leavitt of Utah, a state in the forefront of imposing work requirements on welfare recipients. ''I don't think Bill Clinton created this wave. I think he rode it.''The Justice Department's antitrust division sued the General Electric Company in a Federal court in Montana yesterday, charging that the company's licensing agreements thwart competition in the market for servicing medical equipment. At issue is whether hospitals and clinics that have licensed G.E.'s proprietary diagnostic software to service their own G.E.-made CAT scanners and medical devices should be allowed to offer similar diagnostic services to other hospitals. The company said its agreements prohibit customers from using its own software to compete with G.E. The Justice Department seeks a ruling banning any limits. Analysts estimated that domestic service contracts, the only segment affected by the suit, account for a few million dollars of the estimated $3.8 billion in sales of G.E.'s medical equipment in 1996.
COMPANY NEWSHe crossed the finish line, saw the stunning world record at 200 meters and let out a scream. Later, Michael Johnson slumped to the track on all fours. He had the same reaction to his time of 19.32 seconds as did the other 82,884 spectators at Olympic Stadium. Disbelief. The bronze medalist in the race was so startled that he thought it insufficient to shake Johnson's hand. So he bowed.
In one of the greatest performances in the history of track and field, Johnson became the first man to win the 200-meter and 400-meter sprints at the same Olympics. Monday night, he won the 400 meters in 43.49 seconds, an Olympic record. Never before has a sprinter possessed such blistering speed for the 200 and the muscular endurance for the 400.
His winning time in tonight's 200 whittled more than three-tenths of a second off the previous record of 19.66 seconds that Johnson set on this same track on June 23 at the Olympic trials. No one has ever lowered the 200-meter record by such a hefty margin. Immediately, Johnson was being compared to Bob Beamon, whose phenomenal long jump at the 1968 Summer Games surpassed the existing record by more than two feet.
As remarkable as his victory was, Johnson was not the only person to accomplish the 200-400 sprint double tonight. Marie-Jose Perec of France became the second woman to win both events at the Olympics, winning her 200-meter race in 22.12 seconds. She joins Valerie Brisco-Hooks of the United States, who won the two sprints at the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles. Perec earlier won the 400 in 48.25 seconds, an Olympic record.
If the full house at Olympic Stadium warmly applauded Perec's victory, it launched into frenzied celebration of Johnson's shattering performance. He ran the first 100 meters in 10.12 seconds, then shifted into hammering overdrive to run the second 100 meters in 9.20 seconds. The world record for 100 meters from a stationary start is 9.84 seconds.
Frankie Fredericks of Namibia finished second tonight in 19.68 seconds, only two-hundredths of a second off Johnson's previous record, but he was still four yards behind at the finish. Ato Boldon of Trinidad won the bronze in 19.80 seconds, which would have won or tied for first at every previous Olympics but one; tonight he was a distant third. The race was so fast that the 1992 champion, Mike Marsh of the United States, finished last with a time of 20.48.
''I said before, the person who won the 100 meters was the fastest man alive,'' said Boldon, who also finished third in the 100 meters. ''I think the fastest man alive is sitting to my left.''
That man, of course, was Johnson. On Monday night, his victory in the 400 meters had been overshadowed when Carl Lewis won his ninth gold medal with another victory in the long jump. Tonight, Johnson had center stage. Even he had trouble comprehending what he had just accomplished.
Until just over a month ago, the 200 meters had been the most stubborn and resistant record in track and field. Pietro Mennea of Italy ran 19.72 seconds in 1979, and the record stood for more than 16 years. Now, in little more than a month, Johnson has chopped it down by four-tenths of a second. In a race decided by hundredths of a second, four-tenths may as well be four minutes.
''I can't describe what it feels like to break the world record by that much,'' Johnson said. ''I thought 19.5 was possible, but 19.3 is unbelievable.''
Four years ago, Johnson had been ranked No. 1 in the world at 200 meters, but he ate a piece of spoiled ham before the 1992 Summer Games in Barcelona, Spain. He grew weak, missed a week of training and lost 10 pounds and any chance he had of winning the Olympic gold medal. Tonight, as he stepped into the starting blocks, he told himself: ''This is the one I really want. This is the one I didn't get in Barcelona.''
Johnson drew Lane 3 for the 200 final. Two lanes to his outside was Fredericks, who had defeated Johnson in Oslo on July 5, breaking his 21-race winning streak. Fredericks had won a silver medal at 100 meters here, and he was now considered a threat for gold at 200 meters. Until the gun sounded, anyway.
Johnson stumbled slightly at the start, but he quickly made up the stagger on the Cuban Ivan Garcia in Lane 4, running with his familiar, efficient upright style. As he shot out of the curve, Johnson held a slight lead over Fredericks, but he was already in inexorable control of the race.
''I saw a blue blur,'' said Boldon, who was in Lane 6. ''I came off the turn and he went by and I said, 'There goes first.' ''
The margin began to grow wider and wider, until Fredericks resembled a defensive back who had just been beaten for a long touchdown pass by pro football's fastest receiver. Johnson felt a slight cramp at the finish, but it soon subsided. Otherwise, how did it feel to run that fast?
''It's an incredible thrill,'' said Johnson, 28, who lives in Dallas. ''My dad bought me a go-cart when I was a kid. There a was a big hill at the end of the street and I could make the go-cart go fast if I went down that hill. It's the only thing that really compares. So go get a go-cart and go down that hill, and you'll know how it feels.''
What made Johnson's record victory so remarkable was that he was running his eighth race in seven days. He will have a chance to win a third gold medal Saturday, as the anchor of the United States 4x400-meter relay.
For four years, he has waited for this moment. Perec, on the other hand, has considered the 200-400 double for only about two months.
A native of Guadeloupe, Perec, 28, moved to France when she was 16 after a visiting French coach happened to time her in a 200-meter race. She has won the 400 meters at the past two Olympics with a long, graceful stride that has earned her the nickname ''La Gazelle'' from the French press.
Merlene Ottey of Jamaica, who had won the bronze medal three times at 200 meters, sprung out of the blocks in Lane 5, and had the lead coming into the homestretch. But Perec used her 400-meter endurance to begin closing in the final meters. About 10 meters from the finish, she swooped past Ottey.The Senate completed Congressional action tonight on a comprehensive welfare bill that would reverse six decades of social policy, eliminating the Federal guarantee of cash assistance for the nation's poorest children. The measure goes next to President Clinton, who has said he will sign it.
The vote, 78 to 21, followed hours of passionate debate. Supporters of the bill said it would free millions of Americans from dependency and save nearly $55 billion over six years, while opponents described a grim future for a million children thrust into poverty.
The debate was bitter and intense, with many Democrats attacking the bill, but it changed few minds. Once Mr. Clinton endorsed the bill on Wednesday, the outcome in Congress was ordained.
Twenty-five Democrats voted for the bill, and 21 voted against it. All 53 Republicans voted for it. $(Roll-call, page A16.$)
Just as the Senate began voting, 10 protesters in the public galleries started shouting, ''Shame, shame, shame!'' and they pointed their fingers at senators on the floor below. The protesters were quickly removed and arrested on charges of disrupting Congress.
The debate today was epitomized by the conflicting views of the Senators from New York.
Alfonse M. D'Amato, a Republican, said: ''Thank God, it is an election year. There is one good thing that has come about, and that is welfare reform. Let me also suggest that without there having been a Republican Congress pushing, working, challenging, there is no way that we would have had any opportunity to pass a bill.''
Mr. D'Amato recalled that Franklin D. Roosevelt had once described welfare as a potential narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.
''To those who are critical of the reform,'' Mr. D'Amato declared, ''let me say that no bill is perfect. But to continue business as usual, as if all is well, would have been a kind of conspiracy, a conspiracy to continue to keep our people on that narcotic. Absolutely not acceptable.''
But his Democratic colleague, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who has studied welfare policy for decades, offered a blistering critique. ''I wonder if the nation is ready for the profound social change that this legislation will set in motion,'' Mr. Moynihan said. ''This bill is not welfare reform, but welfare repeal. It is the first step in dismantling the social contract that has been in place in the United States since at least the 1930's. Do not doubt that Social Security itself -- which is to say, insured retirement benefits -- will be next.''
Mr. Moynihan said the welfare bill was based on the false premise that ''the behavior of certain adults can be changed by making the lives of their children as wretched as possible.''
White House aides boasted that Mr. Clinton had stolen the welfare issue from his likely Republican opponent, Bob Dole, by backing the bill. Mr. Clinton vetoed two earlier welfare bills, and the Republicans have been using the issue against him.
The bill would reverse decades of social welfare policy begun by Democrats in the New Deal. It would give states vast new power to run their own welfare and work programs with lump sums of Federal money. It would set a lifetime limit of five years on welfare payments to any family and would require most adult recipients to work within two years.
The protesters in the gallery were identified by Sgt. Dan Nichols, a Capitol police spokesman, as from a New York group called Housing Works. The group, which helps people infected with H.I.V., said the bill would increase poverty and homelessness.
The majority voting for the bill today was slightly larger than on July 23, when the Senate approved an earlier, similar version by a vote of 74 to 24. At that time, the Democrats were evenly split, with 23 for the bill and 23 against it. The House approved the final measure on Wednesday, 328 to 101.
In today's debate, Senator Slade Gorton, Republican of Washington, hailed the bill as ''a magnificent new experiment.''
Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, called Mr. Clinton's decision to sign the bill ''transparently political.''
''The President vetoed essentially this same bill twice before,'' Mr. Inhofe said. ''Clinton stands for nothing, except his own re-election.''
Senator Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, general chairman of the Democratic National Committee, denounced the bill as ''an unconscionable retreat from a 60-year commitment that Republicans and Democrats, 10 American Presidents and Congresses have made on behalf of America's children.''
The bill would abolish Aid to Families With Dependent Children, which aids 12.8 million people, including more than 8 million children.Carl Lewis's chances of winning a 10th Olympic gold medal were greatly enhanced today when one of his teammates, Leroy Burrell, withdrew from the United States 4x100-meter relay team, saying that he had severe pain in his Achilles' tendon. Coach Erv Hunt has not yet named Lewis to replace Burrell for Saturday's race, but he said on Tuesday that Lewis would get ''strong consideration'' if any sprinters withdrew because of injury.
The issue has provoked strong debate. Those on Lewis's side argue that he should get a chance to make history as the most decorated athlete at the Winter or Summer Games. He needs one more gold to surpass the Finnish runner Paavo Nurmi; Larisa Latynina, a gymnast from the former Soviet Union, and the American swimmer Mark Spitz.
Those with the opposite view note that Lewis finished last in the 100 meters at the Olympic trials and did not attend a recent training camp, and therefore has not earned a spot on the team.
ATLANTA: DAY 14 -- TRACK AND FIELDPrime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a furtive trip last week that apparently took him to Europe in search of an agreement that would include Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon, Israeli officials said today.
Both Lebanon and Syria, the main power broker there, have so far refused to give Israel the guarantees it says it needs to withdraw its forces from southern Lebanon, where Israel maintains what it calls a security zone. Both countries have said they would protect Israel's northern border area from attacks by Hezbollah guerrillas only as part of a comprehensive peace accord.
Mr. Netanyahu has ruled out returning the Golan Heights, which Israel seized from Syria in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, as a price for that broad peace. But he has said he remains interested in pursuing a deal on Lebanon, and Israeli officials strongly suggested that the trip reflected that interest.
A leading Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, also reported today that Mr. Netanyahu met secretly in Jerusalem last month with an unidentified Syrian envoy interested in knowing more about the Israeli proposal, but a senior Israeli official said he had no knowledge of such a meeting.
Mr. Netanyahu's departure from the country was first reported today in The Jerusalem Post, but the newspaper said it had been unable to determine where the Prime Minister had traveled. Mr. Netanyahu's spokesman denied that he had left the country at all
But other Israeli officials said they understood that the Prime Minister, who appears to be taking a strong personal role in the conduct of foreign policy, had traveled to Europe. And there was much speculation that he had met with President Jacques Chirac of France. On Wednesday, Mr. Chirac held a meeting at Elysee Palace with Syria's Vice President, Abdulhalim Khaddam, a step that analysts here described as a further indication that France might be an intermediary.
There remained no indication that Mr. Netanyahu's apparent overture had overcome any of the obstacles to a Lebanon plan. Mr. Khaddam, who oversees Syria's interests in Lebanon, where it maintains 35,000 troops, was quoted as describing the plan as ''a death trap aimed at the destruction of Lebanon.''
But whether out of true faith or the hope that it will distract attention from his unwillingness to trade land for peace in a broader accord, Mr. Netanyahu has portrayed the approach as his central foreign policy program. The Prime Minister raised the idea with President Clinton during his visit to Washington last month, Israeli officials said, and pursued it here last week with Dennis B. Ross, the Administration's Middle East envoy.
The reports of Mr. Netanyahu's activities came a day after a disclosure that under the previous Labor Party Government, Israeli and Palestinian representatives had drafted an outline for a final peace settlement that included an independent Palestinian state in most of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, but continued Israeli control of Jerusalem.
The report today of a separate secret meeting in Jerusalem between Mr. Netanyahu and a Syrian envoy was written by Haaretz's military correspondent, Zeev Schiff. According to the Haaretz account, the meeting was held at the request of Syria and took place shortly before Mr. Netanyahu traveled to Washington on July 8. It said the Syrian had been sent to find out more about Mr. Netanyahu's plans and proposals.
The Prime Minister was seen in Jerusalem last Friday, and officials who confirmed that he left the country afterward said he returned by Saturday night. That would have left little time for a journey further afield than a European capital.
Apart from France, The Jerusalem Post reported, there was speculation that Mr. Netanyahu's destination might have been Germany, which helped broker an exchange of prisoners and bodies last month between Israel and Hezbollah.
A top German official, Bernd Schmidbauer, arranged the exchange after three months of secret talks that involved Syria and Iran.
But Western diplomats said France was a likelier destination for Mr. Netanyahu, who held talks in Jerusalem last Thursday with the French Foreign Minister, Herve de Charette, and spoke by telephone to Mr. Chirac that evening.
Israel has held territory in southern Lebanon since it invaded that country in 1982, and it established the security zone there in 1985. Israeli soldiers occupy about 10 percent of Lebanon.
From both the left and the right, Israeli leaders have insisted that Israel has no territorial aspirations in Lebanon. But they have refused to withdraw the Israeli force of about 1,000 soldiers without assurances from Syria and Lebanon that the Hezbollah attacks will stop. With those countries in turn defending the attacks as part of a legitimate war, the two sides remain stalemated.
But the viciousness of a conflict that erupted into war in April and has claimed five Israeli lives since Mr. Netanyahu was elected in May has added to sentiment here in favor a negotiated withdrawal.
With Iran clearly opposed to any arrangement that would impose new restrictions on the Hezbollah guerrillas, and Syria and Lebanon also unenthusiastic, a Western diplomat said Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Ross in their meetings last week discussed how to convert the Israeli impulse ''into a workable proposition.''
''Essentially they're being asked to clean up Hezbollah, secure Israel's northern border and strain their relations with Iran all for the sake of the territorial integrity of Lebanon, which on the face of it is not a particularly attractive proposition to them,'' the diplomat said in summarizing the Syrian view. ''So this won't be easy.''The New York State Athletic Commission filed charges yesterday seeking the revocation of the fight manager LOU DUVA's license and forfeiture of all or part of the $1 million RIDDICK BOWE was to be paid for his heavyweight fight against ANDREW GOLOTA.
A riot broke out following the bout July 11 at Madison Square Garden, set off when Bowe's manager, ROCK NEWMAN, and others charged across the ring as Golota was being disqualified for low blows. Several fights broke out in the ring and the melee spread into the crowd, overwhelming security forces and requiring the police to restore order.
The commission said the charges against Duva involved his protest of Referee WAYNE KELLY's disqualification of Golota, which the commission alleged including charging and bumping the official.
(AP)
SPORTS PEOPLE: BOXINGMeasured by public attendance, the fledgling band of lawmakers that took office here Jan. 1 as the newly created Nassau County Legislature is a hit.
Unlike the Board of Supervisors it replaced, the Legislature regularly draws overflow crowds to its wood-paneled chamber. With a fire code limiting the audience to 175, even county officials have had to talk their way past security guards.
Civic advocates had hoped that the Legislature, with more varied and responsive members than the old board, would shepherd this affluent suburban county of 1.3 million people into the next century with a vision of ''the new Nassau.''
But after seven months, there is a growing debate over the Legislature. Defenders say it is making a difference, but critics see it as a reincarnation of the old Nassau and its vaunted Republican Party.
The Nassau G.O.P. -- best known as United States Senator Alfonse M. D'Amato's home base -- has long had state and national clout. Presidential candidates have paid homage to its voter turnouts and fund-raising powers.
The Board of Supervisors, where Senator D'Amato got his start, was a central feature of Nassau politics. Through three decades of constitutional challenges, Republicans fought to preserve the six-member board and its complex system of weighted votes, fearing Democratic victories in a new legislative map.
But when the courts finally abolished the board for violating the one-person-one-vote principle, the Republicans turned the 19 new districts to their advantage, winning 13 seats.
The new system also created a powerful position -- second only to the County Executive -- in the legislature's Presiding Officer. The Republicans filled it with Bruce A. Blakeman, 40, a novice Hempstead Town Councilman and a lawyer with movie-star looks who was being groomed for a promising future.
Mr. Blakeman gives the Legislature a grade of A. ''I'm told that we've handled as much if not more legislation in the first six months than the Board of Supervisors did in any similar period in years,'' he said.
But the new body has quickly acquired a chorus of critics. They say that its procedures at meetings are squelching public access, that legislators are exerting little oversight on county agencies and that they are failing to tackle Nassau's overriding problems, like high taxes and electric rates, Balkanized government and the struggle for economic revival after cuts in military contracts.
''I'm disappointed, very disappointed,'' said Phoebe Goodman, director of the nonprofit Nassau Citizens Budget Commission.
Bruce Nyman, the Legislature's Democratic minority leader and the only carryover from the old board, gives the Legislature a C, so far.
Perhaps the ultimate criticism came in a recent legislative session when Frank B. Abrami, a retiree from Seaford, barked: ''You guys are worse than the Board of Supervisors.'' After waiting hours to speak at the public forum following the session, Mr. Abrami, fuming, contended that few legislators had remained to listen because they were attending committee meetings scheduled at the same time.
Mr. Abrami is one of hundreds drawn to each meeting, where the audience sometimes steals the show. At one meeting, angry pesticide sprayers turned out in force to protest pending legislation. A crowd arguing for changes on a minority affairs panel included a man in a leather Indian costume with a feathered headdress. Amid the turmoil, a heckler who demanded Indian representation called Mr. Blakeman ''General Custer.''
Last month, Mr. Blakeman gaveled an abrupt end to a nasty exchange between Legislator Roger Corbin, a Democrat who is black, and Michael A. Fiechter, a Conservative who is white. When Mr. Corbin called Mr. Fiechter ''a right-winger,'' Mr. Fiechter accused Mr. Corbin of ''race baiting'' and of being ''an Al Sharpton.''
Mostly, however, legislators have been collegial. Mr. Corbin opened one meeting by singing the national anthem, to bipartisan applause.
''The Legislature has certainly stimulated interest -- now it seems every meeting is jammed,'' said the county historian, Edward J. Smits. ''Why, I'm not sure. It has no more power than the supervisors did.''
Novelty may be a drawing card. Another may be the Legislature's makeup.
In its 96 years of existence, the six-member Board of Supervisors was dominated by older, white, male Republican lawyers. It never had a black member, and no more than one woman at a time.
By contrast, the 19 legislators include two blacks, four women, six Democrats and a Conservative. The average age is 42. Lawyers still predominate, but there are an accountant, an insurance executive, a real estate manager and a betting parlor manager.Citing ''poor economic conditions on Long Island'' linked to high electric costs, the staff of the State Public Service Commission proposed a 5.2 percent reduction today in rates of the Long Island Lighting Company.
Lilco immediately objected, saying the reduction would jeopardize service and reliability for its more than one million customers by cutting its operating and maintenance budget by $55.7 million a year.
The commission is to meet on Sept. 11 to decide whether the company's rates should be reduced. Lilco rates are the highest in the continental United States.
Hearings are scheduled in the commission's New York City offices on Wednesday and Thursday. Suffolk County has called for an 11 percent rate reduction. The commission's rulings often vary from the recommendations of its staff.
The staff proposed that Lilco refund to its customers, in the form of lower rates, $76 million it received from Suffolk County for an overly high assessment of the Shoreham nuclear power plant. It said that any future payments from the county in related cases should also be refunded to customers.
The staff also called for a refund in rates of $5 million from lower-than-expected costs for operating the Nine Mile 2 nuclear plant, upstate in Scriba. Lilco owns 18 percent of the plant.
The staff said the 5.2 percent reduction should take effect on Oct. 1. It would include a $66.1 million cut in base rates and $24.1 million in fuel cost reductions.
A Lilco spokeswoman, Stefanie Gossin, said the cut could hamper the company's ability to restore power promptly after major storms.The emotions many Americans have experienced over the last two weeks, in the wake of the destruction of T.W.A. Flight 800 and the lethal bomb blast at the Olympics, have had a familiar quality. As after the Oklahoma City bombing a year ago, these incidents have left many people shocked, grieving, and with a heightened sense of vulnerability to violence in the most unexpected circumstances.
Yet it is well to note that this time around, one other public response -- religious bias -- was virtually absent. Relatively little suspicion or hostility was directed toward the broad Muslim community, according to American Muslim organizations.
That was not the case in the immediate aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing in April 1995, when television reports hummed with speculation that the attack was the work of Middle Eastern terrorists.
The smoke still hung in the air above the ruins of the Alfred Murrah Federal Building when the Muslim Public Affairs Council in Los Angeles began to receive a stream of anonymous and venomous phone calls, blaming Muslims for the bombing, recalled the council's director, Salam al Marayati.
''From the time that happened,'' Mr. Marayati said of the bombing, ''until they released the sketch, we were getting threats.''
The police sketch, it will be recalled, showed the chief suspect in the bombing to have been a white male, providing a basis for the subsequent arrest of Timothy J. McVeigh, whose connections were to home-grown militant groups, not foreign ones.
By contrast, in the days after the destruction of the T.W.A. flight, the Muslim council has not been subjected to harassing phone calls, Mr. Marayati said. For American Muslim organizations in general, he said, ''I think it's been relatively calm.''
Mr. Marayati's opinion was shared, although cautiously, by Abdurahman Alamoudi, executive director of the American Muslim Council, a lobbying organization in Washington for American Muslims, he said, the atmosphere following the recent bombings was ''much less negative'' than it had been after Oklahoma City.
This raises the question, of course, of why? Both men said they thought that President Clinton had made a difference, by quickly appealing to Americans not to jump to conclusions after the T.W.A. explosion.
They added that they thought it helped too that media reports had been more restrained this time around in discussing what may have caused the airplane to explode, as well as who might have planted the bomb at the Olympics.
Mr. Marayati went a little further too, optimistically saying that public opinion may be shifting away from the point where many people automatically suspect Muslims when these sorts of disasters strike.
''I think the American public is a little more sensitive to the problem of stereotyping,'' he said. ''Generally speaking, you're not going to witness the same kind of rush to judgment that we did in Oklahoma City.''
John L. Esposito, director of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University, concurred with Mr. Marayati's assessment.
In both United States and Europe, Mr. Esposito said, public attitudes toward Islam are undergoing a gradual improvement, with apprehension giving way to a greater acceptance. In his view, the causes are many.
On the negative side, within the United States, Professor Esposito said, the Oklahoma City bombing made Americans confront the fact ''that we have our own domestic terrorists,'' that one need not look abroad for threats to public safety.
But on a more positive note, he added that Americans were becoming a bit better informed about Islam as a religion and about the nation's Muslim minority through in-depth reporting in the media, serious treatment of Islamic history in school textbooks, and, increasingly, through personal contacts with Muslim professionals, like doctors, lawyers and others.
Furthermore, he said, American Muslim organizations have been much more vigilant and vocal in protesting what they perceive as stereotyping, whether in the media, the entertainment industry or in politics.
''As a result,'' he said, ''they're becoming much more visible as a community, a lobbying community, and that earns a certain respect.''
Professor Esposito acknowledged that public attitudes could ''slip back'' should there be another violent act in which suspects who are Muslims were accused -- like the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York. But he said that such a reaction would be temporary.
Any such crime, Mr. Marayati said, would be decisive in determining the extent to which public attitudes have changed.Less than a day after an Italian military court freed a former Nazi SS captain in the 1944 massacre of more than 335 civilians outside Rome, Germany pressed today for his extradition to face murder charges in the same case.
Early this morning the Italian police rearrested Erich Priebke, the former SS officer, at Germany's request. Mr. Priebke, 83, had spent eight hours under virtual siege by protesters angered at the military court's ruling on Thursday to dismiss the charges because a 30-year statute of limitations had run out.
In Rome, angry protesters and members of the victims' families demonstrated outside the military court buildings and set up blockades.
Mr. Priebke, who had admitted taking part in the massacre of 335 Italian men and boys at the Ardeatine caves outside Rome, was allowed to leave the court early this morning only after Giovanni Maria Flick, the Italian Justice Minister, announced his rearrest. He was driven away under heavy police escort to Rome's Regina Coeli prison.
During a three-month trial after his extradition from Argentina, Mr. Priebke said he was only following orders in carrying out the massacre as a reprisal against an attack by Italian Partisans in which 33 German soldiers had been killed on a Rome street -- an argument the court said mitigated his guilt.
The reprisal was said to have been personally ordered by Hitler. Mr. Priebke's commander, Herbert Kappler, who was the Gestapo chief in Rome at the time, was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1948.
The military court ruling on Thursday found Mr. Priebke guilty of ''complicity in violence with multiple homicide against Italian citizens,'' but that the statute of limitations had run out on those charges 15 years ago. The court ruled that Mr. Priebke was not guilty of ''cruelty and premeditation,'' which carry no statute of limitations.
Bernard Bohm, a German Justice Ministry spokesman, said that the German authorities have issued an arrest warrant for Mr. Priebke on two murder charges. ''There is no statute of limitations in Germany on murder,'' Mr. Bohm said.
But, he said, under international law both Italian and Argentine authorities would have to agree to Mr. Priebke's extradition before he could face trial in Germany.
The Argentine Government has already said it will not permit Mr. Priebke to return to Argentina, where he lived quietly for decades, running a hotel and a German community school in the mountain resort of Bariloche. Mr. Priebke's wife, Alicia, still lives in Argentina.
Reporters in Rome said Mr. Priebke looked exhausted when he was finally permitted to leave the military tribunal in Rome. His lawyer, Velio di Rezze, said he would challenge the rearrest in court, declaring it illegal because ''he has been tried by a court and let off.''
But many Italian officials were clearly embarrassed by the military court's decision.
''When the Ardeatine Caves massacre took place humanity was wounded and with humanity the Italian people,'' President Oscar Luigi Scalfaro said in a television broadcast. ''Today the wounds reopen.''
The Italian court's decision also drew widespread protests in Germany. ''This was a crime against humanity,'' said Michel Friedman, a member of the Central Council of Jews in Germany. Ignatz Bubis, the Council's president, called the Italian ruling ''a slap in the face for victims and survivors.''During last year's budget battle, Bob Dole and his fellow Republicans accused the Clinton Administration of using unrealistically rosy assumptions of economic growth to make its deficit-cutting plan add up, and insisted that the White House use more conservative numbers.
Now, as Democrats wait for Mr. Dole to finish the tax-cutting package he is expected to announce on Monday as the centerpiece of his Presidential campaign, they point out with some glee that the Dole plan contains arguably rosy numbers of its own. Among them is an assumption that the Dole program will increase growth to more than 3 percent in coming years, far higher than current Republican budget proposals assume.
Just how much additional growth a sweeping tax cut might generate is a matter of fevered debate among economists, and the Dole camp argues that any plan it adopts will be built on far more credible projections than those used by the Clinton Administration in its economic planning. But in Mr. Dole's metamorphosis to tax cutter from deficit fighter, political strategists at the White House and in the Democratic Party see a lode of material they can use in their counterattacks, from overly optimistic economic assumptions to Mr. Dole's oft-stated disdain for the theory that tax cuts spur growth and therefore more than help pay for themselves to doubts about Mr. Dole's commitment to deficit reduction.
If the emerging Democratic response is predictable, it nonetheless highlights the political risks for Mr. Dole in pursuing a bold tax plan, and it suggests how intense a fight the two Presidential campaigns are likely to wage over the issue. Indeed, Democratic strategists see the issue as an opportunity to counter Republican attacks on Mr. Clinton's character by portraying Mr. Dole's support for tax cuts as a sign of inconsistency or pandering to the electorate.
''This whole episode raises questions about Dole's leadership,'' said Ann Lewis, deputy manager of the Clinton campaign. ''Dole was best known in Washington for an economic philosophy that emphasized reducing the deficit. Now apparently he is going to come out in favor of a philosophy that he derided.''
At the same time, Ms. Lewis said, the Clinton campaign believes that the Dole tax plan will shift the campaign's focus to the economy. And with unemployment and inflation low and new jobs being created at a healthy pace, the economy is a subject the Clinton team is happy to have at center stage, she said.
Democrats said that depending on the Dole's plan structure, its features could also allow them to argue that Republicans were favoring the wealthy over the middle class.
Mr. Dole's campaign aides said their economic plan would be a powerful platform from which to attack Mr. Clinton for raising taxes in 1993 and to expose the economy's performance under Mr. Clinton as anemic. And they said it was Mr. Dole's very reputation as a responsible deficit cutter that would give him credibility in proposing a sweeping tax reduction without sacrificing the Republican pledge to balance the Federal budget by 2002.
Mr. Dole has been deciding between two options. One is built around an across-the-board reduction of up to 15 percent in income tax rates; the other is based on repealing the tax increases passed by Congress in 1990 and 1993. Because the 1990 and 1993 tax increases primarily affected the wealthy, the second option would likely be accompanied by proposals to help the middle class, probably by making payroll taxes deductible.
Seeking to undermine the Dole team's probable reliance on the idea that tax cuts spur growth, or supply-side theory, Administration officials have been circulating public statements made by Mr. Dole and other prominent Republicans over the past year or two deriding that very theory.
In an interview in GQ magazine last year, Mr. Dole was quoted as saying: ''What I could never understand is why, if you just cut taxes, you'd have this big, big revenue increase. You know, more jobs, more opportunity. And you didn't have to make hard choices about spending.''
Although Mr. Dole has disclosed no details of his plan, his aides said last week that he was looking at tax cuts of up to $600 billion over six years, a huge increase from the $122 billion reserved for tax cuts over the same period in the most recent Republican budget proposal.
Mr. Dole has already proposed numerous other tax and spending initiatives, including a charity tax credit, an exemption from estate taxes for owners of small businesses and the development of a missile defense system that White House advisers, using the Dole campaign's own numbers or independent estimates, calculated would cost $149 billion over six years.
Assuming that the big tax cut to be proposed by Mr. Dole totals $540 billion over six years, and factoring in other proposals he has supported, Mr. Clinton's advisers calculated that Mr. Dole would have to find nearly $750 billion in spending cuts or revenue increases over six years to avoid missing the 2002 target for balancing the budget.
Mr. Dole's team is looking at ways to close the gap, including eliminating Cabinet departments, closing tax loopholes and using favorable assumptions about other tax revenues. His aides said their overall plan would make realistic assumptions about the amount of revenue generated by the additional growth that their program would spur. They have looked at models suggesting that up to 40 percent of a tax cut could be paid for by additional growth, although aides said Mr. Dole was likely to use a lower number.
By the Democratic analysis, even if more than half of the Dole campaign's possible $750 billion in tax cuts and spending increases could be made up through the faster economic growth that tax cuts would bring -- an assumption that Clinton Administration economists say is fantasy -- Mr. Dole would still need to enact all the spending cuts proposed in the Republican budget plan last year. Mr. Clinton successfully portrayed those cuts as extreme, and it is unclear whether Mr. Dole would be willing to run on them.
White House advisers said the best judgment on the credibility of the Dole plan might come not from politicians or even economists, but from the collective judgment of the bond market, where the prospects for deficit reduction and inflation are ruthlessly analyzed by global investors who send long-term interest rates up and down. Administration officials said that their 1993 deficit reduction package, which included a tax increase, and the President's commitment to balancing the budget by 2002 have been major factors in bringing down interest rates and improving the health of the economy.The Republic has been treated to the spectacle of grown men and women in Congress behaving like college students pulling a last-ditch all-nighter. Their aim was to pile up a record with which to impress the voters or to club their opponents this fall. The entire show was alarming because when Congress gets in a hurry it can do even more damage than when it has plenty of time.
This week, haste, ideology and politics conspired to produce a dreadful outcome in the form of a punitive welfare bill. After that start, it was logical to expect the worst. But before recessing last night until after Labor Day, Congress passed two worthy bills while some malicious ones stalled.
Congress sent the White House a bill to protect workers' health coverage when they move from job to job, which will be, pathetically, the only real health care reform to come out of President Clinton's four years in office. The legislation does not help people pay for their own policies, but it will at least protect workers with pre-existing medical conditions who now fear that loss of their job will mean loss of health insurance.
Lawmakers were so eager to boost the minimum wage from $4.25 to $5.15 an hour that Senate leaders held it back until the last minute, as a promised reward for getting through the rest of the calendar. Having slashed away at the food stamp program and requiring that all mothers on welfare prepare to support their families on whatever work is available, the least Congress could do was make sure those low-skill jobs paid $10,000 a year. Yesterday, both houses approved the increase.
The desire to look productive did not always translate into accomplishment. President Clinton's attempt to pass an anti-terrorism bill in the wake of the T.W.A. disaster ran into the brick wall of National Rifle Association opposition. The most desirable item in Mr. Clinton's proposal was a plan to make it easier to trace explosives by adding chemical markers known as taggants to black powder and gunpowder during their manufacture. The President, in deference to the powerful gun lobby, had already watered down his idea before it hit the House of Representatives. Then Republicans substituted a meaningless non-government study on the already exhaustively studied taggant issue. Any anti-terrorism proposal that does not include this important method of finding the source of terrorist explosives is pure window dressing.
One of the most depressing signs that elections are upon us has been the Republican effort to pass anti-immigrant legislation that is so outrageous that Mr. Clinton will have to veto it. The goal is to tar the President with being ''soft on immigration'' in California, a crucial state where he is far ahead of Bob Dole in the polls. A bill that was once a sensible strengthening of existing immigration laws has been ruined by a House proposal to allow states to force children of illegal immigrants from public schools.
Another election-driven, easily misunderstood bill would require the Federal Government to conduct official business only in English. While doing nothing to meet the demand for more English classes, it would prohibit Social Security clerks from helping applicants in the language they understand best, require that Internal Revenue Service information be available only in English, and ban the use of multilanguage election forms. The irrationality of the proposal was made clear when the sponsors had to add a provision exempting the use of ''e pluribus unum'' on money from the ban.
Although the House has approved the English language bill, the confused stampede toward summer recess postponed a final vote on that measure or the equally mean-spirited immigration bill until Congress returns in the fall. Unfortunately, then they will become more politically charged than ever.The White House is entitled to take comfort from the failure of the Whitewater prosecutor to convict two of President Clinton's political backers of financial misdealings during the 1990 campaign for Governor of Arkansas. On Thursday, a Federal jury in Little Rock acquitted Herby Branscum Jr. and Robert Hill of four felony counts, including a conspiracy charge in which the prosecution had sought to implicate Bruce Lindsey, then and now a close Clinton friend and trusted aide.
Kenneth Starr, the court-appointed independent counsel, had been gathering speed in May with the fraud convictions of James and Susan McDougal, who were Mr. Clinton's Whitewater real estate partners, and former Gov. Jim Guy Tucker. By naming Mr. Lindsey as an unindicted member of an alleged conspiracy to conceal dubious campaign borrowing, Mr. Starr was able to use some of Mr. Lindsey's statements against the two men on trial -- and to aim a blow close to the President. The acquittal leaves the conspiracy itself unproved.
Mr. Starr's work, however, is far from over. He may decide against retrying the two bank owners on seven counts on which the jury deadlocked, and he may not have further accusations to bring against Mr. Lindsey. But his Arkansas staff is pursuing land and financial dealings, some involving legal work performed by Hillary Rodham Clinton. His Washington caseload includes the handling of White House records after the 1993 suicide of Vincent Foster, deputy counsel and longtime friend of the Clintons, the misuse of F.B.I. personnel files and the politically inspired firing of the White House travel office staff.
Mr. Clinton marred an otherwise satisfying day with a Rose Garden outburst against reporters asking about the travel office. A bill to pay the legal expenses of Billy Dale, who was summarily dismissed as head of the office, prosecuted and acquitted, is stalled in Congress. Mr. Clinton repudiated his own spokesman's promise that he would sign the bill and asked why one person should benefit when his own staff had incurred steep legal bills. He then added a graceless reference to Mr. Dale's pretrial willingness to enter a guilty plea, apparently forgetting that the White House itself had repudiated a similar comment by Mr. Clinton's personal lawyer in January.
What Mr. Clinton should have admitted is that the way in which Mr. Dale incurred the legal bills justified his being compensated. Mr. Dale and several other travel office employees were dismissed at the urging of Mrs. Clinton and others in the White House, and the F.B.I. was then called in to find reasons to support the dismissals. Mr. Clinton needs to clean the White House slate by pushing the Dale bill and signing it, especially given the First Lady's involvement in this shabby episode.
Mr. Starr has some obligations of his own. He is moving properly to fulfill the heart of his mission, which is to clear up the unanswered questions about the handling of money, evidence and F.B.I. files. He correctly cited Justice Department policy to keep sensitive cases low-key at election time. Indeed, given the approach of the campaign season and his own reputation as an ambitious Republican, Mr. Starr must be doubly careful not to appear to be playing political games. Such conduct would do far more damage to his credibility than a case vigorously tried and fairly lost.With Adelphi University's enrollment dropping sharply, its money limited and its campus in turmoil, the head of a state review panel asked Adelphi's president yesterday whether he can effectively continue in office.
''You are in an embattled zone, right or wrong, fair or unfair,'' said J. Edward Meyer, chairman of a State Board of Regents committee holding hearings in Manhattan on a petition to remove Adelphi's board.
''You have declining enrollment, underfunding, underendowment, conflict with the faculty, conflict with students, and in that embattled zone you have stood up to a lot of charges, true or untrue,'' Mr. Meyer said. ''Can you continue to serve as an effective leader of this institution called Adelphi?''
In response, the president, Peter Diamandopoulos, agreed that the controversies surrounding him must be resolved for Adelphi to move forward. But Dr. Diamandopoulos, who is 67, said he did not intend to quit.
''This thing has to come to a closure, a definitive closure,'' Dr. Diamandopoulos said. ''If our name is cleared, we start a new chapter. I believe we will move ahead.''
He added: ''No person with self-respect can run for cover. I will not.''
He said he hoped to ''close my career without disgrace, without failing.''
The Committee to Save Adelphi, a group of Dr. Diamandopoulos's critics, asked the Regents to replace Adelphi's 19-member board, on which Dr. Diamandopoulos sits. The critics charged that the board neglected its duties by wasting money on pay and benefits for Dr. Diamandopoulos and by allowing conflicts of interest in which trustees do business with Adelphi, and that the board neglected its educational mission.
A spirited defense of Dr. Diamandopoulos was offered by Ernesta G. Procope, chairwoman of Adelphi's board, when she took the witness stand in the afternoon.
''He had done an excellent job of bringing us up from almost bankruptcy, with new initiatives, rapport with students and an ability to raise money,'' she said. ''The man has improved the physical facility. He's cleaned it up, created all kinds of programs to improve the quality for students. He has an honors college, a core curriculum.''
Dr. Diamandopoulos called Adelphi's enrollment problems ''a constant threat'' to its finances. The enrollment dropped to 5,000 in the academic year just ended, from 5,800 the year before.
''Ever since this publicity started, we had a serious problem,'' Ms. Procope said. But Amy Gladstein, a lawyer for the coaltion, said the publicity did not begin until last September, after the enrollment was set.
Dr. Diamandopoulos has predicted another drop to about 4,300 when classes resume next month.
Ms. Procope testified at length about Dr. Diamandopoulos's much-debated compensation, which she helped to determine as a board member and officer.
Dr. Diamandopoulos was hired in 1985 for $95,000 with no provision for a raise for five years. He now makes $330,750. His benefits include a sabbatical and severance pay, life and property insurance and the use of a $1.15 million condominium in Manhattan, with an option to buy it from Adelphi for $905,000, in addition to the presidential home at the campus in Garden City, L.I. In the most recent comparison for the country's college and university presidents, he ranked No. 2 in pay and benefits, totaling $523,000, in 1993-94.
Dr. Diamandopolous said he felt the president should be well compensated. He said: ''A president is running a business. I'm selling a vision and a service. I am accountable for anything and everything that is happening.''
He added, ''Is it only business? Of course not.''
Dr. Diamandopoulos's first raise, to $145,000 from $95,000 in 1986, placed him above the $130,000 average for comparable colleges and universities, Ms. Procope said.
She said there were no written standards for assessing the president's performance, and no detailed evaluations by the board. One board letter praised him, saying, ''Overall, your performance continues at an exceptional level.''
Asked why the board set up a severance benefit, which now totals several hundnred thousand dollars, Ms. Procope said it was to encourage him to stay.After marathon negotiating sessions that were laden with election politics on both sides of the Pacific, the United States and Japan agreed today to a new and unusual trade accord governing the computer chip industry, one that reflects the revival of the American electronics industry since the first accord was signed a decade ago.
The agreement will allow President Clinton when he visits Silicon Valley next week to assert that he has pressed Japan into an agreement that keeps up the pressure for continued American expansion in the market that strikes at the heart of Japan's greatest technological strength.
But the Japanese Government, which wanted to kill off the chip agreement, signed the new, three-year agreement only after the United States acceded to Tokyo's demand that the two Governments get out of the business of measuring the share of Japan's market that foreign companies have secured.
That statistic, which was a central feature of two past agreements, has long been despised by the powerful Japanese bureaucracy because it has been used to set targets for further inroads into the Japanese market, and was the basis for sanctions imposed against Japan in 1987.
The Japanese Minister of International Trade and Industry, Shunpei Tsukahara, said that Japan had won what it wanted in the negotiations. ''We have been able to put an end to a system of managing trade by reviewing market share, taking into account numerical targets,'' he told reporters.
Both sides will now periodically examine statistics collected by private industry -- though Japan and the United States have measured the market in very different terms.
''Japan and the U.S. have made good on the pledge of President Clinton and Prime Minister Hashimoto to put in place a new agreement,'' Charlene Barshefsky, the acting United States trade representative, said today, before departing for Washington, where Mr. Clinton is soon expected to formally nominate her to the post. ''The challenge for us was to put in place a new agreement that recognizes that the Japanese market can no longer be characterized as closed, but that continues our vigilance.'' Foreign companies now command nearly a third of the Japanese market; American companies have about 20 percent.
But Ms. Barshefsky failed to get the Japanese to move on another important area that Mr. Clinton and Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto had agreed in June to settle by July 31: the deregulation of Japan's insurance market. With Japan's big insurance companies reeling from huge real estate and stock market setbacks, the Japanese Government has backpedaled from previous agreements to open the largest part of that market.
The new semiconductor agreement differs from past accords between the United States and Japan in several respects. Unlike the 1986 accord, signed when American companies had 9 percent of the market and there was enormous political pressure on the Reagan Administration to save endangered American companies, this accord will be carried out chiefly by industry associations in the two countries.
The two Governments will only oversee it with what Ms. Barshefsky calls ''a light hand'' of government supervision. That was one of Japan's key demands after it became clear that in a Presidential election year the Clinton Administration was not ready to let an agreement lapse altogether.
Retaining that light hand was a crucial goal for the American negotiators, who feared that without government involvement, Japanese companies might begin to backslide, buying Japanese-made chips instead of the foreign competition. That pressure could be particularly intense in the next year, because there is an oversupply of many types of computer chips that has depressed prices -- and sharply cut the profitability of chip-making. Those are conditions that would ordinarily lead Japanese executives to press for less competition in their home market.
''We needed some kind of agreement to keep the pressure on in different ways for open markets,'' said Ira S. Shapiro, who heads negotiations with Japan for the trade representative's office.
The American semiconductor industry applauded the accord. ''We are very appreciative of the support from Congress and the Clinton Administration,'' said William P. Weber, chairman of the Semiconductor Industry Association and vice chairman of Texas Instruments.
For the first time in the history of trade agreements between the two countries, other nations will be invited to join the semiconductor accord. That is a recognition of the fact that many more countries have begun producing a wide variety of chips -- not only for computers, but also for automobiles, fax machines and every kind of household and industrial equipment. Europe, South Korea, Taiwan and China are all now major semiconductor producers, and the nationality of chips has been further blurred as Japanese and American companies enter joint ventures with each other and build new factories around the world.
But to join the accord, other countries must reduce to zero the protective tariffs they have erected against imports, a market barrier both Japan and the United States have complained about. They are likely to be reluctant to do so, for fear that their own fledgling industries could be overwhelmed by Japanese and American competitors.
The new agreement also sets up a global forum to discuss issues in semiconductor trade, and American officials said today that a number of countries would be invited to enter that group without preconditions. The idea originated with the Japanese, who are eager to get out of one-on-one negotiations with the United States -- in which the United States can bring to bear enormous political pressure on Tokyo, particularly because it is Japan's military protector -- and to place talks in a far more global context.
On the issue of insurance, it was clear that the negotiators here were simply too exhausted to even take up the subject. During the days and nights of continuous talks on semiconductors, Mr. Tsukahara, the Japanese minister, fell asleep several times in the middle of talks with the perpetually active Ms. Barshefsky, who is something of a legend in the world of economic foreign policy for her ability to operate for days on end with no sleep. Her relentlessness has surprised the Japanese negotiators, whose war stories about scores of trade negotiations usually center on their ability to stay awake longer than their American opponents.
''You know, life was easier dealing with Kantor,'' one Japanese negotiator mumbled to another in an elevator during a break in the talks in this Pacific port, chosen because it is roughly halfway between Tokyo and Washington. He was referring to Mickey Kantor, the former trade representative and now the Commerce Secretary.
Despite the Japanese complaints, however, American negotiators were hard pressed to come up with the specifics of what they had won in the talks.
Indeed, Japanese officials declared that the vague language in the accord today was a victory, in large part because it ended what they consider was one their biggest political blunders in decades: setting a ''target'' for foreign penetration of their markets.Any group that wants to stage a protest or a prayer anywhere near the 1996 Democratic National Convention will first have to take its chances in the city's newest lottery.
It is a protest lottery, part of the city's effort to keep tight control of demonstrations at the convention here later this month, and thus to exorcise the demons of 1968, the last time the Democrats met here, when the Chicago police and anti-war demonstrators clashed for four bloody days and nights.
Winners of the lottery will get one-hour slots to demonstrate at two sites approved by the city: a fenced-in parking lot at the United Center where the convention will be held, and an area at the corner of South Michigan Avenue and East Balbo Drive.
The city is installing a public address system for protesters at each site, and additional sound equipment will not be allowed.
But not all the potential protesters are willing to go along with the city's plans.
On Thursday night, the city conducted the first drawing and awarded time slots to nearly three dozen groups, including a group of police officers, the Cuban-American Chamber of Commerce and Yippies draped in American flags and carrying boom boxes, as well as various housing, anti-poverty and peace groups.
Another drawing is scheduled in two weeks if a flurry of lawsuits does not stop the process.
Officially, the city cites security concerns for the lottery and the restrictions on demonstrators. But history is also an important reason.
Mayor Richard M. Daley is determined not to suffer the same embarrassments as his father, Mayor Richard J. Daley, did when tear gas and rage shrouded the city and stained Chicago and the reputation of its Police Department.
This year, a group of Chicago police officers, upset about the city's promotions policies, has also applied for the protest lottery.
''We don't have a lot of time to demonstrate,'' Officer Mary Ann Green said on Thursday night. ''Because of the convention, the city has canceled our days off.''
Several lawsuits have been filed in Federal court challenging the city's plans as an abridgment of free speech.
The suits have been consolidated and today, Judge James B. Moran said he would hear the case on Aug. 13, less than two weeks before the start of the convention.
Lawyers from the city and the various groups, including a group of doctors who want to hold a 24-hour vigil to protest the lack of a national health care plan, are trying to negotiate a settlement.
''Mayor Daley is very sensitive to the First Amendment,'' Gail Niemann, a city lawyer said after today's court session, adding that a balance between free speech and security had to be struck.
At the lottery drawing on Thursday night, the stage in the auditorium of the Harold Washington Library was bathed in bright lights and 28-year-old memories. The names of the groups were written on off-white envelopes and placed in a big red drum under the watchful eye of accountants, and then were spun around in a whirling dance of chance. Two accountants in dark suits and serious expressions waited for the city official's signal to begin pulling names from the drum.
After a spin or two, an envelope was extracted and the winner's name was announced and projected onto a movie screen.
''Lotto,'' Leo Pocius, an early winner, shouted, breaking into a million-dollar grin. But in the hall a few minutes later, Mr. Pocius, who represents the Chicago Property Owners Coalition, said: ''The whole thing feels weird.
''I don't think this is what our forefathers had in mind when they were talking about democracy. This lottery is being run like City Hall. It's drowning in bureaucracy.''
Other groups who entered the lottery and received time slots on Thursday night included the National Alliance Against Racism, White America Unite and the Not On the Guest List Coalition.The Clinton campaign announced today that it would help create a system of free, uniform blocks of television time for Presidential candidates this fall, adding its weight to the Dole campaign's and increasing the pressure on the networks to provide the time.
But the President's aides put several conditions on Mr. Clinton's participation. One, regarding where the speeches may be filmed, conflicts with a condition sought by Bob Dole, the presumed Republican nominee.
Still, both Mr. Dole's aides and the independent advocates of free air time applauded the announcement, which came after more than a month of deliberation by Clinton aides.
''This is a very, very important breakthrough,'' said Paul Taylor, who is leading the Free TV for Straight Talk Coalition. ''I believe it's going to happen.''
The coalition immediately turned its attention to the networks. Senators John McCain, Republican of Arizona, and Bill Bradley, Democrat of New Jersey, both supporters of the coalition, invited the heads of cable and broadcast networks to meet with the campaigns before September.
Several networks have already offered free air time in varying formats this fall. In his announcement today, Peter S. Knight, Mr. Clinton's campaign manager, said the campaign intended to take up at least two of those offers, by NBC and CNN.
But the coalition is hoping to create a uniform system that would serve as a model for future races. With that goal in mind, Mr. Taylor and his supporters in June asked the campaigns to produce 10 two-and-a-half-minute speeches, to be broadcast on alternating weeknights during the last four weeks of the campaign. The Dole campaign agreed the same day, on the condition that Mr. Clinton did not use the Oval Office as a backdrop.
In his prepared statement, Mr. Knight said today that Mr. Clinton would go along, provided there were ''no preconditions to the locations of the broadcasts.'' Further, he asked that the broadcasts be live.
Last, Mr. Knight said there must be ''no adverse consequences whatsoever to the Presidential and Vice-Presidential debates.''
In a prepared statement, Mr. Dole's campaign manager, Scott Reed, said it would be unacceptable for Mr. Clinton to use the Oval Office ''because that is the location where the Commander in Chief addresses the nation in times of crisis and should not be cheapened for campaign messages.''
Mr. Taylor said that he would drop his plans to start a print and television advertising campaign intended partly to persuade Mr. Clinton to agree to the broadcasts and that he would instead focus on the networks.
Mr. Knight said the campaign also accepted offers made in June by NBC and CNN for Mr. Clinton to appear. NBC offered to let each candidate appear for a minute and a half in special segments of the ''Dateline'' program over the last six weeks of the campaign. CNN offered the candidates five minutes of free time each week, beginning the first Tuesday of October.When several dozen Vietnamese-American residents gathered at a restaurant for a party here recently, four mysterious people took a table nearby and watched.
''They wouldn't give their names,'' said Thuan Le Elston, who organized the gathering. ''Instead they were asking me, like: 'What are you doing here? Who's in charge of this?' '' The next day another partygoer was visited by the police, who asked the same questions.
For these former refugees -- a growing, high-profile sector of urban life here -- the authorities' scrutiny came as no surprise.
''I knew people here would be paranoid about a bunch of us getting together,'' said Ms. Elston, 30, who sells golf club memberships for a Vietnamese-American joint venture.
In the last two or three years, hundreds of young Vietnamese-born Americans have returned here to do business and seek their roots. They work as consultants for foreign companies, open restaurants and boutiques, take jobs at local English-language publications and, quite often, work on personal memoirs that they hope will help them sort out their cultural identities.
Some, like Trang Hoang, 25, who trains promotional personnel for Johnny Walker Scotch, discover that despite their years in the United States they are ''Vietnamese, totally Vietnamese.'' Others, like Trinh Ai Lan, a 25-year-old freelance television producer, declare that they are ''100 percent American.''
But not all have resolved the question.
''I'm not really sure where I belong,'' said Hoang Mai, 26, a writer. ''I think we've all come to the conclusion that you can never figure it out.''
The Government seems similarly uncertain what to make of its refugee children with their Vietnamese appearance and their thoroughly American ways. It wants the money and the expertise they bring back with them, but it fears the cultural influence of these Westernized free-thinkers and warns that there may be subversive ''hostile forces'' among them.
''The motherland can have only one attitude and that is to welcome them home with open arms,'' Pham Khac Lam, who heads the Government's National Committee for Overseas Vietnamese, said in an interview. But he added, ''There are still dark forces who have not given up their schemes'' of bringing down the Communist Government.
In a recent address to Government leaders, Mr. Lam tried to reassure them that the returnees, known as Viet kieu, are mostly benign. But he also voiced disappointment that they have not proved to be the economic boon that many officials here had hoped.
The number of overseas Vietnamese visitors -- for brief or extended stays -- has risen each year, from 160,000 in 1993, to 200,000 in 1994, to 265,000 last year, he said. They represent a significant portion of the two million or more Vietnamese living abroad, about half of whom are in the United States.
But for all their numbers, the returnees have registered only 58 investment projects in the country, worth a total of less than $100 million, Mr. Lam said. Also, he said, overseas relatives send home $600 million to $700 million a year. But since this money typically is not funneled through banks and is dispersed in small amounts around the country, its economic effect is diluted.
These numbers are all the more disappointing to the Government because, although in many respects it treats returnees like other foreign citizens, charging them higher rates for hotels and air tickets, it has tried to encourage them to invest with tax breaks and business incentives that free them of many of the regulations that other foreign investors complain about.
''What we have found is that there are not so many rich men among the overseas Vietnamese,'' Mr. Lam said, contrasting them with the overseas Chinese millionaires who have proved a windfall for their homeland. ''So we are thinking, the main contribution of overseas Vietnamese will be gray matter. Vietnamese are head people, not pocket people.''
Indeed, the numbers he cited confirm what is evident among the young returnees here: most Vietnamese-Americans return for personal rather than business reasons.
Miss Mai, who has lived in Hanoi for the last year, is one of those who is writing about her experiences, struggling to decide whose fate was happier, her own, growing up in Oakland, Calif., or that of her parents and sisters who remained behind in a Vietnamese village.
''I freaked out when I saw my sisters in pajamas and conical hats,'' she said, recalling their reunion after a separation of 20 years.
''They were just like everything I had seen on television. They harvested rice. Their skin was dark from the sun. Their mannerisms were totally nha que,'' she said, mixing California syntax with the Vietnamese slang for country folk.
''But they are happier,'' she asserted. ''I know that for a fact. They sell noodle soup, they raise pigs, their life is hard. But it is a very innocent life. They are all involved with each other. They all eat together. They all look out for their parents.''A former official of a Mexican anti-drug unit has been arrested on charges of narcotics trafficking and bribery just days after he made headlines with similar accusations against his former colleagues.
Ricardo Cordero Ontiveros, 35, who last November resigned as head of an intelligence unit of the National Institute to Combat Drugs, based in Tijuana, was arrested late Thursday and charged with soliciting bribes, abusing his public office as a law enforcement official and trafficking in narcotics.
A spokesman for Mexico's Attorney General, whose agents carried out the arrest, said that it came in compliance with a warrant issued by a Tijuana judge and that the timing was unrelated to Mr. Cordero's public accusations.
Mr. Cordero's wife asserted in a phone interview today, however, that the Government had trumped up charges against her husband in reprisal for his whistle-blowing crusade.
''They've made all this up,'' Mrs. Cordero said. ''Its pure vengeance.''
In a series of recent news conferences and interviews with reporters from Mexico and other countries, Mr. Cordero accused some of Mexico's top law enforcement officials of selling police command posts and of taking bribes from drug traffickers. Similar abuses have been reported many times, but Mr. Cordero's fresh, detailed accounts gave new urgency to the issue.
Mr. Cordero's credibility is not entirely clear, but American drug agents have corroborated at least some of his charges, which in turn reflect on the Attorney General, Antonio Lozano, who was appointed 19 months ago with a mandate to clean up Mexican law enforcement.
Mr. Cordero is a businessman from the same political party as Mr. Lozano, the opposition National Action Party. Mr. Cordero had no police experience before his appointment last year. Before he went to the news media with his accusations, he raised some of them with leaders of the party, who said they investigated his charges and dismissed them as having little merit.
Speaking to the press, Mr. Cordero has said that abuses have proliferated under Mr. Lozano's administration and that Mr. Lozano personally tried to muzzle him after he first went public.
Mr. Cordero's accusations were front-page news during Mr. Lozano's visit to Washington to meet with Attorney General Janet Reno this week. Several Republican Senators, including Jesse Helms and Alfonse M. D'Amato, responded by writing to Secretary of State Warren Christopher on Tuesday, requesting that the Clinton Administration immediately investigate the charges made by Mr. Cordero.
Mr. Lozano's office at first reacted to Mr. Cordero's criticisms with a statement urging him to ''prove the seriousness of his allegations, not just to the news media, but also to the competent authorities.''
On Thursday night, agents arrested Mr. Cordero in Mexico City as he emerged from a public round-table discussion of a book on narcotics corruption. He was flown today to Tijuana, where he was in jail and seeking to hire a lawyer, his family said.
In a lengthy statement today, the Attorney General's office said that while Mr. Cordero was working as a drug agent in Tijuana he had conspired with a ring of traffickers that enjoyed the protection of corrupt police commanders and federal prosecutors.
In October, after taking part in the arrest of several men ferrying 700 pounds of marijuana through Baja California, Mr. Cordero accepted a $20,000 bribe to allow three of them to go free, the statement said. In an earlier description of the same incident to reporters, Mr. Cordero had painted himself as the only honest agent working in a pack of rogues.Diamond mining, an enterprise whose risk and effort have long stymied all but the most faithful prospectors, is making a comeback in the United States after a dry spell of more than 75 years.
In Colorado, the first American diamond operation to go beyond the exploratory stage since 1919 began production in June. And the nation's only previous diamond mine, one near Murfreesboro, Ark., that has been operated as a tourist attraction for the last 25 years, is being retested for possible reopening. Prospectors are also at work in Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota and Alaska.
There are easier ways to scratch out a living, but more than economics is at work. ''You know, I think there's a lot of people in this world who are not necessarily tied to the security of having a paid job at an oil company or a mining company,'' said James A. Cappa of the Colorado Geological Survey. ''There are other, Indiana Jones types of people in the world who are willing to take greater risks for greater rewards.''
The catalyst for all the activity is a soft-spoken Colorado geologist, Howard G. Coopersmith, the North American manager for Redaurum Ltd., a mining company based in London that trades as a penny stock in Britain and Canada.
Mr. Coopersmith spent 12 years prospecting a diamond-bearing area on the Colorado-Wyoming border called the State Line region, traveling by helicopter, four-wheel drive vehicle and his boots. He finally hit pay dirt in 1987, unearthing a diamond-rich deposit amid jagged granite outcrops in a forest of pine and Douglas fir 8,000 feet up in the Rocky Mountains. The mine, named for the nearby Kelsey Lake -- actually, a pond so tiny it appears only on the largest topographical maps -- went into full production in June.
''It's not really a very glamorous story,'' Mr. Coopersmith, 42, said. ''It was another day of prospecting.'' Mr. Coopersmith, in charge of the new mine, recalled having to persuade bankers -- and ranchers whose land he wanted to take samples from -- that he wasn't crazy. Now, he says, he has to repeatedly explain why he doesn't act more excited at what he found. ''My answer is that I'm too busy working at it to examine where we've gone,'' he said.
Despite his modesty, Mr. Coopersmith's achievement has put the United States on the map as a diamond producer two years ahead of Canada, where large-scale commercial mining is expected to begin by 1998 in the Lac de Gras area north of Great Slave Lake.
To be sure, the world impact of the Kelsey Lake find is negligible, far too small to begin to matter at the retail level. Its projected total of 12,500 carats of mined diamonds in 1996 would be among the smallest of potatoes in the diamond world: about one thirty-fourth of 1 percent of Australia's 1995 production, 43 million carats, and one-hundredth of 1 percent of the estimated world total of 108 million carats. (A carat, the basic unit of measurement for precious stones, is equal to 200 milligrams, or one-140th of an ounce.)
The company has slashed the mine's projected output for the year by half since beginning production in June, an indication of the unpredictability of the business. Indeed, mining veterans caution would-be investors that explorations usually do not pan out, and they point to a frenzy of speculation in Toronto and Vancouver in diamond-hunting penny stocks, some of them dubious, that followed the 1991 strike in Canada's Northwest Territories.
Even so, the Colorado discovery is a boon to Redaurum, which also owns diamond mines in Zimbabwe and South Africa. It estimates that the Kelsey Lake mine has diamonds worth $153 million and a commercial life of at least 12 years. It also said that 65 percent of the stones recovered so far were of gem quality -- a very high percentage of gems to industrial diamonds -- and that 25 percent, by weight, were larger than one carat, including a nearly flawless 14.2-carat gem.
To hard-nosed companies, many of them Canadian and Australian, American exploration is a calculated risk. But to individual mineral hunters, diamonds are the queen of prospecting. They have fascinated people ever since the ancient Dravidians first retrieved them from the earth's interior at the Golconda mines in India about 800 B.C.
Diamonds are formed from pure carbon deep in the earth's upper mantle. They reach the surface in narrow volcanic tubes, called pipes. The gems have been found in at least 15 states, often in stream beds. But many came from somewhere else, possibly as far north as James Bay in Ontario, and were pushed southward under a mile or two of glacial ice. Even so, most pipes of kimberlite and lamproite, the volcanic rocks in which the stones are imbedded, contain no diamonds or too few to be commercially viable.
But if finding diamonds is hard, it is easy compared with making money from them. Diamond-bearing ores are known from the Appalachians to the Pacific coast, and hundreds of thousands of diamonds have actually been dug, but their quality and quantity have been too poor for mining. Geologists have never stopped looking, however, spurred by advancements in surveying and recovery techniques.
The biggest spur was the gigantic Canadian find near the Great Slave Lake, which has attracted billions of dollars in stock investment, land acquisition and construction by Canadian and Australian mining giants.
Modern diamond exploration involves everything from satellite photography and airborne magnetic detection to examining trace elements in the leaves of birch trees. It also involves luck and endurance.
''You don't find a diamond on the surface,'' said Mr. Coopersmith of Kelsey Lake. ''You don't even find a diamond in the ore. You process tons of ore.'' He estimated he and his co-workers had dug 20,000 holes in finding the Kelsey Lake pipes.
Arkansas bought the long-defunct Murfreesboro mine -- the only previous commercial diamond mine in North America -- in 1971 and turned it into a tourist attraction, Crater of Diamonds State Park. Tens of thousands of amateur prospectors have tried their luck, paying $4 apiece to bake in the sun or slog through a muddy 40-acre field. Some hunt almost daily for years, and some have found bonanzas, including the 40.23-carat Uncle Sam, the largest authenticated diamond ever found in the United States.
Lately, several companies have been paying the state to survey and assay the site. The effort has outlined an estimated 78 million tons of lamproite ore. ''The difficult thing is, we have no idea what the grade is,'' said John S. L. Morgan, president of Morgan Worldwide Mining Consultants of Lexington, Ky., the project's general manager. Bulk sampling and grading of ore will begin immediately after Labor Day, he said.
The participating groups are Ashton Mining of Canada Inc., in partnership with the Texas Star Resources Corporation of Dallas, both of which are penny stocks, and the Arkansas Diamond Development Company, a joint venture. The participants will be invited to bid for mining rights if the state decides to reopen the field commercially.
The companies are betting that the Arkansas miners of 80 years ago were using such primitive tools that the site was never properly valued. Tourists' techniques are little different from the old miners': digging holes and pouring dirt into screens and sluices. Another method is to sit in a chair for hours, waiting for the telltale glint of sunlight, focusing on the gem like a bird dog and directing one's spouse to pick it up.No one noticed at first when the mother and her skinny 12-year-old son walked quietly into the South-Central police station here on Thursday evening.
Then the woman identified herself, and the duty officers realized she had just turned in the boy whom the police wanted so badly in the gang rape of a girl and the killing of an 82-year-old woman that they had taken the unusual step of releasing his name to the public.
''She said basically, 'Here we are and we want to do the right thing, and here's my son,' '' Capt. Thomas Lorenzen said. ''It was very difficult for her, and it took a lot of courage.''
As juvenile crime rises, and ever-younger felons get their hands on guns, the kind of predicament faced by this mother -- whose name the police did not release -- is becoming more common, experts say.
But this case has drawn particular attention here because of the age of the boy, the brutality of the crime, the Los Angeles Police Chief's decision to make the boy's name public and the popularity of the elderly woman who was killed by a gunshot in her home in the city's Watts section.
''This is not the first time that a parent, with the best will in the world, is faced with the horrible dilemma of either trying to teach a child what is right or behave as a protective parent,'' said Joan McCord, a professor of criminal justice at Temple University and a researcher on families and crime. ''It's almost impossible to imagine a good thing to do with a gun-toting 12-year-old.''
As the police tell it, on July 26, the day before his 12th birthday, the boy joined at least six other boys and two men inside an abandoned house on East 111th Street, in a crime-ridden area of Watts near the infamous Nickerson Gardens projects.
In the fetid, trash-strewn house, the police say, the boys gang-raped and tortured a 13-year-old girl, then tried to cover their tracks by setting the house on fire with the girl inside. The girl escaped, however, and the smoke and noise caught the attention of Dumar Stokes, whose 82-year-old grandmother, Viola McClain, lived next door.
When Mr. Stokes confronted the boys at the abandoned house, one pulled a gun and loaded it. Mr. Stokes got his own gun and fired several shots at the house. When the boy fired back, a stray bullet struck Mrs. McClain in the throat and killed her as she stood on her front porch.
The investigation took several days, but on Thursday, 50 police and Housing Authority officers served arrest and search warrants in 13 places. They brought in six boys and two adults but did not immediately find the boy believed to have fired the fatal shot.
So Chief Willie L. Williams held a news conference at which he released the boy's name and description, saying the youngster was armed and dangerous. A few hours later, the mother brought the boy in.
''He was not kicking and screaming,'' Captain Lorenzen said. ''He's a fully street-wise 12-year-old.''
Today, a pile of pink roses lay on the front porch of Mrs. McClain's gabled white house. Neighbors, while mourning a woman who was remembered for taking presents to newcomers on the block and keeping an eye on other people's children, said they were not surprised at this latest spate of violence.
''Every day, it's a helicopter overhead,'' said Thornton Hill, 26, a former gang member. ''Every day, it's another shooting. This is just one more. It just happened that it's a resident of six decades.''
Kennetta Thomas, 21, who lives a few houses down from Mrs. McClain, said of the 12-year-old: ''Over here, he was a regular kid, and all of them are bad. He ran with the crowd.
''I know his mother, and I know for a fact he had home training, but the second he gets out, he acts like the crowd does. It's their 'hood.''
But Al Carter, a 14-year-old friend of the boy who had stopped to lay a rose on Mrs. McClain's porch, denied that his friend was guilty, saying they had been walking together when the shooting occurred.
''He didn't shoot that lady,'' the teen-ager said. ''They should let him free because he's no bad kid.''
The police would not comment on the boy's criminal record, but it was clear he had one. Lieut. John Dunkin said the mother wrestled physically with her son several days ago in an effort to get him to see his probation officer but backed down when she realized he was armed.
The police said the boy was likely to be charged with murder and several other counts, but not until Monday at the earliest.He was an officer in the Yugoslav Army, he organized the Serbian military units that held this town against Muslim and Croatian forces in the Bosnian war, and he became a senior intelligence officer in the Bosnian Serb army. So at first it would seem that Milovan Stankovic, 47, is exactly the wrong kind of person to have started an important opposition newspaper in Serb-controlled Bosnia.
But then, his history may give him the kind of protection other publishers in dangerous circumstances will envy.
''The authorities can kill me,'' Mr. Stankovic said. ''But whoever orders it knows the same thing will happen to him, and his family, within 48 hours.''
A statement like that shows how seriously people are taking the Bosnian elections set for September, elections seen as crucial to the country's future. With the apparently solid front enforced by war giving way in the face of a political campaign, divisions are being revealed among the Bosnian Serbs.
Mr. Stankovic -- they call him the Major in this city, remembering his efforts during the war -- quit the army in February and now wants to help mold the new government of a country that is home to war lords and militant nationalists as well as to those who hope that elections will produce the beginnings of democracy.
Mr. Stankovic uses his standing as authority to criticize, something many Bosnian Serbs are afraid to do.
In an interview, he bellowed out in his thundering voice that he is Serbian above all, and proud of it. Then he displayed hideous wounds earned in defending his people when, as he described it, they were attacked by their enemies.
Moving on to exhibit what seems to be the cynicism of a disciple who was misled, he then attacked the politicians, and even the army that led Bosnia's Serbs into what he calls isolation and disaster.
The hard-line politicians, whose strategy for making a Serbian state he helped carry out as a soldier, turned out to be war profiteers, he said. ''They spilled a lot of Serbian blood and got rich,'' he said.
The Bosnian Serb army, which he helped form as the commander of troops in this important city at the outset of the war, he now condemns as having prosecuted the war by attacking civilians. The head of the army, Gen. Ratko Mladic, has been indicted by the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague, as has Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb political leader, who recently stepped down as head of the Serbian Democratic Party.
''There was no professionalism,'' Mr. Stankovic said of the Bosnian Serb army. ''We didn't create an army, we created an armed gang.''
He looked at the floor in one of the two small offices of the newspaper and added: ''After we took a town, paramilitary gangs came in to loot and destroy. That's why when you look at Bosnia today, you can see the places where our forces went.''
Now, he said, Bosnian Serbs continue to be deluded by the Serbian Democratic Party, which has been in control since the war began.
He said the party was run by a small group of criminals who maintain power by controlling the press and terrorizing political opponents.
His newspaper, Alternativa, is wriggling through the bands of tight state control that have kept almost all unapproved opinions from most Bosnian Serbs. It and the few other opposition publications are sources of information that does not come from the ruling party.
Most of the newspapers have sponsors of a sort, opposition parties or locally prominent people hoping to foster criticism of the party, according to foreign experts.
Mr. Stankovic would not identify the people who stand behind Alternativa. He called them ''men in the shadows.''
But his assertion that he was the Bosnian Serb army's intelligence chief until his retirement suggests that at least some of the backing comes from top military officers.
Indeed, he said there was serious friction in the army between those like himself who had been career officers and those who until the war were civilians but now hold important military positions.
The staff of the newspaper said they gave favored coverage to the most prominent opposition party, but the differences between it and the ruling party are more over who should hold office rather than basic political philosophy.Whenever the Olympic Games take the world stage, accusations about the use of performance-enhancing drugs are sure to follow. This time, pointed fingers and knowing nudges have been directed at various athletes, including Eastern European athletes, five of whom tested positive for a stimulant and were disqualified from competing in the Games.
Perhaps the accusations come so easily because the illegitimate use of such controlled substances, banned in competitions, has become so common. Although no one in the Summer Olympics has so far tested positive for anabolic steroids, which are used to enhance muscle-building, they have been the drugs of choice for athletes such as bodybuilders, runners and football players in the last two decades. Indeed, the drugs are big business.
In 1991, after mounting evidence of the drugs' ability to stunt adolescents' growth and perhaps touch off psychotic and violent behavior, anabolic steroids, which are synthetic derivatives of male sex hormones, were placed on the Federal list of controlled substances. Illicit sales of the drugs are punishable by as much as five years in prison.
Before 1991, about 50 percent of steroid users obtained the drugs through medical professionals, the Drug Enforcement Administration has said. The drugs are legally used to treat some diseases.
But virtually all current abusers obtain the substance from the black market. And the black market is huge: An estimated 500,000 Americans, mostly young, white and male, spend a total of $400 million a year on the synthetic steroid hormones. Far from seeking a chemical high, they ingest or inject the drug to build up their biceps and puff up their pectorals to improve their prowess in sports -- or just to show off their brawn.
At the same time, a quiet revolution is under way in the much smaller but booming legal market for the drug. IMS America, a company in Totowa, N.J., that compiles information on the health care industry, estimated that $36.7 million worth of anabolic steroids were sold through prescriptions or administered in hospitals last year. In just the first five months of this year, IMS America calculated, sales have swelled by 38.5 percent compared with the corresponding period last year.
But it is the vastly larger black market for the drug that is creating such a brouhaha in the sports world.
Law enforcement authorities say most of the illegal supply is smuggled into the United States from Europe and Mexico, where the drugs can be purchased over the counter. They are sold on the street in this country for anywhere from $1 to $10 a pill and $10 to $15 for one cubic centimeter of injectable liquid. Bodybuilders often ''stack'' the drug -- that is, take enormous and frequent doses that can cost them $1,000 a month and more.
But it is their use by athletes out to cheat their competitors that makes the headlines. Last year, two 14-year-old girls, Liza de Villiers, a sprinter from South Africa, and Jessica Foschi, a swimmer from the United States, tested positive for anabolic steroids at separate competitions and were banned from competition temporarily.
While steroids are usually associated with professional athletes or ordinary guys afflicted with an excess of bicep-envy, they do have legitimate applications, doctors say.
The principal legal use is the treatment of testosterone deficiencies that result from accidents, diseases or aging, Dr. Gary I. Wadler, a professor of medicine at New York University and a fellow at the American College of Sport Medicine, said.
Anabolic steroids are also sometimes used to treat patients in late stages of breast cancer, said Dr. Don H. Catlin, a professor of medicine and pharmacology at the University of California at Los Angeles and the director of the U.C.L.A. Olympic Analytical Laboratory, which conducts steroid testing for Olympic athletes.
Legal sales have gotten a lift from the introduction of skin patches that unlike either injections or pills deliver a steady flow of the chemical into the body. In 1994, the Alza Corporation introduced its Testoderm patch and within a year had grabbed nearly 20 percent of the new market. Androderm, a rival product introduced by SmithKline Beecham P.L.C. last November, almost immediately catapulted the company to the front of the pack, with almost 26 percent of the market for the first five months of this year, dropping Alza back to just under 17 percent.
Other major producers of anabolic steroids in the United States are ICN Pharmaceuticals and Pharmacia & Upjohn Inc., with about 23 percent and 18 percent of the market, respectively, IMS America said. Depending on the treatment, a month's supply of prescription steroids can cost anywhere from $30 to $170.
The medical community is currently debating other uses for the substance, which some specialists say might work as a male contraceptive and others believe has a therapeutic effect on AIDS patients.
Paradoxically, the drugs that can transform an average male into a latter-day Hercules can also diminish his virility. When men take anabolic steroids, they stop producing sperm, Dr. Catlin said. Their testicles shrink, and breasts become enlarged.Lou Duva was upset. Rock Newman was unavailable. And the New York State Athletic Commission was standing firm, one day after it announced that it was temporarily suspending the licenses of Duva and Newman's Spencer Promotions and withholding $1 million of Riddick Bowe's $5 million purse in the aftermath of the July 11 brawl at Madison Square Garden after Bowe's heavyweight bout with Andrew Golota.
''We're seeking the harshest penalties,'' said Gwenn Lee, a spokeswoman for the commission. ''We're looking at permanently revoking licenses, permanently withholding $1 million.''
Duva's lawyer, Patrick English, said yesterday that he immediately requested a hearing, so as not to be ''lumped'' with Newman's people. And, according to people familiar with the commission and with the promoters, the main target of the commission appears to be Newman. From Duva, the commission apparently would be satisfied with a public apology.
Revoking Newman's license would seem to have tremendous ramifications for Bowe's manager. Should his license to promote and manage be suspended in New York State, the question then becomes whether commissions in other states, particularly in Nevada and New Jersey, would honor the suspension.
''We are very, very interested in what's going on in New York,'' said Mark Ratner, the executive director of the Nevada State Athletic Commission. ''But right now, it would be premature to make remarks about it.''
Apparently, Newman feels the same way. He did not return calls yesterday to his offices in Washington. Duva, on the other hand, wanted to let people know he was incensed.
''I'm surprised they would do something like this without even notifying me,'' Duva said from Atlanta, where he was attending the Olympics. ''I want boxing to thrive in New York.''
At issue was the commission's allegation that Duva charged and bumped the referee Wayne Kelly after Kelly had halted the bout in the seventh round and disqualified Golota for repeated low blows. Golota was clearly ahead in what would have been a significant upset.
Duva's camp denied that he had bumped Kelly, saying that they had tapes and could use stop-action frames that the commission has already seen to support its case.
The commission, meanwhile, was waiting to hear from Newman, who has 20 days to appeal.
''We're saying Riddick Bowe is responsible for the acts of his de facto manager, Rock Newman, who gave these other people special credentials in a protected area,'' Lee said. ''There's a history of Rock Newman and violence -- in Nevada, in particular. Riddick Bowe knows this and he still employs Rock Newman.''
Duva said of Newman, ''He's the guy who should be suspended.''
BOXINGThree weeks ago, Representative Jim Kolbe, a Republican from Arizona, voted with the majority to deny Federal recognition to same-sex marriages and absolve states of the obligation to honor such marriages performed in other states.
In Washington, he is best known for having championed the North American Free Trade Agreement. But a number of gay-rights advocates said there was something else that should be known about Mr. Kolbe, who at 54 is serving his sixth term. Within days of the vote on the Defense of Marriage Act, they began a blistering campaign on the Internet to compel Mr. Kolbe to disclose that he himself was gay, a practice known as outing.
The campaign reached its peak last week with a full-page ad in The Washington Blade, a newspaper that reaches a nationwide gay audience, calling on ''all closeted gay and lesbian members of Congress'' to ''end your silence and defend your community.''
On Thursday night, Mr. Kolbe spoke.
''That I am a gay person has never affected the way that I legislate,'' he said in a statement. ''The fact that I am gay has never, nor will it ever, change my commitment to represent all the people of Arizona's Fifth District,'' which includes Tucson and the southeastern corner of the state.
With his announcement, Mr. Kolbe became the fourth Congressman to identify himself publicly as gay. The other three are Gerry E. Studds and Barney Frank, both Massachusetts Democrats, and Steve Gunderson, Republican of Wisconsin.
All three voted against the Defense of Marriage Act, which was prompted by expectations that a Hawaii court would ultimately rule that the state cannot discriminate in issuing marriage licenses on the basis of sex. President Clinton has already said he will sign the bill.
Explaining his vote, Mr. Kolbe said: ''If the citizens of Hawaii believe it to be in their public interest to permit same-sex marriages, they should be permitted to do so. By the same token, other states -- as Arizona has done -- should be allowed to define marriage differently and not be required to accept the definition adopted by others.
''There are some who have decided that their disagreement with this particular vote warrants their making public information about my private life.''
Mr. Kolbe was elected to the Arizona State Senate in 1976 and to Congress in 1984. He won his most recent election with 68 percent and now serves on the Appropriations and Budget Committees. He is divorced and has no children.
The outing campaign took the form of E-mail messages that were widely distributed to journalists and others. Some messages called on Mr. Kolbe to reconcile his vote with his sexual orientation; others said his personal life was no one's business but his own.
Mr. Kolbe was too busy talking with constituents yesterday to grant interviews, said Ron Foreman, his press secretary. But he added that support from district residents had been effusive and that Mr. Kolbe had also received encouragement from Speaker Newt Gingrich and others in Congress.
Mr. Gunderson was one of them. ''I don't believe in outing, yet I believe everybody ought to be out,'' he said. ''The fact that Jim and I are both out continues to break down stereotypes and the Republican Party is going to have to deal with that.''
From the other side of the aisle, Mr. Frank also welcomed Mr. Kolbe's announcement. ''It's very helpful,'' he said. ''That he is a respected, able, mainstream conservative has to diminish the prejudice somewhat.''
Mr. Frank said Mr. Kolbe's vote on the marriage bill should not by itself make him anathema to lesbians and gay men. ''In general, Kolbe has voted against bigotry and discrimination,'' he said, ''so his overall record is intellectually honest on this issue.''
State Representative Ken Cheuvront, Democrat of Phoenix, who was elected in 1994 as an openly gay candidate, said yesterday that Arizona residents ''could care less'' that Mr. Kolbe was gay but were ''mad at the gay press.''
''They think that outing is wrong,'' Mr. Cheuvront said, ''that what one does in the privacy of one's own home shouldn't be discussed in the newspapers.''
One of the architects of the campaign was Michael Petrelis, an advocate of gay rights who lives in San Francisco. ''I think it's a terrific development that we now have an equal number of openly gay G.O.P. members of Congress,'' he said.The seas calmed today, the fog lifted, and investigators searching the watery crash site of Trans World Airlines Flight 800 discovered a tantalizing piece of wreckage -- a section of the cockpit that they hope will lead them to other significant debris, as well as to an explanation for why the jumbo jet exploded in mid-air last month.
The piece of the cockpit, described as the front-window section, was found by a camera-equipped robot nosing about the Boeing 747 wreckage strewn across the Atlantic Ocean floor some 12 miles off the coast of eastern Long Island. Although the piece had not been brought to the surface by tonight, investigators clearly were eager to see it, because it comes from the front third of the aircraft, where the explosion is believed to have occurred, and might help them finally explain what caused it.
James K. Kallstrom, supervisor of the F.B.I.'s New York office, said the bureau still believed there were three possible explanations for why Flight 800 broke in two less than 15 minutes after leaving Kennedy International Airport for Paris on July 17: mechanical failure, a missile or a bomb.
But in an interview with National Public Radio today, Defense Secretary William J. Perry appeared to disagree.
''It seems to me that on the basis of the evidence I've seen so far, that one would conclude, I would conclude that a mechanical failure was very unlikely,'' Mr. Perry said. ''I would conclude that a missile attack was unlikely.''
Mr. Perry then explained that the capabilities of shoulder-fired missiles and the circumstances of the crash ''argue strongly against a missile.''
''I would not rule it out until we see the final reports of the investigation,'' he went on. ''But on the basis of the data I've seen so far, I'd say it's unlikely.''
''I'm basing it on incomplete reports of the investigation,'' he continued, ''but the reports we've gotten so far, it does not look like it was an engine hit. It looks like an explosion happening in the front of the airplane. That would be a quite unlikely result from a heat-seeking missile.''
Robert T. Francis, vice chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, did not comment on Mr. Perry's remarks and may not even have known of them when he spoke at a news briefing this afternoon. He spoke at length about the cockpit section that was discovered and said that the other wreckage that may be found around it would be as intriguing as the cockpit window itself.
''It's where, obviously, one controls the aircraft,'' Mr. Francis said. ''Not only the cockpit itself, but the area under the cockpit where you have the electronics of the airplane. It's sort of the nerve center of the aircraft, so it's obviously a place we are interested in.''
Mr. Kallstrom shared Mr. Francis' enthusiasm that some answers may be within a diver's reach. ''We hope that it will come from somewhere within that first-class section, which also would include the nose and the cockpit,'' he said.
Although Mr. Kallstrom demurred when asked to be more specific, he added, ''If we can get all of those pieces up and get a chance to look at them, we're hopeful that we'll see what happened.''
The day's developments seemed to bring a rejuvenating air to the investigation, judging by the demeanor of Mr. Kallstrom and Mr. Francis at today's press briefing. Their quest for answers -- as well as the effort to recover more bodies of victims -- has been stymied in recent days by stormy weather that produced six-foot waves, making salvage operations too dangerous. What is more, forensic tests so far have found no conclusive evidence of a chemical residue that would suggest a bomb caused the explosion.
''The weather was a little bit kinder to us,'' Mr. Francis said. ''Things are rolling out there.''
Although no bodies were recovered today -- the remains of 46 of the 230 passengers are still missing -- Mr. Francis said that investigators expected to find more bodies in and around the debris field where the cockpit was located. Still, for the first time, investigators signaled a subtle shift in the balance between recovering bodies and seeking answers to the mystery of the jet's destruction.
''We'll continue to prioritize victim recovery,'' Mr. Francis said. ''But this is certainly going more and more hand-in-glove with wreckage removal.''
The star of the day was a nine-foot-long self-propelled robot called the Deep Drone, which has two mechanical arms and two camera eyes, one for still photographs and the other for color videotape. What it sees and how it moves are controlled by a ''pilot'' who, in this case, was aboard the Navy salvage ship Grapple, moored over a southwestern portion of the crash site.
The robot's talents are particularly appreciated by the divers, some of whom have found themselves in precarious situations. Today, for example, two more Navy divers became ill and needed to spend hours in a pressurized chamber. In all, seven divers have required such attention.
The Deep Drone managed to insinuate itself among the wreckage and to discover the cockpit section, which Mr. Francis said had been shielded by other debris. The plans now call for a master Navy diver to swim to the location where the piece of the cockpit was found and to assess how best to raise it to the surface. But Rear Adm. Edward K. Kristensen pointed out that as with virtually every aspect of the investigation, the recovery of debris is not simple. Angles, balance and proper equipment all have to be considered.
The point was brought home early Thursday morning, when the Grapple's sister ship, the Grasp, sought to lift a large piece of the rear fuselage, only to have a chunk fall back to the ocean floor. Today, the section that the Grasp recovered, a 45-foot-long piece that includes a row of 15 windows, was being brought by Navy barge to the Coast Guard station at Shinnecock Inlet.After several months in overdrive, the economy is showing signs of slowing to a more moderate but still healthy pace that is generating no increases in inflation, Government figures indicated today.
The data showed that the economy created jobs in July at a somewhat slower rate than during the spring and that upward pressure on wages ebbed last month. Consumer spending fell during July for the first time since winter, and orders to factories fell in June for the first time in four months.
Today's report, combined with other recent data, confirmed expectations that the Federal Reserve would not raise short-term interest rates this month, heartening investors. Stocks surged after the release of the report, with the Dow Jones industrial average rising 85.08 points, or 1.5 percent. Bond prices also rallied, driving the yield on the 30-year Treasury bond -- a benchmark for mortgages and other consumer interest rates -- down to 6.73 percent from 6.83 percent. $(Page 35.$)
The employment report also gave another lift to the Clinton Administration as the Presidential campaign increasingly turns to economic issues.
The economy grew at a 4.2 percent rate in the second quarter, its fastest in two years, and analysts said growth might still be so strong that it would require a rate increase by the Federal Reserve later in the year to cool it off and keep inflation dormant. But they said that today's numbers, at least, showed the economy moving toward a healthy balance, with enough growth to keep unemployment low and businesses humming, but not so much that wages and prices begin shooting up.
''We're in a very comfortable middle ground where you don't have any inflationary excesses threatening you and nor do you have any recessionary worries,'' said Stuart G. Hoffman, the chief economist of the PNC Bank Corporation in Pittsburgh. ''It's a perfect prescription for the economy.''
The Labor Department reported that the economy generated 193,000 new jobs in July, fewer than most economists had expected and a sign that the economy's rapid acceleration during the spring was tapering off. The economy had created 220,000 jobs in June, the Labor Department said, down from its initial estimate of 239,000.
The slowdown in job creation helped push the unemployment rate for July up slightly, to 5.4 percent of the civilian work force, from 5.3 percent in June.
Despite the rapid economic growth in recent months, there was no evidence in today's report that wages were being pushed up by labor shortages. The Labor Department said average hourly earnings declined by 2 cents in July, to $11.80, after having risen by a surprisingly high 9 cents in June. Investors have been focusing on wages as an important indication of whether inflation is starting to take root. Over the last year, average hourly earnings have risen 2.9 percent.
Providing further evidence that the economy is cooling off, the Commerce Department said today that consumer spending fell two-tenths of 1 percent in July. The willingness of consumers to keep spending despite mounting debt levels has been one of the main forces propelling the economy this year, and most analysts had expected consumption to be up again in July. The drop in consumption came despite a rise of nine-tenths of 1 percent in personal incomes last month, the department said.
Factory orders fell nine-tenths of 1 percent in June, the Commerce Department said, reversing a four-month trend of increases. The department also revised downward its estimate of factory orders in May, to 2.3 percent from 2.4 percent.
Today's flurry of statistics came at the end of a week in which other figures had also suggested that the economy was not in immediate danger of overheating but was nonetheless cruising along at a pace that could set off inflationary pressures later in the year.
On Tuesday, the Labor Department reported that the overall compensation that employers pay for their workers rose at a relatively modest eight-tenths of 1 percent for the second quarter, although wages and salaries rose nine-tenths of 1 percent, a rate that some analysts took as a warning signal of inflation.
On Thursday, the National Association of Purchasing Managers said that its index of business activity declined and that the rate at which suppliers filled orders speeded up significantly, indicating that no inflationary bottlenecks were forming.
Most economists had been expecting that if the economy did not show signs of slowing, the Federal Reserve would raise rates no later than its next policy-setting meeting on Aug. 20. Now the consensus is that the Fed will not act at least until its meeting in September, when it will have more evidence of the economy's path, and that the central bank might put off any increase in rates until after the Presidential election.
''Despite some positive economic surprises in the data, key inflation portents were neither alarming nor consistently threatening enough to impel the Fed to act this month,'' the Salomon Brothers securities firm said in an economic analysis it released today.
''However, eventual tightening still seems to be the most likely scenario for the months ahead,'' the report said. ''The economy retains considerable momentum, despite some signs of slowing, and labor markets continue to pose a threat of overheating.''
But with its eye on November, the Clinton Administration said the combination of healthy job creation and low inflation further buttressed its claim to be presiding over the best economy in a generation.
''These data should reassure both Wall Street and Main Street,'' said Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich. ''We're not seeing inflation, even though the economy is growing at a healthy pace. Employers are not raising prices, even though there are spot labor market shortages for skilled workers.''
The President's expected Republican opponent, Bob Dole, who has been attacking the economic growth rate under Mr. Clinton as anemic, focused today on the drop in average hourly earnings last week as evidence that American workers are being shortchanged by the Administration's economic policies.In the end, say the jurors in the latest case brought by the Whitewater independent counsel's office, they voted to acquit two Arkansas bankers of four felony counts because Neal T. Ainley, the Government's main witness, had appeared evasive during his testimony.
''He never looked at us,'' one juror, Mary M. Zinamon, recalled in an interview after the verdicts were returned on Thursday. ''He only kept looking at the Government's table, like he was saying to them, 'Tell me what to say.' ''
Betty I. Sweeden, another of the jurors, said all of them had doubted Mr. Ainley -- one of the few things they had been able to agree on.
''We just didn't believe him,'' Mrs. Sweeden said. ''We felt that he was already in trouble and he said what he said because he was just trying to save himself.''
In three days on the witness stand, Mr. Ainley, former president of the Perry County Bank, had accused the defendants, the bank's owners, of instructing him to conceal from the Government large cash withdrawals made by Bill Clinton's 1990 campaign for governor of Arkansas. Mr. Ainley also said he and the owners, Herby Branscum Jr. and Robert M. Hill, had taken bank money to reimburse themselves for their contributions to the campaigns of Mr. Clinton and others.
But after five days of sifting the evidence, the jury announced acquittal on four of the counts with which Mr. Branscum and Mr. Hill had been charged, including conspiracy to conceal the campaign's cash withdrawals.
On seven other counts -- including a second conspiracy charge, on the reimbursements -- some of the jurors deemed other evidence sufficiently strong to outweigh Mr. Ainley's lack of credibility and warrant a conviction. The panel reached an impasse on these counts, prompting the court to declare a mistrial on them. The prosecutors say they are considering whether to retry the bankers on the unresolved counts.
The jurors who were interviewed afterward described the frustration of days of hollering at one another, their deep confusion about the law on conspiracy and their ultimate consensus on only a few of the issues before them.
''At first, it was just six pig-headed people on one side and six pig-headed people on the other,'' said Mrs. Zinamon, 41, a management representative for a telephone company. ''It got real tense. We were really tired, and there were days when everyone was yelling and nobody was listening. At one point, I looked to one other person and said, 'If I say it's yellow, you're going to say it's blue.' ''
The intensity of their disagreements surprised Mrs. Zinamon and the other jurors, who had appeared to be bonding during the six weeks of trial testimony. After Rick DeGroat Jr., a 35-year-old yard foreman for an auto salvage company, told the others that he had become a grandfather, they sported large pink buttons that said, ''It's a girl.'' During breaks in the proceedings, many of them could be seen smoking and chatting on a courthouse stoop, or sitting around a pickup truck in front of the building listening to country music on the radio.
But late on Thursday of last week, when they were locked inside the jury room with a stack of exhibits to begin their deliberations, it quickly became clear that a consensus could prove elusive. The first sign of trouble came with their initial decision: selecting a leader.
Three of them vied to become foreman, and, Mrs. Zinamon said, the vote split 4-3-2. Ultimately the jurors settled on Alice Fields, 55, inventory manager of a grain company.
But Mrs. Fields was so unassuming that on Tuesday she refused to sign a note asking the judge for guidance to resolve a deadlock. Mrs. Fields, who did not return several telephone messages left for her today and on Thursday, told her colleagues that she would not put her name on the note because she feared that it would be published in the local papers. In the end, two other jurors signed in her stead.
At that point in the deliberations, the jurors had reached an agreement on two of the counts, but their decision on one of them did not last long.
According to Mrs. Zinamon, they agreed on Monday to acquit the defendants of both conspiracy counts. But some of them then realized that they had misunderstood the judge's instructions on conspiracy, and by Wednesday they had deadlocked on the first conspiracy count, involving contribution reimbursements.
Most of the jurors appeared unimpressed with the videotaped testimony of President Clinton, called as a witness by the defense. Mr. DeGroat said he would have liked to see the President testify in person, but others said the testimony had been irrelevant to their deliberations. ''We thought it was a waste of time,'' Mrs. Zinamon said.
Several also said they had not believed the testimony of Bruce R. Lindsey, deputy White House counsel, whom the prosecution designated an unindicted co-conspirator. The prosecutors said Mr. Lindsey, as treasurer of the 1990 campaign, had instructed Mr. Ainley to conceal the cash withdrawals from the Government. Mr. Lindsey said he had been trying to hide the withdrawals only from political opponents, not from the Government, and had not violated any laws.
Of Mr. Lindsey's performance as a witness, Mrs. Zinamon said: ''It was the same as Ainley's. I didn't believe a thing he was saying. Lindsey's testimony just didn't make sense.''
Mrs. Sweeden, a 59-year-old retired Federal poultry inspector, said none of the jurors had believed Mr. Lindsey, and Wesley N. Camp, 29, the president of a small company that makes livestock trailers, said he believed that Mr. Lindsey had actually conspired with Mr. Ainley to conceal the cash withdrawals. Still, Mrs. Zinamon said she thought that while Mr. Lindsey might have acted improperly, he had not acted criminally.
Even after their work was over, there remained some disagreement among the jurors about what had occurred. Mrs. Zinamon said there had been only two or three holdouts who wanted to convict the defendants on the remaining counts. Two other jurors said the vote had been closer to 60-40 in favor of acquittal.A former Dallas police officer today admitted in court that he had paid an undercover narcotics agent $2,960 to have the Dallas Cowboy football star Michael Irvin killed and that he had sold police records to someone he believed to be a drug dealer.
The former officer, Johnnie Hernandez, was sentenced to six years in prison, part of a plea agreement in exchange for his guilty plea to a charge of attempted solicitation of capital murder.
Mr. Hernandez's arrest came at the start of Mr. Irvin's trial in June on charges of drug possession. Mr. Irvin has since pleaded no contest to charges of possession of cocaine and was sentenced to four years' probation.
The court proceedings today still left unclear the motive behind Mr. Hernandez's effort to have Mr. Irvin killed. At first, prosecutors said Mr. Hernandez was jealous because his girlfriend had spent time with Mr. Irvin, while the former officer's lawyers said Mr. Irvin had threatened the girlfriend.
But prosecutors filed court papers last week asserting that Mr. Hernandez had been paid on several occasions since February 1996 to work as a bodyguard and escort for people he believed were drug dealers but who were actually undercover officers investigating police corruption.
In court today, Mr. Hernandez also admitted to selling police information about license plate numbers to a man he believed was a drug dealer who was trying to identify undercover agents.
Toby Shook, an assistant district attorney, said outside court today that Mr. Hernandez wanted Mr. Irvin killed because he was concerned that as a witness at Mr. Irvin's trial his relationship with those men might be revealed.
In his plea today, Mr. Hernandez admitted that on June 22 he contacted someone whom prosecutors said he believed to be a drug dealer and asked him to arrange for Mr. Irvin's death. The person was an informant for the Federal Drug Enforcement Administration and was part of an investigation by the agency and local officials into police corruption.
The informant put Mr. Hernandez in touch with an undercover Federal drug agent posing as yet another drug dealer, according to testimony at a hearing last month. Mr. Hernandez's conversations with the agent were taped. Police officers testified at that hearing that the agent told Mr. Hernandez the killing would cost $30,000. When Mr. Hernandez could come up with only $2,960, the agent informed Mr. Hernandez that he could work off the balance by ''protecting'' drug dealers from police investigations, a police sergeant testified.
Mr. Hernandez's lawyers never denied those allegations. They instead asserted that the police entrapped Mr. Hernandez, and they pointed to an officer's admission in court that Mr. Hernandez tried to call off the killing shortly afterward. Because Mr. Hernandez tried to stop the contract, he probably received a lighter sentence, prosecutors said, than the maximum of 99 years he could have received if convicted of the original charge of solicitation of capital murder.
During Mr. Irvin's trial last month on drug possession charges, Mr. Hernandez's girlfriend, Rochelle Smith, became the prosecution's star witness. A topless dancer, Ms. Smith described using drugs and participating in group sex with Mr. Irvin. She began sobbing as she accused Mr. Irvin of threatening her after she became a prosecution witness.
After Ms. Smith's testimony, Mr. Irvin pleaded no contest to the cocaine charge. He was sentenced to four years' probation, fined $10,000 fine and ordered to perform 800 hours of community service.Pressured into swift action by the suspicious crash of a T.W.A. jumbo jet, a bombing in Atlanta, and a plea from President Clinton, the House of Representatives approved a bill today to improve airport security across the nation and increase efforts against terrorism. But the legislation fell far short of the Administration's goals.
Under pressure from the National Rifle Association, Republican leaders stripped from the bill a White House proposal that would require manufacturers to mark black and smokeless powder -- typical components of homemade bombs -- with chemical elements, or ''taggants,'' which would help the authorities trace detonated explosives.
The Republicans also dropped from the bill an Administration proposal to expedite the authorities' ability to obtain court permission to wiretap several telephones with a single warrant so they could track suspects who move from phone to phone. The American Civil Liberties Union had lobbied against these so-called multipoint wiretaps, citing privacy concerns.
Representative Bob Barr, a freshman Republican from Georgia and one of the staunchest gun-rights supporters in Congress, said, ''I'm delighted that we were able to head off what began as a steamroller to ram through some very ill-advised legislation and to slow that process down to a slower and more deliberate process.''
House members on both sides of the aisle criticized the Republican leadership for weakening the bill and for yielding to the N.R.A. on the issue of taggants. In the end, the measure passed 389 to 22. The no votes came from 18 Republicans and 4 Democrats.
With a vow by Democrats to try to amend the bill to restore the dropped provisions, Senator Trent Lott, the majority leader, decided this evening not to bring the measure to a vote before the monthlong August recess, beginning tonight.
The White House reaction was subdued.
''Essentially what they did in the House was to strip the bill of any useful tools for law enforcement to combat terrorism,'' said Barry Toiv, a White House spokesman.
''We are hoping that the Senate will restore those provisions to the bill and we are working with the Senate to do that.
''The President wants a serious anti-terrorism bill.''
The bill does allow for a study on taggants, but a provision dictates that the study ''shall be conducted by an entity outside of the Executive Branch.''
That provision would bar participation by both the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, which have been criticized by the N.R.A., among others, for the two agencies' fatal sieges on Rudy Ridge, Idaho, and near Waco, Tex.
House members from both sides of the aisle who were involved the last week in negotiations over a new counterterrorism bill said the restrictive language was added at the insistence of the N.R.A., the nation's most powerful gun lobbying group.
''We're allowing the N.R.A. to set national policy through the Republican Party,'' said Representative Peter T. King, a New York Republican and a member of the counterterrorism panel that was set up this week.
''Nobody, including the Chamber of Commerce and the A.F.L.-C.I.O., should have that veto power over a national party. Why are we going to such great lengths to protect the N.R.A. and people who make bombs?''
Nevertheless, Mr. King voted for the bill.
The bill has two main sections. The first covers aviation security and includes provisions that require the Federal Aviation Administration to set performance standards for security personnel at airports, to review security arrangements on air cargo and mail, and to oversee the improvement of bomb-detection equipment, like the type used at airports in Israel and Europe.
Bomb-sniffing dogs, paid for with grants from the Aviation Trust Fund, which finances airport improvements with a ticket tax, would be stationed at the 50 largest airports in the United States. And the Government would work with airlines to develop a better passenger-profiling system to spot potential terrorists.
The bill would also authorize checks on the criminal history and other background investigations of security screeners at airports and requires the F.A.A. to insure that the directive is followed.
The bill's other section, dealing with anti-terrorism, would make terrorist offenses punishable under the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organization Act, the same law that the authorities have used to combat organized-crime groups and the courts have used to imposed longer sentences and heavier fines.Are East Asia's fiercely competitive tiger economies starting to lose their fangs?
Things probably have not gotten quite that bad. But if the teeth are still intact, they have lost some of their sharpness of late. Export growth for many countries in the region -- including the original ''Four Tigers'' of Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea, as well as a half-dozen other countries that are following the same fast-growth path -- has slowed sharply this year. And China's exports have actually declined.
The deceleration in part reflects a healthy cooling off of economies that were running the risk of overheating. But it also raises questions about the staying power of East Asia's export-driven economic boom. In particular, it translates into a deterioration of the region's trade balance.
That, in turn, threatens to drag the area's currencies lower against the dollar and the yen, a development that could lead to unpredictable economic consequences, economists say.
This week, Thailand's central bank announced that it had spent more than $1 billion, or almost 3 percent, of its reserves fighting off a speculative attack on its currency, the baht, in the Hong Kong and Singapore markets. The attack developed after the central bank scaled back its export forecasts and revised its estimate for Thailand's payments deficit this year to 7.8 percent of economic output from 6.5 percent.
In country after country, export growth has declined, sometimes precipitously, from the galloping pace of 1995, according to statistics prepared by James Capel Inc., the New York subsidiary of the London-based brokerage firm.
In the first quarter of 1996, the increase in exports slowed to 8 percent from 28 percent in Thailand, to 6 percent from 20 percent in Hong Kong, to 17 percent from 23 percent in Malaysia, to 21 percent from 32 percent in South Korea, to 9 percent from 23 percent in Taiwan and to 10 percent from 20 percent in Indonesia.
China's exports actually declined by 9 percent, compared with a 62 percent rise in the comparable 1995 span. Only the Philippines kept close to last year's breakneck pace, registering a 26 percent gain in exports in the first quarter, only a shade below last year's 27 percent.
''The export slowdown shows that even Asian countries have business cycles,'' said Paul Krugman, a professor of economics at Stanford University, though he added that he thought the Asian economies would take another decade to drop down to the growth rates experienced by the more mature industrial nations.
A more immediate danger, in the view of both Mr. Krugman and Marcus Noland, a senior fellow at the Institute for International Economics, is that slowing export growth may push some of these countries into unsustainable balance-of-payments deficits, which in turn could hurt foreign-investor confidence and cause a Mexican-style currency crisis.
True, many have large foreign-exchange reserves that can be used to defend their currencies. Malaysia's reserves stand at $24 billion, for instance, Singapore's at $70 billion and Indonesia's at $15 billion.
But Malaysia's balance-of-payments deficit stands at a high 8.9 percent of total economic output, while Thailand's is expected to be 7.8 percent. The deficit of Indonesia is smaller at 4 percent. But it has $100 billion in foreign debt and an unstable political situation with an ailing president and no clear successor.
''Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia all look vulnerable,'' Professor Krugman said. Of the three, Mr. Noland added, ''Indonesia is the most worrying because it has political as well as economic problems. That's where I could see a financial-market driven crisis coming next.''
Some easing of Asia's ''growth miracle'' had been expected this year. But in May, the International Monetary Fund said it expected Asia's growth rate to slow only ''slightly'' in 1996 to ''about 8 percent,'' compared with 8.4 percent last year, as a result of tighter financial policies in a number of countries.
As a result of the more restrictive credit policies and slowing economic growth, the I.M.F. also predicted a reduction in East Asia's overall inflation rate to 8.4 percent this year from 10.9 percent in 1995
Part of the export slowdown is a statistical sleight-of-hand. The dollar's weakness and the yen's strength in the early months of 1995 tended to exaggerate these countries' export growth measured in dollars, just as this year's stronger dollar and weaker yen exaggerated the slowdown.
Since most of these countries keep their currencies linked to the dollar, last year's weaker dollar also helped the international competitiveness of the tiger economies and their emulators, while this year's stronger one has done the opposite. ''These Asian economies tend to respond much faster to exchange-rate changes than more mature ones,'' Mr. Noland said.
Chinese exporters have faced a special hurdle this year, as Vice Trade Minister Shi Guangsheng acknowledged in a recent interview, because of the Government's decision to save money by reducing a tax rebate on their foreign sales.
For the region as a whole, analysts attribute the easing of export growth to a softening of demand for electronic goods in Europe and the United States. This trend is particularly hard on Malaysia, 65 percent of whose exports are in that sector, and to a lesser extent on the Philippines and Taiwan, where the share is around 20 percent.
''It's scarcely surprising there should be surplus stocks when the industrial world grew by only 2 percent last year while the tiger economies were boosting their exports by 15 and 17 percent,'' said William Cline, chief economist at the Institute for International Finance.The posters, a blend of cyberlingo and hip-hop-speak, beckon from phone booths in the heart of Bedford-Stuyvesant. They are often ripped down by day's end. But sometimes they last long enough to lure a would-be cybernaut to a new frontier.
''Brothas and Sistas,'' they blare. ''Not tall enough for the N.B.A.? Too 'unique' to get signed to a record deal? Don't worry; there's another way to get outta the ghetto: the Internet.'' A phone number is given -- (212) 726-1063 -- and the name: Virtual Melanin Inc., ''Representin' Bed-Stuy in Cyberspace.''
McLean Greaves, the company's president, is a pied piper spreading this message, and he is happy if the phone rings.
''We're basically showing people that they have a voice,'' said Mr. Greaves, 29, who started his business, which creates Web sites for paying customers, in 1994 in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. ''Some kid from the Fort Greene projects could do the same thing with his friends. And we're going to show them the way to do that, through example.''
Some say the information superhighway has been slow in getting to neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant, where people are often more consumed with survival than with cyberspace. But despite the barriers that poverty and a lack of computer knowledge can bring, there is a burgeoning movement, from Harlem to the South Bronx, to carry the Internet to poorer neighborhoods.
From a library computer lab in Flatbush to an Internet cafe in East Harlem to projects giving free public access to the World Wide Web, organizations, educators and entrepreneurs have a new message for the poor: there is power in cyberspace.
''It's crucial, because the Internet is a window to the world,'' said Georgina Falu, who is opening an Internet cafe in her East Harlem computer school and dreams of her neighborhood becoming what she calls ''the Silicon Barrio.'' ''We want to be in the mainstream. Above all, we're saying this is a revolution like the gold rush, and the Latino people have been behind in almost every aspect in terms of job opportunities and economic development. And my purpose is to give them a head start.''
Sometimes, the new technology must be demystified and misperceptions erased. There are those who assume that computers are prohibitively expensive and not relevant to day-to-day living. Many of those seeking to share their knowledge of the Internet try to emphasize that with a few keystrokes, a bodega owner can tap into a marketing seminar without leaving his store; an elderly person can get medical advice without picking up a phone; an unemployed person can hunt for a job.
But the largest hurdle is access. Though many people may be eager to learn about the Internet, a significant number of homes in New York City's poorer communities do not have telephones, let alone computers. A study by the city's Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications found that in 1990, more than 1 in 5 homes in 8 of the city's 32 community districts had no telephone.
In East Harlem, more than 16 percent of the homes were without a telephone; in the community district that includes Bedford-Stuyvesant and Tompkins Park North, nearly 19 percent had none.
''One of our biggest concerns is, the world is passing a lot of poor communities by as far as computers and information,'' said Dennis M. Walcott, president of the New York Urban League, which plans to set up computers in each of its borough offices by October, giving the public free access to the World Wide Web and other services.
''The point is,'' Mr. Walcott said, ''we have a responsibility as a society to make sure all of us are competing on equal footing. Whether it's education or jobs, it's important for all communities to know how to use computers in everyday life.''
A group of nonprofit organizations calling itself the Linct Coalition, for Learning and Information Networks for Community Telecomputing, is working with the New York Urban League to develop a program in which computers will be given to low-income Harlem residents who complete training.
The Urban League and other organizations are trying to make access to the Internet available at community institutions, often without charge.
The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture provides free access to the Internet on four computers, and plans to hold information sessions for community groups. The Brooklyn Public Library's Flatbush branch, with a grant from the Microsoft Corporation, opened a computer lab in April that has attracted nearly 7,000 people who can explore the Internet and various software programs at no cost.
In October, the Harlem Partnership Center will begin free instruction on creating a Web page and on adding to its existing site, Harlem on the Web. And the Universal Business and Media School in East Harlem is opening its Internet cafe this month.
Unlike some of the cafes in downtown Manhattan, the East Harlem cyber-haunt will start small, with five computers. Customers can buy coffee, sandwiches and, for $5, an hour on the Internet. The goal is to ease neophytes into the new world by making the language of cyberspace relevant. Users will be immediately guided, for example, to a home page from which they can connect to information about everything from jobs to neighborhood events.
''They're going to see events in their community, special services in the community,'' said Dennis Vaque, the cafe's technical adviser. ''Everything's going to be relevant to them.''
Public access is necessary for now, said Ms. Falu, the computer school operator, but she said she believes that people will gradually become so intrigued they will find a way to go on line at home.
''What we need is for them to get comfortable with the computers,'' said Ms. Falu, who is host of a five-minute spot, ''Today With Computers,'' every Friday on the Spanish-language radio station WADO-AM (1280).In clean, brightly lighted laboratories at the J. Edgar Hoover Building, the scientific examination of mangled pieces of wreckage from T.W.A. Flight 800 inches forward. Far from the grim recovery effort, away from the victims' grieving families, teams of white-coated chemists, metallurgists and explosives experts quietly scrape, swab and pick through the shattered debris flown from Long Island.
If the atmosphere is antiseptic, forensic experts say the mood is tense, particularly since the scientists know that the Justice Department, and people around the world, are looking to them to make the call on whether the plane was brought down by a bomb.
In the cramped third-floor laboratory, the experts stand over steaming test vats, glass beakers and carefully calibrated instruments in search of an answer. So far, their findings have been agonizingly consistent: not a trace of an explosive chemical.
But the pressure from a world waiting for an explanation is not the only cause of anxiety within the cloistered world of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's crime lab. The lab's legendary reputation for scientific sleuthing has itself been under investigation. It is at the center of a Justice Department inquiry into its objectivity and methods.
F.B.I. officials deny it, but several former and current law enforcement representatives suggested that a long-running internal inquiry at the lab by the Justice Department's Inspector General is contributing to an atmosphere of caution about declaring the Trans World Airlines crash a criminal act.
Some officials said the caution has contributed to a decision by top F.B.I. officials to wait for incontrovertible evidence before saying publicly what most of them acknowledge privately: that Flight 800 was deliberately downed by an explosive device. ''They know they're under the gun on this one,'' said one F.B.I. veteran. ''No way can they make a mistake on T.W.A.''
But other F.B.I. officials and forensics experts said that the crime lab cannot afford to speculate on such a high-profile case, and must be certain about the cause before the F.B.I. formally takes over the case from the National Transportation Safety Board. These officials said the F.B.I. was exercising an appropriate level of scientific discipline, and other F.B.I officials on Long Island noted that only a small percentage of the wreckage had been pulled from the ocean and moved to Washington for testing.
The F.B.I.'s reluctance to reach firm conclusions more than two weeks after Flight 800 broke apart follows what has been an unusually turbulent period for the crime lab, an operation that has a $63 million budget and more than 550 employees, including experts in chemistry, toxicology, hair and fiber, fingerprints, ballistics, ink and paper -- even people who specialize in tire and shoe tracks.
Until the T.W.A. crash, the lab's explosive unit was criticized not for being slow to reach a conclusion, but for shooting from the hip. Much of the criticism has come from Frederic Whitehurst, an F.B.I. chemist with excellent credentials, whose complaints led to the internal inquiry.
Mr. Whitehurst, a veteran of 14 years who first complained to F.B.I. officials in 1989, has said that F.B.I. explosives experts and other analysts lacked necessary qualifications to make expert judgments, leaped to conclusions without sufficient scientific evidence and misinterpreted their findings.
''There was a quality assurance breakdown within the management of the lab and explosive unit in particular,'' said Stephen M. Kohn, a lawyer for Mr. Whitehurst, who was a chief chemist and the top explosives-residue expert until he was in effect demoted to a lesser job in the paint analysis unit in 1994. He has since been moved again to a job involving environmental crimes.
Mr. Whitehurst's complaints about the lab have already caused embarrassment for the F.B.I. and could bring more. He testified last year as a witness for the defense in the trial Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind Muslim cleric convicted of plotting to blow up New York landmarks, saying that a substance F.B.I. experts concluded to be an explosive chemical could actually have been human urine.
He has also charged that Government witnesses misrepresented their qualifications in other high-profile cases, like the 1991 bombing trial of Walter Leroy Moody, who was convicted in the bombing deaths of a Federal appeals court judge and a civil rights lawyer. The case is especially sensitive for the F.B.I.: Louis J. Freeh, the agency's director, was the prosecutor.
More problems may lie ahead. Lawyers representing Timothy J. McVeigh, one of two men charged with bombing the Federal Building in Oklahoma City last year, have said they are likely to question the integrity of the lab in a challenge that will likely be based at least in part on Dr. Whitehurst's charges.
Law enforcement officials said Mr. Whitehurst's colleagues regard him as a dedicated forensic scientist but a prickly eccentric with low tolerance for what he perceived as flaws in the work of others. They said that some of his charges may be overblown, while others will almost certainly be confirmed in the Inspector General's investigation. It is expected to be completed later this year.
His charges in part underscore a conflict between two main disciplines that exist within the small world of explosives analysts. On one side are the forensic chemists and metallurgists -- scientist with advanced degrees who achieve hard, quantifiable results. On the other side are the blast experts, many of them former street agents, who often lack higher degrees and whose expertise comes from actually using explosives and seeing the results of hundreds of bomb detonations. Their findings, interpretations of blast streaks and twisted fragments of bomb components, are necessarily more subjective.
The long-running debate between the two sides has been apparent in the T.W.A. investigation. For example, it was the blast experts in New York who first concluded that a crushed landing gear from the Boeing 747 was highly consistent with bomb damage. But the scientists in the Washington lab could not confirm that the nose gear had explosive residue. As a result the significance of the physical damage was discounted, and senior officials insisted that the find still fell short of definitive evidence they needed to declare the crash a criminal act.To escape prosecution on a possible perjury charge, the former president of the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation has admitted to lying about the improper purchase of office furniture, according to sources close to the investigation.
The former chief, Elizabeth Colon, was abruptly dismissed from the Navy Yard corporation in April amid concerns that an investigation into her purchase of $30,000 worth of furniture was undermining her leadership there.
Yesterday, authorities familiar with the case said Ms. Colon had signed an agreement with the Manhattan District Attorney's Office admitting that she lied under oath when she was questioned about the furniture by the Department of Investigation. Specifically, the authorities said she admitted to making misleading statements about her level of involvement in the purchase, telling investigators that a Navy Yard lawyer had taken care of the details.
According to a law enforcement official, ''the perjury concerns telling investigators that she didn't have anything to do with the purchase, that she knew about it but was not involved in the details.''
An official said the deal was worked out because of the difficulty of winning convictions in perjury cases.
''It is the most technical crime in the penal law and there is never a guarantee of a conviction,'' the official said. ''She resigned her office. She has no prior criminal record, and the statement that she admitted to will follow her wherever she goes. There is also no financial loss to either the city or the Brooklyn Navy Yard.''
Ms. Colon, who was appointed by Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani in March 1994 to head the nonprofit development corporation, which manages the 260-acre city-owned industrial park, is now chief of staff to City Councilman Israel Ruiz, a Democrat from the Bronx.
Ms. Colon's lawyer, Norman Bloch, said yesterday that he would neither confirm nor deny the existence of the agreement with the District Attorney's office. Ms. Colon could have faced seven years in prison if convicted on a perjury charge.
Ms. Colon bought the furniture more than a year ago without going through the required bidding process. The transaction was arranged by a former board member, Jack Waldman, a Long Island businessman who was also a paid consultant to the development corporation.
In an interview in April, Ms. Colon said the purchase had been approved by the board. She also said she had returned the furniture and deposited the money into the agency's account at the Mayor's urging last year.
In exchange for her admitting to the false statements, prosecutors agreed not to seek an indictment on a perjury charge.
The Navy Yard used to be a major site for the construction of ships for the United States Navy, but since the late 1960's, it has served as an office and industrial park that leases space to 200 businesses.Hours after an inmate brawl during an outdoor basketball game, a cell-by-cell search of the New Jersey State Prison in Trenton found a substantial number of makeshift weapons yesterday.
The search in the prison in the downtown area followed strip searches on Thursday night of 200 to 250 inmates involved in the fighting in the prison's recreation yard. In both searches, guards seized crude weapons that included spoons, pens and toothbrushes with sharpened tips, Howard L. Beyer, the state's assistant corrections commissioner, said.
Mr. Beyer declined to say how many weapons had been found, but he said the discoveries were not surprising. ''It's a way of life in prison,'' he said. ''A reality of the prison world.''
The prison, New Jersey's largest maximum security center, was described as tense but calm yesterday after its worst disturbance in six years. All 1,960 inmates are confined to their cells around the clock until further notice. During such so-called lockdowns, inmates cannot go to the classrooms, work sites, library, commissary or mess hall. Meals are taken to the cells.
Officials described the inmates as among the system's most violent. All were convicted of serious felonies, including murder, and are serving terms of at least 20 years.
The prison is overcrowded and operating at 125 percent of intended capacity. But Mr. Beyer said that ''positive management'' has kept it relatively free of turmoil in recent years. Its latest serious problem with inmates was in August 1990, when several of them assaulted a prison captain and some guards in a corridor that links the outdoor recreation yard and the cell blocks, Mr. Beyer said.
Thursday night's fighting erupted during a basketball game that involved several Sunni Muslims and members of another Muslim faction, officials said. Mr. Beyer said prison officials do not know of any bitterness between the two groups. He said the fighting started about 5:45 P.M., apparently over a dispute that occurred during the game. Other fights quickly broke out among small groups of inmates in the yard during the evening recreation period.
''It was kind of a spontaneous thing, and it went from one area to another and to another,'' Mr. Beyer said. He said the precise number of inmates involved is under investigation.
All inmates have one nightly 90-minute outdoor recreation period each week during the summer, he said, in addition to their 90 minutes of outside recreation each day.
One inmate suffered a head cut during the fracas and was treated at St. Francis Medical Center in Trenton. Several others with cuts and bruises were treated at the prison's medical center.
Mr. Beyer said the fights lasted up to 15 minutes. As inmates continued milling about the yard, prison officials mobilized a tactical squad equipped with riot helmets, shields and batons.
The squad entered the yard with several dogs, including German shepherds and Rottweilers, about 9:30 P.M. and ordered all inmates to strip naked, Mr. Beyers said. Each was searched individually and then returned to his cell, Mr. Beyer said. This operation lasted until about 1 A.M. yesterday.
''It was a very controlled, methodical, well-thought-out response,'' Mr. Beyer said.The United States women's soccer team defeated China, 2-1, to win the gold medal on Thursday night in front of 76,481 fans in Athens, Ga. But it was nearly shut out of prime-time television attention by NBC.
And it did not please the soccer team to know that the American Dream Team in men's basketball took precedence.
''It's frustrating,'' midfielder Julie Foudy said. ''It was our gold medal game. They hadn't shown any of the other games. We know their programming schedule was set, but we'd hoped they might change it. Then finding out how little they covered us was frustrating. You have to get on TV to sell your sport to the public.''
NBC broadcast three taped highlights between 8:30 and 10 P.M., showing all the goals. But at 10, the network chose to show the live start of the Dream Team's semifinal game against Australia. NBC remained with basketball through the soccer game's 90th minute, returning only when the contest had entered injury time. Tonight, NBC spent 17 minutes on women's synchronized swimming -- far more action than it showed in soccer -- broadcasting the Canadian and United States routines.
''I'm disappointed,'' said Tony DiCicco, the soccer coach. ''I'm hoping that this team and soccer can develop media partners in TV so we can expand the media side of the game.''
NBC's programming strategy has been to blend sports that have a historically male viewership, like basketball and track and field, with sports that have a high female viewership, like gymnastics, swimming and diving.
Regarding the soccer team's contention that NBC should have shown more of its game, Ed Markey, an NBC Sports spokesman, said, ''Well, that's their feeling.''
Brandi Chastain, a defender for the gold medalists, said: ''Maybe in Australia they'll change their mind. We've been patient for this long. I hope they realize people want to watch this. What's 78,000? The attendance for two and a half Dream Team games?''
NBC continues to yield great ratings. Thursday night's 20.7 Nielsen rating, added to a 14-night rating of 22.4, is up by 26 percent from the same period during the 1992 Games. From 10-10:30 P.M. Thursday, when basketball gave way briefly to soccer, the rating was a 22.9.
ATLANTA: DAY 15The United States synchronized swim team knew what it would take to win the gold medal: a near-perfect score.
Swimming eighth and last in the free-routine competition tonight at the Georgia Tech Aquatic Center, the eight-swimmer United States team received a score of 10 from 9 of the 10 judges to post the first perfect 100 in national and international synchronized-swimming competition.
That score, combined with the 99.200 the team posted on Tuesday in the technical routine, gave the United States a final count of 99.720, more than a point ahead of second-place Canada (98.367) and third-place Japan (97.753).
In the team event, the five-minute free routine makes up 65 percent of the final score. The technical routine, which runs 2 minutes 50 seconds and includes required hybrids, is worth 35 percent.
Canada, in second entering tonight's event, swam just ahead of the United States and posted a 98.600 in the free routine, putting the pressure on the Americans.
''We knew what we had to do,'' Becky Dyroen-Lancer, 25, said.
The Americans received five 10's for technical merit and four 10's for artistic impression. The Swiss judge Caroline Berendsen gave the United States a 9.9.
''I thought it was a perfect 10,'' said Dyroen-Lancer, who, along with her seven teammates, announced her retirement following the gold-medal presentation.
The American's free routine concept was ''Fantasia of the Orchestra'' and included four lifts and two backflips, which received approval from the capacity crowd.
Other Americans on the team were Suzannah Bianco, Tammy Cleland, Emily LeSuer, Jill Savery, Heather Simmons-Carrasco, Jill Sudduth and Margot Thien. Coaches were Chris Carver and Gail Emery.
ATLANTA: DAY 15After three years of steady budget cuts, more than half of the city's 32 community school districts will have slightly more money to spend this year than they did last year, according to preliminary budget figures issued yesterday by the Board of Education.
The extra money for the districts, which operate the city's 848 elementary and junior high schools, comes largely as a result of personnel cutbacks at the central headquarters of the Board of Education, which Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and others have long complained was filled with bureaucratic fat. Those cuts have produced a surplus of $39 million, most of which is being turned over to the districts.
In addition, many districts are enjoying the benefits of a new Board of Education policy that, for the first time, allows superintendents to roll over their own budget surpluses from one year to the next.
But board and district officials cautioned that the perceived gains were modest and might not result in more dollars per student because the growth in enrollment and other costs continue to outpace budget allocations in most districts.
''If you go to where things were several years ago, this is not a full restoration,'' said Harry Spence, Deputy Chancellor for Operations. ''But it's a turn in the trend and we think it's a very important turn in the trend.''
Though small, the extra money is one of a number of bits of good financial news for the school system. Last year at this time, district superintendents and district board members were trying to approve final budgets even as the city's fiscal crises worsened and the size of proposed budget cuts grew.
This year, the fears of severe budget cuts from every level of government largely proved to be unfounded. The State Legislature restored most of the $200 million that Gov. George E. Pataki had proposed cutting from the city schools. School officials had also feared a cut of the same size from the Federal Government, but Congress proved to be kinder to New York City.
The current budget, said Schools Chancellor Rudy Crew, ''achieved our goal of providing the school districts with the fiscal stability that allows them to focus on the basics of educating our children.''
The $2.9 billion budget for the school districts, which includes city, state and Federal financing, includes $18.3 million of surplus money the districts carried over from last year, something that Mr. Giuliani agreed to let them do earlier this year, and $27.2 million that the central Board is rolling over from last year.
The savings from central headquarters come from a reduction in the number of board employees begun in 1994 by former Chancellor Ramon C. Cortines, who cut the job force at the central Board by about a third, even as Mr. Giuliani complained frequently that he was not cutting fast enough.
But just as the Mayor had urged, the savings are going back to the schools, board officials said. Most of the $39 million in savings is going to the districts. The remainder, $11.8 million, is going to high schools and special education programs.
The Mayor said last night that the districts were benefiting from a better relationship between his administration and board officials. ''If the Board says, 'we need money,' we have confidence in them. In the past, nobody had the confidence that the money would go to children.''
Though 18 of the districts will find themselves with more money than last year, the totals for each district are widely divergent.
For instance, District 14 in the northeast section of Brooklyn will have $1.2 million more this year in its budget thanks to its own surplus and that of the central board.
But District 15 in Brooklyn Heights is facing a $1 million deficit this year partly because it overspent during the last two years. The District 15 board, which Mr. Spence said has operated academically successful schools, has protested the recent budget cuts by refusing to pass budgets. Mr. Spence said the local board said it would cooperate with central board officials to balance its budget this year.
Some districts will see overall cuts even though they had some savings from last year. District 10 in the Bronx, the largest in the city with 40,000 students, will see a $652,000 cut in its overall budget, even though it had a $208,000 surplus.
''We experienced a $6 million cut last year, so obviously in perspective this is definitely not as bad,'' said Irma Zardoya, the Superintendent of District 10. She quickly added, however, that superintendents and parents had little to be thankful for.
''The problem is that we're always so grateful that we're getting cut less than anticipated, but the reality is that when you add together all the cuts of the last three years, they really are drastic, and we're still enduring the cuts of the past. The resources are still lacking there.''
Aaron Friedman, the superintendent in District 26 in Queens, will have $2,539 more to spend this year, a minuscule amount in his $54 million budget. But the news could have been more grim if he had not saved $336,000 from last year, and if the central Board had not promised him $600,000 from its own surpluses.
Dr. Friedman said that in past years, most superintendents spent any surpluses on supplies and equipment rather than giving the money back to the city. In May, Mr. Giuliani promised school board officials that they would be allowed to use their surpluses to offset any budget cuts.David Reid stood in front of the television in the press tent. ''C'mon T, c'mon T,'' he repeated over and over. But it was no use. He would have to go at it alone.
''T,'' Antonio Tarver, the gold medal favorite, was physically exhausted and winging harmless punches in the final seconds. Floyd Mayweather, the brawling young featherweight, had already lost by controversial decision.
Two weeks after the Olympic boxing tournament began, one American and his boyhood coach from Philadelphia remained to fight for a gold medal.
''I guess it's on me,'' said Reid, watching as Tarver was upset.
An Olympic final had been Reid's dream since he walked into United States Coach Al Mitchell's North Philadelphia recreation center when he was 10 years old, and after he had dissected Uzbekistan's Karim Tulaganov, 12-4, in the semifinals of the tournament, he was three rounds away from reality.
''I know I can do it; everybody from Philly knows too,'' said Reid, who will meet the favored Cuban Alfredo Duvergel in the light-middleweight final on Sunday. ''I just expected those other guys to be there, too. I didn't plan on being by myself.''
Tarver was eliminated because he started much too slowly. Except for a second-round flurry, he was thoroughly beaten by Kazakstan's Vasilii Jirov, 15-9, in a bout that ended with both fighters exhausted and collapsing in each other's arms.
Mayweather was an apparent victim of the computer scoring system, or least the human virus inhabiting it. He lost by 10-9 to the Bulgarian world champion Serafim Todorov, a fight that produced major fallout afterward and caused much of the crowd at the Alexander Memorial Coliseum to boo vehemently.
''Everybody knows Floyd Mayweather is the gold-medal favorite at 57 kilograms,'' Mayweather said afterward. ''In America, it's known as 125 pounds. You know and I know I wasn't getting hit. They say he's the world champion. Now you all know who the real world champion is.''
The United States' team manager, Gerald Smith, filed a protest after the bout, explaining in a hastily written one-page statement that Mayweather was not credited with scoring blows and that the Bulgarian received points for nonscoring blows.
Tournament officials have 24 hours to act on the protest, but it is unlikely it will be overturned given that two similar protested decisions -- one by the United States -- were upheld.
What's more, Bill Waeckerle, an American referee and judge with the International Amateur Boxing Association, promptly sent a resignation letter to the association's president Anwar Chowdry after the bout, calling the Mayweather fight a ''blatant example of incompetent officiating.''
Though the American coaches have complained all week about several close decisions -- the assistant Pat Burns said, ''This is a communist European tournament,'' on Thursday -- they seemed to have just cause in this bout. Mayweather started slowly, but was not given credit for several scoring blows in the first round.
He also seemed to land two combinations in the final 15 seconds to at the least tie the match at 10. Fuel to the caldron: The Referee Hamadi Hafez accidentally raised Mayweather's hand after the bout. Also, the amateur boxing association's chief of officials is Emil Jetchev, a Bulgarian.
''They're scared to get cut,'' Mitchell said. ''Same as our officials are. You should take these old men, throw it in the trash and find a new system. Any time you get the same group for three or four years, you get corruption. They might start out honest, but then they get corrupt.
''There's five people that push the buttons. It's not the computer.''
As for Tarver, he was not complaining.
''I lost the fight,'' he said. ''I'm not putting this off on the scoring system, I lost tonight.'' He billed himself as The Nation's Sensation, but was more a symbol of procrastination. He waited too long to throw punches and Jirov was quicker to the punch.
Reid, meanwhile, was awesome. He knocked down the lanky Tulaganov with a four-punch combination in the second round, just as the crowd was chanting, ''U.S.A.! U.S.A.!'' He also scored a standing 8 count and was much too skilled for the Uzbekistanian, using an overhand right behind a left jab to score often.
''Dave looked great, didn't he?'' said Mitchell. ''I can't believe he's fighting for a gold medal. I swear, he really couldn't throw a jab when I first met him.''Reports of carjacking and domestic violence increased dramatically in New Jersey during 1995, the state police said yesterday. There were 781 carjackings reported last year, compared with 574 the year before, perhaps because the crime has become an initiation rite for would-be gang members, said John Hagerty, a spokesman for the state police.
Incidents of domestic violence jumped to 86,621 last year from 70,991 in 1994, a change the authorities attribute to an expansion in the types of crimes categorized as domestic violence, said Chuck Davis, a spokesman for the State Attorney General's office. The murder rate rose by 3 percent last year, but the rate for all violent crimes -- murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault -- dropped by 2 percent.
NEW JERSEY DAILY BRIEFINGUnited States Representative Richard A. Zimmer has threatened to sue 10 radio stations for libel if they continue broadcasting an advertisement that accuses him of having voted to ''cut Medicare spending.'' Mr. Zimmer, Republican of Delaware Township, maintains that he voted to limit growth in Medicare spending, not to cut existing benefits, said Geoffrey S. Berman, a lawyer who drafted a July 30 letter to the stations protesting the ad. Some of the stations have agreed to stop broadcasting the ad, sponsored by an advocacy group called New Jersey Citizen Action, Mr. Berman said yesterday. But several have said they will continue running it.
NEW JERSEY DAILY BRIEFINGAbout 40 supporters of a man who claims the Irvington police beat him severely held an all-day protest in front of City Hall yesterday to demand that the officers be brought to justice. The man, Max Antoine, 28, of East Orange, was charged with assaulting a police officer in the June 2 fracas that occurred when officers tried to shut down a party. But Mr. Antoine says three Irvington officers attacked him when he tried to get their badge numbers and beat him with their hands, feet and nightsticks. His lawyer, Michael Kazer, said the beating left Mr. Antoine blind in one eye, deaf in one ear, and with knee and ankle injuries that require surgery.
NEW JERSEY DAILY BRIEFINGGreg Louganis stopped by the Georgia Tech Aquatic Center earlier this week. He was working as a television reporter, and his presence was a nagging reminder of how much American divers have slipped since he wrung out his chamois for the last time after winning two more gold medals at the 1988 Summer Olympics.
The Americans ended up winning no golds in Atlanta, and the last time that happened in an Olympics in which Americans competed was 1912 in Stockholm.
They could not manage a medal of any color in tonight's final event: the men's 10-meter platform, in which Dmitri Sautin of Russia put an end to China's hopes of an Olympic sweep.
Sautin, the reigning world champion, did it with a superb, steady performance, receiving no score lower than a 7.5 on any of his six dives and consistently receiving scores of 9.0 or higher.
On his final effort -- a back one-and-a-half somersault with three-and-a-half twists -- he received the only perfect 10 awarded during the men's competition (the other six judges settled for 9.0's and 9.5's).
''I was very mad at myself,'' said Sautin of his surprisingly low fifth-place finish in the men's springboard competition. ''So I came out and managed to accomplish what I needed to accomplish on platform.''
Sautin, the first Russian or Soviet to win the Olympic platform title, finished sixth in this event in 1992. That was less than a year after he was stabbed in the stomach several times during a fight. He nearly died from loss of blood and spent two months in a Russian hospital. Since then, he has reasserted his imposing, if not always graceful, presence.
''Sautin's not a style diver,'' said American Coach Ron O'Brien. ''He's a power, acrobatic, good-entry diver.''
He took the lead from Jan Hempel of Germany after the first round in tonight's final and never relinquished it, scoring no lower than 76.50 on any of his six dives and winning by a comfortable 29.07 points. Hempel settled for the silver; Xiao Hailiang of China for the bronze, which means that China won 5 of the 12 diving medals awarded in Atlanta.
David Pichler of the United States was sixth; Patrick Jeffrey was ninth, which means that the United States won only two medals in Atlanta: a bronze from Mary Ellen Clark on women's platform and another bronze from Mark Lenzi on men's springboard.
That is hardly a major surprise. The Americans won no golds in the 1994 world championships in Rome. Nor did they win any in the four Olympic events contested at the 1995 Pan American Games.
The trend continued here despite the support of a large and unabashedly partisan crowd. The Americans were far from abysmal. All eight United States divers qualified for the finals, something no other delegation accomplished, not even the Chinese. But they could not rise (or better yet, fall) to the highest level.
''We need to take another look at our program,'' O'Brien said. ''We have done it to some degree, but we were late reacting. It's not that our guys have gotten worse. It's just that others have made great improvements.''
Today's finals were a case in point. Neither Pichler nor Jeffrey made a major error, and yet when the last dive had been completed, they were well off the pace. At 31, Jeffrey is the oldest male diver in Atlanta. He competed in the 1988 Olympics, where he contracted a virus and finished 12th.
''I'm a little disappointed, but I'm not upset,'' he said. ''I'm walking out with my head up.''
While Jeffrey was waxing sanguine, his competitors were dividing the spoils. The Chinese had won the first three events in Atlanta, with Fu Mingxia winning on both the women's platform and springboard and Xiong Ni winning on the men's springboard. But Xiao and the 16-year-old Tian Liang -- both competing in their first Olympics -- would be unable to complete the first Olympic sweep in 44 years.
''We were new divers; this was our first time in a competition like this,'' said the 19-year-old Xiao. ''We wanted to win the fourth gold for our country, but we were not under any pressure to win it.''
Sautin was simply too good, his scores too consistently high. They were the kinds of scores that once were the rule for a man named Louganis. But Louganis is now reporting for television, and the Americans are no longer dominant.
ATLANTA: DAY 15 -- DIVINGThe former Giants linebacker LAWRENCE TAYLOR will warn high school football players about the dangers of drugs as part of an out-of-court settlement of a charge of trying to buy crack cocaine.
TOMMY BRITTAIN, Taylor's lawyer, said his client must perform 60 hours of community service, get drug counseling and undergo random drug testing under an agreement with prosecutors.
Taylor, who played in 10 Pro Bowls and led the Giants to two Super Bowl victories, was charged May 3 with trying to buy crack in Myrtle Beach, S.C. He was in town for a charity golf tournament when he was arrested in an undercover operation recorded on videotape. (AP)
SPORTS PEOPLE: FOOTBALLNo single piece of economic data seems to affect the stock and bond markets these days as much as the monthly employment report. The anticipation in the marketplace -- the speculation about what the numbers will be -- is enormous. So it is not surprising that a formula has appeared for predicting how much interest rates will move in response to the job numbers.
In a study to be released on Monday, Alan B. Krueger, a labor economist at Princeton University, has found a remarkably consistent correlation between the interest rate on the 30-year Treasury bond and job creation. More specifically, the Krueger formula focuses on the spread between what Wall Street's forecasters say the new jobs number will be, and what that number actually is in the Labor Department's announcement on the first Friday morning of each month.
Thus, says the Krueger method, for every difference of 200,000 jobs between the forecast and the actual number, the interest rate on the 30-year Treasury bond moves 8 basis points -- or eight-hundredths of a percentage point -- going down when the forecasters overestimate job creation and up when more jobs are created than the forecasters had expected.
Since 1979, the average spread between the actual number and the forecast has been 96,000 jobs, which means that the rate on the 30-year-bond moved up or down by 4 basis points, on average. Moreover, all the movement came on the Friday of the announcement.
Right off, Mr. Krueger, ever the cautious academic, makes clear that his method, based on a study of the employment reports back to 1979, does not always work, particularly in these days of great skittishness and emotion over the economy. ''There is a lot of unexplained movement in the markets,'' Mr. Krueger said, acknowledging that no formula, no matter how well founded in scholarship, can factor in uncertainty.
Job creation is not the only influence on interest rates. Changes in the average hourly wage, also part of the monthly employment reports, moved interest rates in predictable ways. For every rise or fall of 6 cents in the hourly wage, the rate on the 30-year Treasury bond moved 3 basis points, Mr. Krueger found.
So how has the formula worked over the last two turbulent months? On July 5, the Labor Department reported 239,000 new payroll jobs for June. The forecasters had expected 150,000. The job creation and, by implication, the economy, turned out to be more vigorous by 89,000 jobs than Wall Street had expected, which means the interest rate should have risen by nearly 4 basis points, as a result of the job creation number.
The hourly wage rose by 9 cents in June, good for 4 more basis points. Between jobs and wages, the 30-year bond rate should have moved up by 8 basis points, or nearly one-tenth of a percent. It actually rose by 25 basis points. That 9 cents, a record wage change for a single month, apparently caused the deviation, Mr. Krueger said, driving bond traders to less-than-predictable behavior.
The formula worked better yesterday. Wall Street and the Labor Department were almost in agreement on the job number for July: 200,000 for the forecasters and 193,000 for the Labor Department, too small a difference to move the bond rate. The hourly wage dropped by 2 cents, just enough to bring down the rate by 1 basis point.
But after what had happened in June, the obvious relief that wages had fallen in July rather than risen, worked its own magic on bond trading, beyond Mr. Krueger's rule of thumb. The Treasury bond rate fell finally by 10 basis points, to 6.73 percent.
Still, the research by Mr. Krueger, who served a stint as chief economist at the Labor Department, offers its insights. Although the employment reports have become more accurate over the years, bond traders respond to them just as they did in 1979, not concerning themselves with accuracy.
And financial markets, for all the talk that they react rationally and consistently to information about the economy, often do not, and then fail to correct the overreaction, to the employment numbers at least, in subsequent trading.The day when Sawako Mitsui, 20, and Midori Usuta, 21, score above 500 on the Test of English as a Foreign Language is the day they will celebrate.
The two are studying in the intensive English program at Temple University's branch here, and only by scoring at least 500 on the Toefl, which assesses the English proficiency of foreign students preparing to study at American or Canadian universities, will they be able to enroll at Temple University's main campus in Philadelphia.
''I never thought Toefl was going to be this hard,'' said Ms. Usuta wearily. After three years of concentrated study and 10 tries at the test, she had managed only 450.
''The listening comprehension section of the test is a nightmare,'' sighed Ms. Mitsui. ''Grasping spoken English is really hard for me.''
They are not alone. Each year, 250,000 Japanese take the one-hour and 50-minute test. With an average score of about 490, the Japanese ranked 152d in average score out of 171 national groups in 1995, according to data compiled by the Educational Testing Service, the Toefl administrator. Japan trails nearly all industrial countries and most of its Asian neighbors, including China, which scored a respectable average of 549 out of a possible 677. (The Netherlands tops the list with a 607 average.)
In a curious paradox, Japan has for decades displayed a national enthusiasm for learning English, with an English language industry estimated at nearly $5 billion annually. Almost every large bookstore in Japan has large displays of publications on learning English, and private English conversation schools can be found all over large cities like Tokyo.
English is also considered an essential subject at school. English classes are compulsory from seventh to ninth grade and most students study it until the 12th grade, when they cram for college entrance examinations. The college entrance tests usually give English disproportionately higher weight than other subjects.
The Japanese are among the most avid takers of the Toefl. The number of Japanese test-takers, just over 250,000 in 1995, is far greater than second-place Korea, which had about 120,000 test-takers in 1995.
The discrepancy between the national effort to teach English and the mediocre performance on the Toefl has been especially disheartening for leaders in English education.
''It's pathetic,'' said Ikuo Koike, professor emeritus at Keio University and the president of the Japan College English Teachers Association. ''I am very disappointed at the results. I really am -- bordering on anger.''
He said the results cannot be discounted simply by asserting that the high number of test-takers may have brought down the national average. He pointed to countries like Korea and Taiwan, which outperform Japan by about 15 points, and where more people take the Toefl as a percentage of total national population.
''You cannot explain away Japan's low scores,'' he said.
Experts like Professor Koike cite such factors as inadequate English education, the country's history of isolation, Japanese sentence structure and Japan's inward-oriented culture as inhibiting people's ability to communicate with the outside world. Among these factors, Japan's English education, with its focus on grammar and reading, is often the first to be criticized.
In Japanese schools, teachers tend to focus on meticulous points of grammar. English passages are carefully analyzed, and word-to-word Japanese translations are prepared. English speakers complain that English is taught and studied like math and science rather than language.
Yoshiaki Sato, a professor of English at the University of Tokyo, blames his fellow academics for having created such ''distorted English.''
''University entrance examinations have been the root of all evil,'' he said. ''And these tests are designed by English professors who have little or no command of spoken English.''
Professor Sato said that English, as treated in college entrance exams, has been emulated in secondary education because a chief mission of high school is to insure students' smooth entries into universities.
Why then do Japanese academics and intellectuals prefer bookish English to a more conversational brand? Eiichi Chino, a linguistics professor at Wako University, sees an answer in Japanese history and its geographic isolation. He argues that the Japanese have historically learned foreign languages for the purpose of absorbing advanced knowledge from abroad rather than for communicating with foreigners.
Many English conversation teachers complain that their biggest obstacle is overcoming students' negative attitudes toward English grammar, a byproduct of high school classes that rigidly emphasize arcane points of grammar at the expense of conversational English.
''Students are trained to be worried about making mistakes,'' said Kenneth Crown, an English instructor at Toefl Academy, a private preparation school in Tokyo. ''Every time I ask students a question, they see it as a mini-test rather than a chance to say something.''Thousands of times every year, stretches of American beach are closed to protect the public from disease-carrying organisms. But there are many coastal states that do not regularly monitor surf pollution, and millions of tourists may be unaware of whether it is safe to swim at any given time or place.
Now, Federal legislation has been proposed to improve the standards for checking water quality and warning people about possible dangers. Currently, the Federal Government does not monitor beach water or require the states to do so.
According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, an influential environmental group based in New York that does extensive research, lobbying and litigation, there were 3,522 beach closings and advisories last year at ocean, bay and Great Lakes beaches, up 50 percent from 1994.
The increase was mainly in Florida and California, states with long coastlines that had heavier rains than usual last year and thus more spills of untreated waste from storm-water drains and sewers. These overflows are the most common source of beach pollution.
Legislation introduced last month by Senator Frank Lautenberg, a Democrat of New Jersey, would require all states to meet rigorous nationwide standards that would have to be set by the Environmental Protection Agency for monitoring coastal waters and notifying the public when the water is unhealthy. For example, the standards might set limits on the frequency, duration, or concentration of pathogens in the water.
At present, states including California and Florida do much less than New Jersey, which because of its tough standards closes beaches so often that annual losses to the tourist economy approach $1 billion.
According to Mr. Lautenberg, for decades studies have shown ''a definite relationship'' between bacteria found in the water and illnesses among swimmers. Viruses, including intestinal infections and hepatitis, are believed to be the major cause of diseases associated with swimming, he said. And people who contract these illnesses at the beach can bring them home and spread them among family members.
In May, the Santa Monica Bay Restoration Project, a partnership of industry and state and local governments, found that people who swam near storm-water drains in the California bay were almost 50 percent more likely to experience fever, diarrhea and other ailments than those who swam farther from the pollution outlets.
''We found significant increases in risk for a broad range of health effects for people who swam in front of storm drains,'' said Dr. Robert W. Haile, an epidemiologist at the University of Southern California who directed the study. ''These results have broad implications with regard to the health effects of swimming in waters contaminated by storm-water runoff, and underscore the need to clean up the sources of beach water pollution.''
But there are great disputes over how best to control sources of the kind of runoff that eventually can pollute beaches. A House bill to revise and extend the Clean Water Act would have weakened parts of the existing law and would have done little to strengthen regulations affecting runoff, but the Senate never acted on it.
Some states already have comprehensive monitoring programs, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. But the current recommendations from the E.P.A. are not strict enough, the group said, allowing 19 out of 1,000 people to get sick from swimming in ''safe'' water.
The environmental group praised New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware, Indiana, and Illinois for having taken steps on their own. But others monitor infrequently or only in certain locations: California, Florida, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New York (for inadequate monitoring of its Great Lakes beaches), Ohio, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, Texas, the Virgin Islands, Virginia and Wisconsin.
New Jersey has the most aggressive program, the council said. It includes a bacteria standard, a monitoring program and mandatory beach-closing requirements whenever the standard is violated, no matter what the source of the pollution.
But the environmental group said that such heavily visited beaches as Key West and Miami Beach in Florida, Myrtle Beach and the Outer Banks of the Carolinas, and Santa Barbara, Calif., are inadequately protected. Either there are no monitoring programs at all, the group said, or there are not adequate rules to close beaches or notify swimmers when monitoring turns up problems.
TRAVEL ADVISORY: CORRESPONDENT'S REPORTIN 1985, THERE WERE 15 galleries in Taipei; now there are more than 200. Most sell decorative oil paintings in a kitschy Impressionist style for bourgeois decorating, but a good number of more serious places sell engaged contemporary work in various so-called Western and Chinese and nativist Taiwanese styles.
Since martial law was lifted in Taiwan in 1987, the country has moved with astonishing ease from dictatorship to democracy, and the art and art criticism of this transitional period have been politicized. Taiwan under dictatorship knew just what it was: the Nationalist Government of China in exile. Taiwan under democracy cannot decide to what extent it is Chinese, independent or Westernized. The re-election of President Lee Teng-hui confirms the country's commitment to what our State Department calls ''creative ambiguity.''
This crisis of identity is reflected in -- and, two high Government officials told me, partly caused by -- the country's increasingly conflicted art. Every stylistic choice carries great significance.
You can almost say that to do traditional Chinese brush painting is to support the rightish New Party, which favors reunification with the mainland; to do conceptual art is to ally yourself with the leftish Democratic Progressive Party (D.P.P.), which favors independence; to do oil painting (almost all dreadful by Western standards) is to tie yourself to the ruling centrist Nationalist Party or Kuomintang (KMT).
Some artists resist all this rhetoric, but a surprisingly large number of intellectuals in Taiwan today have positioned themselves in this sweep of history. The recent exhibition of ''Splendors of Imperial China'' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art threw the politics of art in Taiwan into sharp relief.
The Taipei Fine Arts Museum, the enormous museum of contemporary art of Taiwan, is a city entity, and so its new director was appointed by the D.P.P. mayor of Taipei, who has recently announced plans to build two more museums of Taiwanese art. At a banquet given by the museum's director, I was seated next to the director of exhibitions, Lee Yu-lin, a young woman of enormous grace and charm who moves easily between official circles and the world of contemporary artists. I asked her to help me with introductions to a few artists.
''I'm D.P.P.,'' she said. ''I'll help you if you'll put forward the case for an independent Taiwan in your article.''
A week later, I was seated at a banquet next to Chou Hai-sheng, chief editor at Taiwan's leading art publishing house. ''I'll make introductions to our great Chinese artists,'' he said. ''I was there the day the New Party was founded,'' he explained.
In Taiwan right now there is a term, ben sheng ren, ''people of this province,'' which refers to the ethnic Taiwanese; a term, wai sheng ren, ''people from outside,'' which refers to mainlanders who came over in 1945 and their progeny, and a newly voguish term, Taiwan ren, ''people of Taiwan,'' which is the politically correct term that may save the day. Much of Taiwan's art is about these three modes of self-definition.
The heart of the avant-garde art world in Taiwan is an artist-run gallery called IT Park, founded in 1988 by five friends who felt the need for an alternative space. It is three upstairs rooms, a small sun-drenched terrace, an office and a little bar. There are about 40 artists associated with IT Park, two of whom actually run the place on a day-to-day basis, serving at the bar, talking to artists, receiving the occasional journalist, negotiating such sales as may take place.
Artists drift in to look at one another's work or just to see one another. The conversation is easy, casual. Most of the IT Park artists have studied in the West -- at Cooper Union in New York, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and similar institutions.
When I stopped in, Dean I-mei, a young conceptualist, was showing a mitten made with a raised middle finger; this in-your-face piece, he said, had been knitted to his specifications by his mother. At lunch, he showed me a canvas with two nearly identical watches nailed to it, both bought in Chinatown in New York. One has the mainland flag for a face, the other, the Taiwan flag. ''Made in Hong Kong'' is the title.
''Culturally I am Chinese but politically I am not,'' said the erstwhile art critic J. J. Shih one night as we sat with our drinks on the balcony at IT Park. ''In Taiwan, you can make an IBM-compatible computer, but you cannot make American-compatible art.''
Another artist who calls himself Tchenogramme put it this way: ''I am an international citizen and a Taiwan localist.'' The question of whether their art is Taiwanese and why dominates conversation among these artists.
In the 70's, there was a tendency to make art that embraced the peasant culture of Taiwan and represented the distinctive features of the landscape: ''In the 70's, politics was using art; in the late 80's, art started using politics,'' explained another young artist, Tsu Ming. ''In the 70's, our localism reflected our insecurity around the time we were thrown out of the United Nations; now, our Taiwanism reflects our self-confidence as we move toward complete freedom and great prosperity.''
AS LYNN PASCOE, UNTIL recently director of the American Institute in Taiwan and so the United States ''ambassador'' to Taiwan put it: ''In 1964, Taiwan graduated from aid; then it rapidly graduated from a rural to a handicraft to a technical economy. For a brief period the rural-handicraft side of the society was its basis, and now it's a sentimental matter.''
Artists like the IT Park crowd, educated in the West, have more sophistication than they know what to do with. ''Some of us are breaking with Chinese culture; some are breaking with Western culture; some are breaking with their entire past,'' said J. J. Shih. ''There is underground xenophobia against the West and overt xenophobia against China. But localism is not really nationalism.''
Tsong Pu, one of the founders of IT Park, said: ''Our responsibility is to negotiate between local and international ideas. But where are the boundaries? Artists make work about Taiwan's politics, but their definition of and notion of a political art was learned in American art schools.''
Like most vanguards, this one is full of frustration. The difficulties of ''becoming international'' often seem insurmountable. ''Artists are struggling for a Taiwanese vision, but the struggle is never the subject of the work,'' Dean I-mei said. ''That's why the work isn't interesting to the rest of the world.'' Chen Hui-chiao, an artist who makes formalist-minimalist installations with needles and steel and water, said: ''Don't look at my work and think about Taiwan. Just look at it. It's just art.''
The contemporary art market in Taiwan is weak right now, and about 90 percent of galleries operate at a loss. ''The problem,'' explained Lily Lee, director of the Gallery Association and owner of the Dragon Gate Gallery, ''is that prices became very inflated at the dawn of the museum era, when the Taipei Fine Arts Museum was established, and everyone began fussing about Taiwanese art. And then it turned out that the secondary market was unpredictable and that our art hadn't really gone international. Chinese people don't like this kind of unstable investment.''THE WORLD'S TALLEST building is nearing completion in -- Kuala Lumpur? What kind of place is that for the highest skyscraper? Not that it will much matter, since an even taller tower is already under construction in Shanghai. And after that, who knows? Bangkok? Singapore? Taipei?
It's a long way from New York and Chicago, where most of the world's tallest buildings have been for almost all of the 20th century. Now these American cities lie quiet, not entirely devoid of new construction but almost so, and emphatically uninterested in building tall just for the sake of building tall. The mantle of Tall, Taller, Tallest has passed to the other side of the world. And if I can stake one claim for certain, it is that it will never return to this continent.
The reason for this is simple and tells a lot about the symbolic power the skyscraper continues to possess, even as it moves toward its second century. Buildings that are very tall -- buildings that are not merely high but awesomely high, buildings that grab statistics like ''world's tallest'' or ''world's second tallest'' -- are the product, by and large, of cultures that are in the first flush of excitement at moving onto the world stage. Such buildings are assertions of power, demands to be noticed, and there is a particular moment in the life cycle of a rising culture when those impulses are irresistible.
The moment comes after beginnings and before maturity. When a nation is relatively young and limited in its resources, it's obvious that the notion of putting up any kind of skyscraper, let alone of aspiring to build something that will knock a rival off its pedestal, is unthinkable. It's no accident that there were few tall building in Asia until recently, for while the cultures of Asia were ancient in one sense, they were relatively young so far as their position in the world economy was concerned, and they had other priorities than building to make themselves noticed.
But now, as the global economy shifts more and more toward the Pacific Rim, these countries hold a commanding position. They not only have money; they want to spend it in a way that will demonstrate their economic vigor.
How like New York and Chicago around the turn of the last century this is! The muscle-flexing represented by the Woolworth Building in New York, which at 792 feet was the world's tallest from 1913 to 1930, is not so different from what the people shaping Kuala Lumpur or Shanghai are after today. (Official rankings are kept by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat at Lehigh University, by whose accounting the Woolworth has now fallen to No. 65 on the list of the tallest 100 in the world.)
When the Woolworth was new, there was a fresh, tough, bravado to it all. Make it bigger, bolder. Make it show the world that we are in charge, that we have arrived. Never mind that Benjamin Harrison was President in 1890, when Joseph Pulitzer built the World Building in Lower Manhattan, which at that time was the world's tallest; the spirit of the American skyscraper was the spirit of Teddy Roosevelt. (Not to mention of Pulitzer himself, who was determined to use great height as a means of showing off the might of his newspaper, The New York World.)
And on it went, from the Metropolitan Life Tower of 1909 (700 feet) to Woolworth -- a monument to the might of American business if ever there was one -- to the Chrysler Building (1,046 feet) and the Empire State Building (1,250 feet) in the early 1930's. And then on further, all the way to the twin towers of the World Trade Center (1,368 and 1,362 feet, respectively) in New York and the slightly taller Sears Tower in Chicago, which at 1,450 feet wrote the final chapter in the saga of American supremacy of height in the early 1970's.
NOW, SUCH BRAVADO belongs to the East, and I am not sure it is an entirely bad thing. No one in New York has talked about putting up the world's tallest building in more than a generation, except for Donald Trump, and in an odd way, his preoccupation with it during the 1980's merely proves the point that striving for great height is a sign of an arriviste culture, not of a mature one.
New York and Chicago had more or less lost interest by the 1980's, learning to be comfortable with their urban fabric as a totality and coming to think of this ''world's tallest'' business as little more than macho strutting. It took an anachronism like Mr. Trump, whose near obsession with the idea of putting up the tallest structure in the world made him resemble the swashbuckling builders of a much younger New York, to put the world's tallest building back on the agenda.
It's no accident, I think, that the skyscraper never became the obsession in Europe that it was in this country once, and has now become in Asia. True, Europe has plenty of tall buildings, and as we move toward a more global economy it will undoubtedly have more. But it has never had the world's tallest (forgetting, for the moment, the Eiffel Tower, really a spectacular work of engineering more than a building) and its urban inhabitants have never seemed to miss it.
Europe was a mature culture by the time the skyscraper became technologically possible in the late 19th century, its cities largely built up in solid patterns resistant to the large-scale intrusions that skyscrapers represented. And while Europe encouraged and celebrated engineering advances (long before the Eiffel Tower, there was the Crystal Palace and all of those extraordinary railroad bridges) its architects and builders did not seem to feel the need to express their supremacy by erecting buildings of great height. They were, by and large, confident that the urban fabric they had was sufficient.
Perhaps this was because Europe had already asserted itself in terms of building tall. The European equivalent to what the United States experienced in the late 19th and mid-20th centuries and what Asia is experiencing now, had already come in the Middle Ages, when Europe's cultures were new and strong and powerfully assertive as builders of cathedrals.
What was Beauvais Cathedral, after all, but a brazen attempt by height-obsessed French builders to erect the world's tallest tower (157 feet)? It fell down, twice, but the engineering hand was more sure elsewhere. And as a group the towers of the great cathedrals of Europe must surely be the most concerted attempt to express a powerful, unified societal vision through building tall that has ever occurred in human history.
What light does that shed on the current wave of skyscraper building in Asia? The makers of the world's tallest buildings of today are not motivated by the visions that drove the cathedral builders, of course, any more than the builders of American skyscrapers were. Yet there remains a sense of cultural pride behind their determination: each super-tall tower stands as a reminder that Asia's national economies are growing faster than any place else in the world and that Asia now holds the place in the world economy that the United States did for the last century.
Since height itself is the point, design is often secondary. It is American architects who are doing most of these new towers: Cesar Pelli in Kuala Lumpur, Kohn Pedersen Fox in Shanghai and many other American firms filling Asian cities with also-rans that are nearly as tall.
This being an age of internationalization, it's hard to see much that distinguishes these buildings, even the best of them, from what their architects might have done for a client in Dallas, Frankfurt or Johannesburg. The shapes are striking, and most of these megabuildings are not bad as works of design; continuing an obsession begun in the 1980's, there is an emphasis on giving each and every building its own, readily identifiable form. Make it a logo, not to be confused with anyone else's building.
But do Cesar Pelli's twin, rounded towers in Kuala Lumpur (1,483 feet) have anything to do with Malaysia, or with Asian cities at all? Will Kohn Pedersen Fox's even taller tower (by 26 feet), a twisted slab with a hole punched through the top, tell us anything about Shanghai?
For now, no. These buildings emerge more out of an international design language than out of anything specific to their place. But wait a bit: the same could once have been said of the Eiffel Tower, or of the Sears Tower, or even of that greatest of all symbols, the Empire State Building, which was really just a kind of generic stepped-back tower but eventually become a virtual trademark of New York. These newest skyscrapers may well do the same for their places, in time. We may not be seeing great architecture, but we are surely watching icons in the making.
ARCHITECTURETHE MODERN MEGAPLEX, with as many as 20 screens, not only delivers mainstream movies but serves as the neighborhood art house, theme park, video arcade and agora -- complete with Dolby sound. The question is, what movies will play in such behemoths?
On a recent Saturday morning here at the AMC Grand complex, which has 24 screens, Debbie Boone watched her 2-year-old son explore a bank of video games lining the lobby.
''Today is his second birthday, so we brought him to see his first movie,'' said Ms. Boone, whose husband and mother-in-law were inside watching ''The Hunchback of Notre Dame'' with the couple's other two children. ''He lasted about 45 minutes,'' she said, ''through a popcorn and a Coke.''
Nearby, 13-year-old Josh Ubando and his cousin Brian played a game while waiting to get into ''Independence Day.'' Across the lobby, families, young couples and pods of teen-agers were drifting in to take advantage of the $3.75 matinee ticket price. Two adults were making a day of it, seeing ''Courage Under Fire'' followed by ''The Nutty Professor.'' If, however, they had wanted to see ''Lone Star,'' the new arty movie by John Sayles about life on the Texas border, they would have been out of luck. It's not playing here.
But AMC plans to change that scenario when it opens a 25-screen complex on 42d Street in Manhattan between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. The Times Square complex is scheduled to open as early as next year. At 140,000 square feet, it will be the largest movie theater in the city, though a bigger theater is being built in California. The New York megaplex will use the protected Empire Theater, on the south side of 42d Street, but will relocate it 70 feet to the west of its present site to provide an impressive entrance as well as space for mezzanine cafes.
Like the Grand in Dallas, which has more screens than any other theater in the country, the 42d Street 25 will have unobstructed sightlines from every seat, ergonomically correct chairs, a souped-up sound system and plenty of popcorn and video games to help moviegoers pass the time before or between shows. And movies like ''Lone Star,'' and even foreign films, will be welcome.
According to executives at AMC, the New York complex may be able to escape the fate of other huge multiplexes, with their all-Arnold, all-the-time schedule of blockbusters. In New York, the plan is to devote six or seven auditoriums to specialty films, especially foreign movies that might otherwise have been overlooked.
''We are going to dedicate a portion of our facility to the launching of international film fare,'' said Earl Voelker, senior vice president for AMC's international business development, who hopes that such films will catch on throughout the company's circuit.
But a similar idea was floated when AMC built its Dallas complex last year, and there is nary a ''Postman'' (''Il Postino'') to be found. When AMC tried to book small or foreign pictures into the Grand, Dallas residents didn't bite: today only mainstream Hollywood fare is available on those 24 screens.
Mr. Voelker, however, is confident that New York's moviegoers will be more welcoming, especially given the forthcoming transformation of Times Square (complete with brew pubs and pastry shops), and that they will flock to a theater in the stretch between the Quad Cinema, Film Forum and Angelika Film Center downtown and the Lincoln Plaza and New Yorker theaters on the Upper West Side. (United Artists Theater Circuit is similarly sanguine; they are negotiating to open a large multiplex in the area as well.)
The audience for these so-called niche films is the same audience, Mr. Voelker said, who ''wouldn't be caught dead'' in yesterday's Times Square. ''They'd go to a play, but they wouldn't stoop to go to a movie,'' he added.
AMC's renewed interest in nonmainstream movies reflects a changing marketplace. With foreign-language films like ''The Postman'' and ''Like Water for Chocolate'' reaching $20 million at the box office, theater owners have become less resistant to booking them. ''Pulp Fiction,'' an American niche film that escaped its niche, took in more than $100 million. Thus companies like Miramax, Sony Pictures Classics, Gramercy Pictures, Fox Searchlight and Fine Line (all of them owned by larger companies) can make more prints of their smaller films and spend more money marketing them, making small movies more available and attractive to exhibitors.
Although specialty movies earn little compared with the blockbusters, they often perform admirably on a per-screen basis, which makes them appealing to theater owners. ''They have to fill those 25 screens with something,'' says Bill Thompson, vice president of Eastern sales for Gramercy Pictures. ''They can go three screens with a 'Twister' or four with 'I.D.4,' but that still gives you a lot to fill.''
Such pronouncements would have been unheard of 33 years ago, when Stanley H. Durwood, the founder of AMC Entertainment, first split a small Kansas City movie theater in half and invented the multiplex. Expanding to a modest four or six screens, multiplexes steadily gained in size and sophistication as the lives of moviegoers shifted.
The megaplex, defined as a theater with 16 or more screens and deluxe accommodations, took hold in the late 1980's; soon Imax and 3-D theaters, video games, cappuccino machines and virtual reality games popped up in the megaplexes. No one remembers precisely when the first independent film played a multiplex, but more have been doing so in the last five years. The net effect has been an increasingly all-things-for-all-people movie house.
The formula of mainstream movies plus a few art films has proved successful for Sony Theaters, whose 12-screen Lincoln Square complex, at Broadway and 68th Street, regularly shows independent films. ''The original plan was to dedicate the smaller auditoriums on the lower floors to art and specialized films,'' said Steven Bunnell, vice president for film at Sony Theaters. ''But we found that for us, specialized and art film does as much business as commercial film.''
Although most little movies finding homes in mass-market theaters are from the specialty-film divisions of big studios, independent distributors are also making headway. ''Stonewall,'' a virtually no-budget drama about the gay rights movement, has been booked into many theaters in the United Artists chain.
''Most of the chains now have one booker who only deals with specialty films,'' said Mike Thomas, co-president of Strand Releasing, which is distributing ''Stonewall.'' ''They go to all the festivals, they track these films, and we've developed good relationships with them.''
As the megaplex of today becomes the googolplex of tomorrow (AMC plans to open a 30-screen theater in Ontario, Calif., next year), are art houses in danger of being pushed out of existence?
''Of course we're concerned,'' said Jeffrey Jacobs, president of Jacobs Entertainment, which buys films for the Angelika and other art houses. ''But as long as we offer art audiences something the multiplex doesn't -- like a gracious lobby with a cafe, and programming designed for adult tastes -- we'll be O.K.''ON THE SMALL AUDITORIUM stage of Provincetown High School, the director Jose Quintero was holding a table of actors rapt. Mr. Quintero is 71 and, after a bout with throat cancer, speaks with a vibration-amplifying device that resembles a microphone pressed to his larynx.
''Eugene O'Neill was not interested in information if it did not have something to do with the human heart or the human mind,'' Mr. Quintero said, his voice a buzzing, electronic monotone. His point was that yes, O'Neill repeated things, but he did so for a reason: for emphasis, for resonance.
''There are people who remain children, who belong at home,'' Mr. Quintero continued, his attention directed at an actor playing the young Swedish sailor who, after years at sea, is returning to his mother and his family farm in O'Neill's early drama ''The Long Voyage Home.''
''What is your main drive?'' he said. ''It is home. Home. This is where your heart has always been. Home. No more pain, no more loneliness. No more crying. You are going home.'' And as he repeated the word and it thrummed in the air again and again, it took on the eerie, obsessive quality that Mr. Quintero intended.
The rehearsal was a powerful one for the actors who have astonishingly found themselves at two extremes: in the employ for the summer of a fledgling drama company, the Provincetown Repertory Theater, and under the direction of the pre-eminent interpreter of arguably America's greatest playwright.
The experience was also significant for Mr. Quintero, who had never before visited Provincetown, where O'Neill's career began. It was, in fact, the playwright's first artistic home. Indeed, all summer and into the fall the town will be celebrating O'Neill's arrival here in 1916 and the 80th anniversary of his first production in a former fish house on a pier in the harbor.
''I think I held Provincetown in my head as a mythical kind of kingdom,'' Mr. Quintero said. ''I had visions of where it all began as if it was some faraway country.''
The summer theater season has had something of an O'Neill flavor in the Northeast. The American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., staged O'Neill autobiographical masterpiece ''Long Day's Journey Into Night.'' In New York, after a tryout at the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven last month, ''Hughie,'' a one-act about a gambler and a clerk at a fleabag Manhattan hotel, is now in previews at Circle in the Square for a limited Broadway run that opens on Aug. 22. Al Pacino stars and directs.
And in New London, Conn., in conjunction with the city's 350th-anniversary celebration, there is an exhibit at the Monte Cristo Cottage on Pequot Avenue, where O'Neill lived until 1914 and where he set two plays -- ''Ah, Wilderness!'' and ''Long Day's Journey Into Night.'' Photographs, memorabilia and costumes from productions of O'Neill plays are part of the exhibit, entitled ''Eugene O'Neill's New London: The 'Ah, Wilderness!' Years, 1888-1914.''
''The family actually stayed here until 1921,'' said Sally Pavetti, the curator. ''From here he went to Harvard, and then Provincetown. So the exhibit dovetails nicely into what they're doing up there.''
Nowhere is the tormented spirit of the great playwright more evident than at the tip of Cape Cod, where the O'Neill festival includes ''Theater in Provincetown,'' an exhibit at the Provincetown Museum, readings and self-guided walking tours of sites where the dramatist lived and worked.
Two early one-acts -- ''The Long Voyage Home'' and ''Ile,'' both written here and now directed by Mr. Quintero -- are in performance Thursday through Sunday until Aug. 18 by the two-year old Provincetown Repertory Theater at the Provincetown Museum at Pilgrim Monument.
Eighty years and one week ago, on July 28, 1916, O'Neill's ''Bound East for Cardiff,'' a one-act play about a dying sailor, was produced by an ambitious gang of bohemian artists and drifters in the dilapidated former fish house in Provincetown. O'Neill himself, then 27, directed. He also performed in the walk-on role of Second Mate. His one line: ''Isn't this your watch on deck, Driscoll?'' (As part of the festival, the Provincetown Theater Company is presenting the play at the Provincetown Inn, where it opens on Wednesday.)
Thus began the public career of the winner of four Pulitzer Prizes and the only American playwright to win the Nobel. O'Neill had his first spurt of productivity in Provincetown, writing ''The Emperor Jones,'' ''Anna Christie'' and ''The Hairy Ape'' here, where he spent, in all, nine years. Not only did his work win its first acceptance in the town, among other writers and artists (including John Reed, Charles Demuth, Susan Glaspell and Mary Heaton Vorse), but the atmosphere of the place, its fogbound loneliness, its tenuous coexistence with the sea, would find its way thematically into much of his work.
THE QUESTION ALWAYS IS, 'Would he have done it without Provincetown?' '' said Leona Rust Egan, a local historian and the author of ''Provincetown as a Stage: Provincetown, the Provincetown Players and the Discovery of Eugene O'Neill'' (Parnassus Imprints, 1994). ''Maybe. But it would have been different.''
O'Neill had written plays before he came to Provincetown, mostly based on his travels as a seaman, she pointed out. But his work had not been appreciated. ''And then, lo and behold, they liked 'Bound East' in Provincetown,'' she said. The local support provided momentum for his personal revolution against the ensconced tradition of saccharine American melodrama. ''He was able to go on writing the things he wanted to write,'' Ms. Egan said. ''That's what this place meant to him.''
For Mr. Quintero, his time in Provincetown has felt rather ghostly. He spoke in an interview in his temporary apartment, on the second floor of a house on Commercial Street in which O'Neill himself once lived, a mile or so from the tourist-crammed center of town. From the balcony, one can overlook the spot on the shoreline where Lewis Wharf, site of the fish house theater, stood in 1916. A rocky breakwater remains. Beyond it are pleasure boats, then nothing. ''I can almost feel the old man walking around,'' Mr. Quintero said.
When the director first arrived, he took a tour of the town with the artistic head of the Provincetown Repertory Theater, Kenneth Hoyt, threading his way through the crowds among the shops and bars downtown, passing the Atlantic House, where O'Neill wrote the sea plays Mr. Quintero is directing, and walking the beaches, rimmed by swaggering dunes, where O'Neill absorbed his melancholy.
''So much of 'Long Day's Journey' I saw in those dunes,'' Mr. Quintero said. ''It was a gray day, fog was rolling in slowly. It reminded me of Edmund hiding in the fog, and his mother's line, 'It hides you from the world and the world from you.' All of that came flooding back to me. Part of my soul belongs to O'Neill, and he is very much in this town.''
Mr. Quintero's association with O'Neill began, of course, with Circle in the Square, the venerable theater company he co-founded in 1951. He has written of how Circle garnered the rights to stage ''The Iceman Cometh,'' the 1956 production that would reverse the tide of O'Neill's then-diminishing reputation and earn the company the right to present the first production of ''Long Day's Journey Into Night.'' The story involved his meeting with O'Neill's widow, Carlotta, and her asking him to choose his favorite among four hats. His choice turned out to be the one she had worn at her husband's funeral two years before, and on the basis of that she granted Mr. Quintero the rights to the play.LIKE MANY OF HIS COLLEAGUES IN THE NEW PALESTINIAN LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL, AHMAD el-Diek came into politics the hard way. The elegant, soft-spoken son of a teacher, Diek preferred philosophy in school and never read a newspaper before he was arrested and thrown into an Israeli jail. Now, back in his home village of Salfit in the West Bank, Diek, 36, has plunged wholeheartedly into his new role as a member of the first elected legislature in Palestinian history. He speaks without bravado or bitterness of his years of ''active struggle.'' Prisons and exile were all just part of growing up under Israeli occupation. The reason he and others of his generation speak of the struggle now is that they are convinced that it prepared them to succeed Yasir Arafat, 67, and the other expatriate nationalists of the old Palestine Liberation Organization as leaders of the new Palestine.
What the future holds is still far from clear. But any list of likely leaders would have to include members of the Palestinian Legislative Council like Diek, Husam Khader of Nablus, Marwan Bargouti of Ramallah and Mofid Abed Rabbo of Tulkarm. All are in their 30's; all were student leaders in the resistance to Israeli occupation; all have known torture, prison and exile, and all have passed through hatred and bitterness to the conviction that the Palestinians' future lies in political accommodation with Israel. ''Palestinian national consciousness developed in prison,'' Diek says. ''The national liberation movement crystallized in Israeli prison. When prisoners who were active in prison were released, each came to play a role, each became a leader.''
At the peak of the struggle with Israeli occupiers, more than 10,000 Palestinians could be in detention at any given time for belonging to banned Palestinian organizations, for taking part in demonstrations, for stoning cars or just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Diek was arrested for joining Fatah, Arafat's nationalist movement. This was in 1980, a year after he entered Bir Zeit University in the West Bank. He spent the next three years behind bars.
In prison, Palestinian youths were initiated into manhood through interrogation and torture. They were indoctrinated in politics and history by older inmates and learned the rudiments of representative politics through the strict internal democracy of the packed cells. Diek remembers days of seminars and debates among 70 inmates, followed by nights spent poring over political literature, some of it smuggled into the cells. It was also in prison that these young Palestinians first saw an Israel different from that represented by the occupying soldiers they used to taunt and stone. Watching Israeli television, many learned basic Hebrew and came to appreciate and even admire Israeli democracy. And they came to understand that Israel was not the fleeting ''Zionist occupation'' of P.L.O. propaganda but a permanent and determined nation with which the Palestinians' fate was inextricably entwined.
For many, prison was followed by deportation. But the historic handshake between Arafat and the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in September 1993 cleared the way for these exiled children of the resistance to return home, now as mature and hardened men, admired in their communities. And when the Israeli-Palestinian agreements two years later created the 88-seat Palestinian Legislative Council, it was only natural that the most dynamic of these former resistance leaders would run for office. The council offered an opportunity to put into practice their new notions of democracy and to seek a mandate from their people for a role in the new Palestine that they considered theirs by right.
The inauguration of the new council in Gaza City on March 7, an event proclaimed by Arafat as the ''birth of a new democracy,'' took place in an atmosphere of crisis brought on by the series of suicide bombings in Israel by Islamic zealots. As the council met, the borders of the Gaza Strip were virtually sealed by Israeli troops, and Arafat's police were rounding up Islamic militants.
It was unclear at the outset exactly what powers the Legislative Council would have. The Israeli-Palestinian agreement left most real powers in the hands of Arafat and his Palestinian Authority, and Arafat still appeared to look upon the P.L.O. and its parliament-in-exile, the Palestine National Council, as the senior Palestinian assembly. Arafat evidently intended the Legislative Council to serve as an ornament of his would-be state.
But to Arafat's surprise, council members took his proclamation of the ''birth of a new democracy'' literally and challenged him from the outset. The first major battle erupted on March 21 over the question of who should administer the oath of office to council members. The members, who were initially sworn in by Arafat, now proposed that in the future, the oath be taken before the High Court.
Arafat exploded: ''What are you saying? You are saying you will not take your oath before me? Is that what you are saying? Then I'm leaving.'' With that, Arafat angrily roared off in his armored Mercedes and his phalanx of Jeep Grand Cherokees with heavily armed bodyguards hanging from the doors. The council resumed its discussion. Soon after, Arafat evidently realized the futility of his bluster, and he invited the members to lunch. All dutifully went, although they did not relent on the issue of the oath.
Since then, tangling with Arafat has become a weekly preoccupation of the council. Members aggressively challenged Abu Amar (the nom de guerre by which Arafat is known among his followers) over nominations to the Cabinet and over the P.L.O.'s detention-without-charge of several hundred militants of the Hamas and Islamic Jihad movements. The detentions, prompted by the terrorist bombings, were cheered by Israel and the United States, but the council denounced them as violations of law and human rights.
In response to the council's challenges, Arafat has shouted, lectured, threatened and stalked out, evidently incapable, after so many years of conspiratorial rule, of comprehending the notions of open criticism and public opposition. This typical exchange took place on May 23 after council members demanded a list of all Hamas detainees who had not been charged:
ABDEL-KAREEM ABU SALAH (chairman of the legal committee): The law says that prisoners must be charged 48 hours after their arrest. We want to see if they have been charged. ARAFAT: You don't know anything, you don't know what you are talking about. I think you are working with them! MARWAN KANAFANI: We are not talking about security of the country. We are talking about political prisoners. HANAN ASHRAWI: This is not a secrecy issue. Everyone should know that no one can be arrested without people knowing. HAIDAR ABDUL SHAFI: The council has the right to ask for this information. I want to know why Abu Amar says that the legal committee is working with them. ARAFAT: I have evidence. ABDUL SHAFI: Everyone should respect this council. Arafat should respect this council. . . .
What is important, though, is that Arafat has continued to attend session after session of the council, bolstering its legitimacy and self-confidence even as he struggles with it.
In terms of real power, of course, it is no match. In addition to the extensive powers given him in the Israeli-Palestinian agreements, Arafat controls the various Palestinian security forces and the P.L.O.'s considerable and secretive funds. He and his men run much of the West Bank and Gaza economy as a private monopoly. There are also psychological barriers to how far the council is prepared to challenge him. With the new threat to the entire political process posed by the Israelis' election of the conservative Benjamin Netanyahu, most of the council recognizes that this is not the time to break ranks with Arafat.
''It's a Catch-22,'' said Ziad Abu Amr, a 46-year-old member from Gaza and a professor with a doctorate in political science from Georgetown University. ''With him we have problems, but without him we have even more problems. But we're maneuvering for the post-Arafat era. We are instituting mechanisms for a smooth transfer of authority, safety mechanisms. This council is going to be the birthplace for a new generation of Palestinian leadership.''
The work of the new Palestinian legislature has gone largely unnoticed in Israel, which has been enmeshed in its own crises and elections. But one American organization that has followed the council closely, the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, has given it high marks. A recent report by the institute noted that ''ironic as it may be,'' many council members had learned about democracy ''from reading different points of view in Israeli newspapers and watching the Knesset debate on Israeli television. Many members of the Council thus have, literally, a picture of what it is they wish to achieve.''
HUSAM KHADER, 34, FROM THE BALATA REFUGEE CAMP IN Nablus, clearly remembers his own personal turning point when, as he puts it, he became ''realistic.'' It was April 5, 1994, and he was returning to Israel after six and a half years in exile. Waiting to be processed by the Israelis at the Allenby Bridge crossing over the Jordan River, he heard a familiar voice: ''Look at Husam over there. There's a guy I arrested 10 times and he's forgotten me!'' Only then did Khader recognize an Israeli officer he had known as Major Rami, a man he regarded as his greatest personal enemy.
''Whenever he used to come to search my house, he would damage as much as he could,'' Khader recalled. ''When I recognized this guy, without knowing why, I shook his hand warmly. 'I've returned,' I told him. I can't explain it. It was a combination of a challenge and something else: when I returned, I had a new dream. My daughter said: 'Why are you shaking hands with a Jew? Jews are not good.' I told her, 'Be silent, don't make a scandal.' He heard and started laughing. We talked of the future.
''From that moment, I started to change. I started to be realistic. In the first two months, I had many visitors, and I started to speak to them in a new language. People were surprised: 'Is this the Husam we knew?' I started to get invitations to address Israeli gatherings. I went to places where Jews and Arabs met together.''
The surprise of his neighbors was understandable. In his youth, Khader had taken part in every violent protest he could. He was arrested 23 times in Israel and in four other countries where he lived in exile. In December 1987, the intifada broke out, the spontaneous uprising that began with youths throwing stones at Israelis and grew into a five-year conflict. Khader said he was the first Palestinian in the West Bank to be wounded in that uprising and the first to be deported. Abroad, Arafat harnessed the handsome, smart, audacious young man as a Fatah youth representative, a duty that took him to 55 countries. Khader's attitude toward the Israelis in those years was bitter. ''My feelings were full of hatred,'' he said.THERE is something intrinsically delightful about the sort of person who will say ''This happened to me,'' instead of ''I did this.'' It is as if the world in its bounty came and offered them whatever it was they had accomplished, instead of the other way about.
So it was with Beate Gordon, who at the age of 22 found herself one woman among 25 men, precipitously assigned by MacArthur to write the Japanese constitution still in use today. Single-handedly she wrote the women's rights clause, her face lighting up even now as she relates the story.
For 20 years the director of performing arts, films and lectures for the Asia Society in New York, Beate was one of the first people to bring Asian music, drama and dance to the United States, traveling to remote mountain shrines and tropical islands looking for traditional art.
She was the force behind bringing the Vietnamese Thang Long Water Puppet Theater first to Lincoln Center and now to Southampton College, where it is presenting its last three performances today.
Until a few years ago, around her 70th birthday, she thought nothing of going alone to remote hamlets in Borneo, watching dances of people who once were headhunters, riding over rapids in speed boats to get there or climbing stone steps in the mountains to witness performances in temples in bitter cold.
She watched fakirs climbing long poles on ladders of knives. She found in Australia Aborigine sand painters, and then, bringing them to this country, combed the beaches of Long Island for the proper color sand.
''I can't take pride in having discovered a lot of things really. I sort of had them thrust on me,'' she said in the same tone of voice as ''It happened to me.''
She grew up in Japan, from the formative ages of 5 to 15. By a series of coincidences her father, a Viennese concert pianist, had been lured to Japan by a composer who admired his work and given a post in the Imperial Academy at a time when few Westerners lived permanently in Japan.
Right before the war Beate was sent to school in the United States, where because so many Japanese-Americans were in detention camps, she found herself in demand as a translator and interpreter. She worked for the Office of War Information, even having her own radio show, a nostalgia program to try to convince the Japanese people to surrender, that was supposed to be the counterpart of Tokyo Rose.
She had wanted to return to see her parents, who as Jews in 1943 were sent to the resort town of Karuizawa, but she couldn't go back to Japan as a civilian, so she went as a researcher attached to the Army.
Now at 72, her face expands into a wideness in which you can feel that even her eyes are smiling, as she tells how ''a month after I arrived, our general gathered us together and said, 'You are now a constitutional assembly, and under orders from General MacArthur, you will write a constitution for the Japanese Nation.'
''It was a project that was supposed to be top secret. Every draft that the Japanese government had come up with was almost like the Meiji Constitution, conservative and feudal and keeping the Emperor's power in place.
''When we received our assignments, there were only two men on our committee and me. They said, 'You're a woman, so why don't you write the women's rights.'
''I got into a jeep and asked the driver to take me to the nearest library to gather samples. This was top secret. Because we could not tell anybody about this and we didn't want anybody to become suspicious, I went to as many libraries as I could, getting one or two constitutions from each.
''I gathered up 10 or 12 constitutions from all over the world and became very popular because everybody wanted to look at my constitutions. I studied the women's rights very carefully, remembering what my mother had told me when I was a young girl in Japan and the speeches about women she had given in Vienna.
''I remembered from my childhood how when I would visit my friends, that while the mother was the mistress of her own house, controlling everything inside it, in the streets she would be expected to walk behind her husband. In the outside world she had no rights at all.
''I remembered friends being prepared for marriage. I knew that they would not be able to choose a husband and often wouldn't even know the husband beforehand. I had heard Japanese women who had traveled in Europe speaking about how difficult it was to be a woman in Japan.''
As I watch her, I can see as if in double exposure the determination of the Beate of 50 years before. A little detail comes back to my mind, how she told me that her mother's first marriage had been arranged.
In addition to the fundamental rights to divorce, property, inheritance, domicile and choice of a spouse, she had found in the European constitutions many social welfare items, like help for nursing and expectant mothers and illegitimate children, and she had carefully included them.
When the men on the steering committee shaved her contribution down to only the fundamental rights, eliminating the social welfare clauses, because, they said, the United States constitution had no such thing, Beate started to cry. They told her not to worry, that the occupation was going to last for a long time, and they would see to it that these were implemented in the civil code. But Beate didn't believe them.IN his 18 months as Suffolk County Chief Medical Examiner, Dr. Charles V. Wetli had attracted scant attention as his office went about its grim business of performing routine autopsies and assisting the police in criminal investigations.
As the unanimous choice of a search committee to take over the $105,000-a-year post, Dr. Wetli, who grew up in Bayside and worked for 17 years in the Dade County, Fla., Medical Examiner's Office, was considered by officials as highly regarded if little known.
All that changed when Trans World Airlines Flight 800 plunged into the Atlantic off East Moriches, killing all 230 aboard. Gov. George E. Pataki and other officials have raised questions about Dr. Wetli's activities and whether he committed a serious error by refusing, in their view, to accept outside help until pressure had built up.
Contradicting Mr. Pataki and other critics, Dr. Wetli said last week that he had never turned away assistance. ''I never refused help from any source, public or private,'' Dr. Wetli said, adding that all offers had been carefully noted. ''But there's no point having everybody show up and wait around doing nothing or giving advice I don't need. I don't need 30 dentists at 8 o'clock in the morning.''
The office, which the County Legislature established in 1960, has 122 staff members and performs 1,200 autopsies a year. The first examiner, Dr. Sidney B. Weinberg, had the position until 1983. Other Chief Medical Examiners have been Drs. Michael M. Baden; Charles S. Hirsch, now Chief Medical Examiner in New York City, and Sigmund M. Menchel, Chief Medical Examiner in Onondaga County.
Autopsies are required in deaths involving homicides, accidents or suicides or when a family physician is not available to determine the cause of death. The procedure involves opening the body, chemical and other tests on organs and tissues and the closing of the body .
Three refrigerated trucks were used to hold the crash victims' bodies.
The findings and testimony by the five staff pathologists are often crucially important in criminal and civil trials, and the evidence may prove central to lawsuits that arise from the crash. Medical experts said the autopsies would show whether victims were exposed to a blast in the plane, as well as their positions in the plane.
Dr. Wetli said that shortly after the crash of the 747 jumbo jet he had requested that the victims' relatives be taken to the Hauppauge area, the site of his office, to speed identification and improve communications. The family members' headquarters at the Ramada Plaza Hotel at Kennedy International Airport, Dr. Wetli said, was disastrous and complicated identifications.
Within hours of the crash, nearly 100 bodies arrived at the office in Hauppauge for the five staff pathologists. That effort was complicated by a criminal investigation for evidence of a bomb or missile.
Dr. Wetli, a forensic pathologist with 19 years experience and a passion for being in control of his investigations, was suddenly a central figure. As the victims' families demanded swift recoveries and identifications, complaints about the pace of work were transmitted to Suffolk officials.
Declaring that he was outraged that autopsies were not being performed around the clock, Mr. Pataki criticized Dr. Wetli for refusing offers of outside help. ''Sometimes people are reluctant to ask for help, and that's wrong,'' Mr. Pataki said at a briefing three days after the crash. The Governor had ordered a team of 25 pathologists and technicians to Hauppauge.
Dr. Wetli, who, some people said, efficiently used the assistance to begin round-the-clock operations, said he found no fault with Mr. Pataki's intention but objected to how Mr. Pataki carried it out. ''The way it was presented was we are sending these people and you must use them,'' Dr. Wetli said. ''And there were one or two people who showed up that I couldn't use.''
Hobbled by a lack of dental and other medical records, Dr. Wetli said, his five pathologists, augmented by two from New York City and one from Nassau County, had done everything possible in the first hours to identify victims. ''By Thursday evening we had completed 20 autopsies, and everybody was exhausted,'' he said about his decision not to operate around the clock. ''If you are exhausted you are going to make mistakes. If we make one mistake we are dead. If we miss one crucial piece of evidence we have to shave our heads and jump off a cliff.''
He said the pace picked up quickly after stacks of dental X-rays and medical records requested from the victims' families arrived. ''By Saturday we were able to go to 24-hour operations and by Sunday we had processed all 100 bodies and identified half of them,'' he said.
By last week, with more than 200 staff members and volunteers at work, the agency had identified more than 160 bodies and released them to relatives.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Pataki, Sara Gaffney, said close scrutiny of Dr. Wetli continued. ''The Governor's office and the F.B.I. have been monitoring the Medical Examiner's Office on an hourly basis since the Governor sent in those 25 people,'' she said.
Dr. Wetli said that after the political and media exposure eased it would become clear that the criticisms of his office were unjustified. He said his attempts to move families nearer Hauppauge were refused for reasons that remained unclear to him.
''Our disaster plan called for the immediate transportation of the families to Suffolk,'' he said. ''But we were told the decision was made that the families would stay at the Ramada, and that was that. The families were 50 miles from us, and we were running around here trying to coordinate state and Federal agencies and trying to communicate with the families at the same time. It was just impossible. If the families were 20 minutes away it would have been a lot better.''
The Deputy County Executive for public safety, John C. Gallagher, said he understood that T.W.A., which paid for rooms at the Ramada, was responsible for choosing the hotel to gather the families. ''We didn't question that, and we had so many other things going on it didn't dawn on us what if any logistical problems there would be having the families at Kennedy,'' Mr. Gallagher said.TWO and a half years ago, when the Federal Government announced that 100 cities would receive $3 million Enterprise Community grants with which to create jobs in poor neighborhoods, Bridgeport and New Haven were among the recipients.
In New Haven, the grant appeared to draw the community together and strengthened neighborhood activism.
But in Bridgeport, there was factional bickering and a complete breakdown in the process, which resulted in the municipal government taking control away from neighborhood organizers.
Federal grants are often awarded with considerable publicity but seldom attract much follow-up attention unless questions of corruption arise, or disputes ensue over the grants' extension in Congress. How New Haven and Bridgeport dealt with the Enterprise Community money provides a glimpse into what happens -- or does not -- after such a grant.
People close to the decision-making processes in the two cities suggested that the seeds of New Haven's harmony and of Bridgeport's discord were present well before the grants were announced.
Bridgeport started off with power issues raised by neighborhood activists, who argued that authority over the grant was controlled by a few politicians and business leaders, instead of the neighborhoods. Although this dispute was quickly resolved, bitterness over it lingered. Bickering between factions competing for control eventually erupted into open war as they publicly attacked each other's motives.
New Haven, on the other hand, had already resolved these issues. The committee that was formed to set neighborhood priorities and allocate funds for them grew out of an established structure of neighborhood organizations created two years before to work with the police to address social problems that were hampering crime-fighting efforts. Neighborhood representatives to those organizations had gradually acquired the ability to work together and trust each other, qualities that were absent in Bridgeport.
The Enterprise Community grant originated in the Urban Marshall Plan, drafted by a Congressional caucus led by Representatives Christopher Shays of Stamford and Kweisi Mfume of Maryland, who later resigned from Congress to become president of the N.A.A.C.P. The legislation provided for 10 grants of $100 million each and 100 grants of $3 million.
''We wanted to prove that a real effort to attract busineses to a community would pay off tremendously,'' Mr. Shays said.
Bridgeport vigorously entered the competition for the grant set aside for cities of its size. Mr. Shays said its application was the first submitted to the Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, and was supported by a coalition of the city's government, business community, social service institutions and neighborhood groups.
When it was eliminated from consideration for $100 million, and received $3 million instead, Bridgeport was forced to downsize its efforts. New Haven, which had applied for the smaller grant, had no such disappointment to face, and went straight to work.
The plans of the two cities were similar from the start, having been devised under the same Federal guidelines. They create programs for neighborhood improvements, education and job training, family-oriented and youth-oriented services, and economic development, including loans and technical assistance for entrepreneurs. The major difference was in implementation. In New Haven, Mayor John DeStefano Jr. said, planning and implementation of the grant was in the hands of the Enterprise Community Council, a 30-member board. Twenty of its members were selected from among representatives on neighborhood police district management teams, and the rest from the city government and several major businesses and institutions in the city.
Ten police district management teams were formed four years ago to help the police address issues like housing blight, dysfunctional families and substance abuse, which affect neighborhood crime rates. Already familiar with their neighborhoods' particular needs, the management team members were viewed as a valuable resource for connecting the Enterprise Community Council with the six neighborhoods targeted as beneficiaries of the grant.
''If you weren't active on a management team, you couldn't end up as a citywide representative,'' said Howard Gilreath, a member of the grant committee from the Newhallville neighborhood.
Mr. DeStefano said that in addition to managing the grant programs, the Enterprise Community Council has become ''a platform for community-based planning and consensus.''
''That's better than money, in many respects,'' he said. ''I think money without a sense of ownership and participation by the community often doesn't work because it seeks to impose a paradigm on the community in a direction it doesn't want to go.''
In contrast, the process in Bridgeport apparently began poorly and got steadily worse. The initial committee, formed to apply for the larger Empowerment Community grant, consisted of representatives from the city government, the business community and major institutions. When grass roots community organizations complained, they were included, but an atmosphere of resentment and suspicion remained.
''It started off with control issues from the very beginning,'' said Alma Maya, who wound up as one of three co-chairmen of the Community Collaborative of Bridgeport, which was to act in the same role as New Haven's Enterprise Community Council. With 50 members representing various interest groups, the ungainly group quickly broke into factions.
The group tried to retain a provision from the city's original $100 million grant application. Known as the Office of Neighborhoods, it proposed to spend nearly $1 million to hire a staff of community advocates and clerical help.
While this provision would have been a relatively small portion of the larger grant, it was a third of the smaller grant. H.U.D., which had to approve Bridgeport's downsized application, ruled that it was too much to spend on administration.Employees began moving into the new $40 million Ciba-Geigy pharmaceutical laboratory in Tarrytown, N.Y., on July 22, but the building's architects are still waiting to find out how big their fee will be.
The delayed payment is part of an innovative plan in which the architects and engineers, HLW International of Manhattan, agreed to forfeit a chunk of their profit if the new building's tenants don't like the design -- and to collect a bonus if they do.
After three months of occupancy, the 150 employees -- who will finish moving in by Labor Day -- will rate the 165,000-square-foot, five-story building, through a painstakingly negotiated questionnaire measuring the workers' satisfaction. Categories include soundproofing, lighting, building appearance, spatial organization, construction quality and odor control.
The results will determine whether the architectural firm receives about 30 percent of its estimated $300,000 profit from the project.
The other two-thirds of the profit was at risk, too, and would have been lost if the architects, working with a team of builders who had their own separate incentives, had failed to finish the building on time and on budget.
The building was finished five months early (the original specifications called for completion in 35 months) and $3.3 million under the $40 million ceiling. They have now earned two-thirds of the profit, plus the $2.7 million in costs to the architectural firm, including overhead and design services. Also at stake is an additional $100,000 -- the bonus for meeting time, money and satisfaction goals.
''Of course, we were nervous about it,'' said Leevi Kiil, HLW's chief executive officer. ''It's the first time we've done it. Other firms have tried it with, I guess, differing results. You have to have confidence.'' Asked what he thought the result of the questionnaire might be, he laughed. ''Well, we think it will be pretty good, or I wouldn't be talking about it,'' he said.
He said the architectural firm decided to take the risk in large part because its own team had worked before with the builder, Sordoni Skanska Construction, and Ciba-Geigy. Plans for the pre-cast concrete structure called for different corridor configurations on each floor, each housing a different research facility, arranged differently. The upper floors are cantilevered, to give some specialties more space.
''The main challenge was to keep a good balance with the scientists' needs,'' said Mr. Kiil. Within a tight budget, the choices often boiled down to amenities vs. equipment: ''How much money do we spend on atriums and how much inside the labs?'' he said. ''Which grade of finishes: the ones that cost a lot but last a lifetime or those that last for 10 years that may cost more to maintain?''
POSTINGS: New $40 Million Pharmaceutical Laboratory in TarrytownWHEN Donald J. Trump purchased Seven Springs last year for $7.5 million, he announced his intention to transform the 200-acre estate into a ''world-class'' country club and 15 mansions.
The estate, which occupies one of Westchester County's largest swatches of existing green space, straddles three northern Westchester towns, including North Castle, New Castle and Bedford.
The estate was originally owned by Eugene I. Meyer, an industrialist who owned The Washington Post. His daughter, Katharine Graham, to whom he left the newspaper and estate, was married there in 1940. The estate's most recent owner was Rockefeller University.
Ever since Mr. Trump announced his intention to develop the property, which includes wetlands and borders Byram Lake, the primary drinking water source for neighboring Mount Kisco, there has been much speculation about how the approval process would be handled.
In an unusual move, the three towns voted last Wednesday to act jointly as a single agency to consider the project's environmental-impact statement, always a critical first step in any construction project.
Albert J. Pirro, a partner in the firm representing the Trump Organization, immediately voiced his objection to the arrangement. ''We don't believe it's in our client's best interest,'' he said. ''My problem is that I'm not sure there's sufficient precedent for this. We have to have some protections placed so we don't have to worry about a challenge later saying that this is not a legal process.''
In presenting its formal proposal for the project to the three towns last month, the Trump Organization stated its preference for one of the towns, specifically North Castle, to act as lead agency.
''They are the agency that will have most of the approval authority,'' said Paul D. Sirignano, a lawyer with Pirro, Collier, Cohen & Halpern of White Plains. ''Most of the project will be built there. They'll have the clubhouse, land amenities, parking, etcetera. Designating one town as lead agency, which would work with the other towns, just helps make the process more efficient.''
When Mr. Pirro heard about the towns' decision to form a single agency, he sent them a letter voicing his objection. ''While co-lead agency arrangements have been utitlized in the past on certain projects, to my knowledge no such procedure has been adopted in the situation when the project sponsor has objected or where a three-party co-lead agency has been established,'' he said.
''Such an arrangement is not recognized under the Environmental Conservation Law,'' he said, ''and its implementing regulations, the state's Environmental Quality Review Act $(Seqra$). Those regulations do not provide for a co-lead agency situation. Although there is not a specific prohibition against such a procedure, the Seqra handbook specifically discourages the use of a co-lead agency.''
This is perhaps just the opening salvo in what promises to be a lengthy, highly complex approval process that could possibly set some precedents for future municipal cooperation among municipalities.
Michael B. Gerrard, a lawyer who represents Mount Kisco's interests in the approval process, maintained at the meeting that co-lead agency arrangements had been used frequently.
''It's happened a lot in New York City,'' said Mr. Gerrard, co-author of the book ''Environmental Impact Review in New York,'' (Matthew Bender). ''It's entirely lawful.''
Attempts at other regional approval arrangements have met with resistance, often by the municipalities themselves. Paul J. Feiner, Supervisor of the Town of Greenburgh, suggested such an arrangement in relation to the development of the former CibaCorporation campus in Greenburgh.
Since the current plan for the property requires rezoning land in Greenburgh and a supermarket has been proposed for a section of the former Ciba campus within the Village of Hastings-on-Hudson, Mr. Feiner suggested forming a joint planning review board consisting of Greenburgh, Hastings-on-Hudson and Ardsley, which would be significantly affected by the development. ''It never got off the ground,'' Mr. Feiner said. ''It's too foreign a concept to share that kind of power.''
For developers, it can be a daunting prospect to face a larger joint board made up of multiple municipalities, each representing a separate set of interests.
IN the case of the Trump project, each town is now slated to get a sizable share of the project. Of the 200-acre estate, 91 acres are in North Castle, 78.5 in Bedford and about 30 in New Castle.
The golf course would take up 170 acres and straddle both North Castle and Bedford. Fourteen tennis courts would be built in Bedford. And almost the entire residential project would be in New Castle.
The plans also call for the conversion of an existing 38,000-square-foot Georgian mansion, built in 1917, into a clubhouse for use by members and their guests. The refurbishment of the mansion, which is in North Castle, is to include the construction of men's and women's locker rooms, three dining rooms, a bar and lounge.
Under the plan approved by the three towns last Wednesday, they would create a 15-member board consisting of Bedford's five-member Zoning Board of Appeals, New Castle's five-member Planning Board and North Castle's five-member Town Board.In an unusual financial arrangement, the striking 1910 neo-Medieval terra cotta and brick building at 40 East 62d Street currently owned and partially used by the adjacent Browning School is to become a condominium, with the school owning the second, third and half of the fourth floors, plus part of the first floor.
The apartments on the top floors, each with three bedrooms and three baths, will be sold as condominiums. Two are currently vacant and are being offered at prices in the low $800,000's. When those two apartments are sold, the noneviction condominium plan will go into effect. One of the two apartments being sold -- the apartment that takes up half of the sixth floor -- was once the headmaster's apartment and is being sold by the school.
The developers, a partnership composed of ABC Properties and several other individuals, but not the school, are negotiating with the rest of the tenants in the rent-stabilized apartments they control, offering them insiders' deals of approximately 40 percent off the apartments' market value, according to people involved in the project.
The developers had leased all but two of the building's apartments on a 200-year lease from the school several years ago, but the lease will revert to a sale when the plan takes effect, said Glenn Siegel, one of the partners.
Mr. Siegel said that the school will not use the building for classrooms and that the entrance to the offices will be through the school building next door -- not through the lobby entrance.
POSTINGS: Apartments Above, Students BelowSome questions could come straight from the mailboxes of advice columnists. There was the woman who inadvertently wove a wreath with poison ivy, the one who brought a live black widow spider in for identification, and the man who wanted to find out how to kill his neighbor's tree.
But this time of year, during peak garden-hobbyist season, the experts who give advice in cooperative extension offices throughout the state more often hear calendar-determined questions about why certain flowers failed to bloom, vegetables bolted or insects infested.
''We're getting an earful this season because it's been odd, weatherwise,'' said Joel Flagler, the Rutgers Cooperative Extension agent for Bergen County.
Rutgers Cooperative Extension, based at Cook College in New Brunswick, runs offices in all 21 counties of New Jersey. In some counties, an office's agricultural services division can average 250 calls a week. With trained ''master gardeners'' available on telephone hot lines, this free resource is used by the public in part for information, in part for encouragement.
''A lot of the questions, you'll find that the people know what the answers are, they just want reassurance that they're doing the right thing,'' said Rich Kestenbaum, the hotline coordinator in Middlesex County.
Then again, said James Willmott, Camden County's agricultural extension agent, ''In some cases it may be reassuring, in other cases it may be true that they did something wrong.''
What generally goes wrong, according to extension agents across the state, is over- or under-fertilizing, incorrect planting, misapplying fungicides or noticing problems only after they have fully set in. Regardless, even in odd-weather years like this one, the questions coming into the extension offices stick to time-driven trends.
This June, the phone lines were filled with cicada questions. In July, the cool, damp weather left gardeners puzzled as spring crops came up next to summer crops. This month, fungus and vegetables will command attention. By fall, it's lawns and trees.
The once-in-17-years appearance of cicadas this summer led to hundreds of calls, but little practical advice. It turns out, as Mr. Kestenbaum said, that ''they are big and scary and the noise, that's incredible, but there's not a lot to do.''
Their egg-laying can kill the tips of tree branches, however, so Madeline Flahive of the Union County extension office recommended that people trim affected branches if possible, then water, fertilize and mulch the tree to keep it healthy.
The extension agents usually recommend that people test their soil before applying chemicals such as fungicides, to avoid using the wrong amount. And they frequently ask callers to bring in samples -- clumps of browned lawn or mite-eaten leaves -- to insure an accurate diagnosis. ''We have people spraying fungicide when they needed insecticide and vice versa,'' said Mary Eklund, a master gardener in the Camden County office. ''It's hard to tell sometimes, is it an insect or is it a disease?''
For the master gardeners -- whose training includes hours of classes, tests and field trips -- getting unusual questions is part of the fun.
''Sometimes you get these questions and you think, 'Who cares?' but then there's a reason,'' said Cathy Levine, a master gardener on the Bergen County hotline.
She recently heard from a New Jersey man who was moving to a site in the Poconos with bad soil. ''He wanted to know how far earthworms dig down in the soil. I was like, 'I don't know.' But it turned out that his reason was, it gets colder there and he was getting ready to buy 25 pounds of earthworms to give the soil more organic material. He didn't want them to get there and die. We researched it and found out that earthworms go down way below the frost line, so we told him to go ahead.''
The questioners vary from diehard gardeners who stump the experts to novices who ask very basic questions. On one end of the scale was the former landscaper who found a weed he couldn't identify in his backyard, Ms. Levine said. The extension agents also tried, but failed, and the landscaper called a few weeks later just to fill them in on the answer. On the other end of the spectrum, the office received a call from a woman who had landscaping put in before her sprinkler system was up. It was during a hot spell, and she didn't understand why her lawn went brown.
''Most of the people are very nice, just wanting to talk about their plants, which they'll talk about forever,'' Ms. Levine said.
Despite all the anxious calls they get about seeing one insect or having an indescribable tree problem, the extension agents say most people just want to satisfy their curiosity.
''In general, we try to aid and abet whatever efforts they're making,'' said Marion Sedgwick, a master gardener at the Bergen County office.
Unless, of course, you're trying to kill your neighbor's tree. Then they offer no information.
THE GREAT OUTDOORSEven before the Gap moved into a pristine brick building here, the shopping district had potential. It was compact, with quaint architecture and a mix of restaurants and stores. The rents were reasonable, especially compared with those in fancy shopping malls. Above all, the residents were affluent and eager to spend.
It made sense, then, for one of the nation's most popular retailers to open a store on East Broad Street in 1992, and for a Gap Kids to spring up a year later. Other national chains have followed, and Westfield is acquiring what most suburban towns only dream of: a business district that is thriving, with enough well-known stores to give New Jersey's ubiquitous malls some competition.
Westfield is among a handful of affluent towns that have successfully courted national retailers in recent years, using them to boost their local economies and make a name for their downtowns. The towns -- which also include Englewood, Morristown and Ridgewood -- have aggressively marketed themselves to such stores as the Gap and Ann Taylor, and lately, the chains are responding more frequently.
Retail executives say that downtown locations have become more appealing as mall space has grown more expensive. Meanwhile, they say, customers are tiring of malls and looking for an old-fashioned shopping experience.
''A lot of people don't want to go to the mall anymore,'' said Arthur Tropp, vice president for real estate at Williams-Sonoma, the kitchenware chain based in San Francisco. ''The street locations are proving a viable alternative in an awful lot of cases.''
Even though sales in streetfront shops tend to be lower than those in their mall counterparts, net profits can be just as high, because they have fewer expenses. In addition to charging up to $65 per square foot in rent, malls charge extra for maintenance, security and other shared services. In a downtown shopping district, businesses might pay an extra tax for such services, but the cost is much lower, said Michael Fabrizio, executive director of the Morristown Partnership.
''It costs far fewer dollars to do business in downtown Morristown than at the Short Hills mall,'' said Mr. Fabrizio, whose organization has recruited national retailers like Starbucks and Staples. ''At the end of the day, the downtown businesses can shut off the lights, lock the doors and that's the end of their expenses.''
Towns that do not have giant malls in their backyards stand the best chance of attracting national retailers, Mr. Fabrizio said. Morristown and Westfield were both far enough from malls for the Gap to come in, but Millburn, which has courted national chains for several years, has not been so lucky. The problem is the Mall at Short Hills, which lies within its borders.
''The corporate offices of the Gap already have a thumbtack on their map where Millburn is, because they're in the mall,'' said Tara Braddish, executive director of the Downtown Millburn Development Alliance.
To speed the arrival of all kinds of businesses, Morristown, Millburn and several other towns have started special-improvement districts, which are run by nonprofit organizations.
The organizations market the towns to various businesses, organize special events and provide maintenance and other services that are paid for by an extra property tax. Westfield has a Main Street program, similar to a special-improvement district, and Michele Picou, the director, has praised the town to national chains and real estate investors for three years.
A year ago, Federal Realty Investment Trust, a Maryland-based real estate trust that buys downtown properties for retail development, bought an 11,000-square-foot property on Central Avenue. It is leasing the space to a brokerage firm and a national restaurant chain, said Anthony Schilling, president of Relocation Realty here.
After the Gap came to town in 1992, Mr. Schilling said, Sam Goody, Kay-Bee Toys, Starbucks and Garden Botanika, a bath shop, followed. Limited Express is opening a store this fall, and Ann Taylor, Banana Republic and Nine West have expressed interest, he said.
But Ms. Picou and several other planners pointed out that a downtown full of national chains is not ideal. The nationals help bring in customers from out of town, they said, but locally owned businesses add a dimension to downtown shopping districts that is lacking in malls.
''If you don't keep the good mom-and-pops, you wind up replicating a mall,'' said Peter Beronio, director of community services for Englewood, whose sprawling shopping district has national and regional chains and a number of independently owned stores. ''We want to offer something the malls can't, like a little ethnic market or a unique craft store.''
Local businesses are also valuable because they are more likely than national retailers to get involved in community events, said Lawrence Houstoun Jr., principal of the Atlantic Group, an urban development consulting firm in Cranbury.
''The manager of a national chain store is not always going to be a good participant in the local community,'' he said.
Mr. Houstoun said that any downtown, no matter how bustling, would have a hard time attracting more than a handful of national chains. For one thing, parking is almost always limited, while malls can keep adding parking decks, he said. And downtown properties tend to be old and small, not the kind most chains want to invest in.
''Most downtown space was built between 1890 and 1920, and you have to combine or expand properties to get the nationals interested,'' he said ''The space in the malls was built for today's retailers, and they can always rebuild if it doesn't fit.''
New Jersey's shopping malls are still attracting scores of national retailers -- in fact, many are doubling in size to accommodate larger, showier stores. Some real-estate investors say they have not been entirely successful placing national chains in downtown locations.MICHAEL GREGG, owner of a small apartment building on Manhattan's Lower East Side, was granted judgments of eviction against two adjacent tenants who got married and knocked down the wall between their apartments -- only to have the eviction held up on appeal because the apartment violates city codes.
''They called in the inspector and he cited me, as the owner, for not having a wall where there was supposed to be a wall,'' Mr. Gregg said.
For 44 years, Herbert Walker, an 81-year-old disabled veteran, has lived in a rent-controlled apartment in the Bronx. After being served with an eviction notice, Mr. Walker reluctantly agreed to pay the rent he had held in escrow, even though the judge allowed him to subtract only $400 of the $3,200 he paid out of his own pocket because the landlord refused to repair crumbling ceilings that dropped plaster on his bed in the middle of the night.
''My wife and I live on a pension,'' Mr. Walker said. ''I can't afford the cost of appealing this thing.''
The two men represent two of the myriad faces of eviction. It is the direst of outcomes for a relationship inherently fraught with tension, the ages-old struggle between a landlord's right to a livelihood and a return on investment and a tenant's need for that essential resource -- affordable shelter.
So the fact that about 300,000 New York City tenants are served with eviction papers each year is, at once, both understandable and remarkable. That figure represents 4 percent of the city's population.
To be sure, only about 100,000 of those tenants are eventually ordered out of their homes. At that point, some grudgingly pay and stay; others leave on their own, and still others -- about 25,000 last year -- find themselves out on the street after the knock and lock of the city marshal. But even that 100,000 attests to the bitterness that can pervade the landlord-tenant relationship -- as it has since medieval monarchs first granted land rights to lords of the manor.
And so, weekday after weekday, before the bench and in the crammed, chaotic hallways of housing court, both parties play out angry dramas, most often settling, sometimes going to trial.
The kinds of disputes embroiling Mr. Gregg -- who is still awaiting the outcome of the appeal -- and Mr. Walker are grist for what tenant advocates have long contended is a mill that grinds out case after case in housing court (officially, the Landlord-Tenant Part of Civil Court), and that landlord representatives assert is a system bogged down as never before by frivolous appeals.
Most tenants facing eviction are poor and cannot afford a lawyer, while landlords almost always have legal representation, the tenant advocates say. But that, the landlords point out, is because state law requires corporations, which include most building owners, to have lawyers. That doesn't address the inequity, the tenant side says. And so the arguments go.
But with the current rental market feverish, particularly in Manhattan, tenants are feeling new eviction pressures, their advocates say, not unlike the heat applied during the wholesale co-op conversions of the 80's. More and more, the advocates say, landlords are going to court not so much to get the back rent, but to get the tenant out. That way, the apartment becomes eligible for a vacancy allowance, as well as the regular lease-renewal increase, and moves closer to the coveted status of vacancy decontrol, with its freedom to charge what the market will bear.
''We're seeing more middle-income people than you would expect,'' said Angelita Anderson, director of the City-Wide Task Force on Housing Court, a not-for-profit group that counsels tenants. Increasingly, Ms. Anderson said, long-term tenants who complained about conditions in their apartments have been served with eviction papers, ''with the landlord claiming they are harassing the staff.
''We have well-educated tenants coming to us saying, 'I never thought I would be in this situation,' '' she said.
NONSENSE, say the landlords. Allegations leading to eviction have to be well founded. And after eviction, the owner usually loses all back rent -- months' and sometimes years' worth. That makes it harder to maintain the building properly, and, by narrowing the rent stream, cuts into property tax revenues. There ought to be a law requiring tenants to place withheld rent in escrow, landlord lobbyists insist.
Tenant leaders, the landlords say, are raising false alarms to generate support as the scheduled expiration of the rent-stabilization law next June offers state legislators the volatile possibility of ending, or at least modifying, rent regulation. ''I think this is part of efforts by tenant advocates to enlarge their base'' for the coming fight, said Joseph Strasburg, president of the Rent Stabilization Association, the city's largest landlord group.
The deepest roots of those kinds of conflicts can be found ''way back in feudal times when the king would give a lord dominion over an area of land,'' said Andrew Scherer, author of ''Landlord-Tenant Law in New York'' (Lawyers Cooperative Publishing, 1995). At that time, a tenant could be thrown out without a court proceeding -- a practice obfuscated by the legal euphemism, ''self-help eviction.''
Through the centuries, however, as common law evolved, the principle developed that a landlord could not forcibly evict. ''If your only option was force, you had to go to court,'' Mr. Scherer said. ''And if you went to court, it was a long process.''
Feudal vestiges found fertile ground in America, and particularly in New York, with land grants to patroon families like the Van Renssellaers and the Livingstons sometimes encompassing two or three upstate counties. In the 1830's, rent wars began in the Catskills, with farmers clanging bells and swarming over the hills to confront the sheriff whenever he tried to evict a rent-reluctant neighbor.
Bending to the clamor of republicanism following the Revolution, state legislatures had already begun breaking up the patroons' vast holdings. And they enacted summary-proceeding statutes in which, in exchange for expedited hearings, landlords agreed to abide by court rulings and forgo the harsh practice of self-help eviction.
Currently, it is Article 7 of New York State's Real Property Actions and Proceedings Law that sets requirements for obtaining a court-ordered eviction:FIRST, the good news.
Claudine is back.
In February, the 19-year-old art student stopped at Look, the hair salon owned by her mother, Ricky Tambil, on East 29th Street. Claudine was on her way to answer a classified ad for a job in SoHo. She combed out her long, dark-blond hair and walked out of her parents' lives for a while. After a few days, they called the police, who could do little, officially, to help; as an adult with no mental or physical handicaps, Claudine fit no criterion for a missing person. The Tambils then enlisted friends, passed out fliers and began their own hunt in Manhattan and Brooklyn. After her picture appeared in this corner, Claudine was sighted several times downtown and called briefly from a street phone. She told her mother that she loved her, but that she didn't want to come home. When Ms. Tambil tried to extend the conversation, Claudine hung up.
Admittedly, there had been strains. Umit Tambil, Claudine's father, is a Turkish-born architect who made it clear he didn't like his daughter's friends, especially the black ones she met at clubs. The flash point seemed trivial; Ricky Tambil, who is Dutch, was angry that Claudine used a $200 birthday gift from her grandfather to buy gold hoop earrings instead of shoes. Through the five months of loss and worry, the Tambils talked about the culture clash of a modern teen-ager chafing under an Old World father trying to protect his only child in a world he could not control.
Two weeks ago, Claudine called her mother again. She was living on the street, off the Bowery, and she was ready to come home.
''She lost a lot of weight, and she sleeps a lot these days, and she doesn't want to talk about what happened right now,'' Ms. Tambil said. ''That's all right. She's back. We're taking it day by day.''
The next step is school. Claudine had been accepted at the Fashion Institute of Technology and was to start next month. But Ms. Tambil, perhaps afraid of jinxing her return, did not make last March's tuition payment. She hopes the school understands and has kept Claudine's spot for her.
Now, the bad news.
Red is back.
Andy Singer, a futures and options trader at Chase Manhattan, was sitting on the outdoor patio of Cafe Centro at Grand Central Terminal two weeks ago with two colleagues, having a drink before catching a train home, when he spotted the smooth con man working a mark up the block. Mr. Singer told his friends, ''I can't let this happen.'' He jumped up, began waving his arms and shouting, ''It's a scam, it's a scam.''
One of Mr. Singer's companions, who requested anonymity, was amazed by the scene. He picks up the story. ''The guy being scammed, a white middle-aged commuter, probably from Connecticut, has his briefcase on the sidewalk while he's digging money out of his pocket. He looks up annoyed at Andy, who is running toward him, and he says, 'I know this man's sister. ' ''
''Andy says, 'Yeah, sure, I know his sister, too.' ''
Earlier this year, back when his bank was called Chemical, Mr. Singer was taken for $48 by the light-skinned African-American called Red or Freckles by the police and ''Alfie's son'' in this corner because that was how he insinuated himself to the first victim who told me the story.
Mr. Singer's fleecing was classic; a confident, affluent, physically fit white man walked down a midtown street and Red called out, ''You're not going to just walk by me.''
When Mr. Singer, by all accounts no fool, stopped, he was done for; Red convinced him that they had met ''on the floor'' and that he was a relative of a co-worker. Mr. Singer, typically, searched his head for African-American co-workers, of which most affluent, white, middle-aged New Yorkers do not have that many. He came up with a woman named Lauris, and Red smiled and said he was her brother. Red explained that he needed a one-day loan because his car had run out of gas, and that the racist garagemen wouldn't lend him a gas can without a deposit.
A version of this story -- my tightfisted, hard-headed friend Ed Weinstein gave ''Alfie's son'' $30 six years ago and has seen him a number of times since -- brought so many responses I had to answer by form letter, a first. Detectives from several precincts called to be put in contact with victims, which included at least one Pulitzer Prize winner, a member of the Police Foundation, doctors, a criminal lawyer, too many successful businessmen and the radio star, Barry Farber, who described with a certain admiration how Red had inhaled him ''up the exhaust pipe.''
Mr. Singer had a touch of admiration in his voice when he called about his latest sighting. And his colleague chuckled as he described Red coolly ignoring Mr. Singer as he tucked away the Connecticut commuter's ''loan'' and said, ''Thanks again, I'll be back with it tomorrow at 2.'' Then he sauntered off.
COPINGTODAY, if you call your bank and ask for an American Express or Discover credit card, you'll be told to go elsewhere -- but don't bother trying another bank. Virtually all the 6,500 banks nationwide that issue credit cards belong to the Visa or Mastercard associations, and the handful of big banks that control these groups have collaborated successfully to eliminate unwanted competition.
What is good for these huge banks is manifestly bad for millions of American consumers and for many not-so-big banks because the status quo means a wholly unfair and artificial limit on their choice of products and services.
American Express, Discover and other potential credit card companies want the chance to offer their products through banks. The current restrictions in the credit card arena contradict the principles of open markets and price competition that are the hallmarks of a capitalist economy.
Consumers see banks as primary providers of financial services, and banks are delighted to encourage one-stop shopping. However, today's constricted choice of credit cards, which are arguably the average American's most important retail credit tool, is hardly consistent with the image of a ''financial supermarket'' brimming with a broad selection of competing products.
And as consumers take advantage of the increasing conveniences available through their bank accounts -- from debit cards to home banking on the Internet -- the ultimate reach of this anticompetitive arrangement could be astonishing.
Visa banks, those that belong to the country's largest credit card association, years ago issued a bylaw forbidding members to offer American Express or Discover cards to their customers. Just last month, Mastercard instituted the same prohibition for its United States members. Visa and Mastercard banks are allowed to issue each other's cards, however, and both groups are also allowed to issue Diners Club cards. Apparently, all competitors are not created equal.
Wouldn't it seem strange if all electronics stores agreed to sell only two brands of TV's or if all car dealers carried only G.M. and Chrysler? Shouldn't proprietors be able to sell what they think their customers want? Why should we think differently of banks? Banks shouldn't be required to offer a particular card, of course, but they should be free to choose which cards to offer.
Tellingly, Mastercard took its action fast on the heels of a decision by the European Union in May that rebuffed Visa International's attempt to impose a similar exclusionary policy in Europe. The European Union warned that interference with the freedom of European banks to choose which cards to issue would be ''unacceptable,'' causing Visa to withdraw its proposal.
Why should Americans have fewer choices than the French and British? Have we become less committed to free markets than our European cousins are?
A few big banks dominate the United States credit card market through their control of the Visa and Mastercard associations. Of the 6,500 banks that issue these cards, the 10 largest issuers account for nearly 60 percent of total outstanding card balances. This is clearly why the big banks have such a keen interest in perpetuating the dominance of these two brands. The less competition there is, the less pressure there is to offer better fees, interest rates and features, and the more profitable is the franchise for these controlling banks.
As technology improves the ability to integrate more financial services, the value of this oligopolistic franchise is enhanced, and the ability to unfairly dominate an immense field of services escalates.
For example, consumers who want to use the increasingly popular debit cards may find themselves with few options to Visa or Mastercard products with exclusive access to the big Cirrus and Plus automated teller-machine networks the two associations own.
These anticompetitive conditions clearly violate the principles underpinning our antitrust laws and cry out for corrective action. In a very encouraging development, the Justice Department announced in June an antitrust inquiry into the ''competitive issues involving the prohibition of certain joint ventures in the credit card industry.'' Mastercard's policy decision, occurring two weeks after this announcement, makes such an investigation even more urgent.
If we restore fair and healthy competition to the credit card market, everybody will benefit. American banks will be more competitive with each other and will continue as the best on the globe. American consumers will enjoy the greatest possible freedom of choice at the lowest possible cost, and it is against this standard that market conditions must be judged.
VIEWPOINT Charles E. Schumer, a Democratic Representative for parts of Brooklyn and Queens, is a senior member of the House Banking and Financial Services and Judiciary Committees.THE MEDICAL REPORTS LYING ON A TABLE IN DAVID KESSLER'S office include only the thinnest detail about the death of George Korizis, a 24-year-old Tufts University graduate and Greek citizen who died alone in his Boston apartment on April 18. But there is a curious aspect to Korizi's case that has interested Kessler, who is the Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and who does not ordinarily pay attention to obscure deaths.
Korizi's death has been attributed to myocardial necrosis, a condition in which key heart muscle cells die and that leads to cardiac arrest. It is an unusual although not unprecedented cause of death in a healthy young man. The case became intriguing, however, when a doctor dispatched by the Greek Consulate found several empty bottles of a product called Ripped Fuel in Korizis's apartment. One of the ingredients in Ripped Fuel, an over-the-counter powder used by weight lifters to maintain lean body mass, is ephedrine, a stimulant derived from ephedra, or the mahuang plant.
The doctor recalled reading about the recent death of a Long Island man that was linked to mahuang. So he called the F.D.A., which is why several of the agency's senior scientists and lawyers are gathering Kessler's office on this Tuesday afternoon: to figure out what the commissioner should do about Korizis's death.
Or, more to the point, what he can do, because when it comes to dietary supplements - and Ripped Fuel, like thousands of herb-based products, is considered by law to be a dietary supplement, no a drug - Kessler is not allowed to do very much. A 1994 law, passed with the help of full-bore lobbying by dietary-supplement makers, severely limited the F.D.A.'s power in the supplement regulation business. It was a signal ideological victory for those Americans who believe that the Government best stay out of their medicine cabinets. And it was a devastating defeat for those who believe that Government should play an activist role in protecting the public health.
Today's meeting is focused squarely on the possible link between ephedrine and Korizis's death. But for Kessler, who has spent the past 20 months being squeezed in the fist of the Republican deregulation revolution, there is an acutely political subtext to any discussion about dietary supplements: the decision by Congress to curtail the F.D.A.'s regulation of dietary supplements was a prelude to its current attack on the F.LD.A., and it served to remind Kessler of America's bone-deep ambivalence toward Government regulators.
But Kessler is an unapologetic enforcer of food and drug laws, and he has a lot to enforce. The F.D.A. regulates, in effect, every supermarket and pharmacy in America, one-fourth of all consumer spending - some $1 trillion of goods, including food, drugs, cosmetics, medical devices and the nation's blood supply. As a result, the F.D.A. is constantly placing itself at the center of controversy. Two weeks ago, one of its advisory panels recommended that the agency approve RU-486, the so-called French abortion pill, for use in America. And now, even as Congress fights to dilute the F.D.A.'s powers, Kessler is trying to expand his agency's reach in a historic direction. Any day now, President Clinton, undoubtedly with Kessler by his side, will announce that the F.D.A. will begin regulating nicotine as a drug. It will be an announcement with profound public health - and political - consequences.
Is Daivd Kessler a Traitor?
Three weeks before Kessler convened his working group on ephedrine, he was called on to perform an unpleasant and difficult task, namely to testify before a House subcommittee whose Republican members seem to consider him the red-bearded equivalent of Ralph Nader.
An hour before the hearing, Kessler met with his deputies to prepare for curve balls. ''Tell me the difference between good hemlock and bad hemlock,'' Kessler said.
''Bad hemlock is the kind that killed Socrates,'' one of his deputies told him. ''Thanks a lot,'' Kessler said. ''What about the oleo margarine standard? Can someone please explaint he margarine standard?''
The mood was good-humored, though not overly so - ''Final Jeopardy'' with a suggestion of auto-da-fe.
We felt the F.D.A.'s Washington office for the short walk to the Capitol. Kessler, ordinarily an even-keeled man with the disarming manner of a pediatrician, which he is by training, turned grim. ''This is as serious as it gets,'' he said quietly, traffice shooting by him unnoticed. ''This is about the weakening of a century's worth of food and drug laws. This is about undermining the safety of the drugs Americans take.''
What troubles Kessler so strongly are three House bills, which, if enacted, could lead to the privatization of a wide slice of the F.D.A.'s drug and medical-device review work, as well as less stringent standards for drug approval and blood safety. They are the House's versions of a more moderate Senate measure that would order the F.D.A. to review all new drug applications within six months or farm the work out to private companies. The bills could lead to overwhelming changes in the way the F.D.A. does business, changes that Kessler fears would imperil public health but that F.D.A. critics say would speed the release of life-saving drugs.
Taking his seat at the witness table, Kessler was quite literally surrounded by foes. Before him were Congressional critics, some of whomo are committed to a nearlibertarian vision of a self-regulating private sector. Behind Kessler, in the audience, sat the private sector itself, a blue-suited battalion of lobbyists representing the drug and medical-device industries, food-additive and dietary-supplement makers, grocery and tobacco conglomerates. All of them would like to see more quiescent F.D.A. than the one Kessler now commands.
Kessler seems to have developed immunity against partisan attack (Newt Gingrich has labeled him a ''thug'' and a ''bully'' and conservative magazines have long treated him like a pinata), and he sat impassively as the Republicans made their opening statements.
''If you are here today to say that no, the F.D.A. will not or cannot make America's access to life-saving drugs the best in the world, don't waste my time,'' warns Richard Burr, a frehman Congreeman from North Carolina.
For deregulationists, Kessler is the personification of overbearing, intrusive Government. This is partly because of his Clinton-anointed role as Public Enemy No. 1 of Big Tobacco. It was Kessler who 18 months ago handed the White House a fat politcal winner by redefining tobacco as a ''pediatric disease,'' not as an issue of adult choice, as the cigarette industry would haveit. And it is because of tobacco that the F.D.A., never before a factor in Presidential politics, has suddenly emerged as a campaign issue.
The White House is trying to protect Kessler's scientific independence - and thus the integrity of his proposal to regulate tobacco - by removing itself, publicly at least, from the process. ''The F.D.A. makes its own decisions,'' says George Stephanopoulos, Clinton's senior adviser. ''The President has taken a lot of heat from tobacco companies for standing by Dr. Kessler and the F.D.A.''
Most of the heat, though, has been absorbed directly by Kessler. In fact, Bob Dole has made a point of saying that if he is elected President, he will fire Kessler. Like many Republicans, Dole says it is Kessler's overall performance, an unacceptably pro-regulation performance, that makes him persona non grata in conservative circles. but Dole is a major financial beneficiary of the tobacco industry. The Republican National Committee has taken in $2.1 million from tobacco interests since 1995, compared with $78,2000 that the Democratic National Committee received. And Dole has been openly critical of Kessler's campaign to regulate cigerettes.
To the delight of the White House, Dole spent parts of June and July questioning nicotine's addictiveness and subsequently found himself drowning in ridicule. Dole and Kessler have aparrently never tangled personally on the issue of tobacco; Kessler, the ostensibly nonpartisan head of an independent agency, who was in fact first appoointed by President Bush, keeps publicly clear of Presidential politics, although the F.D.A.'s rollout of its tobacco regulation program will obviously add momentum to the Clinton campaign.DAPHNE HELLMAN wants a gig. Not that she lacks opportunities to play her eclectic mix of baroque, country-western and pop ballads in public. On any given day, Ms. Hellman, who is 80, can be found plucking one of her seven gilded harps at the Mansfield Hotel, at a local hospital or, if a friend is around to carry her 85-pound instrument, on a subway platform under Bloomingdale's.
But since her 30-year run at the Village Gate (where she played every Tuesday when she was in town) ended with the club's demise two years ago, she has been looking for a steady venue ''where all my wildly different friends will feel comfortable hanging out,'' said Ms. Hellman, a rail-thin, regal woman with close-cropped hair and rugged cheekbones.
She says she has tried playing in other clubs, but none have suited her style. ''The waiters at Cafe Figaro were unfriendly, and they were downright nasty at the Ballroom,'' she said the other day as she fed a litter of gerbils in her East 61st Street town house, which brims with pets, harps and artwork collected over the last half century. A crackly radio her mother gave her in the 1940's stays tuned to a jazz station, and the walls of her living room are covered with paintings by friends like Saul Steinberg, William Burroughs and Warren Miller. She refuses to give up her vintage telephones (''I hate Touch-Tone and I refuse to get call waiting,'' she said).
On a coffee table next to her tattered sofa sits a 25-year-old African starling who copies and competes with the yelps of her two Pomeranians, Katie and Woollybear. ''I just love animals,'' said Ms. Hellman, who often travels the world with Earthwatch expeditions observing lemurs in Madagascar or bats in Australia. She smokes nearly a pack of Salems a day, and except for a touch of arthritis, is in perfect health. ''Drink a little, nap a lot,'' is her motto for longevity.
Born on Park Avenue and raised in Morristown, N.J., Ms. Hellman could have enjoyed a life filled with long lunches and society benefits. After finishing her formal education at Chapin, she was a debutante in 1934 and dabbled in acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and the Royal Academy in London.
At the insistence of her strong-willed mother, Ms. Hellman took up the harp at 12, and first performed at a Presbyterian church in New Jersey two years later. ''Daphne could have played anywhere she wanted, but she decided to explore the kind of material rarely heard from a harp,'' said Lyn Christie, a jazz bassist who has been playing with Ms. Hellman since 1968 as a member of her band, Hellman's Angels.
Her father, a banker born in Ireland, disapproved when his daughter played until dawn at clubs like Billy Rose's Diamond Horseshoe, the Ruban Bleu and the Hotel New Yorker, where she was a member of Ving Merlin's All-Girl Band.
She says it is the harp that keeps her going, helping her through the depression that dulls her energy from time to time. On the rare days that she does not perform, Ms. Hellman practices at home to keep her fingers ''from stiffening up.''
To move her harp, she relies on one of her three lodgers or the kindness of doormen and strangers. Although she doesn't need money (she is a generous supporter of the arts) she earns $30 when she plays at the Hotel Wales on Madison Avenue at 92d Street. On subway platforms, she says, she has made as much as $80 in three hours. She's made four recordings for small labels, and is working on a fifth.
At 21, she married Harry Bull, the editor of Town & Country, but the marriage ended when she fell for a New Yorker writer, Geoffrey Hellman, whom she wed in Reno in 1941. A few years later, they bought the house on East 61st Street for $50,000 and held frequent parties attended by writers, actors and artists. Summers were spent in Provincetown with Tennessee Williams, Hugh Shannon and Norman Mailer, who remains a close friend. Last year, at one of her parties, Ms. Hellman surprised everyone by beating Mr. Mailer at a game of Ping-Pong. ''I've never seen her happier,'' he said. ''She was so happy it made me happy, and I don't like to lose.''
After 20 years of marriage, Mr. Hellman ran off with another woman. Ms. Hellman married Hsio-Wen Shih in 1961, whom she described as ''a brilliant architect who drank too much.'' Although their marriage soon fell apart, she retains Shih as her legal name because, she says, ''it's easier to write on checks than Hellman.''
Ms. Hellman has three children (all of whom are now musicians) but admits she was a distracted mother. ''I was too busy with jobs and affairs,'' she said. ''I guess I did O.K. because they turned out all right.''
After breaking her wrist for the third time, she finally heeded the advice of friends and gave up in-line skating last year. But she remains an adventurer and never stays long at any of her three homes (the others are on Cape Cod and St. James on Long Island). She keeps a harp at each place and has another stored in Paris, where she plays on sidewalks; another stays in the van she takes on road trips.
With rush-hour crowds swarming all around last week, Ms. Hellman sat on the R train platform at 59th Street strumming a rococo version of ''King of the Road.'' Wearing a floral-print dress she picked up at a Parisian thrift shop, she concentrated at the strings while commuters stopped in their tracks. Armando Ortiz, a 44-year-old psychologist from Queens, passed up his train to hear Ms. Hellman finish the Beatles' ''Yellow Submarine.'' ''Now this is a reason to hang out in the subway,'' he said.
Half an hour later, Ms. Hellman was playing to a nearly empty lounge at the Hotel Wales, where she performs several times a week. ''Actually, I prefer playing in the subway,'' she said after finishing her set. ''People pay attention, but then they drift along when they have somewhere else to go. That's the kind of audience I like.''
MAKING IT WORKWHEN Hootie and the Blowfish step onto the stage tonight at the Jones Beach amphitheater on Long Island, those in the first 10 rows may be tempted to give a standing ovation before the music starts.
A month ago, the group upended a scheme to parcel off the best seats to scalpers, who were charging up to $150 a ticket. Not only did the rock stars nullify the scalped tickets and resell the seats at their $25 face value, they also asked the New York State Attorney General, Dennis C. Vacco, to investigate.
''It came down to a matter of stealing,'' said Rusty Harmon, the group's manager. ''It's just not right for someone to wait in line for hours and still not be able to get a seat better than row 11.''
Strike another blow for fans' rights, at least for the mass of people who have neither the wallets nor the contacts to get their hands on the hot tickets of the moment.
Within the last two years, several rock groups, including Pearl Jam, have lowered concert prices and made more prime seats available to the general public. The producers of the smash Broadway show ''Rent,'' which has a top price of $70, have set aside seats in the first two rows at each performance for same-day purchase at $20. And the managers of the wildly popular Picasso exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York recently extended the hours and lowered admission prices on certain weekends -- rather than increasing prices, as the laws of supply and demand would allow -- to accommodate the crowds.
The motivation for doing good ranges from a chance to score public relations points to keeping the faith with grass-roots supporters. In Hootie's case, it was the band members remembering that they were part of the great mosh pit not so long ago.
And it is no small matter that the scalpers, not the performers, keep the steep surcharges, which are illegal in most states.
''The tragedy of this is that anyone should be able to get an affordable ticket to any event,'' Mr. Vacco said in a recent interview. ''But that's not happening. We're investigating what happened with the Hootie and the Blowfish concert, and I'm not going to rule out that my office will be able to charge people for wrongdoing.''
Whether being shut out of a Hootie concert is the stuff of tragedy is debatable. But one thing seems clear: as much as some entertainers and law enforcement officials want to level the playing field at the box office, strong market forces are working against them, and scalping is probably here to stay. It can be argued that the market, including scalpers, is working at its efficient best, given that one group of customers is choosing to compete for scarce tickets by using its cash while another group is using what it has lots of: time.
After all, not everyone can sit up front, or even find a spot at the back at the most-coveted events, and there is no shortage of high rollers willing to pay several times face value for a choice seat at short notice.
That leaves the fans who wait in line or who mail in requests months ahead of time out in the cold unless the artist or promoter protects them, and most do not. The sweet seats, the first 10 rows of a theater or concert hall, are usually snapped up by street scalpers or ticket brokers.
Scalping is illegal in most places, but enforcement is spotty and penalties modest.
Typically, licensed brokers are allowed to charge a small service fee for reselling tickets they have acquired legally, by waiting in line or ordering through the mail, as everyone else does, and paying face value. At most Broadway plays, individuals can buy up to 19 tickets at a time. More than that is a group sale, from which the sweet seats are excluded. The resale markup in New York is limited to $5 a ticket, or 10 percent above face value, whichever is greater.
But some brokers charge far more, especially when they get their tickets illegally, as apparently was the case at the Hootie concert. That happens when a box office clerk secretly sells blocks of prime seats to a broker at a premium. The broker then sells them at whatever the market will bear.
Because the penalties are relatively small (in New York, a $350 maximum fine and rarely imposed jail time of up to six months), many prosecutors have decided that it does not pay to go after individual scalpers. It is hard to make a case, they say, against people on the inside to cut off the flood of scalped tickets at the source. The solution, they say, is to raise the penalties.
''I want to have the crime bumped up from a misdemeanor to a felony,'' Mr. Vacco said, a change that could bring a $5,000 fine and additional jail time. He added that he may push for legislation soon.
The rules against scalping vary from state to state. Though a broker in one state selling tickets to an event in another state is supposed to honor the other jurisdiction's rules, in practice compliance is largely voluntary. Some states, like California, allow brokers to charge any price they can get, with minor restrictions.
As for legal ticket prices, which have been soaring for years, the forces opposing change are no less substantial. Pearl Jam's high-profile crusade to keep prices down hardly set off a stampede toward discounting. Tickets for even a Broadway dud can still go for $65. It cost as much as $1,500 to hear Luciano Pavarotti and his colleagues at the Three Tenors concert two weeks ago at Giants Stadium.
Promoters of events from Broadway musicals to professional sports balk at the notion of slicing prices. The money the tickets bring in finances the next production or pays for a new player, expensive transactions that could force prices even higher.
Still, enough crosscurrents are at work to divide the entertainment world into three camps: a few who aggressively try to make the ticket process less expensive and more equitable; a few more who straddle the issue and usually charge top dollar but sometimes give discounts or perform for free, and everyone else.Are accountants professionals who exercise independent judgment, or do they just follow rules and checklists?
That question, at heart, is at the base of many disputes over accounting rules. And it is part of what may be the dumbest ethics investigation ever initiated by a profession.
In accounting, it is often possible to account for a transaction in two or more different ways. The trend has been for the Financial Accounting Standards Board to set rules that go into great detail, so that the accountant has little or no discretion.
An alternative might be to set forth some general principles, and then let professional accountants decide the details on a case-by-case basis. But that raises fears that accountants might let companies get away with dubious bookkeeping because to be tough would be to risk having the client flee to another firm that would be more flexible.
Some corporate officials, speaking privately, see the emphasis on super-detailed rules as a way of accountants trying to get out from under both pressure from clients and any legal liability, which might come if they allowed a company to be flexible in ways that, in hindsight, did not seem wise.
One of the accounting profession's most visible and vigorous critics, Abraham Briloff, raised such concerns in criticizing a proposed rule on when companies should consolidate their results with related companies. Mr. Briloff, an emeritus professor of accountancy at Baruch College of the City University of New York, said the proposed standard was ''a book of rules endeavoring to provide a most detailed road map to account for affiliated enterprises,'' and warned that such specificity would ''detract from the auditor's professional responsibility to exercise his, her or its professional judgment.'' It would also, he said, permit companies to ''contrive transactions which will somehow accommodate the rules, all the while perverting economic reality.''
Mr. Briloff, who is 79, has been criticizing other accountants for decades, frequently in the pages of Barron's Business and Financial Weekly, where he has ripped into companies and their auditors for distorting reality. In the process, he has earned more than a few enemies among accountants. (Full disclosure department: The author of this column was Mr. Briloff's editor at Barron's for several years.)
Now Mr. Briloff, who operates a small accounting firm with his daughter, Leonore, is facing an investigation of his own professional ethics, which seems to stem from his outspokenness rather than from any suspicion he has ill-served his clients.
This furor began when the Briloff firm was subjected to a ''peer review'' by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, and found wanting on a technical issue that Mr. Briloff found absurd. Rather than just comply, he mocked the peer-review process in a letter to the association that was printed in Accounting Today, a trade publication. He said the review was carried out by robots ''programmed with check lists'' that they apply mechanically.
Some found his comments hilarious. Others, it appears, were infuriated. Someone -- the association won't say who -- filed an ethics complaint based on Mr. Briloff's letter. An investigation was duly started.
The issue, if it can be called that, is whether Mr. Briloff was unethical in not requiring a client to sign a letter certifying that the information provided was accurate. Given that the client had signed a tax return, under penalty of perjury, based on the same information, Mr. Briloff saw such a letter as superfluous. The association, which coincidentally recently honored Mr. Briloff for his work in accounting education, seems to be unimpressed with that argument.
It would be nice to believe that the state of accounting ethics is so high that Mr. Briloff is among the most serious transgressors. But it looks more like someone wounded by his criticism is seeking revenge.
MARKET WATCHTHAT'S in a mutual fund? Not always what its name suggests.
Earlier this year, for example, the Fidelity Fifty fund owned contracts on the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index and the Mid-Cap 400 index. In fact, these were the fund's largest holdings then, leading analysts at Morningstar Inc., the fund researchers in Chicago, to nickname it the Fidelity 950 fund. The name implies the fund is concentrated, which, at that time anyway, it was not.
Similarly, Founders Blue Chip owns out-of-favor growth stocks, especially in the biotechnology and retail industries; only five of the fund's top 25 holdings recently were true blue chips. AIM Value recently sported a market-level price-earnings ratio. And Morgan Grenfell Small Companies was 23 percent invested in bonds.
In fact, up to 35 percent of a fund can be invested in something other than what the fund name suggests. That's something the Securities and Exchange Commission has been giving a lot of thought to lately.
Among the proposals that the commission has been considering -- others are a shorter prospectus and a better way to measure risk -- is one to increase the percentage of particular securities that a fund must own before it can assume that moniker.
It's unclear whether the commission will recommend an increase from today's 65 percent to 75 percent, or even 90 percent because the proposal is still at a preliminary stage, said Heidi Stam, associate director in the commission's division of investment management. The S.E.C. staff hopes to have the proposal completed by fall to take to the full commission, she said.
Scudder Imposes Fee on Annuities
Watch out for more fees on annuities. Scudder, Stevens & Clark has added a marketing fee on its investments when they are wrapped in an annuity sold by an insurer, bank or other company. Annuities offer the tax deferral of an insurance policy with a broad range of investment choices.
Scudder received permission to levy the charge, called a 12b-1 marketing fee, from the Securities and Exchange Commission. Such fees are common on mutual funds, but not on investments embedded in annuities. At one time, Neuberger & Berman had such a fee on its annuity product, but the company discontinued the charge in the spring of 1995.
Though other fund companies could follow Scudder's lead, Jennifer T. Strickland, editor of Morningstar Variable Annuities/Life, said she doubted that many would. No other company now levies such a fee, and ''it's a mistake in terms of public relations,'' she said.
''Even many insurance companies aren't comfortable with them,'' she added.
Scudder said it had asked the S.E.C. for permission to charge a 12b-1 fee because of rising marketing and distribution costs. The fee applies to five of the seven portfolios of the Scudder Variable Life Insurance fund, which is sold through insurance companies. The Scudder Horizon variable annuities will not be subject to the additional fee.
The fee will be determined by each insurance company, Scudder says, but cannot exceed a quarter of 1 percent of the assets each year.
Piling on the fees could be enough to ''sour people on variable annuities,'' Ms. Strickland said, ''because the fees on annuities are already complex and this just adds another level.''
Variable-rate annuities, whose returns are not guaranteed but are based on the performance of underlying market investments, are the fastest-growing area of the insurance industry. Total expenses on variable annuities now average about 2 percent of assets, according to Morningstar, which put the mortality or insurance portion at 1.12 percent, the administrative portion at 0.16 and the fund portion at 0.69 to 0.79.
New Ombudsman
Having a problem with your stockbroker but feel you didn't get a fair hearing from the National Association of Securities Dealers?
The association has created an ombudsman's office to handle accusations of staff misconduct and similar complaints. Bernard Thompson, the assistant director for market regulation at N.A.S.D. Regulation, the association's oversight unit, has assumed the newly created position. You can reach Mr. Thompson's office by calling (888) 700-0028 or by E-mail at ombuds@nasd.com.
New Fund
Scudder High Yield Bond aims to provide high current income using below investment-grade domestic debt securities, mostly medium-term corporate bonds.CAROL SCHNABEL'S grandmother had just died, and Ms. Schnabel, a handweaver from Vermont, was near the end of the long drive down to New York City for the funeral when she heard BeDUMM, BeDUMM, the unsettling sound of the wheels of her Saab 9000 CS hitting a pothole on the Cross Bronx Expressway. The entrails of her car clattered faintly and the steering went awry. It was a Saturday in March 1994 and Ms. Schnabel could not scare up an authorized Saab dealer, so she thumbed through the Yellow Pages in search of a mechanic and settled on a company listed as ''AAA Midtown,'' on West 50th Street. They sent a tow truck right away.
Ms. Schnabel did not realize it then, but her car troubles were just beginning.
AAA Midtown had nothing to do with the American Automobile Association, an auto club that provides members emergency road repairs and a list of approved tow truck operators. AAA Midtown was run by one Motke Barnes, a mechanic who told Ms. Schnabel she needed a new oil pan. Then he called her back to say the Saab's axle was broken and its transmission damaged. He could fix everything, he said, for $4,132.25. One more thing: cash or certified check only.
''When I drove home it didn't feel remarkably different,'' Ms. Schnabel said. ''It was still wobbly, but I had my mother and kids to get home and I had no recourse. When I got home I called my aunt and asked her, 'Is there any way to stop a certified check?' '' There wasn't.
Back in Vermont, her mechanic, her insurance company and her car dealer confirmed her nagging suspicions: she'd been had. Mr. Barnes had not replaced any parts, not the oil pan, not the axle, not the transmission. About the most he had done, they told her, was a little hammering on a rim. And the insurance company was not rushing to reimburse her $4,132.25.
''I was a classic case,'' Ms. Schnabel said. ''A woman from out of town down for a funeral.''
What happened to Ms. Schnabel, law-enforcement officials say, was a typical Motke Barnes scam. In a city where horror stories about unscrupulous mechanics are as common as gridlock in midtown, the exploits of Mr. Barnes, 30, who claims to have served in the Israeli Army intelligence service before coming to New York, put him in a league of his own.
Inspectors from the State Department of Motor Vehicles, which oversees auto repair shops, and investigators from the Mayor's Office of Midtown Enforcement say that in the last two years Mr. Barnes ripped off dozens of unsuspecting drivers with a modus operandi that rarely varied. He would tow their disabled cars to his shop, claim to perform costly -- often unauthorized -- repairs, then hold their cars hostage until they met his exorbitant price. When they did, they usually found that the major adjustment Mr. Barnes had made was to their wallets. Customers who expressed dissatisfaction with his work say Mr. Barnes would smile sweetly and tell them, ''Complain to whoever you want.''
Complain they did. Since 1994, Mr. Barnes became the scourge of the motor vehicles department, court records show, eating up hundreds of hours of inspectors' time, skipping court appearances and ignoring fine after fine. The department, an administrative agency, lacked the power to enforce its orders. It was a constant source of frustration. ''We don't have padlocks and we don't have guns,'' said Robert Menak, the director of the department's office for Manhattan and the Bronx. ''We're an administrative body.''
Whenever the department suspended or revoked Mr. Barnes's registration to repair cars, he simply re-incorporated under a new name. ''AAA Auto Repair in Midtown'' became ''AAA Auto Diagnostics of Midtown,'' ''Upper East Side Auto Repair'' ''Upper West Side Auto Diagnostic Center'' and so on. Anything to throw off investigators.
It worked until last year, when Mr. Barnes made automotive history: his West 50th Street garage became the first repair shop ever shuttered by a city law usually used to close prostitution houses and crack dens. ''The state kept taking away his license and he kept operating,'' said William H. Daly, the director of the Mayor's Office of Midtown Enforcement, which led the civil action that closed the garage under the Nuisance Abatement Law. ''He was the mechanic from hell.''
Besides closing his repair shop, Mr. Barnes signed a settlement in State Supreme Court in Manhattan agreeing to pay Ms. Schnabel and 25 other former customers a total of $22,000, which is 80 percent of the money they paid. The first of four quarterly installment checks were sent out in June.
But another important part of the settlement of the civil suit against Mr. Barnes appears to have failed.
He agreed to refrain from ''conducting, maintaining, using, occupying, leasing, providing financial assistance for, aiding and abetting or in any way permitting the repair of motor vehicles'' without a valid registration. Officials say they are unlikely to grant him that privilege anytime soon.
But last week, a reporter found Mr. Barnes working in an East Harlem garage marked by a Day-Glo sign that says ''Big Apple Towing and Repair.'' A sign in the window of the garage, at 505 East 116th Street promises, in English and Spanish, ''We guarantee all our work.'' Pasted on phone booths and lampposts throughout the neighborhood are red stickers advertising towing and repair services. Calls to the telephone number on the stickers are answered by Mr. Barnes with the brusque greeting, ''Service.''
Law-enforcement officials say they are aware that he is working in the garage, almost certainly in violation of his court settlement. ''We're investigating that,'' said a senior official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Mr. Barnes declined to be interviewed. ''How much you will pay me?'' he asked, standing in the driveway of the garage. ''No money, no interview.'' When told he would not be paid, he threatened a reporter and a photographer with pit bulls and said, ''Don't come into my shop.'' When they continued to stand on the sidewalk outside, he dropped his shorts and mooned them, then threw large pieces of metal and glass at them as he chased them along 116th Street, all the while shouting, ''I'm going to kill you.''
Motke, Mortke or Monty?
Who is Motke Barnes? He is, victims and investigators say, an elusive, enigmatic figure who uses many aliases including Mortke Barnes, Monty Barnes, Monti Barnes, Monty Doval and Dave Ruth. Those who have done business with him recall three things: his ready smile, his attention to the bottom line and his steadfast belief that he can schmooze his way out of any situation.
He immigrated to the United States from Israel in 1990. Later, in a sworn affidavit that was part of his court defense, he stated: ''Prior to coming to the United States I spent four years in Israeli Army Intelligence, from which I was honorably discharged after compiling an excellent record of service and reaching the highest rank of non-commissioned officers.'' (A spokesman for the Israeli Defense Forces said Government policy forbade him from confirming whether Mr. Barnes's statement was true.)Rebecca Goldstein was ecstatic in June when she discovered that she had won a MacArthur Foundation ''genius'' award. The award, handed out annually to people who have made extraordinary contributions in their fields, meant that Ms. Goldstein would receive $285,000 over the next five years.
For Ms. Goldstein, 46, who quit teaching philosophy at Barnard College in 1986 to write novels and short stories, the award couldn't have come at a better time. While her five books have received literary raves, their philosophical bent has hardly assured widespread readership. In a short story in a 1993 collection called ''Strange Attractors,'' for example, Ms. Goldstein described a mathematician who spent her time studying the geometry of soap bubbles.
And while Ms. Goldstein's husband, Sheldon, 48, brings in a steady income as a mathematics professor at Rutgers University, his salary could not forestall what Ms. Goldstein calls a ''spiraling downward'' of the family's finances after she left Barnard. Nor could the $8,000 she has earned each semester in recent years as an adjunct professor at Columbia University.
Then come the bills. Besides a $900-a-month mortgage, there are large outlays for the couple's daughters: Yael, 18, and Danielle, 11. The Goldsteins, who live in Highland Park, N.J., in a house Ms. Goldstein describes as ''big and old, with lots of animals and dust,'' have spent liberally on the two children through the years, on everything from parochial school to ballet and music lessons.
Now, even bigger costs loom. Yael starts Harvard in the fall, with the total tab estimated at $125,000. And their second car, a 1978 Ford, is on its last legs.
Without any family money to fall back on, the couple welcomed the MacArthur award with what the winner called ''undifferentiated relief.'' Of course, the award was a moving tribute to the hard work and high skills of Ms. Goldstein, a cantor's daughter who grew up in hand-me-downs. But the money also promises a financial rescue for the couple.
A closer look at the Goldsteins' finances with the help of two certified financial planners, however, suggests that they should not be in such dire shape. While Ms. Goldstein would not specify her books' earnings, she said the couple's total annual income was a bit over $100,000 -- not counting an estimated $31,000 a year, after taxes, from the MacArthur award. Nor do the couple squander money. Their biggest splurge each year is a three-day skiing vacation.
The couple are financially hampered in one way, though. Ms. Goldstein, pondering philosophy and fiction, just hasn't paid much attention to money. And the couple neither plan their finances together nor communicate regularly about money.
Ms. Goldstein lays her personal attitude toward money to the influence of certain philosophers.
''In 'The Republic,' Plato described a very socialist society, where money was, as much as possible, to be avoided,'' she said. And Spinoza ''had a high-minded disdain for worldly affairs,'' she said, ''and looked at things under the mode of eternity. When you're thinking about eternity, it's pretty hard to do comparison shopping.''
She is also just plain bored by the topic. ''Whenever he talked about money,'' she said, referring to her husband, ''my eyes would always glaze over.'' This inattention to money, she added, is ''why I'm so vague on our finances right now.''
MR. GOLDSTEIN is more active and knowledgeable about investing than his wife, and his savings at work have helped the couple gather a retirement portfolio well into six figures. But he is not on top of all the important issues; neither he nor his wife knew whether he had disability insurance through his job, for example. (He does, according to Rutgers.) And, anyway, their cash flow is not impressive. The couple have lived beyond their six-figure income for years, and they do not do any regular budgeting or financial planning.
Moreover, with the Goldsteins, sometimes the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. After ferreting out what appeared to be all of the family's financial basics recently, Ms. Goldstein was amazed to learn from her husband -- he arrived back last week from several weeks in Europe -- that he has been sitting on a jointly held nest egg that reaches back as far as stocks he got at his bar mitzvah.
Mr. Goldstein often failed to tell her about money matters, she said in seeking to explain the unknown assets, because he knew she felt badly about not producing a regular income after becoming a fiction writer.
As it turns out, the Goldsteins, who do not want to disclose the size of the nest egg, have decided to reserve it for possible medical care for their elderly mothers.
In practical terms, the couple's financial absent-mindedness has meant big debts.
To help defray rising expenses, Mr. Goldstein took out an $80,000 home equity line of credit in the late 1980's. The couple pay about $800 a month on the adjustable-rate loan, which now charges about 10 percent interest. Until recently, the Goldsteins had a balance of $66,000 on the loan, approaching the limit of their credit line.
Ms. Goldstein, who remembers her parents as ''never, ever being in debt,'' used her first MacArthur check to shave almost $15,000 off the loan.
''I'm so desperate to be out of debt,'' she said. Even ignoring the mortgage, the family has been in debt since Yael was born.
Ms. Goldstein isn't the only one worried about the debt. So are the planners who reviewed the couple's finances, Peg Eddy of Creative Capital Management in San Diego and Beverly Tanner of Tanner Financial Group in Larkspur, Calif.SMALL is not a word in Linda Wachner's vocabulary.
Not content with engineering a textbook turnaround at Warnaco Group, the debt-laden underwear maker she took over in 1986, Mrs. Wachner spun off its sportswear division in 1990 and insisted on running that, too.
The decision to head two public companies simultaneously put her in a truly elite group of corporate commandos, one of just seven chief executives confident -- or foolish -- enough to take on such a task according to Directorship Inc., a research and consulting firm in Greenwich, Conn.
But now, her efforts to reunite the two companies has Mrs. Wachner tripping over herself. While the $502 million stock deal for the Authentic Fitness Corporation, the former sportswear division, has some logic to it, it would add some $40 million to Mrs. Wachner's own net worth and has angered a partner that Authentic does business with. Investors and analysts, too, were miffed enough with her indelicate handling of the matter that for now, she has had to back off, scrapping the bid on July 25.
Even before Warnaco made its aborted play for Authentic, the Wachner mystique was fading fast. Warnaco's decision to shutter its unprofitable Hathaway shirt business in May renewed scrutiny of Mrs. Wachner's full-figured compensation package. Critics clucked that half of the $16.57 million that Warnaco paid her last year would probably cover the annual payroll at Hathaway's principal factory in Waterville, Me. ''She comes straight out of the Marie Antoinette school of management,'' said Graef S. Crystal, a compensation expert who concluded recently that Mrs. Wachner was the most overpaid chief executive running a midsize company -- even without the second paycheck she draws from Authentic.
Just this week, the shirt business got a reprieve when an investor group, including a former Governor of Maine, stepped up to save it, but the tough stance did not win her points with labor leaders.
Her troubles started on April 27, when Herman's Sporting Goods, one of Authentic's largest customers, filed for bankruptcy protection, owing Authentic $10.6 million. Mrs. Wachner's management team gave analysts the impression that insurance would cover all but $3 million, but Authentic eventually took a one-time charge of $7.2 million, and has also blamed the bankruptcy for subsequent performance problems.
Then, on June 6, Warnaco announced its Authentic bid. To many, it smacked of self-dealing: Mrs. Wachner was steering Warnaco, a company in which she owns a 12.8 percent stake, to buy a company in which she has a 12.5 percent interest.
THIS was not the first time Mrs. Wachner stood accused of self-dealing. Authentic was Warnaco's ''activewear'' division until 1990, when Mrs. Wachner sold it to an investor group that included the Pentland Group P.L.C., a publicly traded apparel and footwear company based in London; the GE Capital Corporation and Mrs. Wachner herself. The price: $80 million, or about $2.54 a share.
The two companies have never quite cut the cord. Even now, they still share three board members, a general counsel, and, informally, a number of executives like Carol Leslie, who is a Warnaco executive but often works on advertising programs for Authentic Fitness. Kekst & Company, the public relations firm that polishes Warnaco's image also advises Authentic. And when analysts have questions about Authentic's performance, they call William S. Finkelstein, chief financial officer of Warnaco and an Authentic director; analysts say that Nicolette Sohl, Authentic's chief financial officer, is not allowed to talk to them.
Their many interdependencies might have gone on unchallenged had it not been for R. Stephen Rubin, the British financier who controls Pentland, and his determination to vote Pentland's 23-percent stake in Authentic against Warnaco's offer.
He and Mrs. Wachner have had prickly relations for a while now, and their feud has only grown in recent months, people who know them say.
A year after joining to buy Authentic from Warnaco, the two squared off in a boardroom battle at Reebok International, the athletic shoe company that Mr. Rubin had helped start with a $77,000 investment.
Mr. Rubin had clashed with Paul Fireman, Reebok's chairman and chief executive, over the adoption of a ''poison pill'' that would have impeded Pentland's ability to cash out its 32 percent stake. Mrs. Wachner, a Reebok director, sided with Mr. Fireman, snubbing the man who had just helped her buy Authentic. Mr. Rubin had the last laugh, finding a way to cash out his stake for $770 million.
More recently, there have been what Mrs. Wachner calls ''little skirmishes'' between them.
Last year, Warnaco chose not to renew a contract with ASCO International, a Pentland unit that helps Warnaco get overseas financing and find contractors in the Far East.
Mrs. Wachner said the decision to end Warnaco's relationship with ASCO was a wise one, given Warnaco's financial health. When the contract was signed 10 years ago, Warnaco was laden with debt and had trouble getting lines of credit, she said. Now, the company has no difficulty obtaining financing. Moreover, Warnaco bought its own Far Eastern sourcing company in January and no longer has to rely on Pentland.
Still, Mr. Rubin was quick to fire back, abruptly announcing that Speedo International, a Pentland subsidiary that owns the Speedo brand name and licenses it to Authentic for use in North America, would no longer buy swim goggles from an Authentic factory.
Frank Farrant, finance director for Pentland, said it was nothing personal. ''If you can buy goggles cheaper somewhere else, you'll do it,'' he said. ''The relationship has been a pretty affable one.''
Certainly, any rifts seemed patched up by June 6, when Mrs. Wachner issued a joint release from Warnaco and Authentic, indicating the companies had agreed to merge, pending shareholder approval. ''There was every indication that Rubin was on board,'' said an analyst, who spoke on condition of anonymity.THE flight to London was set to leave at 8:50 P.M., but hours later the MD-11 sat helpless on a Chicago runway waiting for a wicked lightning storm to finish its tantrum. It was as if the sky was trying to tell us something, the way it crackled in fits over the tarmac. We did not know that T.W.A. Flight 800 had fallen in flames into the Atlantic Ocean shortly before our flight was to take off.
At Heathrow, while changing planes for the final leg to Nice, we learned what had happened. The flight attendant greeted passengers with copies of The Evening Standard, its headline in full cry about a jet exploding and its picture of a T.W.A. 747. Content in that American sense of immunity, my husband and I assumed the explosion was somewhere far from the States and settled in our seats. As passengers began turning The Standard's pages, you could tell the Europeans from the Americans -- the nervous shrugs of fatalistic acceptance versus open-jawed shock and horror. There were murmurs on board that ''this was the safest plane in the world'' and ''how could this happen at J.F.K.?'' I had the hollow realization that we were on the other side of the Atlantic, deciphering the unthinkable off Long Island and wondering if we would get home alive. And who was the enemy now?
From that moment, the trip was no longer just a vacation but a vigil -- CNN upon rising (live coverage from the wreckage site), the quick run for foccacia and The Herald Tribune, if any copies were left. We were visiting a cousin of my husband's, a physician living in northern Italy near the French border, and our routine conversations now turned to what could simply be called The Latest. ''They say it could be a missile now,'' one of us would announce. There would be the stoic debate about the unreadiness of America to deal with terrorism or the implausibility of a missile attack, each of us straining to act like we weren't all that worried.
Ten days into the trip, the bomb exploded in Atlanta. What kind of place were we returning to? Who could be doing this? We began the trip back home 13 days after the lightning storm at O'Hare. And I, a reporter who had covered plane crashes without blinking, who can identify from the air a 727 from a DC-10, and who, as a pilot's daughter, did not hesitate to signal a flight attendant when the flaps weren't lowered on an MD-80 preparing for takeoff, was for the first time frightened boarding a plane. People who fly a lot figure they can protect themselves by avoiding planes with troubled safety records or airlines cited for lax maintenance, but there is nothing anyone can do to avoid a missile or bomb. I could only hope that the mercurial American system of surveillance had awakened to the threat and did its job.
And so at Heathrow, where we boarded an American Airlines flight back home, I relished the interrogation the way you anticipate an interview for a job you're overqualified for, indignant when my carry-on bags were not searched after passing through the X-ray. Surely this could not be enough to separate the terrorist-suicide bombers from the ordinary people, the evil from the good. The mind was racing. Maybe we shouldn't have locked the luggage we had checked. If we left it open, it would be easier for the authorities to search, but also easier for someone to plant an explosive. They would rip it apart if they needed to. Please let them do whatever they must. In that I took a weak comfort.
After the plane took off, suddenly nothing mattered but altitude. I sighed with each 10,000-foot gain. At 35,000 feet, I could talk to my husband again. No bomb had been triggered. We were safe.
Until we got to Chicago, where the surveillance I had longed to see on departure kicked in on arrival instead. There, my husband, the college professor, and I, the journalist, in our J. Crew phase, were detained for 45 minutes at the red zone of customs, forced to unlock the bags that Heathrow saw fit to pass through unopened. We watched the rest of the passengers breeze through a cordon on the other side of the room, while a Customs agent asked my Ph.D. husband, ''Have you ever been convicted of a felony?'' before picking through my cosmetics case with rubber-gloved fingers, through the lotion, the melatonin, and on to the luggage with the dried pasta, the bottles of olive oil and espresso cups, pulling out my husband's running shoes and shaking them, asking us again where we said we worked. All of which would have been understandable, even a cause for relief, if it had happened before takeoff. Or if, on arrival, we had not been the only ones with our bags strewn open and being asked about felonies and if -- it's too maddening to think about -- we had not been black.
This was no time, I thought, for stereotypes and profiles with planes blowing up in the sky and bombs going off in Atlanta and Oklahoma City and who knows where next. At times like these, everyone is suspect. They seemed to know that at Heathrow, where they had not needed to rip open our bags to insure the safety of the plane. But a Customs agent dug through our suitcases just the same to make America safe from the two of us, perhaps the only black people on the plane.
A SENIOR Customs official acknowledged some days later: ''That process should have taken all of 30 seconds. Once you establish you're U.S. citizenry, that's it, you're done.'' He said the agency had done diversity training. ''We try to work with people, but people are people,'' he said.
The anger that day came not because I was stopped but because if I'm the only one being stopped, who might be slipping through? Cases where officials have trouble seeing whites as suspects could be called a crime category of their own -- both Susan Smith, who killed her children in South Carolina, and Charles Stewart, who killed his wife in Boston, knew enough about how the culture works to blame black men. In the Oklahoma bombing, the first fingers pointed to Middle Easterners.
The evening we got home, my husband began unpacking. He dug out the olive oil, the pasta, the running shoes the customs agent found so suspicious, and delivered the good news. ''Well, I'm happy to report that the espresso cups made it back in one piece,'' he told me. I wished the same could be said for our sense of security.SOMEWHERE between the constant carping of 30,000 journalists from around the world, bus drivers afraid to drive their buses on the freeway and the pipe bomb at Centennial Park, the same thought occurred to a lot of Atlantans early last week -- what have we got ourselves into?
But as the Olympics lumbers to a close much like a soap opera with overwrought twists and turns but a triumphant ending, cities around the country are salivating at the thought of being in Atlanta's shoes.
Their reasons vary from ego to economics but they often come down to this: at a time when taxpayers are tight with their money and great civic empire builders have gone the way of the Olympic star without a product to endorse, the Olympics has become for cities the biggest single economic event on the planet.
Move Over, Izzy
''The Olympics have replaced the World Fair as the new gimmick of city building,'' said Mitchell L. Moss, the director of the Taub Urban Research Center at New York University. New York is one of the cities where there has been substantial talk of bidding for the 2008 Summer Olympics.
''We haven't had a major new highway or park in New York since Robert Moses,'' Mr. Moss said. ''The Olympics would be the 21st-century equivalent of Robert Moses, the one way you can mobilize support for massive public investment'' (which is what Mr. Moses last did with the 1964-65 World's Fair as his vehicle).
Mayor Rudolph W. Guiliani is forming a group of city officials and business leaders to consider bringing the 2008 Olympics to New York City. Daniel Doctoroff, a financier who has begun efforts to stir up interest, said: ''Seeing what they did in Atlanta and transposing New York on the event,'' he said, ''I'm even more convinced New York would be the perfect host for the Olympics.''
Expressions of interest have also surfaced in Boston, Chicago and other cities. A Houston businessman, Jim (Mattress Mac) McIngvale, best known for late-night TV ads, was here hosting a splashy party to drum up interest in a Texas Olympics in 2008, much to the dismay of the officially designated Houston International Sports Committee, which is hoping eventually to land the Olympics.
Of course, much of what potential Olympic hosts saw in Atlanta wasn't so encouraging. Early in the Games, reporters from around the world lampooned the city as tacky, incompetent and in over its head, although the criticisms softened over time. The pipe bomb incident, which is still unsolved, was a chilly hint of the kind of large-scale terrorism that can occur at such a venue.
But experts say the Olympics offers at least three huge inducements.
One is the economic payoff -- from $4 billion to $5 billion in Atlanta -- of the single biggest single tourist event in the world.
The second is an unparalleled opportunity to draw attention to the host city.
The third is the ability to mobilize public support for rebuilding roads and bridges, building new stadiums and housing, and rethinking urban planning in a way that is otherwise almost impossible in today's fractured, financially constricted cities.
Never Again
The problem with the vision of the Olympics as a grand engine of true urban renewal is that it relies on a game plan devised in Los Angeles in 1984 and refined by Atlanta in 1996 of having the Games totally supported by private funds. (Actually, federal, state and local contributions for security and other needs surpassed a half billion dollars).
That plan resulted in so much commercialism in Atlanta that the International Olympic Committee has said it will never again approve a privately financed Olympiad without at least a government guarantee of the financing. Public monies would lessen the need to sell so many sponsorships.
''We have probably seen our last summer Olympics in the U.S. for a very long time,'' said John MacAloon, a University of Chicago anthropologist who studies the Olympics.
But such doubts do not bother potential American bidders. Mr. Doctoroff of New York City said there are many avenues of ''creative'' financing that could allow a city to host the Games without resorting to rampant commercialism. And, given New York City's status as the world's media capital, the city could raise more money from fewer sponsors, he said.
''I think America is too important to the Olympic movement to bar it from hosting future Olympics,'' he said.
The NationSome of the heaviest fighting in this country's 12-year civil war took place on the slopes of the volcano that gives this area its name. Even today, more than four years after the war ended, bomb craters, deforested patches, man-made caves and ruins scar its flanks.
But now efforts are under way to convert this onetime war zone into a tourist attraction that is to be part historic memorial, part nature preserve and part theme park.
The endeavor has the support of former guerrillas who have been trickling back into the area and are looking for a new livelihood, and of their erstwhile foes in the Salvadoran Government, who see the idea as a potential moneymaker.
''The war years were hard for all of us who remained here,'' said Concesion Alvarado, 57, a peasant and former leader of a guerrilla militia. ''Now we hope to see this place come back to life again, with help even from those who opposed us, so that we have something more than destruction to show our children.''
The first phase of the project, already under way, involves planting 75,000 trees in what is being called the Monsignor Romero Forest of Reconciliation.
The name was chosen to honor Oscar Arnulfo Romero, the Roman Catholic bishop assassinated by a right-wing death squad as he was celebrating Mass in March 1980. The number of seedlings planted is the number of people estimated to have been killed in the war.
''We would like for this forest to represent the prolongation of life,'' said Victoria Garcia, a director of the Center for Appropriate Technology, the environmental group supervising the planting. ''We want the planting of these trees to be a symbol of reconciliation, among men and between man and nature.''
The trees, which include cedars and cottonwoods as well as local tropical species, are being planted by work brigades whose members include former combatants from both sides, though most are guerrillas, who controlled much of the area for long stretches of the war.
Each morning the workers trudge up the side of the volcano, past bullet-riddled signs that warn, ''Halt: Danger of Mines,'' to a nursery site that was once a guerrilla reconnaissance post.
''The army's mines were all deactivated after the peace accords,'' said Juan Manuel Benitez, an agronomist who is overseeing the project, ''and those of the guerrillas were homemade ones designed to lose their effectiveness with the passage of time. Or so we hope.''
At the site of a common grave where 14 peasants were killed during an army attack in 1980, the foundations for a museum have been laid. Organizers of the combined project, financed with donations from abroad and from the Salvadoran Government, are interviewing people who lived in the area before and during the war and collecting photographs and documents of the period.
''We want people to be able to visit and see what the situation was like,'' Ms. Garcia explained. ''There are still pieces of destroyed houses around, and we intend to preserve and protect them so that there will always be a memory of the devastation of the war.''
The Salvadoran military's bombing raids here left large craters, many of which are gradually filling in and growing over, and resulted in fires that helped savannah replace forest. The elaborate system of caves, trenches and tunnels that the guerrillas and their supporters used to hide from army patrols and bombing raids have also fallen into what those working on the project hope is only a temporary state of disrepair.
''Most of the caves have collapsed,'' Mr. Alvarado, who recalled taking refuge in them during the war, said somewhat sadly. ''But we would like to keep as many as we can in good shape so that we can show them to visitors.''
There is also a proposal to have the volcano itself, which rises to 4,615 feet and is a 90-minute drive north of the capital, declared a national park.
That plan is still bogged down in the Salvadoran bureaucracy, which is slow to move and chronically short of money, but some officials who favor the proposal have argued that such a step would quickly turn the area into a prime draw for domestic and international ecotourism, and a new road to the site is under construction.
Some of the same features that made Guazapa a coveted military objective seem likely to make it an attractive tourist site. The slopes of the volcano offer a commanding view of El Salvador's central valleys, from the cloud-shrouded mountains of Chalatenango south to the San Salvador volcano, and of the zopilotes, the Central American buzzards that circle in the air where bombers once flew.
With the war over, it is possible for Salvadorans to get to know their country in a way they could not before, and many have been taking advantage of that opportunity. Military roadblocks, which sometimes halted traffic for up to 12 hours at a time, have ended, highways and bridges are being refurbished and new bus lines and gas stations are springing up now that their owners no longer need fear guerrilla attacks aimed at disrupting trade and transportation.
At the same time, older Salvadorans want to make sure that the lessons of the conflict are passed on to a younger generation. At a dinner party in the capital a few weeks ago, a 13-year-old girl complained to a group of adults that all they ever talked about was the war.
''There is a lot that we, as Salvadorans, need to restore,'' Mr. Benitez, 25, explained. ''That includes both our national memory and the land that was fought over for so long.''Senate
1. Nuclear Waste: Vote on a bill that would establish an interim nuclear-waste storage site in Nevada. Approved 63 to 37, July 31.
2. Welfare: Vote on a compromise bill overhauling the wefare system. Approved 78 to 21, Aug. 1.
3. Minimum Wage: Vote on a compromise bill raising the minimum wage to $5.15 from $4.25 in two steps and giving tax breaks to small businesses, homemakers and others. Approved 76 to 22, Aug. 2.
1
2
3
Connecticut
Dodd (D)
Nay
Nay
Yea
Lieberman (D)
Nay
Yea
Yea
New Jersey
Bradley (D)
Nay
NayAvianca, the Colombian airline whose owner is among a handful of major business figures who have supported President Ernesto Samper as the United States exerts pressure for his ouster, is facing the possible cancellation of its lucrative service to New York or Miami.
The United States Transportation Department has announced plans to cancel the flights of Avianca or Aces, another Colombian airline, to Miami or New York after the Colombian Government rejected a request by American Airlines to resume its Bogota-to-New York service, which it stopped in 1993.
''We honor our bilateral agreements, and we expect our aviation partners to do the same,'' the United States Transportation Secretary, Federico Pena, said in a written statement. ''We will make every effort to resolve this dispute through further negotiations but are prepared to impose sanctions if we cannot.''
Officially, the United States notice is being treated by officials in both countries as a trade issue, unconnected to the threat of economic sanctions that has hovered over Colombia since March 1, when President Clinton decertified Colombia as a reliable ally in the fight against drug trafficking.
But Eugenio Diaz, a member of the Colombian Senate's communications committee, said, ''The prospect of sanctions is a direct consequence of the political situation.''
Fernando Cepeda, a former Interior Minister and a columnist for the newspaper El Tiempo, agreed. ''The U.S. wants to harass the President's main support base, which is Santo Domingo,'' Mr. Cepeda said, referring to Julio Mario Santo Domingo, Avianca's owner.
Last month, Washington canceled the visa of President Samper, whom State Department officials accuse of accepting more than $6 million from drug traffickers for his 1994 election campaign.
American officials have raised the prospect of further sanctions, most recently after a meeting in Washington with the new Colombian Foreign Minister, Maria Emma Mejia. The sanctions could include eliminating preferential tariffs on Colombian exports or cutting landing rights at airports in the United States.
In July, President Samper was absolved of charges by the Colombian Congress, which counts more than 20 members who are under investigation for possible connections with drug dealers. Business leaders, the church and the news media long ago called for the President's ouster.
Until recently, he has enjoyed the undiluted support of Mr. Santo Domingo, Colombia's wealthiest businessman and owner of its largest conglomerate, the Santo Domingo Group.
In addition to Avianca, the group owns the Caracol radio and television networks, the country's most popular stations, which have been unflagging boosters of the President, and Cromos magazine. It also owns Bavaria, Colombia's most popular beer; a helicopter company; two banks, and many other concerns.
In the last few weeks, there have been signs that Mr. Santo Domingo's support may be wavering.
Augusto Lopez, the president of Bavaria beer, who acts as Mr. Santo Domingo's spokesman in Colombia, visited President Samper to discuss the deteriorating economic situation in Colombia. Associates of Mr. Santo Domingo have reportedly been in contact with Vice President Humberto de la Calle, who may become President if Mr. Samper resigns.
And the editor of Cromos magazine was replaced by a young maverick who describes his profession as ''anti-Samperista.''
Mr. Santo Domingo, through his lawyer, Bruce Rubin, declined to say whether he believed that there was any political motive behind the United States' threat to cancel his airline's landing rights in Miami or New York, and referred questions to Gustavo Lenis, the president of Avianca. He, too, declined to discuss the political climate.
Washington's decision in the matter was to take effect on July 15 but has been postponed. The air dispute began with an announcement by American Airlines that it intended to resume daily service between Bogota and New York, without holding the public hearings required under Colombian law.
After American Airlines' withdrawal from the run three years ago, Continental Airlines stepped in with nonstop service between Bogota and Newark in 1994.
American argued that under the terms of a treaty dating to 1956, it could resume the flights anytime it chose. Colombia argued that the ''equal opportunity'' mentioned in the 1956 agreement provides only for an equal number of carriers and flights between the countries.
Alvaro Cala, former director of civil aviation for Colombia and a former president of Avianca, noted that Colombian airlines relied on the routes to the United States for about 25 percent of their revenues, while for United States companies the figure was about 1 percent.
''If too much competition in these routes leads to a price war, that would damage Colombian airlines much more than American airlines,'' Mr. Cala said. ''This competition would give the U.S. an advantage over Colombia, which contradicts the ideals of equal opportunity and reciprocity.''Over the protests of a Roman Catholic civil rights group and civil libertarians, an Oregon judge has allowed two defense lawyers to listen to a tape of their client's confession to a Catholic priest.
Judge Jack Billings let Terri Wood and Steve Miller, lawyers for Conan Wayne Hale, a 20-year-old suspect in a triple homicide, listen to the tape of Mr. Hale confessing to the Rev. Tim Mockaitis as the two men spoke in April through a partition in the Lane County Jail in Eugene.
But the Rev. Michael Maslowsky, a lawyer for the Archdiocese of Portland who has spent more than two months trying to convince the United States District Court that the tape should be destroyed, said he would continue to argue that it was illegal..
''That tape never should have been made,'' said Father Maslowsky, who made a belated attempt to persuade Judge Owen Panner of United States District Court to withhold the tape from the defense lawyers. ''Taping a confession is morally and legally impermissible because the priest-penitent relationship is sacred, and protected under the First Amendment.''
The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights in New York City and the American Civil Liberties Union agree with Father Maslowsky. Since May, they have sharply criticized the the taping and said it was the first time government authorities in the United States had ordered the recording of a confession.
The Lane County District Attorney, Doug Harcleroad, who ordered the taping, apologized in May, saying the taping was ''legal and ethical but simply not right.'' He said that four people -- two deputy district attorneys, a deputy sheriff and a secretary -- had already listened to the tape, but he promised that his office would seal it and not use it in prosecuting Mr. Hale.
Still, Mr. Hale's lawyers were entitled to review all recorded statements in the possession of the prosecution. Ms. Wood, who is Mr. Hale's main defense lawyer, wanted to know what prosecutors had learned from the tape so she could determine what, if anything, she needed to do about the tape's contents. ''I am defending an individual that the state wants to give the death penalty to,'' Ms. Wood said. ''I felt it necessary to vigorously defend my client in any way that I have.''
Ms. Wood has listened to the tape with Mr. Miller, but she is forbidden, by court order, to discuss its contents and will say only that she may use the tape as she defends Mr. Hale at his trial, scheduled for next July.
Whether Ms. Wood uses the tape or not, it seems likely that it will be preserved until the trial and any subsequent appeals have ended. David Schuman, a constitutional law professor at the University of Oregon, said Ms. Wood might need to play the tape in court, if she wanted to try to prove that prosecutors used information on it to build a case against Mr. Hale.
But Father Maslowsky rejects Mr. Schuman's reasoning. ''If the defense attorneys want to know what was on that tape, they could just ask Mr. Hale,'' he said. Representing the Archdiocese, he will continue his argument in Federal District Court in a hearing that will continue on Monday that the tape should be destroyed.
''That argument is going nowhere,'' Mr. Schuman said. ''Even if making the tape was wrong, the tape is evidence in an ongoing prosecution. And if the state destroyed it, they'd have to dismiss all charges against Mr. Hale.''
Mr. Hale faces burglary and theft charges and is a suspect in the shooting deaths of three teen-agers near Springfield in December.When the Petersburg High School Class of 1971 holds its 25th reunion later this month, each reveler will get a T-shirt that reads, ''Back Together Again.'' The shirt is only half true.
Members of the class were seniors when the city's black and white high schools were combined under a Federal court order. But integration died at graduation.
Only blacks are expected at the reunion. For their 20th and 25th anniversaries, white students from the class of '71 celebrated a year early, with the mostly white class of '70.
The reunion last year took place at a Cajun restaurant in the city's restored Old Towne district. The reunion planned by blacks will be held Aug. 9 to 11 at Club 17, a banquet hall popular among blacks. The black class members also celebrated their 20th reunion separately.
The standoff exposes the scarred race relations in the living rooms of the New South, where complacency and wistfulness are at least as common as the polarization that is usually portrayed.
Rosalind D. Babino, 42, a black member of the class who now is a personnel manager, said she found out several years ago by chance that white classmates had been having reunions without inviting her. ''Bunches of us, I felt were friends,'' she said. ''What are they trying to tell us?''
In high school days, the resentment over integration boiled into the streets, where rampaging students vandalized stores in October 1970. The school closed for two days and the marquee of the local Holiday Inn pleaded: ''Keep Our Heads Cool. Petersburg Is Better in One Peace.''
In the plump of middle age, many members of the class of '71 shrug at the division. Each side says it feels excluded by the other, but both say they enjoy their reunions and do not expect them to change.
''They do stuff separate and we do stuff separate,'' Izon R. Johnson, a black social worker who is chairwoman of this month's reunion committee, said recently. ''You extend an invitation, if they choose to come. But evidently they don't.''
Pamela Shell Baskervill, a white member of the class who was president of the student body, said that while she remembers no black people at the reunion she attended last year, there was ''absolutely never a racial undertone.''
Instead, she said, the odd reunion schedule evolved after the white students were invited by people in the class of '70 who had been their friends since elementary school. At the time, the class of '71 was not having reunions.
Ms. Baskervill, a lawyer, said she and others made a concerted effort to call and write black students about the reunion. ''We had many addresses,'' she said. ''They didn't come.''
With dismay, she asked, ''Is this where we are, 25 years later?''
Petersburg, 25 miles south of Richmond, is a city of 37,000 people with blue-collar neighborhoods and a few Victorian mansions from the past.
Petersburg had full-dress segregation into the 1960's, including separate Bibles in courtrooms and separate entrances and reading rooms at the library. Just a year before the high school integrated, police officers in riot gear confronted civil rights marchers in the streets.
After integration, Petersburg High School, which had been predominantly white, had a black majority. The principal at the time, Edwin M. Betts Jr., 67, who is white, said recently that the lasting rift was no surprise. ''Although we knew it was right, that's an awkward age,'' Mr. Betts said, ''and giving up tradition was traumatic.''
Black students had marched through downtown to protest being forced to leave their school, Peabody High, which became a junior high after integration.
When black members of the class began planning their 20th reunion five years ago, they initially met at a local junior college and at the city library, where everyone would feel comfortable. But when no whites came, they moved the meetings to homes and funeral parlors that were more convenient.
''We didn't get any response last time,'' said Janet P. Baskerville, 42, a black member of the class who is a nurse. ''We didn't try this time.''
Indeed, some white students say the reunion organizers have made little effort to find them. Brad Peebles, who was voted the Class of 1971's ''Most Outstanding Boy,'' is listed in the local telephone book but had not heard about the reunion.In a cavernous sculpture studio here, Ed Dwight tweaked wax into a colonial tricorn hat, filling out the Continental Army uniform of a soldier with markedly African features.
With each wax musket and powder horn, a maquette is taking shape of a memorial to the 5,000 black soldiers and sailors who fought for colonial America's freedom -- and for their own. The Black Revolutionary War Patriots Memorial would be the first permanent tribute to black people on the National Mall in Washington.
But like every other new memorial and museum in Washington -- the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Korean War Memorial and, now, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial -- the Black Patriots Memorial has its share of drama and controversy.
''I feel the way Paul Revere must have: the deadline is coming, the deadline is coming,'' Wayne F. Smith, executive director of the Black Patriots Foundation, the organizer for the memorial, said in an interview from Washington.
The backers face an immutable deadline: build by Oct. 27 or lose the spot to one of 69 other groups that have petitioned the National Park Service for the last space permitted for monuments on the Mall.
Ten years after Congress voted to authorize the memorial, which has to be built entirely with private money, one-third of the needed $9 million has been pledged or raised. All of it must be on hand before work can start.
In 1992, dissatisfied with the pace of fund raising, the foundation board removed the co-founder and first president of the organization, Maurice A. Barboza.
Congress has yet to vote on a bill to allow the minting of a commemorative coin, a mechanism that helped pay for the Vietnam Veterans and Korean War Memorials.
So acute is the problem that the foundation has hired a fund-raising organization to make a frantic all-out push in the final 100 days. Last month, thousands of appeal letters went out across the nation.
Long whitewashed from the history books, blacks played a significant role in the Revolutionary War, starting with Crispus Attucks, the first American casualty. He died in the Boston Massacre in 1770. George Washington, a Virginia slave owner, initially rejected appeals by black freemen in Boston to join the Continental Army. But he reversed his stand after British officers had recruited large numbers of slaves by promising them freedom at the war's end.
Some slaves joined the colonists', paying for their freedom with sign-up bounties. Massachusetts and Rhode Island fielded all-black units, but most blacks were scattered through the Revolutionary army, fighting in integrated units.
In addition to bearing arms, blacks aided the Continental Army and Navy as ship pilots, blacksmiths, teamsters and spies. When Washington crossed the Delaware, two black soldiers were at the oars.
''It was not for their own land they fought, nor even for a land which had adopted them, but for a land which had enslaved them, and whose laws, even in freedom, oftener oppressed than protected,'' Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote in 1855 for a history, ''Colored Patriots of the American Revolution.'' ''Bravery, under such circumstances, has a peculiar beauty and merit.''
Today, fund raisers for the Revolutionary War memorial suffer from a handicap not faced by fund raisers for other recent memorials. There are no living veterans of the Revolutionary War, and few people know the black soldiers' roles.
Although black America's purchasing power now totals $400 billion a year, Mr. Smith said, donations have only trickled in from black Americans. In his studio in northeastern Denver, a predominantly black area, Mr. Dwight reflected on the reasons for that reaction. One, he speculated, is a lack of knowledge about the black soldiers' roles. ''They ask, 'There were black people on the continent then?' '' he said of the response from potential donors.
Mr. Dwight, a former test pilot and the first black man to train to be an astronaut, finds fault with what he calls an obsession with black suffering instead of heroism. ''No matter how successful we are, we are still on a victimization roll,'' he said. ''If you tell black people that we are doing something on slavery, they would be writing checks left and right.
''Because blacks have been so shabbily treated,'' he added, ''there is a void about the flag, the nation, duty.'' But most public-opinion surveys report few major differences in how blacks and whites describe their feelings about their country.
Mr. Dwight has spent his career trying to focus on success rather than on his personal experience of adversity. Thirty years ago, he abruptly cut short what had been a promising career in the Air Force.
As Mr. Dwight tells it, President John F. Kennedy created a parallel astronaut-training program in the Air Force because conservative white senators had told him that he would not have money for the space program if black fliers were admitted to regular training.
The program for black astronauts foundered after Kennedy's assassination, Mr. Dwight said. While white colleagues went on to orbit the Moon, Mr. Dwight left the military and reinvented himself as a sculptor. In 1977, he earned a master's of fine arts degree from the University of Denver and embarked on a career whose artistic muse could be summarized by a label that he has placed on a bookcase in his studio: ''Successful blacks.''Minnesota
G.O.P. Focusing On Welfare Vote
Minnesota Republicans profess delight over Thursday's Senate vote to enact a stiff new welfare law, not so much because their party's proposal passed but because one Democrat made a point of opposing it.
That Democrat is Senator Paul Wellstone, the energetic and sometimes hyperbolic Minnesotan who is locked in a potentially tight re-election struggle against the man he unseated in 1990, Rudy Boschwitz.
Mr. Boschwitz has run a buzzsaw of a campaign featuring billboards that dubbed his opponent ''Senator Welfare'' and ''Welfare Man'' for his support of Federal antipoverty programs, and he seems poised to push the issue even harder.
''The vast majority of Minnesotans want workfare, not welfare, and Paul Wellstone is arrogantly disregarding the wishes of the people of Minnesota,'' said Jon Lerner, the manager of the Boschwitz campaign.
Mr. Wellstone, who gave a fiery Senate speech on Thursday mocking the notion that cuts in welfare spending were reforms, was unrepentant. In an interview Friday, he said the evidence ''is irrefutable that this legislation will create more poverty and more hunger among people.''
''There can be a zillion attacks,'' he said. ''I won't vote to take food out of the mouths of hungry children.''
Mr. Boschwitz's campaign could use a lift. Many polls say Mr. Wellstone has a lead of 6 to 8 points despite Republican attacks.
A former Republican pollster in Minneapolis, Bill Morris, said Mr. Wellstone's decision to buck both the Senate and his President on the welfare bill could hurt. Belying its liberal image, Minnesota takes a moderate stand on welfare and has grown more conservative in the 1990's, Mr. Morris said.
Then again, Mr. Morris said, one of Mr. Wellstone's main assets is his charismatic image as a go-getter and a maverick.
Mr. Wellstone solidified that image Thursday, promising a national tour of poverty-stricken areas to underscore the need for Government aid. On Friday, Mr. Boschwitz announced his own tour -- this one, Mr. Lerner said, highlighting ''people who have worked hard and overcome adversity and lifted themselves up from the welfare rolls.''
California
Change Advocates In Bitter Dispute
In the prohibition movement known as campaign finance reform, it is as if war had broken out between the Salvation Army and the Women's Christian Temperance Union.
The California Public Interest Research Group, part of Ralph Nader's political muckraking network, is locked in a ferocious battle with Common Cause, the League of Women Voters and their allies over whose November ballot initiative will best clean up state political campaigns.
The fray began after talks on a single ballot measure limiting campaign contributions broke down between Calpirg, as the Nader group is known, and an umbrella group led by Common Cause, the League, the American Association of Retired Persons and United We Stand America. The two groups wrote separate proposals and gathered enough signatures to put them on the ballot.
But they did not stop arguing. Calpirg's measure, it seemed, contained a ''poison pill'' specifying that if both initiatives passed, the Common Cause plan would be nullified if it drew fewer votes, but the Calpirg measure would take effect regardless. Common Cause counterattacked, seeking to bounce Calpirg off the ballot.
When that failed, the Common Cause group sued to force the Calpirg measure off the ballot, arguing that its signers were never told of a fine-print clause that would repeal all limits on gifts to state officials. The court rejected the suit. Common Cause and its allies have appealed. Meanwhile, Calpirg countersued after California's Attorney General added the gift-law repeal to the combined ballot measure that voters will see in November.
The rivals call it a philosophical dispute. But Tony Miller, a Common Cause board member and head of the umbrella group, also calls the Calpirg proposal ''outrageous'' and a loophole-filled ''deception.''Russell K. Paul, the chairman of the Georgia Republican Party, has a recommendation for the candidates competing in runoff elections here on Tuesday.
''What we're suggesting is that our candidates run naked through the Closing Ceremonies because that's the only way they'll be noticed,'' Mr. Paul said. ''So far, I haven't had any takers. But they're beginning to get desperate.''
At any other moment, Georgians probably would be full of talk about Guy Millner and Johnny Isakson, the two Republicans vying for their party's nomination to run for the Senate seat being vacated by Sam Nunn. After all, Georgia has not had an open Senate seat for 40 years, and the Republicans have a serious shot at picking up the seat.
But given that the polls will open only 31 hours after the Olympic flame is extinguished, most Georgians, and Atlantans in particular, have had little time or inclination to think about politics. For candidates for all manner of offices, the convergence of the Olympics and the runoff campaign has meant inflated advertising rates, an attrition of campaign workers, and, above all, a desperate lack of public interest.
''When I've gone out and asked people to vote for me in the district attorney's race, they've asked me if that's one of the track and field events,'' said Paul L. Howard Jr., a Democrat running in Fulton County, which includes most of Atlanta.
Under Georgia's political calendar this year, primaries were held on July 16, three days before Opening Ceremonies, and runoffs will be held on Aug. 6, two days after Closing Ceremonies. Like candidates in dozens of other races, neither Mr. Millner, a businessman, nor Mr. Isakson, a former legislator, won a majority of the vote in the primary, forcing a runoff. In November, the winner will face Max Cleland, Georgia's former Secretary of State, who won the Democratic nomination without opposition.
In Georgia, which traditionally holds summer primaries, it is usually difficult enough for candidates to compete for attention with vacations, barbecues and weekend trips to the lake. This year, they are also competing with Michael Johnson, Kerri Strug and the Dream Team, not to mention the bombing at Centennial Olympic Park.
For the Senate candidates, the task is complicated by the fact that so much of the Republican vote is cast in the Atlanta metropolitan area, where the preoccupation with the Olympics is most intense. Forty percent of the Republican vote in the July 16 primary came from five metropolitan counties.
Other Georgia cities have been captivated by the Olympics as well. Softball has been the talk of Columbus, soccer has drawn big crowds in Athens, and yachting has been a distraction in Savannah.
In Atlanta, television news has been utterly obsessed with the Games and the bombing investigation, insuring a virtual blackout of political coverage. The ABC affiliate, WSB-TV, has broadcast two stories on the Senate runoff. The CBS affiliate, WGNX-TV, has broadcast one. And the NBC affiliate, WXIA-TV, which has carried the Games, has not produced any.
''I don't think we've even reported our own poll,'' said Jon Shirek, the station's political reporter.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has covered the Senate race and other campaigns, but the political reporting has largely been obscured by the tall headlines and special sections devoted to the Olympics.
Such a dearth of so-called free media normally would require candidates to make heavy purchases of television and radio advertising time. But the Olympics have made that difficult as well. Viewership has suffered on the stations not carrying the Olympics. And advertising rates are prohibitive on NBC affiliates that are broadcasting the Games.
''It is very expensive,'' said Patricia C. Sibley, a media buyer for the Millner campaign. Ms. Sibley said that a 30-second ad on WXIA-TV probably would cost about $30,000 during the Closing Ceremonies on Sunday night, compared with between $8,000 and $12,000 normally.
As a result, the two Senate candidates waited until this weekend to begin their television advertising, and many candidates for lower offices have decided not to broadcast commercials at all.
The surprise, Ms. Sibley said, is that advertising time is available. That, she said, is because automobile manufacturers have pulled many of their commercials during the Games. ''People are more concerned with what's going on with the Olympics than with buying a car, so there is inventory available,'' she said.
Campaign schedules, staffing and fund raising have also been victimized by the Olympics.
Civic club luncheons, a political staple, have been canceled during the Games. Candidates have avoided hand-shaking tours of downtown Atlanta because the hands they might shake are as likely to be from the Republic of Georgia as from the state of Georgia.
''Politicians are normally attracted to large crowds,'' said David J. Shafer, a Republican candidate for Secretary of State. ''But working the Spanish equestrian team isn't helpful in winning a runoff election here in Georgia.''
Several candidates have lost volunteers to the Olympics, like the fund-raising aide to Mr. Shafer who has spent three weeks as an official greeter for the Japanese Olympic team. Raising money has been challenging because contributors are either attending Olympic events or have escaped the city during the Games.When Deng Yaping hit her winning shot to take the gold in the women's table tennis final in Atlanta, a crowd of several dozen shoppers in the TV section of a downtown department store here burst into vigorous applause.
''At least we can win in Ping-Pong,'' said Wang Zhimao, 57, a white-haired postal worker holding the hand of his grandson, Ping Ping. ''They can't keep that from us.''
Many Chinese, while taking pride in the success of their compatriots in Atlanta, still seem to feel that there is a conspiracy against the national Chinese team. In addition to being subjected to bad food and chaotic bus routes, Chinese athletes are being cheated out of medals, many people here believe.
''They're afraid of us,'' said Wang, with an extra nod of conviction. ''We're catching up with America, and they're afraid.''
The Olympics are probably being watched by more people in China than anywhere else, since more than 900 million have access to television sets and three channels are broadcasting events morning, noon and night. And the Games seem to be stirring a nationalist, and particularly anti-American, fever, as spectators at home rally around athletes in Atlanta.
Deng's competition with her Taiwanese rival, Chen Jing, might have been expected to cause a stir after all the political tensions between mainland China and Taiwan a few months ago.
Yet many viewers seem to see ''Chinese Taipei'' competitors as cousins in the same family, and reserve their competitive juices for the Americans.
There have been complaints aplenty about bad organization at the Atlanta Games. Yet there seems to be an added edge to the criticism in the Chinese news media, where many commentators once blamed the United States for helping to block China's bid to host the 2000 Olympics, which Beijing narrowly lost to Sydney, Australia.
''Perhaps it is the American style to blame others for one's own mistakes,'' wrote The Beijing Youth Daily one day last week. ''Now everyone who came to Atlanta is asking the question: Why choose this damn city to host the 100-year anniversary Games?''
American hosts are even being blamed for the judging.
One hot topic of conversation here this week was the judging in the final round of floor exercises in men's gymnastics, where the Chinese finalist Li Xiaoshuang turned in a stellar performance but lost to a Greek rival, Ioannis Melissanidis.
''Do you think they give it to him because it is the centennial of the Olympics in Greece?'' asked Yan Hong, a magazine editor in Beijing. ''Or because he paid off the judges?''
Chinese television replayed the two performances one after another as commentators dissected what they called Li's superiority at many points.
Viewers like Yan agreed, so there was no doubt in her mind that Li was robbed of the gold medal; her question was whether American officials had pressured the judges, or whether it was out-and-out bribery.
China's news media did not hold back, either. An editorial in The Beijing Daily said that ''people have said'' that judges may have been taking money in Li's event.
''We hope this is just a rumor, and we also hope that the Olympic spirit will not be replaced by money in the future,'' the editorial said.
Another outrage, in the eyes of many Chinese, was the 3-1 victory of the United States over China in the gold medal game in women's softball, a game won on a home run that just hooked past the foul pole before landing in foul territory.
''A woman umpire stole the limelight by ruling fair a clear outside hit by U.S. player Dot Richardson,'' reported The New China News Agency. ''Despite strong protests from the Chinese coaches, the woman remained stubborn in her decision -- all to the cheers of the crowd of home fans in Columbus, Ga.''
Before the Olympics began, nationalism had seemed to be on the rise in China, fueled in part by authorities who sometimes suggest that Americans have a military and diplomatic plan to contain China's growth.
A similar flavor has seeped into some of the official commentary about the Olympics.An international agricultural research organization, reopening an impassioned debate over who is responsible for the decline of the world's tropical forests, says in a report to be published on Sunday that poor farmers in the developing world could destroy half the remaining forest cover, with logging threatening the rest.
Rapidly increasing numbers of poor farmers practicing slash-and-burn agriculture are major contributors to the loss of 38 million acres of tropical forests every year, or 72 acres a minute, according to the report, by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, which is supported by four affiliates of the United Nations.
The world's tropical forests have been reduced to about 5 billion acres, from 5.5 billion in 1980, the United Nations estimates.
In the developing world, many environmentalists and political leaders reject the idea that the poor are the cause of significant deforestation, saying that slash-and-burn agriculture, in which forests are felled and the stumps and underbrush burned to clear new land, has been practiced judiciously for centuries.
''It is very common for people making such conclusions to blame poor people,'' said Kenya's leading environmentalist, Wangari Maathai. ''Poor people are the victims, not the cause. In Kenya at the moment, we are fighting to protect the remaining very few indigenous forests from some of the richest people in the country.''
Economists do not disagree that traditional farmers have used land carefully, but they say that with poverty and population pressure forcing people to venture deeper into woodlands or follow openings made by logging roads in search of a subsistence livelihood, old images are no longer valid.
''A hundred years ago, slash-and-burn was a very well-adjusted system,'' said Ismail Serageldin, an Egyptian scientist who is chairman of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research. ''You had a very small population against a very large forest cover. Basically, they could slash and burn a piece of the forest and move on. They had long periods of fallow, which allowed the ground to regenerate.''
''Though it was very low-output agriculture, you had about seven years of fallow between plantings,'' he said in an interview. ''If you farm 2 hectares and there are 14 hectares of fallow, it's an O.K. system. But with the huge demographic explosion that has happened, there is no solution to this without solving the poverty problem.'' A hectare is 2.47 acres.
Mr. Serageldin, who is also a World Bank official, said the loss of tropical forests to farming could be stopped only through a combination of new agricultural practices and government policies.
Farmers can learn more intensive cultivation techniques and grow new crops, in particular trees with multiple uses, which also refortify the land with nutrients. But governments must also better regulate land use and allow some food prices, now held to artificially low levels, to rise to the benefit of rural growers, Mr. Serageldin said.
William E. Mankin, director of the Global Forest Policy Project, which was set up four years ago by the National Wildlife Federation, the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth, agrees that government policies are often driving the poor into forest areas. But hequestions the hopes placed on teaching them to plant new kinds of trees.
''Trying to teach a poor, desperate farmer to grow interesting new crops after he has been forced into the forest is asking him to grasp at straws,'' Mr. Mankin said.
Lester R. Brown, president of the Worldwatch Institute in Washington, said in an interview that there were few alternatives to more efficient use of existing farmland.
''Many countries are outrunning both land and water resources,'' he said. Pressure on both comes as the demand for food in some large developing nations overtakes the capacity to produce. World grain prices have doubled in the last three decades as a result, he said. Relying on the sea is no longer possible, either.
''The world's farmers can no longer count on the world's fishermen to help with the food supply,'' Mr. Brown said. ''We've hit the wall on the oceans first. Now pressure is shifting to land.''
''A lot of developing countries with population pressures have turned to the ocean for animal protein -- like the Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia,'' Mr. Brown said. ''Japan has been doing this for a long time. Last year the Japanese consumed 10 million tons of seafood. If China went the same route, with 1.2 billion people, it would need 100 million tons, which is now the total world fish catch.
''This makes it clear that the path Japan followed is not open to other countries.''It's war, they say.
Don Hill, the owner of a nightclub on the edge of SoHo, is ready for combat because he had to pay a $100 fine after a city inspector caught 40 people dancing at his place last year. Larry Bloch, the owner of Wetlands, a nightclub in TriBeCa, is fighting mad because if a band puts up illegal posters advertising its appearance on his stage, he is the one who is cited for violations, the result of a city law he says is reminiscent of a ''Gestapo state.''
And Peter Gatien, the owner of several Manhattan clubs, is under indictment for running what the United States Attorney's office says is a drug ''supermarket'' at two of them, the Limelight and the Tunnel.
For most of the 20th century, nightclubs and their owners have risen and fallen in New York, a reflection and a definition of their times. Sherman Billingsley of the Stork Club and Steven Rubell of Studio 54 were the two legendary princes: proprietors, in their eras, of the two most famous nightclubs in the world.
But in the mid-1990's, the New York club owner has transmogrified from raffish royalty to community pariah, at least in the eyes of the enforcement-prone administration of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and the more powerful community boards. Current club owners say that it has been a long time since the establishment treated them as ornaments of the city's night life and that they have never been more harassed and less appreciated.
The Mayor responds that he is not engaged in a broad-scale crackdown on club owners, but that as part of his campaign to improve the quality of life in New York he is making life tougher for those owners he regards as a menace.
''Some of them create enormous problems in the neighborhoods,'' Mr. Giuliani said. ''The Stork Club didn't disrupt life for other people.''
Then, too, Mr. Billingsley had the advantage of being host to Ernest Hemingway, Averill Harriman and J. Edgar Hoover during the three-decade life of his club, from the 1930's to the 1960's. And Mr. Rubell opened his doors for 33 months in the late 1970's not only to Andy Warhol and Bianca Jagger but also to Jacqueline Onassis, Gen. Moshe Dayan of Israel and Betty Ford, the First Lady. The 1996 New York club owner, in contrast, is a frequent host to teen-agers with no social connections or political clout. And Mr. Gatien's highly publicized arrest has made things worse, club owners say, creating images of owners as overseers of drug dens.
''They're the bad boys, no question about it,'' said Robert Bookman, a nightclub lawyer, summing up the city's attitude toward his clients.
Consider, for example, the opinion of Kathryn E. Freed, a City Council member representing residential constituents in SoHo and TriBeCa, two front lines in the struggle. Mr. Bloch's Wetlands, she said, is ''a horror'' where patrons ''make lots of noise, throw bottles, urinate and throw up in the street.''
(Mr. Bloch counters this: ''I don't believe she's ever visited the club. I take umbrage at Ms. Freed's statement.'')
Ms. Freed takes an equally dim view of club owners who say they bring good business to bad neighborhoods. ''If I hear one more person say, 'Oh, it was a bad block before, but now that it's got night life it's lively,' I'm going to strangle them,'' she said.
Ms. Freed will not soon forget, she said, the night she drove up Greene Street during the opening of Spy, a SoHo bar of that particular moment, and encountered patrons throwing bottles and running out into traffic.
Ms. Freed, who is not often described as subtle, stopped to vent with a woman in the street.
''I said, 'This is a residential neighborhood, don't you care?' '' recalled Ms. Freed, who has lived in TriBeCa or SoHo for the last quarter of a century. ''And she said: 'Hey, it's Manhattan. If you don't like it, move.' ''
Rare Harmony Seeking Strength In Unity
On a steamy afternoon in Greenwich Village last month, club owners banded together, uncharacteristically, to fight back with what most likely will be called the New York Nightclub Association, a trade and lobbying group. Its tentative birth took place at the Bottom Line, the venerable granddaddy of New York clubs, at a ''Quality of (Night) Life Forum'' organized by two people eager to bring a tone of gravitas and responsibility to clubland: David Hershkovitz, the editor and publisher of the downtown entertainment magazine Paper, and Andrew Rasiej, an owner of Irving Plaza, a large club near Union Square.
''Is there a campaign to drive out clubs to make the city safe for Disney?'' Mr. Hershkovitz said in opening remarks, setting off an hour and a half of war stories from club owners who largely said yes. Hilly Crystal, the owner of CBGB's in the East Village, complained that he was fined $2,000 when a band played on a truck outside his club; Mr. Bloch, the owner of Wetlands, said that city regulations required him to be ''a fire drill instructor, a sprinkler system supervisor, a food handler, an alcohol awareness trainer, a certified nurse, a searcher of bodies, even a baby sitter.'' Others complained of inspectors who make patrons stop dancing if a club has no cabaret license, as was the case with Mr. Hill's club last year. (He has since been granted a license.)
More remarkable was the presence of numerous city officials, including Borough President Ruth Messinger of Manhattan, who briskly told the group that ''you are an important city industry'' and ''the faster you can both meet regulations and requirements to get recognition as a good neighbor, the better.''
Ms. Freed was there, too, pointing out that there are good clubs as well as bad clubs (she herself goes to Pravda, the hot downtown bar of the moment) and sounding conciliatory. ''I don't want to put anyone out of business,'' she said.Something is wrong with this picture of emerald lawns so green that they glow, of shrubs with leaves big as cafeteria trays, of blossoms that wink everywhere in candy-corn colors and waterfalls that spout from great nests of hibiscus.
The problem is that it is all so exotic. Exotic meaning not native.
Voracious interlopers are invading native flora that evolved in such isolation they never armed themselves for competition with tough outsiders.
The Hawaiian Islands, blessed by fertile soil and favorable climate, have seen much of their territory taken by newcomers. They may be beautiful like African tulip trees and ornamental fountain grass or edible like blackberries and castor beans, scientists say, but they are killing a singular heritage.
When Dr. Diane Ragone, chairwoman of plant science at the National Tropical Botanical Garden on the island of Kauai here, looked out her window over a chartreuse meadow, she said: ''It all looks so lush and green. But practically everything you're looking at is exotic. It landed from abroad.''
In the last 100 years or so, botanists estimate, 100 plant species, or 10 percent of the 1,000 native species, have become extinct. One-third of the plants on the Federal list of endangered species are in Hawaii.
The state has grown aggressive about conservation in the last decade, setting aside habitats for protection. But species from abroad remain such a threat that passengers who arrive at the Honolulu airport may be struck by the sight of an ''amnesty bin,'' to discard foreign species before they infect the islands.
The latest plague is the two-spotted leaf-hopper, an insect from Asia that infests a wide variety of plants, botanists say. The greatest fear many experts have is that the brown tree snake, which has killed much of the bird life on Guam and has been known to bite children, will stow away and make its way here to attack birds that are already in danger from alien rats and mongooses.
Botanists from the national garden who climb rocks, boat and fly helicopters to gather the more out-of-the-way species for preservation, come back with tears over the pace at which special plants are disappearing, Dr. Ragone said.
Even the state flower, the yellow hibiscus, is endangered. ''That's as if the dogwood were endangered in Virginia,'' she added.
All is not lost, though. Dr. Ragone led the way deeper into the garden, along a trail past vistas of strange greenery and bizarre birds and trees straight out of ''Jurassic Park,'' which was filmed nearby, to a nursery where the plant heritage is being painstakingly nursed away from extinction.
The president of the garden, Dr. William McK. Klein, called the garden's work ''a Noah's ark concept for the gathering of organisms.'' The garden, in Lawai Valley, is one of five display gardens of the National Tropical Botanical Garden. Four are in Hawaii, and one is in Florida.
The national garden, founded in 1964 and privately financed, collects and categorizes tropical plants. The garden goes beyond Noah's ark, working not only to gather the species, but also to propagate them, explore why they have become so rare and start them multiplying again, whether with improved environments or a little lift in the reproduction department.
In a place of honor at the front of the nursery, really a large glorified shed full of flats of rare plants, are pots that hold two of the rarest plants, Kanaloa kahoolawe, a new genus that the garden's botanists discovered on an outcropping on Kahoolawe. The island had long been abandoned because the Navy had used it for target practice, and the plant, a legume somewhat similar to the pea, had somehow survived. No goats -- goats and wild pigs, both imported, are some of the worst enemies for native plants -- could reach it.
There are now four known specimens of the plant, which once abounded in Hawaii, two in the wild and two in the nursery. There would be more, but the nursery manager has found them difficult to breed.
The botanists have discovered about 30 new species and have recovered 30 others thought to have been long gone, as well, Dr. Klein said. ''It's like walking into the valley of the dinosaurs and seeing what was thought to be extinct,'' he said.
Dr. Ragone counts more than 100 species in Hawaii that have less than 20 individual specimens left. ''We have things in the garden extinct in the wild,'' she said. ''And they have gone extinct since 1989, when I started working here.''
One rare native plant is a palm known as pritchardia. Virtually all the palms swaying by the beaches here are foreigners, Dr. Ragone said. But pritchardia, being cultivated with vigor in the garden, is native to Kauai. Four were known in the wild, she said, until a hurricane in 1992 killed two.
Except for a few hotels that have yet to reopen, there is virtually no sign of the hurricane. The tropical foliage has crept back into every gap. But the storm wreaked extensive hidden damage, botanists say, accelerating the demise of some vulnerable native species.
''It is a jungle out there,'' Dr. Klein said. ''It's a very fragile system, and it's threatened.''Eighteen days after Trans World Airlines Flight 800 crashed into the ocean off Long Island, law enforcement officials say they are moving closer to declaring that the plane was destroyed by a bomb. But determining the cause of the crash is easy compared with the next challenge: figuring out the type of device used, how it got on the plane, and then catching the culprits.
The circumstances of the T.W.A. crash have already made the investigation one of the most difficult criminal inquiries ever into the sabotage of an airplane, according to experts who have investigated similar crashes.
There were no specific warnings beforehand or credible claims of responsibility afterward. Law enforcement officials have a long list of possible suspects with political and personal motives, but they say a worldwide search has yet to turn up evidence that elevates any one to the status of prime suspect. And the crime scene is 120 feet below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean, where tiny bits of evidence are threatened by everything from strong currents to hungry fish.
''People shouldn't expect any early breakthroughs,'' said Rodney Wallis, the former director of security for the International Air Transport Association, who has written about attacks on commercial airlines. ''For it to be quick, the investigators will have to be lucky.''
For the last two and a half weeks, investigators have tried to find a piece of evidence -- no matter how small -- to confirm their strong suspicion that a bomb destroyed the Paris-bound 747, killing all 230 people aboard. They say they are confident that they will find it when they recover and examine the areas of the plane closest to the blast.
But if that evidence does not surface, the criminal and air safety investigations will continue to try to determine whether Flight 800 was downed by a crime or an accident.
Law enforcement officials acknowledge that once they conclude that the crash was a criminal act, the next phase of the investigation will be even tougher.
''The second part of that is to find out definitively, exactly what it was -- how it was made -- if it was a bomb,'' said James K. Kallstrom, the assistant F.B.I. director for New York. ''You know, what was the explosive? What was the timing device, et cetera, et cetera? And for that, we may have to find little bits and pieces, like in Lockerbie.''
In the December 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed 259 people on board and 11 on the ground, those crucial bits and pieces of evidence were scattered over 1,000 square miles of countryside, but at least they were on the ground. The bomb was timed to explode when the plane was over the Atlantic, but the flight had been delayed for 25 minutes in London. The recovery effort was aided by more than 1,000 police officers, military personnel and volunteers, who combed the area, retrieving 10,000 pieces of the airplane.
One of the pieces, a sliver of plastic no bigger than a thumbnail, turned out to be a fragment of a circuit board from a Toshiba radio-cassette player that investigators determined had concealed the plastic bomb. It was the first step on the trail to two Libyans eventually charged but never arrested for the bombing.
It is just that kind of tiny clue that Flight 800 investigators fear they may have trouble finding in the dark vastness of the ocean. In bombing cases, it is often the smallest specks of evidence that tell the most.
''Because of the deep water, because the wreckage is so far dispersed, and because they are trying to preserve the scene, it is just extremely difficult,'' said Susan M. Coughlin, the former vice chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board.
Unlike T.W.A. Flight 800, Pan Am Flight 103 offered investigators strong indications that the explosion was a result of terrorism even before the first piece of evidence was picked off the ground in Lockerbie. Two weeks before the bombing, the American Embassy in Helsinki received a call warning of an attack on a Pan Am jet traveling from Germany to the United States -- the precise route of Flight 103.
Although the T.W.A. crash has been compared most often to Flight 103, it more closely resembles the June 1985 midair explosion of Air-India Flight 182, a jumbo jet that fell into the Irish Sea about 120 miles from Cork, killing all 329 aboard.
In the Air-India crash, as with the T.W.A. and Pan Am crashes, investigators were immediately presented with a small but forceful set of facts. A 747, known for its strength and durability simply dropped from the sky without warning of a mechanical problem, unusual weather conditions or any sign of a collision with another airplane. Given the same scenario in each case, sabotage quickly became the most likely cause.
The recovery of Air-India wreckage was even harder than the T.W.A. effort now mounted off the Long Island coast. Debris from the Air-India crash was scattered in a seven-mile-long line, as much as 7,100 feet below the surface of the Irish Sea.
After a lengthy and confounding recovery effort, investigators were able to retrieve only 5 percent of the plane's wreckage. Not one piece of forensic evidence pointing to a bomb was found.
The ocean erases evidence and terrorists try to time the blasts when planes are over water, experts say.
''On the ground, at least, you have a fighting chance,'' said Douglas Henderson, who is the lead criminal investigator of the Air-India bombing for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. ''For an investigator, you have quite a job in front of you when you are trying to find forensic evidence in the ocean.''
Although Air-India investigators were frustrated by their search for evidence at sea, within days they began getting the first hints of what would eventually become a strong circumstantial case from half a world away.In what his advisers say amounts to a third start-up of his Presidential campaign, Bob Dole is heading into an event-packed 11 days in which he plans to unveil a centerpiece economic proposal, select a running mate and deliver his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in San Diego.
The flurry of events will be the most crucial period so far in Mr. Dole's campaign, one that his aides hope will help him overcome President Clinton's months-long double-digit lead in public opinion polls.
''The acceptance speech is important,'' Mr. Dole said in a recent interview. ''The running mate is important. The whole atmosphere of the convention -- how we're perceived compared to '92. It's going to be very important to my campaign. That's why we're working so hard to get a good one.''
With all the deadlines fast closing in, Mr. Dole met today with advisers to work on an economic plan, which he is scheduled to announce Monday in Chicago. After a day of intense negotiations and lobbying by rival Republican factions, Mr. Dole was said this evening to be leaning toward endorsing an across-the-board reduction of up to 15 percent in income-tax rates.
If Mr. Dole moves ahead with that decision, he would be following the advisers who believe that a clean, steep tax cut would best frame his economic case against President Clinton. Mr. Dole has been moving back and forth on this, but the aides said late today that he seemed inclined to accept the tax cut proposal rather than a more complicated plan to roll back Mr. Clinton's 1993 tax increase.
Mr. Dole stopped short of revealing any details when he previewed the plan in his weekly radio address today. But he said the proposals would put the country on a path to a balanced budget by the year 2002, would create a ''flatter, fairer, simpler tax system and will begin to change the size and power'' of the Internal Revenue Service.
Anticipating criticism, Mr. Dole said the Democrats would say it would be impossible to cut taxes and balance the budget at the same time -- and that Mr. Dole's program is a tax break for the rich.
''The fact is,'' he said, ''that last year Republicans in Congress passed a plan that would have cut taxes and put us on a path to a balanced budget, but President Clinton vetoed it.''
Mr. Dole's advisers said the coming days would represent what was essentially the third start of his campaign: the first was last year during his weeklong announcement tour, then his resignation from the Senate on June 11 and his post as majority leader. But those actions did not give Mr. Dole the lasting surge his aides had hoped for.
After the economic plan, the next big splash will be the announcement of his running mate, which Mr. Dole has long said he considers his campaign's most important decision. Aides said he had probably narrowed his list to three or four. Nearly a dozen have been notified, his aides said, though many of the contacts were what one called ''courtesy inquiries.''
The selection of a Vice-Presidential candidate could reveal a great deal about Mr. Dole's judgment. While the short list seems to be ever shifting, Mr. Dole's advisers recently gave a great deal of attention to Senator John McCain of Arizona, former Gov. Carroll A. Campbell of South Carolina and Senator Connie Mack of Florida. The current plan is for Mr. Dole to announce his choice next Saturday in his hometown, Russell, Kan., before heading to San Diego for the convention.
Mr. Dole, whose organization is virtually broke from spending during the primaries, said his campaign was eagerly awaiting the Federal money, close to $70 million, it will receive after he becomes the official Republican nominee. Mr. Clinton's campaign, flush with cash because he had no challenger in the primaries, has been running commercials since last year.
''It's the time we get some money, finally, so we can get our message out there instead of playing defense,'' Mr. Dole said in the interview.
The challenge facing Mr. Dole is not easy. Expectations are so high -- and Mr. Dole is perceived as so far behind -- that he needs to seize the opportunity to capture the nation's attention in a positive way.
From Michigan to California and Pennsylvania to Texas, polls in states where Mr. Dole traveled recently show that his support dwindled even further after his visits -- even though the White House has been mired in controversies, like the Whitewater investigation.
In a poll released on Friday by the independent firm of Epic/MRA, Mr. Clinton leads Mr. Dole 58 percent to 35 percent in the battleground state of Michigan. It was the President's best showing in the state all year, although Mr. Dole has recently taken numerous trips to Michigan.
But John Buckley, Mr. Dole's communications director, offered this preview: ''The American people in the course of the next two weeks are going to learn an awful lot about someone whose presence they felt and whose face they're familiar with, but who has yet to be fully introduced to them. So many elements that will be important throughout the fall will begin to be snapped into place.''
Lyn Nofziger, who was an aide to Ronald Reagan, and informally advises Mr. Dole, said that ''Dole's got to do something that creates a little excitement in the party right now because the thing that's killing Dole now is that there ain't none.''
Indeed, a nationwide poll made public this week by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, a nonprofit group, found that 7 of 10 Americans think that the Presidential campaign is dull so far -- and just about the same number expect that Mr. Clinton will defeat Mr. Dole in November. The survey found that enthusiasm for this election is noticeably lower than four years ago.
In laying new markers for his campaign, Mr. Dole will be competing for the limelight with the Democrats, factions within his own party and with Ross Perot, whose Reform Party will stage gatherings just before and just after the Republican convention, which begins on Aug. 12.It is an average cotton crop, not a great one, but Clifford Smith will take it. Last year, Mr. Smith, the owner of the Los Coyotes Gin, ginned just 354 bales, or about 177,000 pounds, of cotton. This year, he expects to process 6,000 bales, or about 3 million pounds, and he plans to keep his gin running day and night for another three weeks.
But Mr. Smith and other cotton producers in South Texas will not forget last year's losses, estimated at $140 million, any time soon, and the legal battles over those losses are just beginning.
Three groups of cotton farmers have sued the Texas Boll Weevil Eradication Foundation, a program created by the Texas Legislature in 1993 to rid the state of the weevil through repeated applications of the pesticide malathion. The spraying, which began in South Texas last year, was widely blamed for an invasion of the beet army worm that destroyed the area's cotton crop.
In the wake of the army worm problem, local farmers, led by Mr. Smith, began a petition drive to end the eradication effort. And in January, out of 1,700 ballots cast, they voted by a ratio of nearly 3 to 1 to stop the program. It was the first time in the 22-year history of the boll weevil program that farmers had voted to quit spraying. They can opt out of the program only by a majority vote. In March, farmers in eastern Mississippi, who also had a poor cotton crop last year, voted to end eradication effort there.
As his employees loaded another bale of cotton onto a flatbed truck, Mr. Smith said, ''This year's crop shows that we were right.'' Mr. Smith said the malathion killed the wasps and other beneficial insects that help keep pests like the army worm in check. And he points out that two Federal Agriculture Department scientists from the agency's Agriculture Research Service office in Weslaco, Tex., have published a study implicating the spraying in last year's pest problems.
The pest infestations in South Texas have been embarrassing for the Agriculture Department, which provided $3.9 million to the Texas eradication effort last year. But the lawsuits may undermine the program's ability to collect assessments from farmers. On July 19, a state district court judge ruled in favor of a group of farmers from the Texas Panhandle who claimed that the assessments levied on them by the eradication foundation were an illegal tax.
The foundation has appealed the judge's ruling to the Texas Supreme Court, but no date has been set for a hearing. Tim Leifeste, a spokesman for the eradication foundation, said that getting rid of the boll weevil is ''vital to the future of the cotton industry in Texas.'' Mr. Leifeste said that weevil eradication was continuing in other parts of the state and that if the program's financing mechanism was unconstitutional, the agency would ''go back to the drawing board.''
Many farmers have refused to pay their assessments. The Texas Department of Agriculture is pursuing more than 2,000 cases of nonpayment, while the foundation has filed dozens of lawsuits against farmers who have not paid for last year.
For more than a century, the boll weevil has been the enemy of American cotton growers, costing millions of dollars in crop losses each year. But several states have eliminated the boll weevil, allowing growers to reduce pesticide use and increase profits. A 1993 study of North Carolina cotton fields found just two weevils in the entire state.
But those successes do not console Mr. Smith, who was forced to borrow $400,000 to stay in business. Indeed, throughout South Texas, the future of cotton ginning does not look bright. Although growers voted to end the eradication effort, they are still liable for $9 million of the foundation's debt. Farmers who plant cotton must pay an assessment of $12 to $18 an acre until the debt is retired.
The assessment led many farmers to plant sorghum instead of cotton this year. South Texas growers planted cotton on just 150,000 acres, less than half the acreage planted last year. Less acreage means less business for ginners like Mr. Smith, who will process about half the cotton he has in past years.
Despite the problems in South Texas, Bill Grefenstette, who directs the boll weevil eradication program for the Federal Agriculture Department, expects Texas to receive about $5 million in Federal money this year to continue spraying. ''Our commitment is as strong as it's ever been,'' Mr. Grefenstette said. He said that it is ''easy and it's convenient'' to blame the eradication program for the region's pest problems, ''but it's not necessarily the right conclusion.''
By contrast, Othal Brand, the longtime Mayor of McAllen, Tex., and one of the region's biggest growers, has no doubt that spraying caused the disaster. Last year, Mr. Brand lost $250,000 worth of cotton and $2 million worth of bell peppers to insect damage. ''I've been farming cotton for 50 years,'' he said, ''and I cannot ever remember a problem of this magnitude with all of these kinds of insects.''
Despite his losses, Mr. Brand has decided not to join other farmers in suing the foundation. ''I'm not angry,'' he said. ''It was just foolishness.''The city Department of Investigation subpoenaed a former city employee and questioned her about the source of embarrassing news leaks.
It forwarded confidential information about the employees of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani's rivals to the Mayor's top aides.
And the department's leader is considered so close to the Mayor that the F.B.I. took over an investigation the department was conducting into the administration's highest ranks.
The Department of Investigation -- the city's anti-corruption watchdog -- by the City Charter reports directly to the Mayor, and there has never been an administration in which it was truly independent of City Hall. Nonetheless, Mr. Giuliani and Howard M. Wilson, his Commissioner of Investigation and an old friend, have forged the closest such relationship in at least 20 years, leaving a trail of incidents such as these that have drawn fire from his critics.
Shortly before he was inaugurated, Mr. Giuliani said the agency needed to be more aggressive and its director not subject to the Mayor's whims. ''It would be worth looking at a more independent office,'' he said then.
Now, however, the Mayor dismisses the notion of independence, saying that because mayors are held accountable for corruption on their watch, he needs to have a close working relationship with his chief corruption fighter.
''People just have to have enough confidence in the Mayor of New York City to feel that the Commissioner of D.O.I. can report to the Mayor,'' he said in a recent interview, praising the department's accomplishments. ''If that's not the case, then they should vote the Mayor out of office. I'm not going to corrupt an investigation, I'm not going to obstruct an investigation.''
Mr. Wilson's close relationship with the day-to-day workings of city government differs dramatically from that of his predecessors, most of whom rarely visited City Hall. Mr. Wilson regularly briefs the Mayor -- a friend of 20 years -- on a variety of topics, and has become a key member of Mr. Giuliani's inner cabinet. He is one of the few city commissioners who regularly attends the Mayor's 8 A.M. staff meetings, dispensing advice on policy and political matters far beyond the traditional scope of his agency, administration officials say.
In interviews, several current and former employees of the department said that all investigations must be approved by City Hall and asserted that some investigations were intended to discover the source of embarrassing information leaks or provide political intelligence. In addition, they said, the department has been at its most aggressive when pursuing the Mayor's campaigns against organized crime and welfare fraud, while failing to follow through on promised investigations in areas that were not high on the Mayor's agenda, such as the waste in rebuilding Kings County Hospital.
Several employees in the department, which has an $18.9 million budget and 350 staff members, said privately that many were resentful because they feel their agency has become the Mayor's political investigative tool instead of pursuing its official mission to dispassionately root out corruption, fraud and abuse.
''D.O.I. does not initiate investigations,'' said a current department investigator, who insisted on anonymity. ''City Hall tells us to investigate this, and to investigate that.'' In the past, the department usually began its own inquiries in addition to responding to mayoral requests.
Mr. Wilson said in an interview that he often starts investigations without seeking the approval of City Hall, but needs to remain responsive to the Mayor, to keep him informed of problems. ''If I fail to do that, that's when the Mayor's in trouble,'' he said. ''This notion of being independent has no meaning.''
Pursuing the Source Of News Leaks
Several recent examples illustrate the unusual nature of the department's role under Mr. Wilson, and the degree to which it has worked to serve the administration's interests.
In one case, a former employee of the city's Community Development Agency says the Investigation Department subpoenaed her in April to determine how newspapers learned that the administration planned to cut off financing for several groups that serve immigrants, shifting the contracts to other groups that were seen as supporters of the Mayor. The decision resulted in unflattering articles in several newspapers, and in May, the administration canceled the new contracts under pressure.
The employee, Mae Dick, the agency's former director of literacy, said in an interview that she was fired from the agency in January after 5 1/2 years on the job because of a series of disagreements with a new supervisor. In April, she said, she received a subpoena signed by Mr. Wilson, and after appearing at the Investigation Department, she was asked a series of questions that focused on possible sources of the leaks.
''From their questions, they wanted to identify where the leaks of information about the immigration contracts had come from,'' she said. ''They obviously weren't investigating the decision to award the contracts, but just how word got out. I told them I didn't know, and they asked me to speculate.''
Alan Compagnon, Ms. Dick's attorney, accompanied her to the questioning, and said his handwritten notes of the questioning confirmed her account.
Mr. Wilson acknowledged that Ms. Dick was asked about how reporters learned of the contracts, but he said it was part of a larger inquiry into possible wrongdoing in the award of the contracts. He said his office does not routinely investigate leaks to newspapers.
Another example originally began in August 1994, when several elected officials around the city -- including some of the Mayor's rivals -- discovered that the department was informing the Mayor's top aides of the result of background checks on employees hired by four borough presidents and City Comptroller Alan G. Hevesi -- all Democrats. The officials complained to the city, and Randy M. Mastro, the Mayor's chief of staff, said the practice would stop.The United States left Carl Lewis off the Olympic 4x100-meter relay tonight and missed his vast international experience, losing the race for the first time except by disqualification.
Canada, anchored by the Olympic champion and world record-holder at 100 meters, Donovan Bailey, ran the fastest time in the world this year, 37.69 seconds, to win the gold medal. The United States finished a distant second in 38.05, while Brazil won the bronze in 38.41.
The Americans had won 14 of the previous 18 Olympic quarter-mile relays. They had failed to win only during the 1980 boycott of the Moscow Games and three other times upon disqualification for baton exchanges outside the allotted passing zone.
While the American men were handily and surprisingly defeated, the American women's 4x100 team of Chryste Gaines, Gail Devers, Inger Miller and Gwen Torrence ran the fastest time in the world this year to win the gold medal in 41.95.
The Bahamas took the silver in 42.14 and Jamaica won the bronze in 42.24.
Even without the Olympic 400-meter champion Michael Johnson, who was suffering tightness in his right hamstring, the American 4x400-meter relay team of LaMont Smith, Alvin Harrison, Derek Mills and Anthuan Maybank ran the third-fastest time in history to win in 2 minutes 55.99 seconds.
Maybank held off a serious threat by Roger Black of Britain, the 400-meter silver medalist, down the homestretch, leaving Britain second in 2:56.60 and Jamaica third in 2:59.42.
In the riveting women's 4x400, Jearl Miles of the United States held off Falilat Ogunkoya of Nigeria in the final meters to give the Americans the gold medal in 3:20.91.
Ogunkoya appeared ready to pass Miles out of the final curve, but Miles wisely moved a bit to her right, which would have forced the Nigerian woman to go around her.
Ogunkoya closed within a stride but Miles defiantly maintained the lead to the finish. Nigeria finished second in 3:21.04 and Germany won the bronze in 3:21.14. Also on the American team were Rochelle Stevens, Kim Graham and Maicel Malone.
In Lewis's absence, the American men went with a 4x100 team of Jon Drummond, Tim Harden, Mike Marsh and Dennis Mitchell. They ran sluggishly as a group and passed the baton cautiously. At least Drummond, Marsh and Mitchell are seasoned international competitors. Marsh won the 1992 Olympic gold medal at 200 meters and Mitchell won the bronze at 100 meters. Harden, however, has been running collegiately at Kentucky.
He was the 1995 national collegiate champion at 100 meters, but he had never been in a relay of this magnitude. Harden was surprised to be running in the final and it showed. He ran an ordinary 9.36 on his leg, while Glenroy Gilbert of Canada ran 9.02.
Drummond flinched at the start, ran a solid first leg, but handed the baton to Harden with some caution, aware that the Americans have suffered poor exchanges at recent international competitions.
Harden held his left hand around the middle of the baton, with not enough of the stick exposed to deliver it smoothly to Marsh. So, at top speed in the middle of his leg, Harden used his right hand to reposition the baton. It is a difficult maneuver, and he developed a momentary hitch in his stride.
''We haven't practiced that much,'' Harden said.
Marsh appeared to get out slowly on the third leg, and there was an awkward exchange with Harden. By then, the race was getting away from the Americans. Bruny Surin of Canada, a silver medalist at 100 meters at the 1995 world championships, ran a torrid curve, handing the baton to Bailey with a two-stride lead over Mitchell.
Bailey ran 9.84 to win the Olympic 100 meters last Saturday night; with a rolling start, he was not about to be caught in the relay, storming through the anchor leg in 8.95.
Lewis, who was seeking his record-breaking 10th gold medal, was left off the team after finishing last at 100 meters at the Olympic trials and after missing a pre-Olympic training camp in North Carolina. He was also criticized for campaigning for a spot on the relay even as he said he was not. Still, his experience was sorely missed tonight, though it was impossible to say whether his presence would have changed the outcome.
Lewis has anchored American relay teams to six world records; he was part of 5 of the 10 fastest 4x100 relays of all time. At the Barcelona Games, he anchored the United States to the world record of 37.40.
If Lewis had run anchor tonight, Mitchell would have run the third leg and Marsh would have replaced Harden on the second leg. Afterward, Mitchell defended the squad that won the silver medal, saying, ''The best team we could have put out there tonight, we did.''Confined to her bed by grief and surrounded by friends and relatives, Khairiya Jumayel went from sorrow to anger today as she retold the story of how her son died last week after he was tortured by Palestinian security officers.
''I never expected this,'' she said bitterly. ''We had waited for the Palestinian Authority to come here, we welcomed them, and we were happy to be free from the Jews. But I prefer the Jews to these traitors.''
On the floor of a crude dwelling in a refugee camp in Tulkarm, another circle of mourners consoled Naima Hadaideh, whose husband was killed on Friday when Palestinian officers opened fire during a clash with hundreds of protesters demanding the release of prisoners on a hunger strike.
''When the Palestinian forces first arrived in town, we danced for joy because the occupation was gone, and they are Muslims like us,'' she said, as police officers stood watch down the road. ''But these people have nothing to do with Islam. They're not ours. They are doing the same thing the Jews did.''
From the homes of the bereaved families to the streets of the West Bank, a wave of public resentment against the Palestinian security forces is posing a challenge to the leadership of Yasir Arafat, the president of the Palestinian Authority. The anger has produced the biggest protests in the West Bank against police abuses since Mr. Arafat's forces took control of large areas of the territory in December under a self-rule agreement with Israel.
Scenes reminiscent of the seven-year uprising that began in 1987 against the Israeli occupation have been replayed in recent days in the streets of West Bank cities that are now under Palestinian control.
In Nablus, the death of Mahmoud Jumayel on Wednesday after he was severely beaten and burned by three officers in a Palestinian jail brought out hundreds of protesters, who marched on police headquarters, and thousands of mourners, who buried him as a martyr. Shopkeepers shuttered their stores, in some cases under threat by masked youths. Palestinian police patrols ordered them to reopen, just as Israeli soldiers used to do.
Outside the Tulkarm prison on Friday, a confrontation between police officers and families of prisoners who were on a hunger strike turned violent. The protesters hurled stones, and the officers fired back, killing Ibrahim Hadaideh, 44. A few dozen prisoners escaped during the melee, but they surrendered hours later. Twenty of them were released today, but at least 100 more people were arrested in the aftermath of the riots.
The striking prisoners were suspected members of the militant Hamas movement who had been jailed without charges since a spate of suicide bombings in Israel by Islamic militants in February and March. The prisoners stopped eating last week, complaining about their detention without trial and harsh prison conditions. Hundreds of suspected militants are being held in Palestinian jails in the West Bank and Gaza Strip without charges, and human rights groups say some have been tortured under interrogation.
Reacting to the violence in Tulkarm, Hamas issued a leaflet calling for another ''intifada,'' or uprising, this time against Mr. Arafat.
''To respond to the crime of the authority in Tulkarm, our people should rise up against this collaborating authority,'' the leaflet said. It demanded the release of prisoners and the trial of security officials for ''crimes against our people.''
The authority accuses Hamas of trying to undermine its rule, asserting that armed militants whipped up the crowd and fired the fatal shots in Tulkarm. ''We have put our hands on messages from abroad instructing people inside the territories to stage riots and also some leaflets calling on people to take action against the Palestinian Authority,'' said Amin al-Hindi, chief of Palestinian intelligence.
But the authority has scrambled to restore shaken public confidence in its commitment to the rule of law. It formed a ministerial committee to investigate the events in Tulkarm and Nablus, and in a highly publicized trial on Saturday, a Palestinian military court sentenced the officers who tortured Mr. Jumayel to prison terms and hard labor, one to 10 years and two to 15.
The Palestinian Justice Minister, Freih Abu Middain, acknowledged in an interview that abuses were frequent and that the authority had to improve its training of police officers, many of whom until recently had been guerrilla fighters in far-flung camps of the Palestine Liberation Organization, or street toughs leading the uprising.
''The first priority is to make the change from a revolutionary mentality to a civil society in which there is respect for the law,'' he said. ''This is a golden opportunity to set things right.''
Mr. Abu Middain, who is a member of the ministerial committee, said that specially trained lawyers would be assigned to police stations and interrogation centers and that more officers would receive legal training and instruction in crowd control.
But many Palestinians remain skeptical, contending that not enough has been done to instill respect for civil rights in the Palestinian security forces. They note that seven prisoners have died since the police first arrived in the Gaza Strip and West Bank more than two years ago.
In Tulkarm today, Jamal Hadaideh, the brother of the man killed in Friday's clashes, came home after being released from jail along with other suspected Hamas militants. ''Israeli officers never shoot at Jews when they break up a demonstration,'' he said. ''Jewish blood is sacred, while Palestinian blood is desecrated. We've sacrificed for Palestine, and we expect the authority to protect us. Instead, people are saying that we have a new occupation -- it only speaks a different language.''Clad in buckskin and feathers, Mohegan Indians danced to a booming drumbeat. Their chief sprinkled tobacco on the ground in a ritual tribute to the spirits and then joined tribe members in smoking an ancient pipe on the graves of their ancestors.
''The dying days are done,'' declared Jayne Fawcett, the vice chairwoman of the 1,100-member tribe. ''The cycle of life has begun anew.''
The celebration that day in November was for the start of a $275 million project to transform an eastern Connecticut factory where nuclear reactor components were built into a glitzy casino, the Mohegan Sun Resort, which will open in October. After years of struggle, the tribe that James Fenimore Cooper eulogized in ''The Last of the Mohicans'' was experiencing a stunning renaissance.
And it came about through an unusual partnership between the tribe and an international gambling mogul, Solomon Kerzner, sometimes referred to as the South African Donald Trump, who began looking to move into the American gambling market more than a decade ago and now appears to have found his opening.
The opportunity is not without risks. On one hand, the Mohegans will tap into a $2 billion New England gambling market with a casino that is just 2 hours and 20 minutes from New York City by car. But that market is already being served by a casino only 10 miles away, Foxwoods, which is owned by the Mashantucket Pequot tribe and is the nation's most profitable gambling venture. It is expected to be a fierce rival.
To compete with Foxwoods and build a casino that could stand with the new generation of Las Vegas and Atlantic City extravaganzas, the Mohegans say they needed the financial resources and the know-how of Mr. Kerzner, whose family trust alone is valued at $750 million and whose company, Sun International, operates 32 casinos in Africa, the Bahamas and Europe. Although some critics say the Mohegans have given him too much -- he and his partners will get as much as 40 percent of the casino's profits over the next seven years -- the Mohegans insist he is worth every penny.
They point to Mr. Kerzner's record. Sun City, a resort that opened in the Bophuthatswana homeland outside Johannesburg in the early 1980's, was South Africa's answer to Las Vegas, with stars like Frank Sinatra and Liza Minnelli playing to crowds in a 6,000-seat arena. A few years ago, he built an addition known as the Lost City, a fantastical invention of a lost water-loving civilization that includes a miniature ocean for surfing, a nightly volcanic eruption and a golf course with live crocodiles near the 13th hole.
It is this panache that Mr. Kerzner says he is bringing to the rolling hills of eastern Connecticut, where he hopes to capitalize on the history of the Mohegans, the ''Wolf People.''
The new casino is intended to be a Disney-like monument to a tribe that is said to have lived centuries ago without money or private property. It will be in the shape of a giant wigwam with a river running through the food court, faux animal skins hanging from the rafters and slot machine games like ''Cash Canoe'' and ''Mohegan Money Tree.''
An indoor forest is being built out of logs, steel and aluminum beams. A replica of a sacred cliff, where the great sachem Uncas is said to have leaped across a river, is being created in fiberglass. The ''makiawisug,'' the little people who the Mohegans believe walk between the natural and spiritual worlds, will somehow be incorporated.
''Every aspect of its design will connect to Mohegan,'' Ms. Fawcett said.
A Generous Deal Raises Questions
Still, the project has raised questions among those who regulate and follow Indian gambling.
Since 1988, when Congress authorized gambling on Indian reservations and established a National Indian Gaming Commission to regulate it, about 130 tribes have opened casinos. The Mohegan contract with Trading Cove Associates, the partnership that includes Mr. Kerzner, was by far the largest deal to have come before the commission.
Although Foxwoods and perhaps two or three other Indian casinos are physically larger, those did not require commission scrutiny because they are operated by tribes or their employees, not a non-Indian contractor.
The commission officially approved the deal last September, but the chairman, Harold Monteau, had to exercise his power to overrule the two other commissioners, who said it needed further review.
In a memorandum to Mr. Monteau, the two dissenters, Jana McKeag and Tom Foley, argued that the commission had not conducted a comprehensive background check of Mr. Kerzner, who has been accused of allowing a $600,000 bribe to be paid in 1986 to the leader of Transkei, a South African homeland, so a company he owned an interest in could maintain a gambling monopoly.
While Mr. Kerzner has acknowledged that a payment was made, he and others said it was extortion on the part of the Transkei leader. An investigator hired by the Mohegans, Francis M. Mullen, a former head of criminal investigations at the F.B.I. and former head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, cleared Mr. Kerzner. A Connecticut State Police investigation also found him fit to be licensed here, echoing the decisions of gambling authorities in the Bahamas and France.
Perhaps more important was the commissioners' criticism that the contract was too generous to Trading Cove Associates. While independent operators are allowed to have seven-year contracts and receive up to 40 percent of an Indian casino's profits, as Mr. Kerzner has, such deals are supposed to be allowed only in unusual circumstances; the law sets a standard deal at five years and 30 percent.
The two commissioners concluded that the Trading Cove contract could not be justified, and Ms. McKeag called it a ''crummy deal.''Marilyn Gelber, New York City's Commissioner of Environmental Protection, has been forced out of office at an extremely sensitive moment. The Giuliani administration is trying to conclude delicate negotiations over the protection of upstate watershed lands, in which Ms. Gelber has played a central role. While the Mayor has a right to shuffle his staff at will, the timing of this particular change is troubling.
Ms. Gelber's friends say she is being punished because she resisted hiring patronage appointees thrust on her by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's office. Mr. Giuliani's aides say the problem was actually bad management, involving, in particular, mounting complaints about water bills, which are the department's responsibility.
It is true that homeowners complain frequently about getting bills that are inaccurate, and about the long time it takes to have them corrected. But water bills have been a problem for nearly a decade now. Mr. Giuliani should have deferred making changes until the more crucial matter of water quality was resolved.
The Department of Environmental Protection is a peculiar agency. The name suggests issues like land preservation and clean air, but most of its work involves pipes -- sewers, mains and tunnels. Conventional wisdom used to be that running the department was a job for an engineer. Through the last two administrations, however, the department's overriding concern was to protect the city's water supplies and avoid the need to build a ruinously expensive filtration plant.
The city's water comes from reservoirs upstate, where increased development has begun to threaten its purity. Ms. Gelber won the confidence of both the watershed towns who resented city interference and environmental groups who were pushing for the strictest possible controls. Representatives of both sides expressed dismay at her sudden departure.
She was forced out of office before her critical task was done. Environmentalists have been complaining that the agreement may not have enough controls to guarantee long-term protection of the water. The 34 upstate towns that must ratify the agreement are skittish. The final pact was supposed to be finished months ago, but one issue after another has halted progress.
The Giuliani administration has expressed confidence that Ms. Gelber's departure will not be a drag on negotiations, and that the agreement could be completed within weeks. If that is the case, it seems cruel to elbow her out of the way before she could receive the praise she deserves upon the signing.
Mayor Giuliani has said that the department needed to be reinvigorated, and appointed the Buildings Commissioner, Joel Miele, as Ms. Gelber's successor. Mr. Miele, an engineer, has been energetic in trying to bring about change at one of of the most hidebound agencies in city government. He may well be a good choice to handle the pipe end of the D.E.P. mandate. But he has no experience with the environment.
Ms. Gelber's contribution to the city's welfare has been substantial, and she should have been given a warmer departure.In the hours after Trans World Airlines Flight 800 exploded in flames, the airline issued conflicting statements about how many passengers had been on board. It took 12 hours to verify the passengers' identities and determine that certain travelers, including three people bound for Rome, had not in fact been on the ill-fated plane.
Federal investigators now say T.W.A.'s early confusion about the number and identity of the passengers has set off alarm bells about a possible breach of aviation security. Law enforcement officials say they have suspicions about the airline's procedures for handling checked baggage and are closely examining whether it would have been possible for someone to put a bomb in a piece of luggage, check it through to Paris and not board the plane.
Security experts say the system of matching bags to passengers in United States airports is more vulnerable to deception and inaccuracy than the system at European airports, where security guards monitor the process at each critical step. In the United States, most airlines have bag-matching systems that are similar to T.W.A.'s, and investigators say that any flaws found in the bag-matching procedures for Flight 800 could raise questions about the quality of other airlines' procedures.
''There is no way any bag on its way to the U.S. can get onto a plane without going through security,'' said Philip Baum, who until recently was a senior official with the T.W.A. subsidiary that handles security at overseas airports. ''But coming out of the U.S., it's a different story.''
A T.W.A. spokesman, Mark Abels, said the airline had made sure that every checked bag in the cargo hold belonged to someone on board.
''Every piece of luggage on the plane was matched to each passenger and accounted for,'' Mr. Abels said. He acknowledged that it took T.W.A. hours after the crash to verify the number and identity of the passengers, but said the confusion bore no relationship to the airline's control of the luggage. He pointed out that Flight 800's departure was delayed for an hour, in part because some luggage was removed to await the passenger who had checked it.
Investigators have said that the forward sections of Flight 800 were separated from the rest of the plane by an explosion. Although they have not reached a definitive conclusion, a leading theory is that a bomb in the forward cargo hold, in a toilet cubicle or on a food cart blew off the front of the plane. The front cargo hold contained only checked luggage, according to investigators.
Compiling accurate passenger lists and matching each checked piece of luggage to a specific passenger are cornerstones of aviation security. Congress passed a law in 1990 requiring airlines to confirm that every checked bag belongs to a passenger on international flights. The legislation stemmed from the 1988 downing of Pan American Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, a disaster caused by a bomb planted in luggage that had been checked by a passenger who never boarded the plane.
''The passenger manifest and the luggage match is a critical part of security,'' said Kurt Wurzberger, director of security operations at the Fairfax Group, a security consulting company in Falls Church, Va. ''If an airline is not using that system the way it is designed, it could create a serious vulnerability.''
The 1990 law also required airlines to compile a complete passenger list, including full names, passport numbers and emergency phone numbers, for international flights. Airlines must make this information available within three hours of any crash occurring outside the United States. A proposal currently in Congress would require airlines to make an accurate list available soon after the crash of a domestic flight.
But while the bag match requirements have been put into effect, the passenger list law has not, in part because of opposition by airlines.
At 9 P.M. on July 17, some 30 minutes after the crash of Flight 800, T.W.A. officials began trying to confirm the identity of those aboard, Mr. Abels said. At 11:30 P.M., they put the number at 229. Twelve hours later, they changed it to 228. Finally, late that afternoon, airline officials confirmed that 230 people had actually been aboard.
Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani has said that he and his staff repeatedly beseeched the airline for an accurate passenger list so that anguished family members could know if relatives were on board. At various times during the night of the crash, the Mayor said, airline officials told him they could not produce an accurate list because the F.B.I. or other law enforcement agencies had taken crucial records -- or because the National Transportation Safety Board had told them not to release the information. Both Mayor Giuliani and a safety board spokesman later called the explanations untrue.
In their effort to make the identifications, airline employees were scrambling to compare differing lists of passengers with boarding passes and telephoning airports around the country for information on passengers who had started their trips in those cities.
Mr. Abels said discrepancies in the passenger list do not prevent the airline from correlating the names of those who checked bags with the names on tickets collected at the gate. Confusion about names of passengers, he said, sometimes arises because people traveling together book their tickets under one name. He added that there was not always a direct connection between the number of passengers who check bags and the number on board, because some take only carry-on bags.
Still, aviation security experts said that bag-matching systems used by airlines at American airports are not as tightly controlled as those used by the same companies in Europe. At major European airports, security guards are posted at points where luggage is collected or might get mishandled, said Mr. Baum, formerly manager of training and auditing for the T.W.A. subsidiary that handles security overseas.
Mr. Abels said that every piece of luggage checked by an international passenger is marked with an electronic bar code. It then travels to a cargo area where it is sorted according to flight, packed into a container and loaded onto a plane. As passengers board the flight, their names are typed into a computer and matched against the names of those who have checked bags until all the luggage is accounted for.
Although many carriers follow similar procedures, a spokesman for Delta Air Lines, Bill Berry, said the airline loads each international passenger's luggage after the passenger boards the plane.
A former director of security for Northwest Airlines, Douglas R. Laird, said bag-matching procedures used in the United States provide good safeguards against terrorism, but are not fail-safe, in part because they depend on properly trained and honest baggage handlers. Federal investigators say they have questioned baggage handlers who loaded luggage onto Flight 800.
Now, they are also scrutinizing the passenger manifest to make sure it accurately represents all those who boarded the plane.It almost has the ring of an advertising slogan, if not the power to keep New York consumers from going to New Jersey or Pennsylvania: buy clothes tax-free, courtesy of New York State.
Of course, there is a catch: the offer is good for only one week, starting Jan. 20.
And there is another catch: the offer covers only the 4 percent state sales tax. Shoppers in some jurisdictions may still have to pay local taxes on their purchases.
Over all, though, retailers are enthusiastic. ''Anytime an opportunity presents itself where taxes can be reduced, which would in effect increase our business, we're fully in favor,'' said Tim Ray, a spokesman for Macy's. ''It only becomes a win-win situation for our customers.''
The state tax exemption, which applies to purchases of $500 and less, was part of the budget package that the State Legislature approved and Gov. George E. Pataki signed last month. The Assembly Speaker, Sheldon Silver, pushed for the weeklong exemption after a 1995 campaign to permanently eliminate the sales tax faltered in the State Senate. He sees the 4 percent levy as putting New York at a competitive disadvantage to the half-dozen nearby states that he says do not have sales taxes on clothes.
''Unfortunately, they're all on our border, if you count Rhode Island, which is on the border of Long Island Sound,'' Mr. Silver said. ''They all impact on our sales.''
But the officials from those states are not worried about the New York exemption. ''It's a one-week thing,'' said Jayne Rebovich, a spokeswoman for Gov. Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey. ''We have no sales tax on clothes and shoes 365 days a year.''
Exactly how much New Jersey and other states draw from New York is unclear, retailers and analysts say. Mr. Silver estimated that state tax revenues would drop $10 million to $15 million for the week. But he maintained that some of the lost revenue would be offset by higher taxes from improved corporate profits resulting from increased sales during the week.
Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani supports the state exemption and will match it by exempting clothes from New York City's 4 percent local sales tax for the same week, said a spokeswoman for the Mayor, Deirdra Picou. She said the weeklong suspension would have to be approved by the Municipal Assistance Corporation, which oversees the city's finances.
But lifting the 4 percent local tax would not make clothing purchased in the city tax-free. Shoppers currently pay an additional one-quarter of 1 percent, which goes to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. ''It's not clear that we have the discretion to suspend it, or if we were included in the legislation,'' said an M.T.A. spokesman, John Cunningham. ''We're concerned about the revenue impact if we were.''
If the M.T.A. decided not to rescind its tax for the week, the sales tax on a $100 purchase would fall to 25 cents, from the usual $8.25.
On Long Island, the Nassau County Executive, Thomas S. Gulotta, favors the local exemption. But it is subject to approval by the Nassau County Legislature, which has not scheduled a vote.
''Our position is, the necessities of life should not be taxed,'' said David Vieser, a spokesman for Mr. Gulotta.
In Suffolk, the County Executive, Patrick J. Gaffney, has not decided whether to lift the 4 percent local sales tax or an additional one-quarter of 1 percent that pays for a drinking water protection program, said a spokesman, Rick Belyea.
The Westchester County Executive, Andrew P. O'Rourke, has also not decided whether to suspend the local sales tax.
Mr. Silver said he believed that the weeklong exemption would provide fresh evidence that lowering sales taxes increases sales, which might in turn persuade legislators to lift the sales tax on clothing for good, starting in 1998.
But Pearl Kamer, the chief economist of the Long Island Association, a business and civic organization, said a permanent exemption would cause new financial headaches for officials already struggling with reduced Federal and state contributions to local budgets.
''County government has come to rely on revenues from the sales tax,'' she said. ''You'd have to find another source of taxation. I don't think you could raise property taxes. They're onerous as is. And if a county imposed a personal income tax, you risk that people will vote with their feet and go to areas where there is no such tax.''
Fred Kaplan, the executive director of Local 340 of the Retail Clothing and Salesmen's Union, said he doubted that dropping the sales tax for only one week would change customers' clothes-buying habits.
''Maybe I would think about buying a TV'' if the exemption covered appliances, he said. ''But I don't see clothing as the kind of thing where somebody's going to go out and buy clothing in January that they don't need 'til May. They're not going to go and buy a summer suit in January. I'm not even sure the retailer will have it.''While Robert G. Torricelli, the Democratic Congressman from New Jersey who is running for the Senate, was building a powerful campaign war chest, he was also realizing significant returns on his personal investments, according to his financial disclosure forms, tax returns and other documents on file in the House of Representatives.
Mr. Torricelli, who recently reported having a lead of more than $3 million in fund raising over his Republican opponent, Richard A. Zimmer, has also realized rapid growth in his personal finances over the last four years by investing in risky new companies through a blind trust and by profiting in an initial stock offering in which he is said to have received privileged, albeit legal, advice. With the general election just three months away and the race tight, Mr. Zimmer has been publicly criticizing Mr. Torricelli over his personal finances in an attempt to make it a campaign issue.
In less than two years, Mr. Torricelli's initial $139,000 investment in a blind trust account set up in September 1994 has grown about 160 percent, to $365,000, his financial records show. Mr. Torricelli said he has added $50,000 more to the account, bringing its total value to about $415,000.
None of his investments have been illegal in any way, and his assets are modest by comparison with many of his peers in Congress. But his returns in the blind trust have far outpaced the overall stock market, and, like such other political leaders as Senator Alfonse M. D'Amato of New York and Hillary Rodham Clinton, he has received a windfall from a relatively small investment that resulted from a personal relationship.
Mr. Torricelli set up the blind trust after he received $144,000 in profits from a 1992 savings-and-loan stock issue. The chairman of the savings association, a longtime friend of Mr. Torricelli's, informed the Congressman of the stock issue, which was limited to select investors and promised rapid-growth returns. Before 1992, Mr. Torricelli had few investments, reported no capital gains and earned very little interest income.
In an interview last week, the Congressman said, ''I've earned enough through the blind trust to get a little security in life.'' He said he had instructed the trustee to invest aggressively and he did not consider the returns to be extraordinary, given the stock market's performance over the last two years. ''It's done well, but I know it's high risk,'' he said. ''At age 44, if I'm going to remain in government, I have do some investing to get some security.''
Mr. Zimmer, the Republican candidate, who has invested his money primarily in balanced mutual funds and bonds that have earned much lower returns, criticized Mr. Torricelli for using a blind trust to make such large profits. ''He should disclose how he got rich in such a short period of time,'' Mr. Zimmer said. ''With the blind trust, in the end, he's keeping the information from his constituents.''
Mr. Torricelli's investment streak began in May 1992, when he began buying an undisclosed number of shares in the First Savings Bank of Perth Amboy. The bank was going public, changing from a mutual institution to one controlled by stock owners. Such issues were generating significant profits at the time, so demand for the stock was high and few shares were available to the public. The bank's chairman, Joseph Yewasis, was a longtime friend of Mr. Torricelli's, and the Congressman acknowledged that Mr. Yewasis informed him of the opportunity to buy shares in the bank.
Mr. Torricelli said the bank chairman played no role in helping him secure the shares, even though the demand for the stock far exceeded the limited number of shares that were available to the public. Mr. Yewasis died earlier this year.
The bank stock was offered at $10 a share, and, according to Mr. Torricelli's own records, he bought two blocks, one in May 1992, and another block in November 1992. In January 1993, he sold some of the stock, realizing $72,500 in profits, and in 1994, he sold the remaining shares for an additional $72,000 in profits.
To buy the bank stock, Mr. Torricelli said he used an unsecured loan from Brown Brothers, Harrimancoei & Company of New York. The loan, which was for at least $100,000, was repaid in full in December 1995, the Congressman's financial disclosure statement showed.
While Mr. Zimmer and his campaign staff have relentlessly sought to make an issue of the stock purchase, the Justice Department examined the transaction last year and found no wrongdoing. ''There was no conflict of interest and no violation,'' Mr. Torricelli said last week.
The proceeds from the stock transaction enabled Mr. Torricelli to begin his next series of investments, which have been carried out through the blind trust. Such accounts are sometimes set up by politicians seeking to avoid conflicts of interest. A trustee invests their money and is prohibited from discussing any of the account's holdings with the politician.
Rodney N. Houghton, a partner in the Newark-based law firm of McCarter & English, which handles many trust accounts, said Mr. Torricelli's returns were high but not impossible. ''The typical returns for that period, if you invested in growth, would have been 30 to 40 percent,'' he said. Mr. Houghton, who is a former president of the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel, added, ''I would very much like to have the name of his stockbroker.''
Mr. Torricelli first created a blind trust in March 1993, according to Congressional records. That account was administered by Stephen J. Moses, a Newark lawyer and a close friend who now serves as chairman of the Congressman's campaign finance committee. But after the account had a lackluster performance, Mr. Torricelli closed it in May 1994.
Four months later, he started his current trust with $139,000, naming as his trustee Matthew A. Gohd, a managing director of Whale Securities, a Manhattan-based brokerage concern that favors high-risk ventures. In the early 1990's, Whale paid fines to customers and to the National Association of Securities Dealers for selling unregistered securities and operating without a license. Company officials have said they have put the problems behind them.
''We take reasonable small bets,'' Mr. Gohd, the trustee, said in a telephone interview last week. ''When they work out, they add a large amount to the portfolio.'' He said Mr. Torricelli ''liked the idea'' that venture-capital investing could net high returns. But Mr. Gohd played down the significance of Mr. Torricelli's returns, noting that the trust account has been down over the last few weeks. ''It looks a lot more impressive than it it really is if you look at some of the risks we take,'' he said.
In addition to the blind trust, Mr. Torricelli's assets include two individual retirement accounts worth less than $50,000 each, and less than $50,000 in stock in a New Jersey bank. His assets also include his Englewood, N.J., house, valued at $281,000, and a condominium in Washington that he bought in 1994 for $177,000. Mr. Torricelli's Congressional salary is $125,000 a year.No political strategy is considered more potent by Republicans or truer to their core beliefs than promising big tax cuts.
In advocating a $548 billion tax cut, Bob Dole has seized an issue that he can use to define his differences with President Clinton, and one that opens the door to a debate over why Americans feel so insecure and overworked despite the economy's solid performance in recent years.
But Mr. Dole is also betting his career on being able to persuade the electorate to come down on his side of a complex and often bitter dispute: whether it is possible to slash taxes in the American political system without sending the deficit sky-high again, and if so, whether the smaller government that results will lead to faster economic growth and improved living standards.
It is not an easy dispute to follow, much less conclude, because it involves an array of questions like how much additional growth tax cuts might generate, how much human behavior is changed when economic incentives are changed and to what extent do political leaders have the desire and the will to enact deeper spending cuts than they have so far.
In assessing Mr. Dole's plan, both sides of the argument point to the 1980's, but they focus on completely different consequences of the Reagan tax cuts and draw completely different conclusions.
''In the 1980 election, the Republican Presidential candidate, Ronald Reagan, promised a tax cut, and Bob Dole led the effort to implement it,'' said Senator Spencer Abraham of Michigan, a Republican and one of the first and most influential backers of Mr. Dole's tax-cutting plan. ''The result was we got the longest peacetime expansion in history.''
But in an advertisement in The New York Times on Sunday, the Concord Coalition, a fiscal watchdog group led by two Republicans, former Senator Warren Rudman of New Hampshire and Peter G. Peterson, who was Commerce Secretary in the Nixon Administration, and a Democrat, former Senator Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts, argued that a big tax cut now would be fiscally irresponsible.
''Let the 1980's be a lesson,'' the advertisement said. ''The original supply-side concept of targeted tax cuts quickly led to a general tax cut bidding war, with both parties joining in the frenzy. This resulted in unprecedented peacetime deficits and interest costs that will be with us for years to come.''
Mr. Dole's aides have long argued that he is well aware of the lessons of the Reagan era, and that Mr. Dole's long commitment to deficit reduction should give him credibility as a responsible tax-cutter.
But in outlining Mr. Dole's economic platform today, Republican officials gave only sketchy details of how Mr. Dole would pay for the tax cuts he is proposing. They said that increased economic growth resulting from his plan, which also includes reducing government regulation and overhauling the legal system, would make up about 27 percent of the cost. An additional 18 percent might come from sales of unallocated broadcast frequencies and reductions in Government administrative expenses.
The only details the party aides offered were that Mr. Dole had supported scaling back or eliminating at least four Cabinet departments and that the plan would not call for additional cuts to Medicare or Social Security. It is unclear how much more information Mr. Dole will provide when he formally presents the plan in Chicago on Monday.
Democrats are already arguing that the numbers cannot possibly add up in a way that will keep the nation on track to a balanced budget.
''He is saying that part of this is going to be paid for by growth in the economy, which again is the kind of supply-side voodoo that did not work in the 80's,'' Leon E. Panetta, the White House chief of staff, said of Mr. Dole today on the CBS News program ''Face the Nation.''
As the Presidential campaign heats up, the varying positions of the two camps amount to a role reversal of sorts: the Democrats are talking about the importance of the bond markets and responsible fiscal policy, while the Republicans are using Mr. Dole's economic plan to appeal directly to working Americans.
As the debate over the Dole plan unfolds, the Clinton Administration has begun portraying itself as the protector of the deficit reduction the nation has enjoyed over the last several years. In part their strategy is intended to insulate them against Mr. Dole's attacks on Mr. Clinton for raising taxes in 1993. But they are also trying to draw a direct line between the reduced deficit and benefits to voters, primarily in the form of a reduction in long-term interest rates that accompanied the shrinking deficit.
''Under the guise of cutting taxes for some in the short term,'' Mr. Panetta said, ''what we are going to wind up doing is increasing the most regressive taxes of all, which is interest on the national debt that is going to be passed on to our kids.''.
Republicans said Mr. Dole's package would directly address the economic anxiety that they said had seized much of the country.
''Working families in my state say they work hard but have less to show for it at the end of the month,'' Mr. Abraham said. ''Salaries and incomes have been flat under Clinton, but taxes have gone up. Under the Dole plan, hard-working American families could keep more of what they earn.''
But beyond any immediate political appeal, the Dole plan, his advisers said, is intended to improve the nation's capacity for economic growth. A tax cutting plan could theoretically help boost the economy in two ways. If it is not accompanied by offsetting spending cuts or other revenue gains, a tax cut provides a short-term stimulus by putting more money into the economy, generating more growth for a short time but also inflation.
Mr. Dole's plan is at least partly aimed at improving the nation's capacity for noninflationary economic growth in the long run. Most economists agree that reducing the size of the government and reducing regulation, among other steps, could help make the economy more productive by freeing up capital for investment.Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani has often distanced himself from the conservative social policies of his fellow Republicans, but after last week's upheaval of the country's welfare landscape, he has suddenly found himself to the left of President Clinton and much of the Democratic Party on issues of welfare and immigration.
In unsuccessfully urging Mr. Clinton not to sign the welfare bill passed by Congress last week, he argued that the Federal Government was in effect shifting millions of dollars in costs to the city and state. But he also evoked a tradition of social generosity in the city and state that goes back to the great waves of immigrants in the last century, and that makes it difficult even for a budget-cutting Republican Mayor to endorse wholeheartedly the welfare retreat now under way across the country.
''The city of New York is really just a better place than a lot of other places in terms of caring for people and understanding the worth of human beings,'' Mr. Giuliani said last week, explaining why local government would inevitably have to shoulder the burden that Washington has now dropped.
To be sure, the Mayor is hardly an advocate for the welfare state. He has removed 155,000 people from the welfare rolls since taking office and has forced thousands of others to be finger-imaged, or electronically fingerprinted, and to work for their benefits. He has advocated the wholesale abolition of the joint state and city Home Relief program, which provides assistance mostly to childless, able-bodied adults; barring that, he has said, he favors a 90-day time limit on benefits. Last year, he noted that the combined effects of state and city welfare cutbacks could prompt many recipients to move out of the state, though he stopped just short of saying that would be a good thing.
Nonetheless, Mr. Giuliani has made it clear that he will not follow the President all the way to welfare's new terrain, and his opposition seems to grow from the nature of governing the nation's largest city, the one with the highest population of welfare recipients.
On a political level, his opposition to the bill may play well in next year's election among those Democratic voters who support social programs and have otherwise been critical of some of his actions. On a financial level, the city does not have the necessary money to pick up the new burden. And on a historical level, he can assert that the bill's severity violates the city's tradition of embracing immigrants and supporting the needy.
''The instinct for generosity and taking care of people began in New York State, and it is still strongest here,'' said former Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, who added that the state was one of the few in America to enshrine that principle in its Constitution. ''There are more people clustered here, in a smaller space, and the intensity of the need is so much greater,'' he said.
That tradition began around the turn of the century, when the Tammany Hall machine won the loyalty of its immigrant working-class constituency with generous helpings of public relief. It continued through the Depression, said Frances Fox Piven, a professor of political science and sociology at the Graduate School of the City University of New York, through the support of labor unions and leaders like Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia.
In recent years, the tradition has begun to erode somewhat, although not as fast as elsewhere. Even before the new Federal bill, Mayor Giuliani, Gov. George E. Pataki and the Democratic leadership in the State Assembly had come out in favor of time limits of some sort on public assistance, though political differences kept any from being approved.
The Mayor and the Governor favor reducing the size of the state's welfare grant, a proposal that the Democrats killed. And thousands of people in New York City, Westchester and Suffolk Counties are now working for local governments in exchange for their benefits.
When the details of the Congressional bill emerged last week, the Governor said he was pleased with the time limit and workfare provisions, expressing some disagreement only with the decision to cut off many legal immigrants from food stamps and some other benefits. He said he may call a special session of the State Legislature to wrestle with Albany's new welfare responsibilities.
With Senator Alfonse M. D'Amato supporting the bill, the loudest voices against the bill in the state became those of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan -- who said the effect on New York would be ''apocalyptic'' -- and the Mayor, who used somewhat less florid language to say the same thing.
But even some of those who have differed sharply with Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Pataki in their attempts to reduce welfare's benefits believe New York State will remain more generous than other states when the time comes to assume the responsibility passed on by the Federal Government.
True, the state's monthly welfare grant of $577 hardly seems generous in light of the area's high cost of living, and the size of the grant has gone up only three times since the 1970's, falling far behind inflation. But only four states have a higher monthly benefit, and at least for the time being, the state is considered likely to maintain that relative position. The state has not cut its benefit or dropped its Home Relief program the way other states have, and New York's constitutional protection for the needy may prevent the impoverishment of many legal immigrants that is predicted in many other states.
''I think there is a commitment among a substantial part of the people of New York to maintain some basic level of decency for their neighbors,'' said Henry Freedman, executive director of the Center on Social Welfare Policy and Law, a Manhattan-based organization that assists lawyers for welfare recipients. ''The reason is that they understand the consequences of the social disaster that would otherwise result.''
Those consequences, Mr. Cuomo said, include the prospect of more families living on the street, more people committing crimes, more people in public hospital beds, more AIDS cases, more domestic violence -- ''more of all of the things that abject poverty brings,'' he said.
It remains unclear, however, just how the city and the state will be able to sustain their generosity in light of fiscal pressures that were enormous even before passage of the bill, which local officials say will add hundreds of millions to their annual welfare costs. Earlier this year, for example, Mr. Pataki, with Mr. Giuliani's approval, proposed reducing the monthly benefit for a one-parent family with two children to $424 from $577, a 26 percent cut that would match New Jersey's level. The idea was quickly blocked by the Democrats in the State Assembly, continuing the party's tradition as a defender of the social safety net.
But now, even the Assembly Speaker, Sheldon Silver, acknowledges that time limits on benefits have become a reality, both for the main welfare program for families and for the state's Home Relief program. With the state about to pay a much larger share of the costs, welfare advocates fear that the spirit of generosity may be difficult to afford.
''I don't see how they can sustain it indefinitely,'' Ms. Piven, the professor, said. ''The financial pressure may now be too intense.''As the American Bar Association gathers at its annual meeting in Orlando, Fla., today, lawyers will be raising the same ethical question that investment bankers have already answered: Should municipal bond lawyers be barred from donating to the campaigns of office-holders with whom they do business?
Municipal bankers are already barred from making such contributions -- putting a crimp in campaign donations this political season -- and now lawyers will be asked to agree to the same ban. The Association of the Bar of the City of New York, whose members represent major Wall Street law firms, will be presenting this proposal to the national bar association today. The A.B.A. is expected to agree to study the issue and make a final decision within six months.
This would be the first time that lawyers, who are major political campaign donors on the state and Federal levels, have ever even considered such a ban. It is a controversial move, and one that comes as a similar ban on investment bankers is having mixed results: Political contributions to local politicians from Wall Street firms have pretty much dried up, but the national Democratic and Republican Parties have come up with clever new ways to mix municipal bankers, money and state-level politicians.
''I would hope that the leaders in the legal profession, the ones who are concerned with the reputation of the profession, would recognize these contributions as a pernicious danger to their reputation,'' said Arthur Levitt Jr., the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which enacted the ban, known as Rule G-37, on municipal bankers. ''If brokers, who do not have the same canon of ethics as lawyers, can do it, I would be disappointed if lawyers didn't follow suit.''
But getting lawyers to follow the lead of investment bankers will be a tough sell, proponents of the ban say. ''Everyone knows this is controversial,'' said Alan Rothstein, general counsel of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York. ''Lawyers give lots of money to political campaigns and they fear that if they don't, they will lose business. It's as simple as that.''
The proposal from the New York association would ban contributions from law firms to state and local politicians who can give them bond business. The ban would apply to all members of a law firm, even if only a small number of its members are municipal bond lawyers. The ban on investment bankers prohibits donations from municipal bankers to state and local official who hand out lucrative bond underwritings.
''It's high time for lawyers who like to pride themselves on ethical behavior to get out of the gutter and raise themselves to levels that investment bankers have accepted,'' said Simon Lorne, a managing director at Salomon Brothers and a former general counsel at the S.E.C. ''It's embarrassing that the brokerage industry is ahead of the bar in this.''
But Richard Webber, a lawyer with Fulbright & Jaworski in Houston, said that lawyers were concerned that this measure would disenfranchise lawyers from political participation.
''You can have a bigger influence on the outcome of elections if you can contribute money to candidates as well as vote,'' Mr. Webber said. ''In a firm like ours, this means we would have to choose between ending our public-finance practice or telling the 95 percent of our lawyers without a public-finance practice they cannot make political contributions.''
Similar concerns were raised by bankers when the Rule G-37 ban was enacted in April 1994. But Christopher Taylor, executive director of the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board, called the ban a success.
''I don't know of anyone involved in our business who doesn't think it isn't working very well,'' Mr. Taylor said. ''You'd be hard pressed to find people on Wall Street who don't think it's a good thing. I don't hear complaints anymore about how the municipal finance business is being bought by contributions.''
Still, political fund-raisers have come up with new, though more indirect, ways to allow municipal finance firms to make donations. Both the Democratic and Republican governors' associations have set up special accounts for municipal bankers to donate to conferences where they can meet state-level politicians and their staffs, along with Federal policy-makers. None of these dollars, however, go directly to individual candidates.
''We're very careful about keeping segregated accounts,'' said Paul Hatch, executive director of the Republican Governors Association. ''We've received legal opinions allowing us to receive donations from municipal finance firms so long as the money is used to support conferences and not for an election.''
To this end, both the Democrats and the Republicans have planned lavish events at their upcoming national conventions to bring municipal bankers and politicians together. In Chicago, the Public Securities Association, the public-finance trade group, along with Goldman, Sachs & Company, the Paine Webber Group and Everen Securities, which all do public finance business, have paid $80,000 to sponsor a reception at the Museum of Contemporary Art. This will give municipal bankers a chance to mingle with state officials who hand out bond business and with members of Congress and the Administration responsible for laws and policies on municipal finance.
''This provides us with a forum to develop relationships with governors and their staffs,'' said John Vogt, a senior vice president of the Public Securities Association. ''But all money from our association and its member firms is walled off from going to any election campaign.''
In San Diego, the Republican Governors Association has raised $500,000 from Wall Street firms and corporations to finance an array of social events: a reception at a private home, golf parties, a fishing expedition and a luncheon honoring House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
In addition, Wall Street firms are helping to underwrite an upcoming governors conference in Grand Rapids, Mich., which is expected to cost around $500,000. At all these events, municipal bankers can meet with state elected officials and important Republican policy makers.
Mr. Taylor of the rule-making board said that these events did not violate the campaign ban, though his board was ''vigilant'' in watching them. ''As a board, we discussed contributions to group meetings,'' he said. ''And, yeah, a lot of money is poured into these things. But it is a lower level of concern because it doesn't generate the same conflict of interest.''It began as a real estate lawyer's goofy pipe dream, turned into unlikely reality and for the last two weeks veered between triumph and nightmare, the inspirational and the tawdry.
But when the Olympics ended today with marathoners racing through streets packed with cheering spectators, Centennial Olympic Park jammed and the main stadium filled with exultant participants for the extravaganza of the closing ceremonies, for most people here, Billy Payne's folly had paid off for Atlanta.
Despite a fatal pipe bomb and rampant commercialization that drew protests from international Olympics officials and derision from many journalists, experts say spending for the Olympics and by visitors gave the area a boost of $4 to $5 billion. The Games left Atlanta with new stadiums, downtown improvements and transportation projects, a higher -- if not entirely flattering -- international profile, and perhaps a newfound drive to address its substantial urban ills.
Experts disagree about how big the payoff will be, especially given the lack of long-term gains from other Olympics, like the 1984 Games in Los Angeles.
Others question whether Atlanta did enough to use the Games to help the poor in a city that is 67 percent black and one with the fifth highest poverty rate among nation's large cities.
But few doubt the Games worked economically, providing a remarkable pageant of interracial unity in a nation racked by racial division, and instead of the world-class headache a lot of people here expected, they proved to be a giddy party few people here will ever forget.
''People ask me now, knowing the good and bad that went on, would Atlanta still want the Games,'' said Donald Ratajczak, an economist here at Georgia State University, and one of the more skeptical economists who have followed these Games. ''Well, if you ask people in Atlanta, 90 percent of them would say yes.''
''I think there's a general agreement,'' Mr. Ratajczak said, ''that in the end, we won.''
Some benefits of the Games, brought to Atlanta largely by the efforts of the Olympic chairmen, Mr. Payne, a suburban real estate lawyer, and former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, are clear.
As a result of the Games, Atlanta ended up with the 21-acre Centennial Olympic Park, the largest urban park built in America in 25 years. It is viewed as the centerpiece for the development of what had been an eyesore and what is likely now to become a new focus for downtown Atlanta. The Olympic Village, will become student housing for Georgia State University. The Olympic Stadium becomes the new home of the Atlanta Braves, guaranteeing they will stay downtown instead of leaving for the suburbs.
In all, eight permanent competition sites were built with private money by Olympic organizers and turned over without charge to local universities and public bodies. The Games spurred or accelerated $2 billion in publicly financed transportation projects, including $700 million in improvements to Hartsfield Atlanta International Airport. These construction projects and other spending helped Atlanta sail through the national recession with no downturn. And they led to new municipal art, improved streets and maintenance projects that radically improved the look of downtown.
Some say that those improvements, rather than the immediate spending by visitors, were the real payoff of the Games.
''The Games allowed Atlanta to solve a lot of problems pretty inexpensively, without a lot of political bloodletting, in ways that lots of other cities are really having to confront now in a very serious fashion,'' said Thomas J. Cunningham, a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank in Atlanta.
What the Games did for Atlanta's image is less clear. The European press in particular was merciless for the first week in depicting Atlanta's handling of the Games as incompetent and its staging as like a flea market. The commercialization was so omnipresent that Olympic officials have vowed they will never again mount the Games as Atlanta did with virtually all money raised from private sources.
But many economists and business experts say that what are likely to be far more lasting are the upbeat televised images and the sense of Atlanta's arrival as a major city.
''I think three months out all that will remain will be a very positive statement about Atlanta and the South as an area on the upswing, which is why you see so much international business here already,'' said Helmut Panke, chairman of the American arm of BMW, the German car maker, which built its new American factory in Greer, S.C.
The short-term gains, though, may also be mixed. After a very slow first week outside the downtown area, many major restaurants and malls reported extremely strong business during the Games' second week, and this weekend local malls were full of athletes, coaches and dignitaries from around the world taking part in Atlanta's usual favorite sport -- shopping.
On the other hand, hundreds of small vendors, particularly those relegated to side streets outside the main crush downtown, suffered substantial losses. Businesses in areas like Auburn Avenue, the historic heart of Atlanta's black community, found that the Olympic gains they had anticipated were nonexistent.
''There are more people here visiting this area on an average summer day than what we've seen during the Olympics,'' said Lanard Collins, executive director of the Sweet Auburn Improvement Association.
Similarly, the Olympics fell far short of the most rosy expectations of new housing for the poor and other neighborhood improvements that some expected in 1990, when Atlanta won its bid to hold the Games. But, by their finale, even most of the harshest critics said that they had done some good for neighborhoods, that blacks as well as whites had shared in the prosperity and that the Games left behind a warm glow with the potential to continue the Olympic development.Sometimes Internet technology moves faster than the speed of sound.
Nearly 400 Intel Corporation engineers were waiting for Brian Frank to stage a demonstration of Internet telephones last week at a business meeting in Oregon, when suddenly his laptop computer started ringing.
Mr. Frank, a summer intern, had just finished loading new software that would let him place a phone call from his laptop to an associate's PC backstage. But before he could make the call, someone in Norway had seen Mr. Frank's network connection pop up on an Internet phone directory on the World Wide Web and dialed him up.
Though it was 2 A.M. in Norway, the caller was so enamored of this new technology that allowed him to bypass his country's pricey long-distance telephone service that he was giddily calling whomever he could find logged onto the Internet using similar phone software.
''It was crystal-clear audio, with no delay, all the way from Norway,'' recalled Mr. Frank, a junior at Cornell University. As the audience listened, Mr. Frank and the Norwegian carried on an impromptu discussion about the rapidly evolving world of ''Internet telephony'' (pronounced tel-LEFF-a-nee), as this voice-over-the-Net technology is known.
For the Intel engineers, hearing Internet telephony in action came as a bit of a jolt. Hitherto a hacker's hobby, the use of microphones and computers to place phone calls, send faxes and transmit pager signals over the Internet now seems ready to emerge as a serious business opportunity.
Since the first crude homemade phone software was hacked together a few years ago as a way to make ''free'' long-distance calls (free, assuming you have an Internet account, a $3,000 multimedia computer and someone to call who has compatible software), telephony has become the fastest-growing type of service on the Internet.
Technical drawbacks still keep Internet telephony from being a true substitute for the good old, reliable telephone network. And yet, the number of regular Internet telephone users is expected to rise from fewer than 400,000 last year to 16 million by 1999, according to a forecast from the research company International Data Corporation. By that year, IDC predicts, Internet telephony could constitute a $500 million market.
Beyond cheap phone calls, the possible applications include:
*Catalogue shopping on the World Wide Web, where the customer could speak live with a sales agent.
*Work-team software that would enable groups working collaboratively on documents via the Internet to converse about the project, too.
*Adding voice capabilities to multiplayer computer games like ''Doom'' or ''Quake,'' so that teammates could coach one another and jeer the opposition.
*Combining video and audio for low-cost videoconferences over the Internet.
''The next level in the killer application we call communications is going to be audio,'' said Mark R. Anderson, a technology industry analyst who is president of Technology Alliance Partners in Friday Harbor, Wash. ''Intel sees this, and I think Microsoft sees this.''
In fact, Intel and Microsoft late last month jointly announced a set of technical standards that are intended to promote compatibility among various makes of hardware and software used in Internet telephony.
Separately, Microsoft is planning to embed Internet voice technology into its Windows operating systems and Explorer software, and it is working on standards for a universal ''net phone'' directory that would list users' otherwise arcane and hard-to-find Internet phone addresses.
Intel, meanwhile, is adding multimedia extensions to all its future PC microprocessors. Compaq Computer, the leading maker of PC's, is building voice capabilities into its machines. Netscape Communications, the dominant Internet software company, has already added net telephony features to its popular Navigator Web-browser software. And even some of the biggest telephone companies, whose business might seem threatened by the trend, are studying Internet telephony.
All of these companies see potential beyond helping Norwegians save a few cents on overseas calls.
''A lot of people look at Internet telephony as a replacement or alternative for long-distance service, and that's the most obvious use for it today,'' said Frederic H. Yeomans, marketing manager for Intel's Internet and communications group in Hillsboro, Ore. But Mr. Yeomans said the technology was advancing so quickly that new applications, possibly ones not yet imagined, would inevitably arise.
''It's similar to when Intel invented its first microprocessor and thought, wow, this will be really good for the calculator market,'' he said. Only later did the PC emerge as the ''killer app'' for Intel's chips.Farmers protesting the eradication of their coca crops maintained a tense standoff with Government troops today after 2 farmers were killed and 26 people were wounded in violent clashes over the weekend.
The conflict, in the southern region of Putumayo, occurred after the military police on Friday hurled tear gas into a crowd of about 8,000 people trying to take control of the airport at Puerto Asis.
News reports from the scene said gunfire had erupted from the military and from armed men in civilian clothes who had joined the farmers and shot at the soldiers as they advanced toward the airport. Two soldiers were among the wounded.
The eradication of coca crops is a central element of the United States plan for battling cocaine exports. In a recent meeting in Washington with Colombia's Foreign Minister, Maria Emma Mejia, American officials demanded that Colombia use more effective herbicides to kill the crops and calculate the results by acres destroyed, rather than by the number of acres fumigated, as Colombia currently does.
The farmers became frustrated as the Colombian authorities carried out programs to burn and spray fields where coca was grown without offering the farmers support other than promises of low-interest loans to plant other crops.
The face-off in Putumayo, Guaviare and Caqueta exploded in what several analysts described as an attempt by guerrillas, who control coca growing in much of Colombia, to capitalize on the country's political weakness and internal disarray by fomenting rebellion among farmers over plans to eradicate coca cultivation.
Though President Ernesto Samper has just been cleared by Colombia's Congress of charges that his campaign accepted millions of dollars from drug traffickers, his administration remains embattled and its future is uncertain.
After an emergency security meeting prompted by the unrest, Chief Prosecutor Alfonso Valdivieso announced an investigation to determine who was behind coca growing in various parts of the country.
Military analysts say much of the coca growing in the southern region is controlled by guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces. In some places the guerrillas are believed to grow the coca, while in others they are believed to buy it from farmers, who earn more selling coca to them than growing legitimate crops.
Among the demands of the protesting farmers are requests for basic necessities, like electricity, roads, decent hospitals, potable water and agrarian reform.
But the violence of the protests and the objectives -- which in Puerto Asis were described as the airport and several Government offices -- suggest a rebellion with more strategic objectives, analysts said.
In addition, some of the measures that the protesters took, such as imposing a 7 P.M. curfew in Puerto Asis, appeared too sophisticated for a spontaneous protest.
Several reports from the area described protesters attacking an ambulance that had come to collect the wounded. The ambulance driver was able to escape, but the ambulance was overturned and torched.
The army evacuated a number of women and children from the area of conflict, in what leaders of the farmers charged was an effort to undermine the protest. At the local hospital, doctors complained that they were unprepared for the bloodshed and lacked the medicine and supplies to care for the wounded.Federal agents are continuing to focus their investigation on a security guard but are still insisting that he is just one of a number of possible suspects in the pipe bombing at Centennial Olympic Park more than a week ago.
Over the weekend, agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation took fingerprint and hair samples from the guard, Richard Jewell, a 33-year-old former sheriff's deputy who remained secluded in his apartment in northeast Atlanta. But Mr. Jewell's lawyer, Watson Bryant, refused to allow his client to provide investigators with a voice recording they had requested, saying he wanted to determine if the agents were entitled to it.
Late this afternoon Mr. Bryant and Mr. Jewell met with Jack Martin, an Atlanta lawyer who specializes in criminal law, said someone answering the telephone in Mr. Bryant's office who declined to give her name. The meeting at Mr. Bryant's office lasted for a little more than an hour, and the men were scheduled to meet again on Monday. It was not clear whether Mr. Martin was being retained or simply consulted on some aspect of the investigation.
Jay Spadafore, a spokesman for the F.B.I.'s office in Atlanta, declined to comment on the investigation of the bombing, which killed a woman and injured 111 people. However, the White House chief of staff, Leon E. Panetta, on the CBS News program ''Face the Nation,'' said today of Mr. Jewell, ''I've talked to Louis Freeh, the director of the F.B.I., who says that he remains a suspect but that they are obviously looking at other suspects as well.''
Reporters and camera crews continued to be staked out near Mr. Jewell's apartment today. The police were keeping them 200 yards away.
The authorities have declined to comment on a CBS News report that Federal investigators had completed an analysis comparing Mr. Jewell's voice with that of a man who warned of the bomb in a 911 phone call, and had found no apparent similarities.
Meanwhile the police in Doraville, a town of about 7,500 just north of Atlanta, were investigating a shooting early today in which one off-duty Indiana National Guardsman helping to provide security for the Games was killed and another was wounded.
The two men, both in civilian clothes, were returning from a restaurant about 3:20 A.M., police officers said, when an assailant jumped from bushes and fired seven shots at them.
The ending of the Games provided an opportunity for Olympic and police officials to review the effects of crime on the event.
In the last daily press conference by Olympic officials, Juan Antonio Samaranch, president of the International Olympic Committee, said he did not think the bombing would dominate people's memories of the Atlanta Games. But he added that the security lessons learned from the Games here would be strongly impressed on Sydney, Australia, the host for the Summer Games in 2000.
A spokeswoman for the Atlanta Police Department said that by Saturday there had been 250 crimes directly connected to the Olympics, by location, victim or perpetrator.THE Clinton Administration is moving to speed the development of bomb-detection systems and other antiterrorism devices by expediting patent applications. But even without the White House's action, announced last week, a survey of recently issued patents in this field suggests that researchers have been aggressively pursuing new antiterrorist strategies.
For instance, CPAD Technologies, a privately held company in Ottawa, has received several patents covering an apparatus that detects the presence of explosives by vacuuming up invisible vapors and particles on the outer surfaces of a suitcase and analyzing their chemical content.
''This system is in the area of what we call sniffing technology, as opposed to X-rays,'' said Lawrence Haley, vice president of research and development at CPAD. ''Instead of taking a picture, our device sniffs out explosives much as a trained dog would.''
Although other companies have developed sniffing detectors based upon similar principles, CPAD contends that its apparatus is faster and vastly more accurate than comparable products available on the market.
''In the past, people have been reluctant to deploy sniffer technology because of the high false-alarm rates,'' said Scott Feagan, president of CPAD. ''The ramifications for false alarms can be costly and aggravating. Passengers are needlessly detained and flights can be delayed.''
To gather a sample, one grazes a surface with a 10-inch-long wand, which sucks in an airstream filled with vapors and particles. The sample airstream passes through a tube to a filter, where the vapor and particles become trapped. The machine then mechanically rotates the filter into an analyzer, much as an old-fashioned turntable changes a record.
The contents of the filter are heated up and turned into a gas and then analyzed using a process called gas chromatography, which separates the sample molecules as they go through a long hollow tube. ''When the molecules go in, they are all mixed up, but they separate out by the time they get to the end of the tube,'' Dr. Haley said. Once the molecules pass out, they are given an electrical charge and then separated once again with an ion mobility spectrometer.
At the end of this process, each molecule gives off two signals that identify it as a specific chemical. A computer then compares these signals to a library of signals collected by using this process on a variety of explosive materials. If any matches are found, a red light flashes.
CPAD said its analysis, which takes about 10 seconds for each suitcase, was more accurate than other methods because it sorted out molecules using both gas chromatography and ion mobility spectrometry, rather than just one process.
CPAD said the Federal Aviation Administration, which along with the Canadian Government contributed $5 million to the sensor's development, purchased one of its devices and has been using it at a major international airport since last fall. The F.A.A. is still testing it, though, and has not yet sanctioned it for sale to airports. ''We hope the F.A.A. will approve it some time in the coming month,'' Mr. Feagan said.
CPAD said its machines cost $70,000 to $150,000, depending on how many different substances they are programmed to look for, whether or not the machine includes a portal that monitors passengers as well as luggage, and whether it is programmed to detect drugs as well as explosives.
Patent 5,465,607 was granted to Mr. Haley and Colin Corrigan, a founder of CPAD.
Scrutinizing Cargo With X-Ray Beams
Since the explosion of the T.W.A. flight to France last month, much attention has been paid to the fact that airplane cargo does not undergo the same scrutiny that luggage and passengers do.
William Bertozzi, a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said he had found a way to ferret out even the most deeply buried explosive: by irradiating cargo containers with X-ray beams of several million volts.
When dosed at such a high intensity (the average airport luggage detector only emits about 100,000 volts), nuclei in an irridiated object selectively scatter, emitting frequencies that when read by an X-ray spectrometer, chemically identify the elements that are present, according to Prof. Bertozzi.
''It's just like a fingerprint,'' Prof. Bertozzi said. ''This will give you a physical image of an object in terms of its elemental composition.''
Thus, according to Dr. Bertozzi, one could screen for items with attributes found in contraband material. Some explosives, for example, contain high concentrations of nitrogen and oxygen and low concentrations of carbon.
''The advantage of this technology is that it is extremely penetrating,'' Prof. Bertozzi said. ''It will see deep inside. If somebody wanted to ship a tank car of wine through the Eurotunnel and place an explosive inside, this would find it.''
''Of course,'' Prof. Bertozzi noted, ''you wouldn't want to use it on a person.'' He received patent 5,420,905.Representative Ralph Regula, a Republican with 24 years in Congress, is the essence of political moderation, a man who is both the chairman of the House Subcommittee on the Interior and a founder of the Congressional steel caucus, a middle-of-the-roader who has devoted much of his political career to finding common ground between environmentalists and industrialists.
As a country lawyer in the early 1960's handling a probate case, he helped bring together the Timken steel company and the Audubon Society to form the Wilderness Center, the dominant environmental group here in Stark County.
As a State Senator in the Republican-controlled Legislature in the early 1970's, he worked with the Democratic Governor, John J. Gilligan, to develop the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency.
And as a Congressman in the mid-1970's, he and Representative John Seiberling, a Democrat from Akron, created the Cuyahoga Valley National Recreation Area, northeast Ohio's grandest public park, a place now used by nearly a million outdoor enthusiasts annually.
But last year, when the new Republican majority took control of Congress, Mr. Regula's methods were no longer in favor. The conservative Republican leadership and the new freshman class felt he had been compromised by years of working with the Democratic enemy, and despite his seniority, he was passed over for the chairmanship of the Appropriations Committee.
Mr. Regula watched with dismay last year as the Republican leadership twice tried to enforce Point No. 8 of the Contract With America and eliminate most of the Federal Environmental Protection Agency's regulatory powers. He was 1 of 51 moderate Republican Congressmen to break with the leadership and vote to protect the E.P.A.
Those were difficult days, but Mr. Regula, who is expected to easily win re-election to a 13th term this fall, has an uncanny ability to be in step with the people of Stark County and the people of Stark County have an uncanny knack for mirroring national voting trends.
He felt confident he was right, and sure enough, the first week of August Mr. Regula has watched with relief and amusement as those same Republican House leaders and freshmen, now facing re-election, have suddenly joined moderate Republicans and Democrats to vote for bills to strengthen the regulation of drinking water and pesticides. ''I guess,'' Mr. Regula said, ''you could say the freshmen had an epiphany on the environment.''
The environment will be a major issue confronting Republican freshmen this fall. The two Ohio Republican freshmen with districts nearby, Representatives Bob Ney and Frank A. Cremeans, voted to cripple the E.P.A. and both have already been attacked by their challengers for their environmental records (in Mr. Cremeans case, a zero rating from the League of Conservation Voters in 1995).
In the first days of August, the Natural Resources Defense Council, a national environmental group, ran radio ads in the districts of 16 Congressmen, including Mr. Ney and Mr. Cremeans, criticizing their voting records and listeners to call their offices and urge them ''to stand up for the environment.''
Mr. Regula, on the other hand, is highly regarded by local environmentalists like Alan Dolan, president of the Canton Audubon Society, though the Congressman is hardly a liberal on the environment. Through the years he has frustrated environmental advocates by opposing some clean air and water measures that he felt were unfair to Canton's steelmakers and by his support for offshore drilling. His environmental rating from the Conservation League is usually in the low 30's, half of what a mainstream Democrat scores.
His differences with the current House Republican leadership are as much about methods as substance.
The leadership sought to hold to the Republican contract agenda without compromise, while Mr. Regula's formative legislative experience came in an era when finding common ground was a valued talent.
In the mid-1970's the Democrats controlled Congress. But when the Democratic Congressman from Akron, Mr. Seiberling, introduced the bill to create the Cuyahoga National Recreation Area, he wanted Mr. Regula as a co-sponsor in case there were problems with the Republican President, Gerald R. Ford. When Mr. Ford threatened to veto the bill as too costly, it was Mr. Regula who went to Ray Bliss of Akron, the former national chairman of the Republican Party, and got Mr. Bliss to convince President Ford to sign.
Today, riding along the park's wooded bike paths is one of the finer things about living in northeastern Ohio.
One reason there remains broad support for environmental measures here is that people can see enormous improvements in their lifetime. When John Dos Passos, the writer, visited Canton for Life magazine after World War II he described the soot that ''falls gently through the twilight, drips in inky stain from icicles along the gutters, blackens the grime on close-packed frame dwelling houses and settles in soft smudges on your face.''
Dan Fonte, a union leader, recalls growing up near the steel mills in the south end of Canton in the 1950's and 1960's and ''every two years we painted our house because of the soot and dirt.''
But in the past 30 years, Canton's big steel companies, the Timken Company and Republic Engineered Steel Inc., have made enormous environmental progress, spending tens of millions of dollars on pollution control, sometimes on their own, sometimes under pressure from environmental regulators.
Bag houses capture the furnace soot in a manner like a home vacuum cleaner, and the main thing that comes out of the stacks these days is white, billowy steam. Before Timken built a water treatment plant in the 1980's, billions of gallons of used dirty water washed into the storm drain system. Now 10 billion gallons a year are captured and recycled. Timken used to send its electric arc furnace dust to a landfill, but now it is recovered from the bag house and used to make the next batch of steel. And Faircrest, Timken's newest steel plant here, looks positively bucolic, sitting in rolling green hills, bordered by a farm and a public park.
When Mr. Regula appears at political gatherings in the district, he speaks well of Speaker Newt Gingrich. Still, Mr. Regula says, splitting with the Republican leadership over the vote on the environmental agency was not a close call. ''We had made great progress on the air and water,'' he said. ''I didn't want to go back.''Two months after calling for the breakup of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani assailed the authority's police force yesterday, citing statistics that showed a rise in robberies and burglaries at Kennedy International Airport this year.
In his most pointed public statements on control of airport security, Mr. Giuliani said that New York City police officers should have jurisdiction over Kennedy and La Guardia airports because their buildings are on city-owned land, and crimes committed at the airports are reflected in citywide crime statistics.
The Mayor's comments come in the wake of heightened concern about airport security after the crash of Trans World Airlines Flight 800.
He suggested yesterday that security shortcomings at the airport provided an open door to terrorists.
''Every single intrusion that involves the theft of cargo, the smuggling of drugs, is also a possibility that someone who wants to plant a bomb or do something else can take advantage of,'' he said.
The Mayor argued that property crimes had dropped substantially in Queens and the rest of the city over the last year, while they had climbed at Kennedy, highlighting what he called the ''terrible mistake'' of giving the Port Authority police control of airport security.
''I don't know whose decision that was,'' he said. ''It should be reversed.''
Port Authority officials disputed the Mayor's comments about crime at the airport, saying that they have, in fact, reduced some categories of crime at Kennedy this year.
''Now that the scapegoating and finger pointing has escalated, it's important to review the facts about J.F.K.,'' Edward J. O'Sullivan, the assistant director of public safety for the Port Authority, said in a statement. He said that luggage and cargo theft has dropped 30 percent from last year and that crimes against passengers, such as pickpocketing, have fallen 28 percent. The Port Authority police are responsible for security within the airport, while individual carriers handle most security on the tarmac and are responsible for their airplanes.
''At an airport half the size of Manhattan -- with a daily population of 120,000 -- we have only two larcenies a day,'' Mr. O'Sullivan said.
His statistics appeared to be at odds with the New York City Police Department's crime numbers for the airport, located within the 113th Precinct. Those numbers, first reported yesterday in The Daily News, show that there were 862 grand larcenies, most of them thefts of luggage, in the first 7 months of this year, 162 more than during the same period in 1995.
Mr. Giuliani, speaking after the Queens Ecuadorean Day Parade in Jackson Heights, said those crimes represented about 60 percent of all property crimes in the 113th Precinct and about 27 percent of such crimes in the borough.
John Kampfe, a spokesman for the Port Authority, said he was unable to account for the differences, but added that the authority's police and the city police used different standards to classify crimes as grand larcenies, larcenies or petit larcenies. ''At this stage, they have apples, we have oranges, and it would be impossible to reconcile the numbers without going through hundreds of incident reports,'' he said.
No matter which statistics prove correct, the Mayor argues that the city force has a proven track record of reducing crime and would be better able to handle airport security.
''I have no doubt that if the city Police Department should take over security at the airports it would improve dramatically,'' he said. ''You'd have the same reductions in crime that you have in the rest of the city. You'd finally have a real solution to the organized crime problem the city has been able to achieve with regard to the Fulton Fish Market and carting and other places.''
Mr. Giuliani's comments followed more than a year of public criticism that the authority favors New Jersey at the expense of New York. The city also contends that the authority owes it $400 million in lease payments for Kennedy and La Guardia airports, a dispute that shows no signs of being resolved.
In June, in a proposal that even he admitted had almost no chance, Mr. Giuliani urged breaking up the authority, called on New York State to take over some of its functions and advocated creating a new agency to operate the two city airports.For years, the maelstrom of modern-day crime largely bypassed this rural state, and that fact attracted refugees from the murders and mayhem that plague urban areas.
But in the last two years, Montana has been catching up with the rest of the nation, leaving law-enforcement officials shaking their heads.
''What used to be shocking is now a daily occurrence,'' said Dennis Paxinos, the Yellowstone County Attorney, who is based in Billings, the state's largest city with a population of 87,000. ''Juvenile crime has skyrocketed. We have kids killing kids, kids killing parents. I used to be able to tell you how many murders there were off the top of my head. Now, I have to tally them up.''
Last year, he said, 1,321 felony and misdemeanor juvenile cases were filed with his office, an increase of 36 percent from 1992, when 850 such cases were reported.
There were 317 felony cases filed against adults in 1986, Mr. Paxinos said. This year, the number is well on its way to 1,000, which would be an increase of 215 percent.
And the crimes, he said, are more heinous. Last April, for example, a 16-year-old boy fatally shot a convenience-store clerk who had already handed over the cash demanded and raised his hands in surrender.
Mr. Paxinos blames drugs, especially methamphetamine, for much of the crime. Other local and state officials have suggested that at least some of the crime increase is linked to the newcomers who are flocking to the state. Montana's population has increased by 21 percent, to 850,000 in 1994 from 700,065 in 1990. Then, too, the numbers increased after state legislators recently reclassified some crimes as felonies.
Law-enforcement officials speak of an ill-defined anger that seems to be infecting a large portion of the population. Why else, they ask, would youths in a pickup truck beat to death a stranger who had yelled at them to slow down?
''We're seeing crimes that make no sense, if homicide ever makes sense,'' said John Connor, the head of County Prosecutors Services, a bureau in the Montana Department of Justice that aids county attorneys in prosecutions.
Statewide statistics collected by the Montana Board of Crime Control show that the number of felony crimes peaked in 1980, at 4,678 per 100,000 people. Then rates declined until 1994, when the number increased to 4,730. In 1995, the figure rose again, this time to 4,797.
Many Montana jails are filled to capacity or exceed it, corrections and law-enforcement officials said. The state's main prison, Montana State Prison at Deer Lodge, about 30 miles north of Butte, had so many inmates that 125 were shipped to a prison in Dickens County, Tex., and another 125 will be shipped out by the end of this month. Two new regional jails are being built, to house about 300 inmates each, and the question of whether to construct a third will be voted on in November. Beds are also being added to existing prisons.
Local jails are filled to overflowing. ''If someone gets arrested for burglary, they'll bring him in, book him, and let him go,'' Mr. Light said.
He suggested that the higher crime rate was a simple function of the number of crimes committed, but the equation may not be that straightforward. Ted Clack, the research manager for the Montana Department of Corrections, said that politicians' efforts to ''get tough'' on crime play a role in the increased number of felony charges and in the number of people incarcerated. Mr. Clack noted in particular that legislators have upgraded some crimes to felonies and have lengthened sentences for some crimes.
It is not just urban areas that are experiencing a jump in crime. In Lincoln County, in western Montana, a sprawling chunk of real estate with just 17,000 people and, at most, one murder a year, there have been three murders in recent months.
''Montana is growing and there is a fair rate of in-migration,'' said Bernard Cassidy, the Deputy Lincoln County Attorney. ''With it comes problems common to urban areas.''After weeks of debate among his advisers, Bob Dole has settled on the economic and political foundation of his Presidential campaign -- a $548 billion tax-cut package highlighted by a 15 percent reduction in individual income tax rates and a halving of the capital gains tax, campaign officials said today.
Mr. Dole plans to go to Chicago on Monday to present the package, which his aides described today as the single-most critical component to reviving his fortunes against President Clinton.
Mr. Dole will call for a 15 percent across-the-board reduction in personal income tax rates, starting in 1997 and spread over three years. He will also advocate cutting the capital gains tax to 14 percent, from 28 percent; endorse a Republican Congressional proposal to provide a $500-a-child tax credit for families, and call for increasing the allowable contribution to Individual Retirement Accounts by nonworking spouses.
He will also support repealing the Clinton Administration's 1993 tax increase on upper-level Social Security benefits.
Aides to Mr. Dole offered only sketchy details today on how he would pay for the package. But the aides said $145 billion, or about 27 percent, of the cost of the tax cuts would be covered by new revenue created by the economic growth resulting from the cuts -- a figure that the aides put at the conservative end of estimates by economists.
With this decision -- which forced Mr. Dole to wrestle with competing Republican factions over how he should approach both the economy and his campaign -- he has settled on the most politically aggressive and clear-cut of the economic plans that were presented to him.
In advocating a comparatively simple across-the-board tax cut, Mr. Dole is adopting a political strategy that has become a steadfast element of national Republican campaigns since Ronald Reagan's election in 1980. A similar pledge was at the heart of Christine Todd Whitman's successful campaign against Gov. Jim Florio in New Jersey in 1994.
''Dole needed a wedge issue where he could draw an unambiguous distinction between him and Clinton,'' said Bruce R. Bartlett, a former Treasury official in the Reagan and Bush Administrations who was among the first to suggest the 15 percent across-the-board tax cut.
''The challenge to Dole is to convince the American people he means it and will do his best to see it enacted if elected. One of the biggest problems he's got to overcome is the feeling among the American people that politicians always promise candy at Christmas and don't deliver.''
The Dole campaign was keenly aware that the plan carried not only political promise but also high political risk. The prolonged debate seesawed through Saturday afternoon, when Mr. Dole finally signed off on the 15 percent plan.
During 35 years in Congress, Mr. Dole framed his political career as an advocate of reducing the deficit. He has been among his party's most caustic critics of supply-side economics, which asserts that tax cuts produce enough economic growth to offset losses in tax revenues.
Even as Mr. Dole was weighing an across-the-board tax cut against rolling back the 1993 tax increase, an approach that other advisers had urged, Mr. Clinton's re-election team was distributing to reporters quotations in which Mr. Dole disparaged supply-side economics.
The effort by Mr. Clinton's campaign was intended to rattle Mr. Dole, but the White House's intense concern with the issue suggests nervousness in Mr. Clinton's camp over an issue that has historically proven highly effective for Republicans.
The President is particularly vulnerable on this issue, in the view of Mr. Dole's aides, because Mr. Clinton ran in 1992 on the promise of pushing a middle-class tax cut and, after taking office, abandoned that pledge to instead push for measures to close the budget deficit. In fact, he pushed through an increase in taxes over the objections of Republicans.
Joe Lockhart, the Clinton campaign spokesman, said of Mr. Dole's plan, ''It appears Bob Dole is taking the political route that will balloon the deficit, hurt long-term economic growth and destroy his own credibility -- all in one speech.''
The tax cut plan is part of an overall economic growth program that is titled ''Restoring the American Dream: The Dole Plan for Economic Growth.'' It also calls for reducing Federal regulations, a staple for Mr. Dole on the campaign trail, and adopting Republican legislation, vetoed by Mr. Clinton, to change the way civil lawsuits are handled by the courts. Mr. Dole's aides argue that this change would improve the nation's business climate.
The tax cuts, though, are the heart of the plan. Mr. Dole will call for a 15 percent reduction in existing tax rates -- 5 percent a year -- starting in 1997. His aides said that would affect about 90 million taxpayers. Tax rates now vary, depending on income, from 15 percent to 39.6 percent. Under Mr. Dole's plan, each of those rates would be cut 15 percent.
Under the Dole plan, taxpayers paying the bottom rate of 15 percent in Federal income taxes would see their rate fall to 12.75 percent. Those paying a rate on their last dollar earned of 28 percent would have their rate go down to 23.8 percent. Those paying 31 percent now would pay 26.35 percent under the Dole plan, with the current 36 percent bracket declining to 30.6 percent and the 39.6 percent bracket falling to 33.66 percent.
Significantly, Mr. Dole did not embrace the position of a former rival for the Republican Presidential nomination and now an economic adviser, Steve Forbes, for a single flat-tax system.
Aides to Mr. Dole said he would instead promise to work toward simplifying the tax system. Mr. Forbes, who based his entire campaign for the nomination on a call for a flat tax, is scheduled to travel with Mr. Dole to Chicago.This is a state that has not elected a Democrat to the United States Senate since 1932. And that is not likely to change soon.
But the Republicans are hardly one big happy family. In the Republican contest for the nomination to seek Bob Dole's vacated Senate seat on Tuesday, a serious ideological rift has erupted in the primary fight between Sam Brownback, a hard-charging conservative, and Sheila Frahm, an old-fashioned moderate.
The race has provoked a debate among many party loyalists about what it means to be a Republican. It is a clash that also reflects a larger battle now roiling the Republican Party across the nation, a tug-of-war that inflames issues like abortion and school prayer.
''It's really been quite bitter,'' said Russell Getter, a political science professor at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.
''I've not seen anything so heated and pointed in Kansas politics in the 25 years I've lived here.''
Recent polls show a dead heat in the race between Mr. Brownback, a freshman Congressman and a lawyer, and Mrs. Frahm. As Lieutenant Governor, she was appointed to the Senate vacancy after Mr. Dole resigned in June to concentrate on his race for President.
Coming just before the Republican convention, the Kansas primary is being closely watched as a measure of the Christian Coalition's strength, especially given such a vivid choice between candidates.
''For evangelicals, this is going to be an extremely important election,'' said Burdette Loomis, a political science professor at the University of Kansas.
''They're not going to come out of this the same as they went in. Either they're going to emerge with a bigger foothold in Republican politics, or they're going to be found wanting.''
Mr. Brownback, 39, opposes legal abortion and favors a constitutional amendment allowing school prayer. Mrs. Frahm, 51, takes the opposite position.
Mr. Brownback, one of the brash young leaders of Republican freshmen on Capitol Hill, promises a radical reduction in the size of the Federal Government, saying he would abolish the Secretaries of Education and Housing, among other Cabinet-level positions.
Mrs. Frahm, meanwhile, has criticized what she calls the slash-and-burn approach on her party's right-wing.
Mr. Brownback, who describes himself as a born-again believer, often talks about religious faith on the campaign trail, calling for ''a return to basic values.'' Mrs. Frahm, a Methodist, virtually never talks about her religion in public.
This is not an election that is going to turn on farm programs or water policy on the Western Plains, despite the image of this state as a sea of wheat -- the amber waves of grain -- or of lonely little towns on the plains, like Mr. Dole's hometown, Russell.
The vote-rich battleground, especially for Republicans, is here in prosperous Johnson County, a suburban sprawl of expensive new subdivisions and fancy shopping malls, outside Kansas City.
One in five Republican voters in the state live in Johnson County. There are significantly more Republicans in Johnson County than in the more populous Wichita.
And it is here that both Christian conservatives and social moderates show considerable strength. It is not uncommon for the two sides to face off in pitched battles for precinct committee and school board.
Well-educated, prosperous and Republican, the voters here would seem to be united -- until it comes to social issues with religious overtones, especially abortion.
''I think the bottom-line problem in our society is that God is missing,'' said Vic Clark, 46, and a strong supporter of Mr. Brownback. ''But people don't want to hear that.''
Mr. Clark, who sends his children to a private Christian school, said he supported tax vouchers for school-choice, and a cut in taxes.A nasty Senate primary race in Michigan is echoing the likely divisions at next week's Republican National Convention in San Diego, as the Republican Party has split deeply on abortion and economic policy lines here.
A populist candidate, Ronna E. Romney, is struggling to retain an early lead. She has called for a Federal ban on most abortions, the legalization of semiautomatic weapons, the elimination of corporate tax breaks and a review of the North American Free Trade Agreement.
The state's business and political elite has rallied around her rival, Jim Nicholson, a wealthy Detroit businessman who has been a strong supporter of Dennis Archer, the city's mayor and a moderate Democrat. Mr. Nicholson has argued that Federal and state governments should neither restrict nor pay for abortion. He has also favored lower trade barriers, an end to corporate subsidies and the repeal of taxes on capital gains and inheritances.
A former talk radio host who lost the 1994 Republican primary to Senator Spencer Abraham, Mrs. Romney started the race with polls showing that she had more than twice as much support as Mr. Nicholson, who had never sought public office before. But Mr. Nicholson has virtually erased her lead, moving to within several percentage points of her in the latest polls. He has used a lavish campaign of television advertisements, often negative, during the Olympics.
''It's a complete tossup now,'' said Edward V. Sarpolus, a pollster in Lansing, Mich. He added that whoever wins the Republican primary on Tuesday would have a hard time beating Senator Carl Levin, who is seeking a fourth term and is running unopposed in the Democratic primary.
According to the most recent filings with the Federal Election Commission, Mr. Nicholson had raised $1.3 million from campaign contributors by July 17 and put in $1.2 million of his own money. Mrs. Romney has raised half as much money from contributors and has put in little of her own, forcing her to rely more on less costly radio advertisements.
Both sides' ads have grown nastier as the primary approaches. Mr. Nicholson's ads have questioned whether Mrs. Romney deserves to bear the surname of George W. Romney, a popular Governor of Michigan who died last year. Mrs. Romney is divorced from one of the late Governor's two sons, G. Scott Romney. She has not remarried and uses the honorific ''Mrs.''
Mrs. Romney has retaliated with radio advertisements criticizing Mr. Nicholson for allowing his disabled brother to live in a federally subsidized group home, instead of using a family trust estimated at $1.8 million. While the Nicholson family's 400-employee chemical company has kept its headquarters in Detroit's inner city and has actively supported neighborhood social projects, Mr. Nicholson has also been more emphatic than Mrs. Romney in favor of limiting the time that anyone can collect welfare benefits, arguing that the current system creates a culture of dependence.
In separate interviews, Mr. Nicholson and Mrs. Romney each dismissed the other's personal criticisms as inappropriate invasions of their families' privacy.
Lacking the financial resources of her opponent, Mrs. Romney has relied heavily on support from Right to Life of Michigan, one of the most powerful groups in Republican politics statewide. Like the anti-abortion group, Mrs. Romney contends that abortions should be allowed only when necessary to save the mother's life.
Right to Life of Michigan did not take a position in the 1994 primary, when Senator Abraham also favored restrictions on abortions. But the group has been mailing pamphlets to its members, printing yard signs and bumper stickers and taking out radio advertisements this year to help Mrs. Romney. Barbara A. Listing, the group's president, said that its only previous radio advertisements for a candidate were in 1990, when the anti-abortion group helped Gov. John Engler win his first term.
Mrs. Romney has also won the support of the National Rifle Association. While Mr. Nicholson has also come out for the repeal of the Federal ban on assault weapons, Mrs. Romney has been more outspoken in contending that Americans should not blame guns for the violence in society.
''More is done with fists, feet and knives,'' Mrs. Romney said in a telephone interview from western Michigan, where she is campaigning. Polls have shown that Mr. Nicholson leads in the Detroit area, and among younger, more moderate voters, while Mrs. Romney is ahead in the rest of the state, particularly among older, more conservative voters. POLITICS: MICHIGANFour years ago at the Republican National Convention, Susan R. Cullman, a moderate Republican, ''felt horrified'' by the pictures of dead fetuses placed on the delegates' chairs, the banners railing against gay rights and the conservative speakers, like Marilyn Quayle, who asserted that ''most women do not wish to be liberated from their essential natures.''
''I felt like I was a stranger in a foreign, unfriendly, frightening country,'' said Ms. Cullman, chairwoman of the Republican Coalition for Choice, which supports abortion rights. ''It was unrecognizable to anything I knew as a Republican.''
Four years later, after the Republicans lost the White House to a Democrat who is leading in this year's race, things are different. The Republicans' likely nominee, Bob Dole, is peddling furiously toward the political center. As a result, moderates like Ms. Cullman say they are feeling better about the Republican Party than they have in years.
In recent weeks, Mr. Dole has been sending signals -- some substantive, most symbolic -- to the moderates to indicate that he is not completely in the thrall of the party's right wing and that he is looking for more support among centrists.
He has given prominent prime-time speaking roles at the convention to moderates like Gen. Colin L. Powell, Representative Susan Molinari of Staten Island and Gov. Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey, while barring Mr. Buchanan from making an official speech. He has dropped his support for efforts to overturn the ban on 19 types of assault weapons. And he has called for a platform ''tolerance'' plank that says Republicans have ''deeply held and sometimes differing views on issues of personal conscience like abortion and capital punishment.''
''You look at the lineup for opening night -- Colin Powell, President Ford, Nancy Reagan,'' said David Greer, public affairs director of the Log Cabin Republicans, a gay rights group. ''With those types out there, moderate Republicans are feeling very good about the convention, at least the televised portion.''
The moderates' newfound acceptance in the party could represent a momentary election-year tactic rather than a realignment away from the conservative dominance that has been the Republican Party's hallmark since 1980. Most of the 1,990 delegates in San Diego are likely to be very conservative, and it is virtually certain that the convention will reaffirm party support for a constitutional amendment to ban abortion.
A number of moderates say that Mr. Dole's actions are largely symbolic and that precious few concessions are being accorded to them on issues like abortion and gay rights.
''The reality is that it looks like we're getting tossed bread crumbs,'' said Michael Dubke, executive director of the Ripon Society, a liberal Republican group. ''The reality is that the platform, the Vice-Presidential candidate and all the policies that this party will espouse in the next four years are not going to have a moderate tone in them or any input from the moderates.''
Still, centrists are being accommodated at the convention to a remarkable degree, even though moderates like Mr. Powell declined to run in the Republican Presidential primary or, like Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, fared poorly in them.
Mr. Specter said, ''I think it's very substantive when you have Buchanan out and Molinari and Powell in.''
Political analysts say Mr. Dole is moving toward the center in an effort to gain support among suburban women, who tend to hold politically centrist views. Another factor is that Mr. Dole, unlike former President George Bush, has solid credentials among conservatives and feels less of a need to placate the party's right wing continually, the analysts say.
Others say that however modest the moderates' comeback, it is a harbinger of the change that will occur if the Republicans are to remain the party in power in Congress. ''This is part of the evolution of the party,'' said Representative Brian P. Bilbray of California. ''Now that we've become the majority, we're bearing the responsibility of understanding that part of the responsibility is to be moderate and gain a degree of consistency.''
That sense of an inevitable change, at least on social issues, is making moderates more feisty and more likely to challenge the party's right at the convention on a number of issues, the most visible of which is abortion.
''We were extraordinarily unified during the campaign of '94 and extraordinarily unified during the first 100 days of the contract,'' said Representative James C. Greenwood, a freshman from Pennsylvania, speaking of the Contract With America. ''We had promises that we made and had to deliver on those promises. But as we've gone into other issues that we didn't necessarily all sign onto in '94, we have broken when we felt it necessary to reflect what we see as the mainstream view in this country. And we are not going to be led by right-wing ideologues off of precipices that have nothing to do with where Americans want to go.''
The Republican leadership's leftward lurch has left a number of conservatives fuming, public grousing is minimal because of the desire to maintain a unified party.
''Frankly, the moderates may be happy,'' said a conservative Republican strategist, speaking on the condition of anonymity, ''but the Dole campaign has been moving left for three or four months, and it's not getting them anything. The gender gap is still as wide as ever.''
Prof. Charles O. Jones, dean of the political science department ''I don't think Dole has ever had to certify himself as a conservative,'' said Prof. Charles O. Jones, dean of the political science department at the University of Wisconsin. ''Nobody ever doubted that that's what Dole is. His record shows that.''
POLITICS: THE CENTRISTSPeru's long struggle against the Shining Path guerrilla group has taken a turn for the worse in the last week with a deadly series of bombings and attacks that have raised fears that the insurgency is making a comeback.
While Peruvians have learned to live under the constant threat of terrorism, the latest wave of assaults by the Maoist group, which was once believed to have been defeated, is particularly troubling because it was well coordinated and penetrated sensitive Government and military targets.
The guerrillas bombed a central police station charged with protecting the Peruvian Congress and the house of a general who is the military chief in a region where the rebels have a stronghold. Following assertions that the attacks were made possible by security lapses, the chief of Peru's anti-terrorist police resigned.
Experts on terrorism said that the attacks were the most successful the Shining Path has undertaken since its top leaders were captured three years ago. The arrests were considered a turning point in a civil war that has killed more than 35,000 people and cost $25 billion in damages since 1980.
''If you consider what has happened in the last few days -- that the Government was forced to remove its director of anti-terrorism because of these strategic attacks -- you have to conclude that Shining Path has started to recover from its long demise,'' said Carlos Tapia, a leading Peruvian researcher in terrorism.
Mr. Tapia and other terrorism experts attribute the success of the recent attacks to new leadership within the Shining Path, which was severely crippled when the military captured Abimael Guzman Reynoso, Shining Path's founder. After his arrest, he called for his comrades to forge a peace with the Government. Many subsequently turned themselves in under a Government amnesty program.
Political violence in Peru had not stopped even before the current series of attacks. In the last 18 months, analysts estimate, about 450 people have died in political violence in Peru, and the Government has detained more than 500,000 suspects.
The recent attacks began on July 26, when a car bomb exploded outside the police station two blocks from the Congress, killing one passer-by and wounding at least seven other people.
Last Monday, the Shining Path took responsibility for a bombing outside the home of an army general, Manuel Varela Gamarra, who is the military chief in the Upper Huallaga Amazon region, where the rebels have a stronghold. The 20-pound bomb killed a taxi driver, wounded five people and damaged the facades of 30 nearby homes. His house was destroyed, but he was not there.
On Wednesday, two Shining Path gunmen shot and killed a prominent community leader, Epifanio Santamaria Rodriguez, in the Lima shantytown of San Martin. The group had been trying to make inroads there but had been rebuffed by Mr. Santamaria. Shining Path guerrillas also attacked a construction company in the highlands, destroying equipment and property. In each case, they either claimed responsibility or they left signs that they were responsible for the attacks.
Gen. Carlos Dominguez was ordered to resign his post as chief of the anti-terrorist police following widespread criticism within the Government that security forces were careless in failing to guard against the attacks.
Military officials declined to discuss the attacks. But military staff members said that security forces have declared a full alert and that the Government is considering extending a state of emergency, already in effect in 19 districts of Lima and many provinces, that give security forces broad powers to combat terrorism.
President Alberto K. Fujimori has sought to assure Peruvians that the Government is fully in control of the situation. ''The attacks do not signify that we have let our guard down,'' the President said at a recent news conference. ''I repeat -- we guarantee citizens' security, and the iron fist approach will continue.''
While no one expects the violence to return to the days of daily bomb blasts, Peruvians in the capital and the countryside remained tense and fearful that the violence would escalate. ''I think we Peruvians had a false sense of hope that the bombs had ended,'' said Enrique Palomino, who owns a film processing store. ''But I am afraid again for the first time in years. It's the randomness that scares me the most.''
With the capture of its central leaders in 1993, Shining Path divided into two factions: one that heeded Mr. Guzman's call for peace and another that continued the fight under the leadership of Oscar Ramirez Duran, who was a top aide to Mr. Guzman and is believed to be hiding out in the highlands along the Huallaga River.
But terrorism experts said that contacts within the group indicated that Shining Path has now splintered into numerous factions.
The factions are being coordinated by a new group of leaders who had been part of the Shining Path hierarchy during its infancy in the 1970's but who had left the group after a dispute with Mr. Guzman over the timing of his decision to take up arms in 1980.He was only 5 when he saw his mother and younger brother killed and the soldiers took him away to their base in a helicopter. She was just 6 when she was separated from her parents during a bombing raid and delivered to an orphanage here.
Amilcar Guardado, who is about to turn 22, was raised by military officers on an air force base. Imelda Lainez, now 17, ended up being adopted by a family in the United States, where she was given the name Gina Marie Craig.
Now, both have been reunited with their original families, beneficiaries of a private investigative program that has forced El Salvador to confront one of the darkest secrets of its civil war, which lasted from October 1979 to January 1992.
Some 75,000 people were killed in the war -- most of them by troops trained and financed by the United States -- or disappeared and were presumed dead.
Among those who disappeared were hundreds of children who, parents and human rights groups say, were kidnapped by the Salvadoran military during attacks on peasant settlements suspected of harboring guerrilla fighters or sympathizing with the leftist insurgency.
''These children were robbed, abducted in the countryside by the military for a variety of motives,'' the Rev. Jon de Cortina, a Spanish Jesuit priest who is the founder of the El Salvador Disappeared Children's Search Association, said in an interview at the group's headquarters here. ''But we believe that their right to recover their identity, and the right of their families to know the fate of the children they lost, must be fulfilled and respected.''
Since its founding in 1994, the Children's Search Association has registered what it says are 323 instances of children who were taken by army troops or separated from their families in battle zones.
But the group has barely begun working in some areas that experienced heavy combat and expects at least 500 cases to be uncovered before that task is complete. So far, there have been 29 reunions of children with their parents.
Though most of the missing children appear to be in El Salvador, where the military placed them in orphanages or with new families, nine have been located in the United States, Italy and France. To help match parents and children, Physicians for Human Rights, a group based in Boston, has conducted DNA tests on both.
But reunification has not been easy. Records have disappeared, some orphanages and family court judges have refused to cooperate, and the Salvadoran military has discouraged efforts to link the disappearances to massacres and military offensives or to investigate the possible trafficking in kidnapped children.
In contrast to its stance during the war, the United States Embassy here now says Salvadoran officials engaged in ''clear-cut fraud in certain instances'' in which children here were adopted by American families.
There are no reliable statistics on how many of the 2,300 Salvadoran children adopted by Americans during the war may have come from the pool of abducted children, but there has been no suggestion by anyone involved that adoptive American parents acted in anything but good faith or that more than a small percentage involved abducted children.
''We were dealing with a Government agency, courts and our own embassy, so we just assumed everything had been checked out,'' Thomas Craig, Gina's adoptive father, said in a telephone interview from his home in Ohio. ''Here we have been trying to build a relationship, and now we find that the whole cornerstone of it is built on a lie.''
Abducting Children As a Tactic of War
Gen. Humberto Corado, the Salvadoran Defense Minister, has rebuffed efforts to obtain a public accounting for the missing children.
Last year Gen. Adolfo Blandon, a former military chief of staff and Defense Minister, acknowledged that families had been separated during the war but attributed the military's conduct to humanitarian motives.
''During the war, there occurred cases in which children were found in war zones in situations of extreme danger and evacuated to the sites of different units,'' he said. ''Some were handed over to welfare institutions, others given to the care of some families, while others remained under the responsibility of the unit that evacuated the zone.''
Others tell a much different story. Taken together, their accounts suggest that some children were abducted to prevent their later incorporation into guerrilla groups, others to intimidate families sympathetic to the insurgents and a few to serve as mascots or trophies of war or even to be sold for profit.
Miss Craig, for instance, remembers being with her parents, who acknowledge they were rebel supporters, and two sisters when a bombing raid began one day in 1984.
Wounded by shrapnel in the attack, which killed her older sister, Vilma, she was evacuated to a rebel field hospital. Days later, she was taken away by soldiers during an assault that left no other survivors.Relegated to the back of Renaire Frierson-Davis's closet are the high-priced business suits she wore daily until two years ago. Front and center now is a less costly assortment of jeans and khakis, casual wool pants and shorts sets.
It is a change in wardrobe that mirrors a quiet but clear shift in Ms. Frierson-Davis's attitude. A 36-year-old self-employed lawyer with two children from Freeport, L.I., Ms. Frierson-Davis still loves fashion. But increasingly she thinks she no longer needs to dress up to show she is someone. ''I used to use clothing to define me,'' she said. ''Now I know a little better who I am.''
And, given her busy life, she would rather wear something comfortable and appropriate not just for the courthouse but also for grocery shopping and shuttling the children. Furthermore, she now looks elsewhere for the pleasure she once got from shopping for clothes -- to exercise, tennis, manicures.
The American woman has radically changed her attitude toward clothes, and that has drastically altered what she buys. Recent studies and interviews with 40 women are finding that especially among the aging baby boomers, money that once went to the perfect red suit is now going to a variety of new places.
Nor is it only being spent on more casual, often less expensive clothes, from jeans to chenille sweaters to workout wear. Now the money is also increasingly going to other passions, from one's children, to investing, to a variety of goods and services being marketed as salves for a stressful life: backpacking trips and gardening tools, vanilla-scented candles, spiritual retreats and manicures.
It is as if women have decided they prefer experiences to outfits as relief from their demanding lives. ''We are not just an industry competing with ourselves anymore, but with every industry,'' said Eric Hertz, executive director of the Fashion Association, a trade organization.
This profound shift, just starting to be understood in the fashion business, has contributed greatly to a 12 percent drop in sales of women's apparel in the United States, from the record $84 billion set in 1989 to $73 billion last year, according to Tactical Retail Solutions, a market-research firm in New York. Industry experts, economists and Government agencies that track spending confirm the significant drop.
The decline is all the more stunning when compared with overall personal spending -- which grew 37 percent during the same period, according to figures from the Commerce Department -- and with sales of men's apparel, which rose 16 percent, between 1991 and last year, according to Tactical.
A decade ago apparel makers and retailers expected a glorious future. After all, more women would be working. And designers and retailers saw little reason to believe that women in 1996 would not continue their ascent in the workplace and continue to demand the expensive, complicated armor that went with it. When sales instead began to decline in the 1990's, many in the business attributed their problems mainly to too many stores and too many women sitting out a few fashion seasons.
Now they are increasingly recognizing that women are moving on to other things, and that money that once went to fashion might be going elsewhere for good. That has huge implications for one of the nation's largest industries. Counting textile mills, manufacturers and retail stores, the apparel business employs more than five million people and ranks among the country's four largest employers, along with health care, automobiles and government.
Indeed, the change in women has produced some striking losers -- mainly clothes perceived as too formal, too impractical, too expensive or too unflattering on maturing bodies. The navy power suit with padded shoulders and the accompanying floppy bow, the uniform of millions of women in the 1970's and 80's, is nearly extinct, little more than the butt of a joke. Sales of blouses fell 12 percent between 1991 and last year, according to a study of 16,000 American households by the NPD Group, a market-research firm in Port Washington, L.I. Hosiery sales dropped 6 percent between 1993 and last year.
The designers and retailers that counted on such merchandise have struggled. Among them are the fashion companies Anne Klein, Perry Ellis, Calvin Klein, Escada, Leslie Fay, Esprit and Liz Claiborne, and the retailers Martha, Barneys, Ann Taylor, the Limited, Charming Shoppes and Casual Corner.
One example of how not recognizing the changes among women can mean disaster is the so-called modern romantic look, typified by ruffled blouses with full cascading sleeves and long velvet skirts. Bloomingdale's bet big on the look in 1993, devoting an entire catalogue to it. But women did not want a costume that seemed impractical in a variety of settings, from the office to the supermarket. Sales were less than half what the store projected. High-priced ''grunge'' fashions, the monastic look (capes and crucifix jewelry), and see-through and lingerie-style clothing met similar fates.
But there are also signs of life in the business. Some designers and retailers are finding ways to win women back, as indicated by mild sales upturns among various apparel retailers in recent months. They are selling comfort and practicality. The winning words among fashion retailers are no longer ''power dressing'' and ''designer label'' but rather ''casual comfort'' and ''multiple end-use'' -- clothes that will serve women through their various role switches and long days.
Sales of pants suits grew 167 percent between 1990 and last year, NPD Group numbers show. Sales of knit shirts increased 31 percent during that same period. Vest sales rose 488 percent. Among the winners are the labels Dana Buchman, Emanuel and Searle, and the retailers Sears, Roebuck; Target stores and the Gap.
Two recent hits epitomize how responding to the changes in women can produce great profits. One is pants, with khakis a good example. For years labels like the Gap, Banana Republic and J. Crew sold them as a wardrobe staple, to be worn on the weekend and the occasional Friday at the office. Then, last fall, the designer Karl Lagerfeld, sensing the rebellion among women against high-maintenance fashion, sent khaki pants and denims down the runway of his spring presentation for Chanel in Paris.
The move had a major impact. Khakis were splashed across the pages of top fashion magazines, and manufacturers at every price added khakis to their collections. Women now wanted to wear them at work and as a fashion statement. Sales of khakis have jumped everywhere from Saks Fifth Avenue (at $760 each) to discount stores (at $19.99).
Then there is the chenille sweater, a warm, cozy knit of lustrous yarn popular since the early 1990's. Initially available in tunic lengths, they cost $300 to $600. Women seemed to revel in the deep, rich colors, the sensuous touch and the versatility: a chenille sweater works well with a rugged pair of jeans and the most glamorous evening skirt.
Now the chenille sweater has become a staple everywhere, from Madison Avenue boutiques like Searle to 34th Street emporiums like Conway, which expects to sell thousands of an acrylic-blend version of the sweater for $14.99. Last Christmas, the Bloomingdale's chain sold 5,000 chenille sweaters a week.
Of course, the apparel industry's problems can be traced to factors beyond women's changing attitudes toward clothes. For one thing, despite the decreasing interest in fashion, the number of stores has continued to rise. There was 12 square feet of retail space per person in this country in 1985; today there is closer to 20, according to the International Council of Shopping Centers.Gaze out the windows of Sandy Grushow's 16th-floor office here and you can trace the arc of his life. Off to the east lies Beverly Hills High School, from which Mr. Grushow graduated in 1979. And due west, barely visible in the haze, is the sprawling studio of 20th Century Fox, where he spent most of his career at the Fox television network.
Mr. Grushow is a consummate Hollywood specimen. The only twist is, he now works for the telephone industry. And that has meant nothing but problems.
Sixteen months ago, Mr. Grushow agreed to take over the programming arm of Tele-TV, a television joint venture owned by Bell Atlantic, Nynex and Pacific Telesis. The three companies had set a lofty goal: to develop an interactive alternative to cable television. They recruited Mr. Grushow to forge ties to the studios, develop ideas for original programs, and fashion a distinctive image for the service.
But after repeated delays in technology and a tectonic shift in regulations, the Baby Bells now admit that getting into television is only one of several priorities. Having completed his design for Tele-TV, Mr. Grushow wonders how many people will ever see it.
''I think we've come up with a compelling product,'' said Mr. Grushow, an intense 36-year-old who clambered up the corporate ladder at Fox because of his talents as a marketer of television programming. ''The thing that's left me frustrated is that I came on board because of interactivity. And interactivity is no longer on the table.''
For Mr. Grushow, it is just one of a litany of disappointments. Tele-TV's partners originally planned to deliver an array of conventional video and new interactive services through telephone networks upgraded with digital switches and high-capacity wires. But they have scrapped much of that because of high costs and technological hurdles.
The Baby Bells originally planned to roll out Tele-TV to 30 million homes in six of the nation's seven largest markets by the end of the century. Now, they will be lucky to reach one-fifth of that. Under Bell Atlantic's latest timetable, the company's digital fiber optic phone network would be available to no more than two million homes by the year 2002.
Tele-TV's shrinking ambitions have fanned a smoldering resentment between Hollywood and the Baby Bells. Entertainment executives hunger for a mass audience because it gives them the economic base to finance original programming. Telephone executives are content to treat television as a sort of research and development effort, where they can experiment over several years with pockets of viewers.
''If you're a rising star in Hollywood -- the kind of guy who may someday run a studio -- you're not going to want to stick around in an R.& D. operation for five years,'' said one executive at Tele-TV, who insisted on not being identified. ''Without two million subscribers, you won't get your phone calls returned. You won't be a player in Hollywood.''
With the financial muscle of three Baby Bells behind him, Mr. Grushow still gets his calls returned. But power in Hollywood is fleeting. So Mr. Grushow is showcasing his work to the media in a last-ditch effort to persuade the regional telephone companies to roll out Tele-TV aggressively this fall.
''If the telephone companies deliver this product with appropriate focus and emphasis, they can steal customers from cable,'' he said.
To compensate for the technological delays, the three Baby Bells shifted Tele-TV's focus earlier this year from wired to wireless delivery -- using a microwave technology known as wireless cable. Using wireless cable would enable the Baby Bells to begin offering Tele-TV in limited areas by the end of this year.
But because wireless cable does not have interactive capabilities, Tele-TV in many ways is a plain, old cable system. Under its current plan, it will offer 38 cable networks, including CNN, ESPN and HBO, plus the major broadcast networks. It will also offer a selection of pay-per-view movies, which can be ordered in half-hour increments by pushing buttons on a remote control keypad. Still, Mr. Grushow has come up with some novel innovations.
For example, the company's designers have devised an electronic program guide that features the programming lineup and is constantly updated. Unlike other such guides, viewers can choose a channel simply by pointing their remote controls to an icon on the screen and clicking.
In addition, Mr. Grushow hired two producers from ''Entertainment Tonight'' to create a promotional show that will present features about the shows on Tele-TV, plus interviews with the stars. He also created a pair of animated characters, Terrance and Virgil, who will pop up from time to time before and after shows as roving mascots for the service.
David Grant, a former executive vice president of Fox and Mr. Grushow's deputy, is wrapping up complex negotiations that would enable Tele-TV to carry all the major cable and broadcast networks. He persuaded his backers to outbid a sports network backed by Rupert Murdoch and John C. Malone for rights to telecast the Los Angeles Dodgers beginning next baseball season.
''It doesn't matter whether we open on Broadway in front of one customer, 1,000 customers, or 10 million customers,'' Mr. Grant insisted, ''This is going to be a great product.''
Those are brave words. But Howard Stringer, the chairman and chief executive of Tele-TV, acknowledges that it has been very difficult to maintain the morale of his executives -- especially those in Los Angeles -- when the regional telephone companies operate so differently from traditional media companies.
''The telephone companies are disappointed that the technology hasn't worked in their favor,'' Mr. Stringer, a former president of CBS said. ''But I also think they are more patient than the rest of us.''
Both Mr. Stringer and Mr. Grushow are careful not to criticize their backers. They sympathize with the decision of the Baby Bells to focus on long-distance telephone service, which is a larger and less risky business than television. And both men said they intended to honor their contracts, which run another two to three years.A few years ago, Peter Barikua made a living as a fisherman, just as generations have done before him along the shores of Africa's largest lake.
Now he toils with a pitchfork for eight hours a day down in the muck at the lake's edge, working for the state electric company. He and 20 other men who used to fish are engaged in the Sisyphean task of trying to remove from the water tons of a flowering weed that has not only destroyed fishing in these parts but has also clogged the nearby hydropower plant at Owen Falls.
''It's a big problem,'' he said, leaning on his fork. ''I just want to remove this stuff because it's chasing away the fish.''
All along the shores of Lake Victoria, people are facing an environmental debacle caused by an innocuous-looking flowering plant from the Amazon called the water hyacinth.
No one knows for sure how the hyacinth traveled to Africa, but however it arrived the plant has thrived in the warm, nutrient-rich waters of Lake Victoria. Like some movie monster, the weeds are reproducing like mad, agriculture officials say, invading shoreline waters and carpeting over ports.
''It has no natural enemies here,'' said Joseph Mukiibi, chairman of the National Agriculture Research Organization in Entebbe, which is coordinating Uganda's fight against the plant. ''It came from Latin America. It's like the rabbits, which were brought to Australia and started reproducing. Nothing can stop it.''
By some estimates, the hyacinth now covers 14,820 acres of water, still less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the lake's 26,828 square miles. Seen from the air, the lake's shore is fringed with acres of the plant, while the open water is dotted with huge floating islands of weed. Some of these isles are more than half a mile wide and have roots trailing down as far as nine feet into the water.
When the wind and the current blow the masses of hyacinths into Uganda's ports and coves, they wreak havoc on the local fishing, socking in canoes and skiffs in ports and bottling up the fish under the plants, say fishermen, whose catches have fallen sharply. Even if they manage to push their canoes through to the open water, the fishermen often get trapped in the stuff. It can take hours to break through to port.
The weed invasion has also hampered cargo boats and ferries, fouling engines and propellers and making docking a nightmare. More than 80 percent of the landing sites in Uganda are obstructed on any given day. In addition, the weeds clog cooling pipes for the transformers at the Owen Falls power plant, causing frequent blackouts.
On many days, the country's largest port, Port Bell, is completely closed down by the weeds, and it is nearly impossible for ships to dock with their passengers, railroad cars, and goods from Tanzania and Kenya. The weed has cut the amount of cargo coming into Uganda through Port Bell in half, to fewer than 200,000 tons a year, port officials say. Sometimes it takes days to dock a single ship.
''At times for even a month or so, you can't see a drop of water,'' said Alfred Karangira, the chief marine manager at Port Bell. ''Sometimes it takes two or three days to get a ship in.''
Beyond the immediate threat to fishing and business, scientists worry that the weed will wreck the lake's ecosystem in the long run. The blankets of weeds appear to be destroying the spawning grounds of fish along the shore, they say. Fish stocks appear to be declining.
As it covers shore waters, the hyacinth sucks oxygen out of the water and blocks out light, killing the algae and other microscopic plants at the bottom of the food chain. When the older plants die, they sink to the bottom and decompose, robbing the water of yet more oxygen.
Since the Nile perch and tilapia -- staples of the local diet -- breed in the shallows along the shore, fishery officials say they think the hyacinths are turning their spawning grounds into dark, stagnant places with no oxygen. Though no studies have been completed, fishermen have reported a drastic drop-off in their catch. The cost of fish in Kampala has doubled in the last three years.
''This has been a disaster on this lake,'' said one fisherman, Lukwita Muzamiru, 25, who plies his trade in a rickety boat out of Jinja. ''We used to catch up to 30 fish a day. Now you can spend the whole night and only catch one fish.''
The water hyacinth, Eichhornia crassipes, first showed up in Uganda on Lake Kyoga in May 1988. It did not appear in Lake Victoria in large amounts until December 1989, when tons of the plant came streaming down the Kagera River, which starts in Rwanda and flows through Tanzania. Every week, nearly 350 tons of the plant still flow into the lake on the river, officials say.
The plant is believed to have been brought to Africa by colonists, who used it to decorate their garden ponds. Its earliest recorded appearance was on the Nile River in the Sudan in the 1920's.
On Lake Victoria the hyacinth has discovered a perfect home. With its tall stem, frondlike leaves and purple flower, the water hyacinth loves the tropical sunlight and the warm waters of the lake. It has done especially well near the shore, where sewage and agricultural runoff make the waters rich in plant food, scientists say. Since there is nothing to slow its growth naturally, it could conceivably cover a greater and greater portion of the lake, botanists say.
''It is not quite a disaster yet,'' said Mr. Mukiibi. ''It will become a disaster if nothing is done.''
A fierce debate is raging among government officials, environmentalists and fishermen here about how to stop the infestation. One plan involves importing South American weevils who eat the plant in its Amazon home. Other officials favor using herbicides, which have been tried successfully in Nigeria and Zimbabwe. Still others say it can be removed with machines that resemble floating harvesters.Arts organizations pride themselves on their appetite for innovation and risk. Now they are being asked to entertain a truly novel idea: black ink.
Alarmed at the organizations' tendency to run up deficits year after year, foundations and local arts agencies have in the last few years taken a new tack in assisting arts groups. In a variety of initiatives that now funnel about $100 million into the arts each year, they have begun experimenting with ''tough love'' grant programs that force cultural organizations to change their behavior and develop habits that will allow them to prosper in the long term.
These programs, supported by the Ford Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund and the Heinz Foundation, among others, are often lumped together under the bureaucratic-sounding term ''stabilization.'' Broadly speaking, stabilization grants are intended to help recipients impose financial discipline and institute long-range planning.
''This represents a real shift in thinking by grant makers and the organizations they fund,'' said Thomas Wolf, a partner in Strategic Grantmaker Services, consultants in Cambridge, Mass. ''It demands real thinking about how to do strategic planning, the realization that you can't grow your way into stability and a greater awareness of market forces and consumer demand.''
One of the most rigorous programs is National Arts Stabilization, which grew out of the Ford Foundation's early stabilization efforts in the mid-1960's. Since 1990, with its own money and backing from the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund and New York City's Department of Cultural Affairs, the program has been working with a dozen New York organizations with financial problems, including the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, the Pan Asian Repertory Theater and El Museo del Barrio.
To qualify for a grant, paid out over four years, organizations must reduce their debt and then work with the program to develop a long-range plan that forces them to confront the issues that arts institutions frequently tend to avoid. The questions can be as basic as: Who am I? Why do I exist? Where am I going? How do I get there?
The soul-searching is more than a form of institutional therapy. In pondering the basics, arts organizations often end up changing the makeup of their boards, devising strategies to reach a broader audience and casting about for new income sources.
In December 1990, the Alvin Ailey dance troupe went to National Arts Stabilization on the brink of collapse. With a debt of $1 million, the company was thinking of shutting down its school.
''Typically, when an arts organization is in trouble, the focus is on short-term cash requirements,'' said Michael M. Kaiser, who was the executive director of the Ailey company when it went through the stabilization process and is now the executive director of American Ballet Theater. ''You're asking, 'How do I get to next week, to the opening,' and not 'How do we become viable in the long run?' ''
Over the next two and a half years, the Ailey company eliminated its accumulated deficit. By drafting a long-range plan, it helped convince potential donors that the company knew where it was headed. As a result, contributed income doubled. At the same time, the company introduced operating efficiencies, switching from a basic health plan to a health-maintenance organization, for example, and setting its touring schedule more efficiently.
It also unleashed a furious marketing campaign in late 1992 and early 1993 that included several high-visibility ''look at us'' performances. The company appeared at President Clinton's inaugural gala, did a full hour on Phil Donahue's show and gave a free performance in Central Park.
''These activities, one after the other, made donors want to reassess their relationship to Alvin Ailey,'' Mr. Kaiser said. ''The national exposure helped attract tour sponsors, and the tour contributed to earned income.''
''There was not a personality change with respect to the art,'' he added. ''In fact, our expenditures for new works went up each year under N.A.S. What the process did was change many modes of behavior, particularly on the administrative side.''
That is exactly what National Arts Stabilization had in mind.
''In the arts, there's rapid turnover in staff and boards,'' said Nancy R. Sasser, the president of National Arts Stabilization. ''You are trying to create behavioral changes that will outlive specific people.''
El Museo del Barrio, which is entering its third year in the stabilization program, is enjoying its first deficit-free year in a decade. In the course of developing a plan that will take it to the year 2000, it doubled the size of its board, recruiting some non-Hispanic members, and adopted the kind of strict financial reporting procedures typical of larger museums. It hired a development officer, rather than relying on outside consultants, as well as a professional finance director.
''Strict reporting and controls, and bringing the development in-house, made the fund raising much more targeted,'' said Susana Torruella Leval, the museum's director.
The museum also broadened its mission. Responding to demographic changes in the neighborhoods surrounding it, the museum, founded 27 years ago as a Puerto Rican institution, formally declared that it would address the history and culture of other Hispanic groups in New York.
''All this is key to a museum competing in this city,'' Ms. Leval said. ''We have to be viable, relevant and go forward, and this is not just a matter of money. It's intelligence in growing the board and staff. It's remaining relevant so you'll survive.''
Arts organizations are not alone in going through a period of intense scrutiny. Foundations, too, have been asking whether they bear some of the blame for encouraging unhealthy patterns of dependency.NEW JERSEY DAILY BRIEFINGAfter 16 days of competition, the centennial Olympics ended tonight after spellbinding performances that perhaps exceeded the expectations of even the organizers. But the success of the athletic competition could not eliminate all the disruptions that left these Games short of delivering on the promise that they would be the greatest ever.
In the wake of the bomb explosion in Centennial Olympic Park, a distressed transportation system, glitches in the I.B.M. computer system and tacky commercialism, the president of the International Olympic Committee was muted in his assessment of the Games in his speech at tonight's closing ceremony.
Juan Antonio Samaranch, the I.O.C. president, called the Atlanta Games an event of ''universality and unity.'' He referred to them as ''most exceptional.'' His speech, however, did not award Atlanta his customary verbal pat on the back as ''the best Games.''
Atlanta succeeded on the playing field with such electric performances as Michael Johnson's world record at 200 meters, Carl Lewis's fourth victory in the long jump, Kerri Strug's courageous gold-medal vault and Amy Van Dyken's four gold medals in swimming, which overcame the favored Chinese and her own lifelong battle with asthma.
Johnson, winner of the historic sprint double at 200 and 400 meters, carried the five-ringed Olympic flag into the stadium for the closing ceremony, when the flame was extinguished. As Gloria Estefan and Stevie Wonder serenaded the 80,000 spectators and the 8,000 athletes still on hand, the formal separation of athletes from different countries dissolved into an informal, celebrative mingling in the stadium infield.
As riveting as the competition had been in the stadium, it was also fleeting. As the ceremony ended, the Olympic Stadium faced a removal of the track and downsizing of its capacity to 50,000 seats for its second life as a baseball stadium for the Atlanta Braves.
The centennial Games will be remembered in particular for the impressive showing of female athletes, from both established and emerging sporting nations. Michelle Smith, with three swimming victories, became the first Irish woman to win an Olympic medal. Ghada Shouaa, the heptathlon champion, became the first Syrian to win a gold medal. Deon Hemmings, the 400-meter hurdles champion, became the first Jamaican woman to win a gold medal. Chioma Ajunwa of Nigeria, the long-jump champion, became the first African woman to win a field event. Fatuma Roba of Ethiopia became the first African woman to win a marathon.
The African men, long represented on the medal podium by distance runners from Kenya and Ethiopia, were joined in Atlanta by victorious stars from unlikely places like Burundi. Venuste Niyongabo of Burundi won the men's 5,000 meters on Saturday night, bringing riveting success to a country riven by a recent coup d'etat and murderous ethnic hostilities between the Hutu and Tutsi tribes.
All told, African athletes won 11 gold medals, 5 more than the previous best eight years ago at the 1988 Summer Games in Seoul, South Korea. Nigeria won the men's soccer competition. The swimmer Penny Heyns won both breast-stroke races, giving South Africa its first gold medals in 44 years. The country was banned from the Summer Games from 1964 through 1988 because of its apartheid policies. Today, the possibilities of the post-apartheid era were made dramatically evident in the men's marathon when Josia Thugwane became the first black South African to win an Olympic gold medal.
These were the most inclusive Summer Games ever held. All 197 invited nations participated before a record number of three million spectators, who bought 8.6 million tickets. Athletes from 78 nations won medals, 12 more nations than the 1992 Games in Barcelona, Spain, and 26 more than the 1988 Seoul Games, Samaranch said.
''This had never been seen before in the Olympic Games,'' Samaranch said of the record crowds. ''In the beginning, we had some problems. The arrival of some teams, transportation, technology. Bit by bit, things were controlled and last week was excellent.
''While we celebrate the success of these Games,'' Samaranch went on to say, ''we have not forgotten the tragic explosion of last week, nor have we forgotten the victims, their families and their friends.''
The speech linked Atlanta to the 1972 Games in Munich, Germany, where 11 Israeli athletes and officials were killed by Palestinian gunmen. A moment of silence was called to honor the victims of these attacks. Unlike the Munich Games, where terrorism resulted in the deaths of athletes, no athletes were killed in the Atlanta explosion, and the Games continued without delay.
''No act of terrorism has destroyed the Olympic movement, and none ever will,'' Samaranch said.
Earlier today, Samaranch addressed the issue of financing at a news conference, saying that it would be impossible to organize the Games without corporate sponsorship. One of the enduring memories of Atlanta is certain to be the commercialism that left downtown with a feel more closely aligned with a trade show than an Olympics.
''This commercialization must be controlled and directed by the organizing committees or the I.O.C.,'' Samaranch said.
It did not help Atlanta organizers that television rights were sold during an economic downturn. While NBC paid $456 million for the Atlanta Games, it paid $715 million for the 2000 Games in Sydney, Australia.
In terms of the competition and the enthusiasm of the spectators, however, there can be little criticism of the Atlanta Games. Olympic Stadium was filled with 80,000 fans night after night, and the track and field performances were greeted with throbbing roars.
''They even cheered for the shot-put,'' Michael Johnson said.
With its roundly criticized concept of ''plausibly live'' coverage, NBC concentrated on the teen-age gymnasts at the expense of the more mature and compelling American women who won the softball and soccer competitions. And the questioned success of Smith in swimming -- there were whispers that Smith had used performance-enhancing drugs -- means that almost no come-from-nowhere performance can be achieved without raising suspicion. But these realities could not negate the fact that women drew as much attention at these Games as did the men. Of the 44 gold medals won by the United States, 19 were won by women, including tonight's basketball competition.WHEN we lived in Kentucky years ago, we were always intrigued by that most southern farewell: ''Y'all come back.'' I knew a transplant from up north who left a dinner party at midnight and knocked on the host's door at 12:05 A.M. and said, ''I'm back.''
Atlanta said ''Y'all come back'' to the rest of the world last night at the closing ceremony of the Summer Games of Michael Johnson and the great female athletes and the sneak who put the bomb in Centennial Olympic Park.
The last impression of the Games was last night's closing ceremony: the tasteful homage to the victims of Centennial Olympic Park and also of Munich in 1972; Stevie Wonder performing John Lennon's ''Imagine''; Boyz II Men singing the national anthem; the Cadets of Bergen County, N.J., one of the best drum-and-bugle corps in the country; Bill Irwin, the actor and pantomime artist; choruses and orchestras, classical singers and cellists; Gloria Estefan of Latin-rock fame; the country singer Trisha Yearwood; the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis; the gospel singer Al Green; Little Richard, Buckwheat Zydeco. Such a big country, such a diverse country.
Like any good host, Atlanta tried to show the world a good time, and, for the most part, succeeded. When you stand at the doorway and your host and hostess say, ''Y'all come back,'' you talk about the succulent roast chicken and not about the biscuits that might have been slightly burnt.
The hosts of Atlanta did what they said they would do: present games in modern stadiums and arenas, with huge crowds. On Saturday night, I truly felt I was at the Summer Games, as the huge crowds in Olympic Stadium gasped at each nuance of the high jump and the relay races. The flags hanging from the rafters, the anthems, the torch, the Jamaicans and Nigerians and Canadians and Czechs, made me feel this was the big time.
I started to think back about these last 16 days, what I had seen, what I had perhaps missed. As a man of a thousand venues, I enjoyed a glimpse of badminton and mountain biking and weight lifting, and I carefully avoided the Dream Team, figuring we see enough of Charles and Scottie in their season.
When I thought about my favorite event at these Games, I came up with road trips for the women's soccer games, getting away from the clutter of Atlanta. Dozens of refreshed American journalists said we would have paid $50 or $80 or whatever to see the United States women overcome China for the gold medal before a knowledgeable crowd of 76,481 in a lovely football stadium in Athens, Ga.
It's kind of sad to talk about the Summer Games in terms of avoiding the crush and security and visual and aural insult and uncertain transportation. Still, I got a taste of Atlanta, living on the east side, in a real neighborhood, and yesterday, I had brunch at the home of friends in a verdant corner of midtown, with no trace of Olympic madness.
These Summer Games made me want to experience Atlanta at its best. A. M. Rosenthal once told me that he always tries to read a book about the country or city he is visiting. I began reading ''Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn,'' by Gary M. Pomerantz, recently published by Scribner, the history of two dominant families in Atlanta, one black, one white. I wish I had more time to get out and feel the city he describes so skillfully.
One major success was fulfilling the aspirations of the International Olympic Committee of staging the Games in a city where blacks play a major role. I'll remember the young, black middle-class people out at restaurants in midtown, and the graciousness of black volunteers who sat next to me on bus rides to venues, who told me how they work for major companies in Atlanta. The volunteers make these Games go. Any city that aspires to staging the Summer Games must count on volunteers with the good will of the Atlantans.
In this day and age, putting on these Summer Games may be an impossible task for any host, without turning the place into a logistical nightmare. Even before the bomb, Atlanta had the feel of an armed camp. You were always hemmed in by chain-link fences and soldiers and electronic surveillance. On Saturday night, I was in a good Olympic mood -- until the press bus took one hour to traverse the one mile from the stadium to downtown.
I left Los Angeles, Seoul and Barcelona with magic feelings about their Summer Games. Sorry, but I just don't have those feelings about Atlanta's Summer Games. Last night Sydney appeared on the Olympic horizon, with flowers and aborigines and kangaroos and the opera house, and I found myself looking four years ahead, hoping the Summer Games don't mess up that urbane city I have always wanted to visit.
And I'm looking forward to seeing Atlanta at its best, maybe this October for a World Series against the Yankees. I've marked out the restaurants and the parks and the Civil War memorabilia and the hotels for the next time. As cranky as I am, people kept saying, ''Y'all come back.'' Did they really mean it?
Sports of The TimesHe reached the end after 26.2 miles and windmilled his arm as if winding up to throw a pitch instead of winding down from a marathon. But Josia Thugwane could be forgiven for this bit of ostentatious celebration. He had just become the first black South African to win an Olympic gold medal. Five months ago, he was not certain that he could even run this race, much less win.
In March, Thugwane was carjacked outside his hometown of Bethal, South Africa. A shot was fired that grazed his chin and left a thick inch-long scar. He jumped from the car while it was moving and injured his back. One moment, he was the South African marathon champion, a qualifier for the Summer Games. The next, he was lying on the ground wondering whether his career had been stolen along with his car.
''I thought it may not be possible for me to come back and run again,'' Thugwane said.
But the coal mine that employs him as a security guard paid for his medical expenses, giving him free time to train and to rehabilitate his back. Today, work at the mine came to a standstill as miners interrupted their shifts to watch their hero on television. He did not disappoint them. Thugwane used a series of surges on a humid morning to win the closest race in a century of Olympic marathons, taking the gold medal in 2 hours 12 minutes 36 seconds, a mere three seconds ahead of Lee Bong Ju of South Korea. The bronze went to Eric Wainaina of Kenya in 2:12.44, only eight seconds behind the winner.
As South Africa emerges from international isolation, the most visible signs of international achievement and national unity are President Nelson Mandela's Government and the success of the country's sporting teams.
South Africa won the 1995 rugby world championship, the 1996 African nations soccer championship, and collected its first Olympic gold medal in 44 years when the swimmer Penny Heyns won the 100-meter breast-stroke at these centennial Games. Today, in a dramatic confirmation of racial equilibrium, the same country that was banned from the Summer Games from 1964 through 1988 because of the policies of apartheid produced a black Olympic champion.
''I'm grateful I have this opportunity,'' said the 25-year-old Thugwane. ''It is an indication to others that if they work hard, all of us have equal opportunity, not like in the past.''
In addition to seeing his wife and four daughters for the first time since June, Thugwane is now certain to be granted a meeting with Mandela and a lavish celebration when he returns home. He will also be awarded a cash prize of 50,000 rand, or about $11,100, by the South African Olympic Committee, said Tony Longhurst, who is Thugwane's agent.
''For a country that has been through so much political turmoil, this is a huge hope for the future,'' Longhurst said. ''We can have heroes who don't have to be black or white. They can be South Africans.''
Mandela called Thugwane ''South Africa's golden boy'' who reinforced the country's pride and determination to overcome the disadvantages of apartheid. Of all the sports in sports-mad South Africa, perhaps none has been more progressive in terms of racial diversity than road racing, which has been integrated since the 1970's.
Forcibly cut off from the rest of the sporting world during apartheid, South Africans developed a fevered interest in road races at every distance from the 10-kilometer (6.2-mile) run to ultra-marathons of 50 miles or more. Since being restored to international competition again in 1992, South Africans have won important marathons in New York and Berlin. Today, Thugwane won the most important marathon of all, the Olympic marathon.
''Road racing reflects the color makeup of the nation more accurately than any other sport,'' said Mike Green, the editor of the South African edition of Runner's World magazine. ''Sport has been such a unifying force the past two years. This is the cherry on top.''
During apartheid, whites generally had the access to technical instruction, equipment and running tracks that were forbidden to blacks. In all of what was formerly considered black South Africa, there is only one all-weather running surface, in the township of Soweto. Blacks generally took to road racing, where shoes were the only equipment needed and bare feet would often suffice.
Still, blacks suffered legislated discrimination. In the past, black runners said they were sometimes stopped by police for running through white areas without carrying their identification papers. Some of the best black talent was forced to go elsewhere to find success. A native of South Africa, Mark Plaatjes, won the 1993 world championship, but by then he had become an American citizen.
Like most of South Africa's top distance runners, Thugwane works at a mine, where he can get coaching, proper nutrition and prize money from winning races against runners from other mines. He has avoided the trap of many South Africans who run two mine races each weekend, from 10 kilometers to a half-marathon. While this helps to feed a runner's family, too much racing can ultimately destroy the chance for a successful international career.
Thugwane was a soccer player at the Koornfontein coal mine, 60 miles east of Johannesburg in the drab town of Witbank, until he realized in 1988 that his legs would be more useful for distance running. A friend recruited him to run, and in his first race he earned 50 rand, or $11.
His home is 26 miles from the mine, the distance of a marathon. Sometimes Thugwane drives home after work and training; when he trains for a crucial race, he stays in a hostel at the mine on weekdays and travels home weekends.
By 1993, Thugwane, a member of the Ndebele tribe, had become South Africa's national marathon champion. He repeated as champion last March, but two weeks later, he was carjacked near his hometown of Bethal. He stopped to pick up a man he knew, Thugwane said, when three other men climbed into his Toyota and demanded the keys and the car. He refused, he said, and ''there was a bit of a scuffle.'' A shot was fired, and a bullet sliced Thugwane's chin.
''I jumped from the car when it was moving,'' he said.
By June, his wrenched back had healed enough for Thugwane to accompany his teammates Xolile Yawa, Lawrence Peu and Gert Thys to Albuquerque, N.M., for altitude training. Yawa later withdrew from the Games because of a stress fracture. Today, on a humid morning and on a wickedly hilly course that wound through Atlanta's downtown and suburban neighborhoods, Thugwane, Peu and Thys broke free from a pack of about 30 runners. By Mile 16, they were running up front with Lee of South Korea.Investigators yesterday took their first look at the battered remains of the cockpit of Trans World Airlines Flight 800 and said they were puzzled by how the plane's nerve center became gnarled into a one-ton ball of wires, metal, seats and switches.
Senior law enforcement officials said no cockpit in previous accidents resembled the 6-foot-high, 10-foot-wide mass of debris. They said a large metal beam from another section of the Boeing 747 is inexplicably lodged in the center of the cockpit wreckage, which one official likened to a metallic ball of twine that investigators would now begin to unravel.
The body of the plane's pilot, Capt. Ralph G. Kevorkian, 58, of Garden Grove, Calif., was also recovered, still strapped into his flight-deck seat, near the mound of wreckage, which was lifted off the ocean floor and delivered to the former Grumman hangar in Calverton, L.I., on Saturday night.
''Untangling that cockpit mass is going to take some time,'' said Robert T. Francis, vice chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board. ''We are not expecting dramatic results from today to tomorrow.''
For two weeks, investigators have characterized the Boeing 747's cockpit as an important piece of wreckage that may help them determine the cause of the crash on July 17, just 11 1/2 minutes after it left Kennedy International Airport for Paris. All 230 people aboard were killed.
But now that they have a main piece of cockpit debris, investigators cautioned yesterday that it would probably take several days, or even longer, before analysis of the wreckage tells them anything conclusive about what brought the plane down.
James K. Kallstrom, the assistant director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in New York, described the cockpit debris as ''a pile of things that are all mashed together.''
''To see that massive jumble of wires certainly brought home to me how difficult it's going to be if the rest of the front of the plane looks like that,'' Mr. Kallstrom said.
Law enforcement officials said last night that a new pile of wreckage, which they believe contains bottom pieces splintered off the front of the aircraft, was found near the area where the cockpit had been sitting.
In the next several days, investigators plan to pick apart pieces of the cockpit wreckage. Bomb experts will examine the cockpit at the Grumman hangar, looking for pitting consistent with a bomb blast. And some pieces of it will be tested for chemical residue from an explosive.
But at yesterday afternoon's press briefing, investigators attempted to lower expectations about how quickly they could conclusively determine whether the plane had been destroyed by a bomb, a missile attack or a catastrophic mechanical failure.
Law enforcement officials have said privately that they believe a bomb destroyed the aircraft, severing the cockpit and first-class cabin from the rest of the jet. For that reason, they said, the recovery of several large pieces from the front of the aircraft is potentially significant.
After 18 days of a painstaking recovery effort on the seas 10 miles off Long Island, salvage workers have retrieved several important pieces of the front of the aircraft, where they believe an explosion occurred.
Besides the main chunk of the cockpit, investigators have pulled up a 40- by 60-foot arc of metal from the roof over the first-class section of the jet, the left cargo door, a large metal cargo container and the front landing gear and nose wheels.
Samples of those pieces were tested for explosives in the last several days by agents of the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms at the Grumman hangar. One law-enforcement official, who insisted on anonymity, said the test results were negative.
For the second straight day, the recovery effort accelerated as thousands of pounds of debris were brought through the Shinnecock Inlet. A steady convoy of barges hauled large heaps of wreckage to the Coast Guard station at Hampton Bays, L.I., where cranes transferred the wreckage to large trucks for a nine-mile trip to the Grumman hangar.
Salvage crew members said they expected to work 16-hour days. Before late Saturday, the only part of the cockpit visible to divers and underwater video cameras was the distinctive curved windshield. But investigators assumed, correctly, that the cockpit remains were nearby.
The remains of three more occupants of the plane were brought to the Suffolk County Medical Examiner's Office, raising the total number of bodies recovered to 194. Only 2 bodies remain unidentified, yet tentative identifications have been made, officials said.
At the Ramada Plaza Hotel near Kennedy airport, 11 families of crash victims still waited for word that their loved ones' bodies had been recovered and identified.
The relatives of four of the victims returned yesterday after having gone home, their hopes resuscitated after 10 bodies were recovered in the last two days.A TEAM of scientists at the National Center for Human Genome Research and other institutions has used genetic engineering to create a new breed of mice remarkable not for their color or size, but for a peculiar defect. They have been bred to suffer one of the most unusual genetic diseases.
The gene for the strange disease, known as ataxia telangiectasia, was discovered a year ago. Children born with the mutated gene suffer a panoply of illnesses, including unsteady gait, slurred speech, muscular spasms and several different kinds of cancer. By their teens, their hair goes prematurely gray, and their skin becomes wrinkled. They fail to reach normal height and are sterile. At all ages, they are especially sensitive to radiation, becoming very sick when exposed to even small amounts of it, and weak immune systems render them susceptible to infections. They usually live into their 20's.
''It catches in one disease all of the big three -- cancer, brain disease and immune-system failure -- while also having symptoms of premature aging,'' said Brad Margus, the father of two children with the disorder and the head of a parents' group called the A-T Children's Project, based in Boca Raton, Fla.
The scientists reported in the July 12 issue of the journal Cell that they had succeeded in generating mice that have the ataxia telangiectasia defect in their corresponding version of the human gene. From these animals, they hope to discover how one genetic flaw can cause such a catalogue of afflictions.
Dr. Lewis Cantley, a cancer researcher at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston and Harvard Medical School, said the creation of the new mouse strain was ''important for many areas of research.'' He added, ''It connects some of the hottest areas of research on cancer.''
One of those areas is the question of how cells protect themselves against runaway division, a process that represents the beginning of cancer. The normal role of the gene linked to ataxia telangiectasia and the protein it specifies is to monitor the cell's integrity. When the cell is damaged in certain ways, the gene signals the cell not to divide any more. But when the gene is mutated, as in people with the disease, it can no longer do that.
The protein produced by the ataxia telangiectasia gene is one that is already known to be involved in a couple of different activities in the body. It helps repair broken strands of DNA, and it appears to be needed to allow the cycle of cell growth and division to proceed normally.
The newly generated mice show at least six symptoms found in people with ataxia telangiectasia: stunted growth, neurological problems, immune failures, infertility, sensitivity to radiation and the appearance of tumors.
When scientists try to manipulate mouse DNA to develop susceptible animals, ''it doesn't always turn out that way,'' said Dr. Anthony Wynshaw-Boris, the leader of the team at the genome center. ''But we were lucky,'' he said. ''The effect of the gene damage in the mice was to produce a set of symptoms that were very striking because they were so similar to those in humans.''
With the new mice in hand, the scientists plan to check out their ideas about how the normal version of the ataxia telangiectasia gene works and what goes wrong in the mutated form. For example, they plan to see if unrepaired DNA accumulates in the mice's cells, which would be expected since a role of the protein produced by the normal gene is to help repair DNA. That could explain one reason why the immune systems of patients fail. In making defensive molecules like antibodies, the immune system must break, shuffle and recombine DNA to produce different antibodies. If the protein from the normal gene is absent, the recombination may fail.
Ataxia telangiectasia afflicts about 1 in 40,000 Americans, but carriers are far more numerous. Even the carriers, each with one defective gene, show some ill effects, Dr. Wynshaw-Boris said. They appear to have a higher risk of getting certain kinds of cancer.
Now that the ataxia telangiectasia gene is known, Mr. Margus said, more people may get tested to find out if they carry the defective gene so some precautions against developing cancer or other steps could be taken. ''You might decide not to have children,'' Mr. Margus said, ''or you might decide to have prenatal testing done to see if the fetus is going to have the disease or not.''
The development of the new strain of mice means that there is now a way to test treatments that might alleviate one or more of the symptoms of the disease, Mr. Margus said. ''We are excited to find anything at all we can do to help because there is almost nothing there now,'' he said.A MAJOR cost-cutting initiative begun in Germany by Chancellor Helmut Kohl threatens to hamstring a half-dozen international scientific projects, including completion of a giant particle accelerator near Geneva that American scientists consider vital for the future of high-energy physics.
The main victim of the projected reduction would be the Large Hadron Collider, a huge particle accelerator being built by the European Laboratory for Particle Research, known as CERN, in a collaboration of 19 European nations. The United States is not a member of the coalition, but is seeking to participate in the support, research and construction of the collider because no accelerator of comparable power exists or is planned in this country.
Leading American and European physicists have expressed dismay at the projected German spending reductions, saying they could lead to a withdrawal of support for international science by other nations and slow research in particle physics, astronomy, space exploration and other fields.
Another cost-cutting measure that France and Germany announced on July 16 may block development of a large reactor intended to prove that hydrogen fusion can produce important amounts of electric power. Both countries said they were unwilling to act as hosts for the $8 billion experimental reactor because the host country would be compelled to pay up to 70 percent of reactor construction costs. The United States and Russia are also unwilling to assume such a large share of the financial support of the project, leaving Japan as the only nation still considered willing to be a major sponsor.
A plan by Germany's Ministry of Research to reduce Bonn's contributions to European scientific agencies by up to 10 percent was disclosed recently by the British journal Nature. The news caught scientists in Europe, the United States and Japan by surprise, and many expressed uneasiness about prospects for international scientific collaboration.
''The irony,'' said Dr. Burton Richter, director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in California, ''is that the Europeans have often accused the United States of not being a reliable financial partner in international scientific collaborations. Now we have to wonder if they are really willing to go ahead with the Large Hadron Collider, which is now the world's main hope for achieving the high energies needed for future discoveries. I don't know whether the German decision to reduce funding for particle physics is final, but I think that everyone in all branches of science must be very concerned.''
Another American physicist, Dr. Peter J. Limon, director of technical support at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., agreed. The feared European reduction ''would be a severe blow to the Large Hadron Collider,'' he said, delaying it at the very least.
The collider is currently scheduled to begin operation in 2004 at two-thirds of its final planned energy of 14 trillion electron-volts. American and Japanese support could bring the machine up to full power within another year, but without non-European support, the collider would take several more years to complete.
Germany is bound by treaty to maintain its current support for certain European scientific projects, including the Large Hadron Collider. But if Germany's science partners agree to the projected German reductions, the treaty could be modified. Other partners, including Britain and France, would probably reduce their own contributions by the same amount, with crippling consequences for some major projects.
The Large Hadron Collider is a $15 billion proton accelerator under construction in an existing circular tunnel 17 miles in circumference beneath the border between France and Switzerland. If and when the collider is completed, it will be by far the most powerful particle accelerator ever built.
Nature reported that the German cabinet proposes to reduce German support not only to CERN and the Large Hadron Collider but also to the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, the European Southern Observatory (which is building what will be the world's largest telescope on a mountain in Chile), the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, and the Laue-Lengevin Institute in Grenoble, France.
The projected German cuts include a 9.3 percent reduction from its contribution of $178 million this year to CERN and the collider project. Bonn has also announced that it will reduce its support for the European Space Agency by 7.4 percent. Germany and other European nations are trying to reduce government spending, partly to comply with an international accord that will create a unified currency for the European Community.
The United States' interest in participating in the Large Hadron Collider project dates from 1993, when Congress scuttled completion of the superconducting supercollider, a giant proton accelerator being built in Texas at an expected cost of about $10 billion. The supercollider was considered the only machine in the world that would be capable of exploring energy domains where scientists expect to find the Higgs boson, a theoretical particle believed to represent a unifying bridge between three of the forces of nature: the weak and strong nuclear forces and the electromagnetic force.
With the Congressional cancellation of the supercollider project on the ground that it had become too expensive, American physicists turned their attention to the less powerful but still very promising collider being built in Europe.
In 1994, the Department of Energy appointed an advisory committee headed by Dr. Sidney D. Drell of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center to examine alternative spending priorities in light of the cancellation of the supercollider. The committee strongly urged that the United States give highest priority to helping the 19-nation European particle physics consortium build the Large Hadron Collider. American representatives have been negotiating with CERN during the past year over the size of this country's financial contribution.
In an interview, Dr. Drell said the new developments in Europe ''are certainly ominous.''
American scientists already play a large role at CERN; some 600 of them work at the European consortium's Geneva headquarters. Based on the assumption that the United States will participate in the construction, financing and staffing of the new European collider, scientists at Fermilab have begun work on some of the giant magnets that will be needed by the European behemoth.
These magnets will operate bathed in liquid helium at a temperature less than three degrees above the absolute zero, and Fermilab built the first large particle accelerator using similar superconducting magnets. Experience by American experts in designing and building such magnets, which are some 30 feet long, is regarded as an important potential asset for the European collaboration.
Dr. Limon of Fermilab said that his laboratory was spending about $3 million this year on the design and engineering of magnets the United States might provide for the European machine.
''It is important that America preserves the expertise we developed over decades in learning how to build these big magnets,'' he said. ''One of the main benefits for us in the Large Hadron Collider project is in maintaining American skills.''WHAT begins as one of nature's most heartwarming scenes, three downy white chicks aflutter in their nest, often ends as one of its most gruesome. In a nasty case of sibling rivalry, researchers have found, the two eldest chicks in an egret nest will often attack and kill their youngest sibling, sometimes pitching it over the side. And where are mother and father during all of this? Standing idly by, preening and yawning.
Researchers say the killing of a sibling, or siblicide, as well as less extreme forms of sibling rivalry, is being recognized in increasing numbers of species, presenting the knotty evolutionary question of why so many animals regularly do in their siblings while parents do not lift a feather or paw to intervene. Now those studying the egrets, the long-legged birds often seen wading in ponds and marshes in which sibling rivalry has gone to an extreme, say they have begun finding some answers.
Dr. Douglas W. Mock, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, says work done by him and his colleagues suggests that the mother and father do not intervene because they are unwitting actors in a ruthless evolutionary scheme that enables them to perpetuate their genes.
In cattle egrets, there is often only enough food for two of the three hungry chicks. So the parents, the thinking goes, favor the two chicks born first, providing advantages to insure that they will be able to fight successfully for food, dominance and safety in the nest, even if it costs their runtish third chick its life. In years of plenty, even the beleaguered youngest may be strong enough to survive to adulthood along with the rest.
After piecing together this theory during 16 years of research, the researchers say they have what may be the most convincing piece of evidence yet that these parents do indeed play favorites.
Dr. Mock and his colleagues will report on Thursday at the Animal Behavior Society meetings in Flagstaff, Ariz., that the first two chicks to hatch count among the advantages given them by their parents a whopping dose of testosterone and other androgens in their egg yolk -- as much as twice the amount found in the third chick's egg.
''We have every reason to believe that parents are collaborators in siblicide,'' Dr. Mock said. He noted that while biologists used the anthropomorphic shorthand of intentions for these behaviors shaped by evolution, these birds are acting on instinct rather than devising a conscious strategy.
''Now we find parents are skewing these androgens in ways consistent with collaboration with the older siblings,'' Dr. Mock said. ''The yolk is like a bag lunch that the kid takes to school. You can either give your kid a lunch packed with steroids so he'll be a brute by recess or you can give him peanut butter.''
Dr. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, an anthropologist at the University of California at Davis who is credited with being the first to show, with her work on langur monkeys, that infanticide can be a natural, even adaptive, phenomenon, said of Dr. Mock's research, ''It's extraordinary and illuminating work.''
Dr. David W. Winkler, an evolutionary ecologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., when told of the work to be reported on Thursday, said the study would be the first account of an endowment of testosterone being passed to eggs in the wild. ''It raises the possibility that parents are controlling these things ultimately,'' he said. ''The parents may be setting all the rules of the game ahead of time.''
Previous laboratory work on the domesticated canary has revealed differences in the levels of testosterone in eggs. In canaries, however, parents do the reverse, giving the most testosterone to the youngest, in what may be an attempt to smooth the playing field for struggling chicks.
When Dr. Mock, who has studied both cattle and great egrets, first brought egret eggs into the laboratory to hatch, he was dismayed to find his charges engaging in frequent, bloody battles. Sure that such brutality would not be tolerated if parents were present, he nestled the young in pillows to protect them from one another.
But when he later saw chicks in the wild, he found the same mayhem he had been trying to prevent. Chicks typically fought four or five battles a day, with prolonged fights sometimes involving over 100 thrust-and-parry exchanges.
Yet in nearly 3,000 observed battles during which parents were present, Dr. Mock said, the two did nothing to intervene. ''It was deliciously counterintuitive,'' he said.
In the intervening years, researchers have accumulated evidence that evolution has honed a strategy in which parents appear to be maximizing the number of healthy, strong chicks they produce by putting most of their resources into the first two.
Cattle egrets begin stacking the deck by laying their three eggs one or two days apart. The first to hatch grows quickly, while the other two remain trapped in their eggs. The chick that hatches next has a similar advantage over the last one. The parents preferentially feed the dominant chicks, which are able to cow the third. The first and second hatched are the top two in the pecking order, a status that an extra boost of androgen may help them acquire. Researchers note, however, that while they suspect that added testosterone and other androgens will be linked to aggression in egret chicks, as they appear to be in canaries, exactly how these hormones affect the behavior and development of egrets remains under study.
Dr. Mock said the parents were probably ''sincerely interested'' in raising two chicks, given the amount of food they appear to be able to bring home. But since eggs are metabolically cheap to produce, parents lay one more egg, a strategy called ''parental optimism.''
The third chick then acts as a kind of insurance policy against accidents with the other two. Should it turn out to be a banner food year, the parents may be able to raise the third without too much extra effort.
Interestingly, just as egret parents, with their androgen dosing, seem to be betting on two chicks to make it, the chicks also seem to see two as the magic number. When the third chick is removed from the nest, fighting falls off and relative harmony among the remaining siblings ensues. But if researchers replace the third chick, increasing the competition for food once again, the vicious pecking resumes. Relative peace also reigns if only two hatch out.
Other birds, like osprey chicks, appear to adjust their tolerance for siblings based on their level of hunger: they fight when hungry and are peaceable when full.DR. BENJAMIN D. SANTER a shy, even-spoken, 41-year-old American climatologist who climbs mountains, runs marathons and enjoys a reputation for careful and scrupulous work -- is the chief author of what may be the most important finding of the decade in atmospheric science: that human activity is probably causing some measure of global climate change, as environmentalists have long assumed and skeptics have long denied.
The finding, issued for the first time in December by a panel of scientists meeting under United Nations sponsorship in Madrid, left open the question of just how large the human impact on climate is. The question is perhaps the hottest and most urgent in climatology today.
Dr. Santer is in the forefront of a rapidly unfolding effort to answer it, and he has been itching to get back to the chase now that he has finished his stint as main author of the crucial chapter 8 of the United Nations report, which details where the quest has led so far.
Ordinarily he is so absorbed in the work of analyzing the effects of heat-trapping carbon dioxide and other industrial emissions on climate that he has programmed his computer here in a small, spare room at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to sound a cuckoo-clock alarm every hour. Otherwise, he says, his absorption becomes ''catatonic.''
Lately, though, he has been able to accomplish little. His role on the U.N. panel, which he did not seek, placed him squarely in the sometimes dangerous intersection of science and politics, provoking so much contention that he has had scarcely a moment to deal with anything else.
Instead of plunging back into his research, he has been forced to engage in public combat with a tiny but vocal group of industry lobbyists and contrarian scientists, including Dr. Frederick Seitz, a former president of the National Academy of Sciences and of Rockefeller University. They charge that unauthorized and politically inspired changes were made in chapter 8 after it was approved in Madrid, and that the changes served to underplay uncertainties about the effects of human activities on climate.
Dr. Santer ''must presumably take the major responsibility'' for ''a disturbing corruption of the peer review process,'' Dr. Seitz wrote in a June 12 op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal.
Dr. Santer has struck back hard, like the trim middleweight he resembles, throwing verbal jabs and crosses. He and he alone did indeed alter chapter 8 after the Madrid meeting, he said, because the scientists gathered there accepted the chapter, after long discussion, only on the condition that he do so. The result, he maintains, is a clearer and more accurate statement of the relevant science than the earlier draft. And he points out that the revised chapter devotes a long and detailed section to uncertainties.
The post-Madrid revisions left unchanged the chapter's basic conclusion that the scientific evidence so far points toward a human influence on climate. The chapter, which did not require line-by-line approval, provided the underpinning for the Madrid group's official finding -- formally approved word by word -- that ''the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.'' That conclusion, contained in a separate summary for policy makers, also remains unchanged.
The panel advises the world's governments, which are negotiating reductions in greenhouse emissions.
Dr. Santer says that neither his industry critics nor Dr. Seitz contacted him or anyone else associated with chapter 8 for their side of the story, and that by failing to do so, Dr. Seitz ''failed to behave as a responsible scientist should.'' Further, he says, Dr. Seitz, a nuclear physicist who is not a climate expert, is unqualified to judge the science of the case. And he says that his critics have done no peer-reviewed research on the question; that they, not he, are the ones subverting the science and that their charges ''would be ludicrous if they were not so serious.''
Top officials of the United Nations panel have strongly backed Dr. Santer, calling the accusations ''rubbish'' and saying that the alterations were faithful to the mandate of the Madrid group. Most governments, including that of the United States, have endorsed the revised report. And many climate experts have flocked to Dr. Santer's defense.
The criticism ''has actually rallied a lot of the serious scientists around him,'' said Dr. John F. B. Mitchell, a British climatologist who was Dr. Santer's Ph.D. examiner a decade ago. This, says Dr. Mitchell, has been ''counterproductive from the standpoint of those trying to weaken the conclusions'' of the U.N. report.
The critics have not relented. In Congress, conservative Republican allies of the critics have also weighed in, raising questions about the role of the Department of Energy, which has contracts with Lawrence Livermore, in financing the work of chief authors of the report, including Dr. Santer. This has raised fears among climate scientists of political intimidation.
As for himself, Dr. Santer says, ''I've been taken out of science'' by having to deal with the attack.
Dr. Santer is widely regarded by colleagues as being among the most careful and thorough of scientists and the straightest of straight arrows, and as being apolitical. ''I have no politics,'' he said. Dr. Karl Taylor, a colleague at Livermore who has worked with him closely, says that Dr. Santer ''has set very high scientific and ethical standards for himself.''
Dr. Mitchell said it was ''quite ironic that somebody like Ben should be accused of things like this, because I don't think you could find anyone less likely to do that sort of thing.''
One of the chief critics says no personal attack on Dr. Santer was intended. ''There wasn't any implication that we thought he was doing anything wrong,'' said John Shlaes, director of the Global Climate Coalition, an industry lobbying group that first raised the questions about chapter 8. Mr. Shlaes complained that the post-Madrid changes in the chapter were not publicly revealed, discussed or formally approved before the report was published. ''It was basically the process we were addressing,'' he said.
Dr. Santer, like his forebears, has been no stranger to the character tests imposed by adversity. Two of his grandparents died in a Nazi concentration camp. His Jewish father fled Nazi Germany and migrated to the United States, where he joined the American Army. He later landed and was wounded at Normandy, served as an interpreter at the Nuremberg war-crimes trials, met and married his wife in Munich and then became a businessman in Washington, where young Ben was born in 1955. He attended the public schools of Bethesda, Md., moving to Germany at the age of 10 when his father was transferred there.
In Germany, he went to a school for the children of British Army personnel, where, on the first day, the English teacher grabbed his exercise book ''and whacked it around my head, and said, 'Santer, we're in a British school, and you'll write in pen, not in pencil.' ''HIDING in coral reefs in the Philippines, venomous cone snails have lured collectors with their brilliant and intricately patterned shells. The snails, just inches in length, have intrigued biologists because they can catch fish as large as they are. And increasingly they are attracting neurobiologists because it turns out that the snails make thousands of toxins that lock onto crucial molecules of mammalian nervous systems with pinpoint precision.
The cone snail toxins can knock out particular molecules needed for the transmission of certain nerve impulses while leaving similar molecules alone. In addition to their use in studies of how the nervous system works, they may lead to therapeutic drugs that avoid the undesirable side effects that occur when a substance used to block one molecule inadvertently blocks similar molecules.
The array of the toxins' effects is like nothing ever seen before. Inject one toxin into the brains of rats and they fall asleep. Inject another and they start to scratch themselves; another and they swing their heads; yet another and they go into convulsions.
Now the first of these toxins is being tested clinically at 30 medical centers across the United States by the Neurex Corporation of Menlo Park, Calif. The toxin, which blocks the transmission of pain impulses up the spinal cord to the brain, is the focus of a study that will enroll 300 patients with AIDS or cancer who have intractable pain. Dr. Paul Goddard, president and chief executive officer of Neurex, said he was extremely encouraged by the results so far. He said the company expected to complete its enrollment of patients by the end of the year.
Dr. Ponzy Lu, a biochemist at the University of Pennsylvania who is interested in the structure of small molecules, said that with most of the toxins yet to be characterized, ''I think there will be a lot more coming out of this.''
The slowly unraveling discovery of the cone snail toxins began with a molecular biologist's desire to do science in his native Philippines. The scientist, Dr. Baldomero M. Olivera, now at the University of Utah, said he had no idea when he turned to the snails how fascinating they would be. He had received a Ph.D. at the California Institute of Technology and then done postdoctoral work at Stanford University, where he was a discoverer of ligase, an enzyme that is crucial for recombinant DNA experiments. Finishing his postdoctoral work in 1969, he decided to go back to the Philippines to study molecular biology.
''I ended up at a laboratory at the University of the Philippines that had no equipment,'' Dr. Olivera said, so he decided to study something that was readily available. ''I figured it would make a nice kind of short-term project to purify out what made these snails so deadly.''
Dr. Olivera had collected shells as a child and knew about the venomous marine snails in the waters near his home. The shells of cone snails have attracted collectors for years and have killed about 30 hapless shell hunters with their poisons. Their shells have been so treasured that one two-inch-long shell brought in more money at an auction in 1796 than a painting by Vermeer.
There are about 500 species of cone snails in the world's tropical ocean waters, and about 70 of them hunt fish. Some bury themselves in the sand, waiting for a fish to come by. When a lurking snail senses a fish, it throws out a slender tube from its mouth and wiggles it. The tube can be transparent or it can be colored a brilliant red, a soft amber or a velvety purple, depending on the species of snail. But it looks, Dr. Olivera said, for all the world like a fishing line. When a hapless fish swallows the line, a poisonous barb comes jetting out, paralyzing the fish with deadly toxins. The snail reels in the fish and swallows it whole. After about an hour and a half, it spits out the bones, the scales and the barb it used to kill the fish.
Other cone snails catch sleeping fish with the biological equivalent of a fisherman's net. They open their mouths wide, so the fish drift in. Then they jab the fish with a poisonous barb to kill them.
''We started out basically looking at things that cause paralysis of fish,'' Dr. Olivera said. ''The first surprise was that there were really a lot of things in venom that cause paralysis. If you look at sea snakes, which also eat fish, almost all of their paralytic activity is in one component of their venom.''.
He characterized a few of the snail toxins that paralyze fish. One is like the toxin that cobras and other poisonous snakes make. It blocks a molecule at the junction between a nerve and muscle, preventing nerve impulses from passing to the muscles. Another resembles the toxin made by the Japanese fugu puffer fish, which paralyzes muscles by preventing electrical signals from spreading through the muscle from the place where the nerve touches it.
Dr. Olivera said the snail's poisons hit its prey in so many places that an equivalent brew made from other known toxins would have to include curare, the poison that natives of the Amazon put on their arrows, tetrodotoxin, the poison of the puffer fish, and the botulism toxin.
He said the snails probably developed the diverse and powerful toxins because they had to paralyze their prey quickly. ''Once a snail harpoons a fish, it can't have the fish jerking around,'' Dr. Olivera said. ''That would attract other predators. The snail is very vulnerable in its feeding.''
So, he said, the snails developed toxins consisting of small protein fragments, or peptides, that not only paralyze fish but shock them in much the way that an electric eel shocks its prey. ''The first thing you see is that the fish's fins stiffen up,'' Dr. Olivera said, from the chemical equivalent of an electric shock. ''It's rigid, as if it is being shocked. That gives time for the toxins that wipe out the nerve-muscle connections to spread through its body. It's a one-two punch.''
But after studying the two toxins, which seemed not too different from toxins found in other species, Dr. Olivera all but abandoned his study of the snails. By the early 1980's, he had moved back to the United States to do research in molecular biology, ending up at the University of Utah. He had decided that the snail toxins were ''interesting but they weren't that interesting.''
Then, a few years later, an undergraduate student, Craig Clark, came to him with a proposal. ''He got, in retrospect, a brilliant idea that instead of looking at paralysis, we should inject the peptides directly into the central nervous system,'' Dr. Olivera said. ''To be honest, I didn't really think we'd learn anything from that, so I tried to dissuade him. But he did the experiment anyway and he made this incredible discovery that the venom was laden with components that made mice do different things.'' In analyzing the venoms, the researchers had separated them into components or fractions. ''We just tested every fraction that had some venom component in it and almost everything scored,'' Dr. Olivera said.
That was the turning point, when Dr. Olivera began to consider devoting his laboratory to the full-time study of the snail venoms. ''About six years ago, I kind of quit everything else,'' he said. ''It became clear that this project was worthy of all of our time.''
He learned that each of the 500 species of cone snails seemed to have its own distinct collection of toxins and that these tiny, rigid peptides are just a fraction of the size of poisons made by snakes, scorpions or spiders.
And they were amazingly specific. For example, one toxin, which he named the omega toxin, prevents certain nerve cells from releasing their signals by blocking calcium channels, tunnels in nerve cells that open to allow calcium to enter. But the toxin binds only to one subset of calcium channels, the N subtype, discovered a decade ago by Dr. Richard Tsien of Stanford University. The N channels are found only in nerve tissue. In contrast, calcium channel blockers that are used as drugs for heart disease patients block calcium channels in smooth muscle, skeletal muscle and cardiac muscle, as well as in nerves.When it opened in Britain in February, ''Trainspotting'' seemed headed for instant cult-classic status. But the film, a vivid depiction of life in Scotland's heroin underclass, became a bona fide hit.
For Channel Four, one of Britain's two independent noncable television stations, ''Trainspotting'' was just another notch in the belt of a very successful film department. Since its founding in 1982, Channel Four, which, among other things, broadcasts the American television series ''E.R.'' and ''Frasier,'' has been committed to investing in feature films.
In recent years Channel Four has had a number of notable international successes, among them ''Four Weddings and a Funeral,'' ''The Madness of King George,'' ''The Crying Game'' and ''Secrets and Lies,'' the Mike Leigh film that won the Palme D'Or at Cannes this year and that has been chosen to open the 34th New York Film Festival on Sept. 27.
Channel Four recently announced plans to increase its feature film-making investment substantially, to about $150 million over the next four years, which will allow it to produce some 80 films when co-financing from other sources is added. About $10.5 million more will be earmarked for script and film development, giving a much-needed lift to Britain's cash-poor but recently spruced-up film industry.
The station says it has a public-service mission to fulfill and that it wants to help promote British film through its support and money.
''Channel Four has contributed enormously to the British film industry, insofar as they've really been the only constant source of finance since 1982, which is itself quite a remarkable feat,'' said Wilf Stevenson, director of the British Film Institute. ''They've been a very integral part of the revitalization of the British film industry. If you look at the most successful British films recently, all of them are Channel Four films.''
''Trainspotting,'' which has also been performed as a stage work, is based on a 1993 novel by the young Scottish writer Irvine Welsh, but David Aukin, Channel Four's head of drama, said it was the involvement of the director, Danny Boyle, that stirred his own interest. Mr. Boyle had made a previous film for Channel Four, ''Shallow Grave.''
''I'm not interested in making formula films,'' Mr. Aukin said. '' 'Trainspotting' is a case in point. If anyone else had come to me and said, 'We want to make a film of this book,' I would probably have said 'No.' ''
Mr. Aukin and his staff of seven or so have the sometimes enviable, sometimes not-so-enviable task of being on the front lines of the British film industry, which lacks a Hollywood-style studio system and often seems hard-pressed to keep its talent from defecting to Los Angeles. Each year, the drama office reviews some 5,000 film proposals before selecting the 20 or so it wants to invest in.
''The great problem of the job is that you say no to 98 percent of the stuff,'' Mr. Aukin said. ''We have to spend 60 percent of our time on stuff we're planning to make, and 40 percent on rejecting the rest.''
Mr. Aukin looks for films that are low-budget, idiosyncratic and characterized by a freshness of approach. ''We're committed to not trying to compete with Hollywood by making multimillion-pound blockbusters,'' he said. ''We stick to our formula of supporting talent and making films that are comparatively modest in terms of backing.''
Forthcoming releases include ''True Blue,'' an account of a famous Oxford-Cambridge boating race; ''The Truce,'' based on a book by Primo Levi and starring John Turturro, and the farce ''Remember Me,'' from a screenplay by Michael Frayn, which is to star Rick Mayall and Robert Lindsay.
Almost all the films that Channel Four backs are made for commercial release first rather than for television, unlike the films at the British Broadcasting Company, where the order is usually reversed. But Channel Four always gets the right to show the films on television some 18 to 24 months later, a luxury that it may not have been able to afford otherwise.
''The people who see the film in cinema and on video are marketing the film for us on television and making our audience larger,'' Mr. Aukin said. ''If you'd taken a film like 'The Crying Game' and shown it on television first, it would have had a very small audience.''
At the BBC, recent successes include ''Priest,'' starring Linus Roache and Tim Wilkinson; an adaptation of Jane Austen's ''Persuasion,'' and ''Cold Comfort Farm,'' a surprise hit starring Kate Beckinsale. Most of these were shown first on the BBC and then released theatrically outside Britain.
But even though it is in the midst of setting up a stand-alone film department with a budget of $15 million a year, the BBC has so far failed to establish a reputation to rival Channel Four's. Part of the problem, some British film makers have said, is the built-in bureaucracy at the organization Britons call ''Auntie.'' When he was in the midst of making ''Secrets and Lies,'' Mr. Leigh met with George Faber, the BBC's head of single drama, and agreed to make his next film for the BBC instead.
But Mr. Leigh later told British reporters he became so bogged down in paperwork and bureaucracy at the BBC, and so discouraged by what he found to be the difficulty of reaching Mr. Faber even on the telephone, that he ended up taking the project back to Channel Four.
Even though Channel Four has had its fair share of forgettable projects, like the recent movies ''Blue Juice,'' ''Shopping'' and ''Wild West,'' it is, for the time being, reveling in its status as British film's top talent-spotter. And as much as he favors independent films that the studios might ignore, Mr. Aukin says he also wants to make his films accessible to as wide an audience as possible. To this end, he agreed that the actors in ''Trainspotting,'' who speak with the thick accents of working-class Scotland, should re-dub their voices so that Americans would understand what they were saying.
''I have no problem with that if it means that the film will be seen by more people,'' Mr. Aukin said. Nor is he worried about the people who complain that the decision is a sellout meant to appeal to commercial interests.
''It is this kind of preciousness,'' he said, ''that I think has held back British films in the past.''A new surge of outrage swept Britain today after a woman who is 16 weeks pregnant and her gynecologist agreed to abort one of two healthy twin fetuses because she says she is too poor to raise twins.
Experts said the abortion would be the first known case in Britain in which a healthy fetus in a naturally conceived multiple pregnancy was aborted. Such a procedure in a multiple pregnancy, known as selective termination, is not unusual when a fetus is discovered to be unhealthy or abnormal.
The woman in this case was not identified, but it is known that she is a 28-year-old single mother who already has one child. No other details about her were disclosed.
There was an outcry from anti-abortion groups last week when the Government ordered the destruction of 3,000 unclaimed human embryos in fertility clinics in keeping with a law stipulating that frozen embryos cannot be kept for more than five years without specific requests from the parents.
The doctor who agreed to carry out the abortion and others who supported it asserted that the decision was ''no different from any other abortion,'' in the words of Dr. Vivienne Nathanson, the head of the board of ethics at the British Medical Association.
But anti-abortion groups here and in Italy, where there was much shock last week over the frozen embryo case, have offered money to the woman to give birth to both twins and give one up for adoption.
The decision was first reported over the weekend by The Sunday Express in a front-page interview with the woman's gynecologist, Dr. Phillip Bennett of Queen Charlotte's Hospital in London. He said the abortion of one fetus was the solution he had proposed to the woman when she told him she could not continue the pregnancy if it meant having two children.
After the report appeared, other British dailies and television gave the story prominent coverage. A wide range of commentators expressed revulsion, with some calling the decision ''uncivilized,'' ''horrific'' and ''abhorrent.''
A spokeswoman at Queen Charlotte's Hospital said that Dr. Bennett had not been in the hospital today and that there would be no comment on the case, which she called ''a private matter between the doctor and his patient.''
The spokeswoman, Nuala O'Brian, declined to say whether the abortion had been carried out, but other knowledgeable people said it had not.
Dr. Bennett told The Sunday Express that he had performed 3,000 abortions in the last 10 years and as many deliveries. Having suggested that he knew the sex of the babies, he said, ''Killing one healthy twin sounds unethical, but my colleagues and I concluded this week that it would be better to terminate one pregnancy as soon as possible and leave one alive than to lose two babies.''
The doctor faced a deluge of requests for interviews today but was not available for further comment.
Ms. O'Brian would not say whether the woman had been informed of offers of financial aid to carry the pregnancy to term, saying such information would have to be communicated by the doctor to his patient.
The technique of abortion in this case would involve piercing the selected fetus with a needle, Dr. Bennett said in the interview with The Sunday Express. That fetus is then carried for the full term of the pregnancy, ''although it shrivels and mummifies'' in the womb, Dr. Bennett said.
Among of the unanswered questions in the case are how the doctor selects the fetus to be aborted and whether the woman is told the sex of that fetus.
British law permits the termination of a pregnancy up to the 24th week. The law allows wide latitude on the reason for terminating a pregnancy, considering that a woman's request motivated by a psychological rejection of childbearing is acceptable ground for abortion even if there would be no health risks to the mother or child.
After 24 weeks, the law permits an abortion if there is a physical abnormality.
''Although technically it meets the criterion under which abortion is legal in this country, it is so close to abortion on demand,'' Harry Coen, acting editor of The Catholic Herald newspaper, said in an interview. ''At this stage, in this case particularly, it sounds to me like selective murder. I mean, we know they have aborted healthy babies before, but to leave one and kill the other is abhorrent.''
Some anti-abortion activists and charity groups have offered money and adoption as incentives to the woman to give birth to both twins.
Life, a British national charity with 35,000 dues-paying members and 135 offices around the country, said it was deluged with offers of help and could immediately offer the woman upward of $16,000 from donors who had called today. An Italian anti-abortion group said it would offer monthly stipends and adopt one of the babies after birth.Images of drunken Bosnian Serb militiamen burning Muslim villages, killing elderly civilians and carting away truckloads of loot is not a version of the Bosnian war that has been acknowledged by many Serbs.
But a searing antiwar film that portrays Bosnian Serb fighters as petty criminals, thugs and drug addicts is offering many moviegoers here their first view of the war outside the prism of Serbian nationalism.
''Most Serbs do not really know what went on in Bosnia,'' said Stojan Cerovic, a critic for the opposition magazine Vreme. ''We have been terribly manipulated. People did not even know that Serbs were shelling Sarajevo. What is portrayed in this movie is a shock to many Serbs, even moderate Serbs. It is forcing people to accept that Serbs did some really bad things in Bosnia.''
The film, ''Pretty Villages, Pretty Flames,'' opened on June 1. It is based on a true incident, in which a group of Serbian soldiers were trapped for several days in a tunnel by Muslim militiamen.
The Serbian Ministry of Culture and the Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic, initially agreed to provide financial backing for the film. Dr. Karadzic's wife, when told that the director was looking for a magnum pistol for one scene, pulled the bulky handgun from her handbag and offered to lend it.
But the tone of the film soon disenchanted Dr. Karadzic and Government officials here, all of whom boycotted the film on its opening night. In the final days of filming, near the Bosnian Serb-controlled town of Visegrad, many in the cast said they feared attacks from Serbian nationalists.
Srdjan Dragojevic, the 33-year-old director, said he was taken aback by the reaction in the theaters.
''People who watch Serb soldiers burn Muslim villages and murder civilians come up and ask how I could have made one of the soldiers a drug addict and the other a thief,'' he said. ''This illustrates the paucity of our moral response to the war.''
The film, which cost $2 million, opens with a simulated newsreel of Communist officials, surrounded by Communist youth groups, inaugurating the Brotherhood and Unity Tunnel in Bosnia on a road connecting Zagreb and Belgrade. But the tunnel is never finished and is never put to use, like so many of the huge state projects foisted on Yugoslavia by the Government.
Two young boys, one a Muslim and the other a Serb, grow up together near the empty tunnel and believe that an ogre lives inside. As the war looms over Bosnia in 1992, the friends are drawn into opposing sides.
After the newsreel scenes, the film shifts to undisciplined Serbian militiamen, many drunk, descending on Muslim villages. As troops burned a Muslim home, after killing the elderly Muslim owner, a soldier turns to his companion and asks: ''They say war brings out the best and the worst in a man. Where is the best?''
The carnage is juxtaposed with the gaudy patriotism and flowery words about Serbian destiny that filled the streets of Belgrade at the start of the war. Young men, after hearing bombastic speeches, volunteer to fight in Bosnia, buying old royalist insignia from street vendors to pin on their uniforms.
After the soldiers are chased into the tunnel, one of the militiamen launches into a long speech about Serbian history.
''Six hundred years ago they were using forks in the Serbian court while the Germans, the Americans and the Austrians were eating like barbarians with their hands!'' he shouts. ''Forks!''
A professor trapped with the group responds, ''It is your ridiculous story about forks that got us into this tunnel.''
One of the actors, Velimir Zivojinovic, who starred in dozens of films during the Communist era about the partisan struggle against Nazi Germany, plays an old officer. He talks to the militiamen of military honor and recounts how when Tito died in 1980 he walked more than 200 miles to the funeral, carrying the dead leader's portrait.
''Were any of the houses we burned, or the houses they burned, honestly acquired?'' asks the character who plays a thief. ''While Tito stuffed you with American dollars, you knew how to preach brotherhood and unity. You all smiled at each other. Then came the time to pay the bills. You took this money for 50 years, you had the best women, you drove the best cars and then it all collapsed. This is the honor your generation bequeathed to us.''
Only a few of the soldiers, badly wounded, ever make it out of the tunnel. They end up in a hospital, maimed and deranged.
The final shot, set in the present, shows a new Brotherhood and Unity Tunnel being inaugurated in Bosnia by smiling European officials.
''The Americans and the Europeans are building the new tunnel of Brotherhood and Unity, and feeding us all the same rhetoric and lies,'' said Mr. Dragojevic, the director. ''The farce is beginning all over again, with these staged elections and huge projects in Bosnia. The ogre in the tunnel lives.''As the Queen Elizabeth 2 limped across the Atlantic in December 1994, plagued by exploding pipes and erupting toilets from an unfinished renovation, Peter Ward remembers feeling sorry for the world's most famous cruise liner -- but even sorrier that Cunard management allowed such an embarrassment to befall the crown jewel in its fleet.
As chief executive of the ailing Rolls-Royce Motor Cars, Mr. Ward could readily identify with an elegant British institution that had fallen on hard times. Now, having succeeded in turning around Rolls-Royce, Mr. Ward is trying to effect a similar change for Cunard -- a challenge that will require restoring profitability, reversing a pattern of rudderless management and winning the confidence of new owners who have already tried to sell the line.
To hear critics tell it, there may be little left to sell. That is because Mr. Ward is pursuing a high-risk strategy for the 156-year-old line: At a time when the number of cruise passengers has flattened and most lines are dangling steep discounts on glitzy ships to attract middle-income, first-time customers, Cunard is sending its aging fleet at flank speed to the small luxury end of the market.
Cunard has always been identified with high-end passengers, of course, but not across the board. Now, even the more modest Cunard Countess and Cunard Dynasty will be getting the stardust treatment, which on most Cunard ships boils down to more pampering, more big name entertainers and possibly more space.
The QE2's 1,850 cabins, for example, are being reduced to a roomier 1,500. And the ship's trans-Atlantic crossings next year will take six days, instead of five, less to derive an extra day's revenue than to turn the hustle and bustle of an ocean sprint into the quiet pleasures of a leisurely voyage.
The key, Mr. Ward is convinced, is attentive service, interesting ports of call and careful trading on the Cunard name and mystique -- much as he traded on luxury and mystique to revive Rolls-Royce and the company's equally opulent Bentley.
''But one miscalculation and Cunard could end up like the Japanese Navy after Midway,'' said a senior executive of a major competitor, referring to the pivotal World War II battle in which the Japanese fleet was badly crippled.
Well aware of the criticism, the 50-year-old Mr. Ward, who is chairman and chief executive, appears unconcerned, although he may simply be resigned, since his 11 months at the helm have been anything but a pleasure cruise.
''When I came here in September,'' Mr. Ward said, ''the only guy who went to bed worrying about the bottom line was me. Cunard was almost like a welfare state at sea.''
While some current and former employees regard that as something of an exaggeration, they do concede that Cunard in the pre-Ward era was rife with waste, indecision and fiefs determined to keep all other fiefs in the dark. ''We could afford those inefficiencies when we were making money,'' a longtime employee said. ''But once we went into the red, something clearly had to be done, and Peter Ward's doing it.''
Cunard had a $25 million operating loss last year after modest profits in 1994 and 1993, but sales have fallen each year since 1992 -- from some $520 million to about $440 million in 1995. While the fallout from the QE2's 1994 fiasco hurt that ship's bookings and cost Cunard $13 million to settle claims of angry passengers, the company's annual report acknowledged that all its ships ''failed to meet either target occupancy levels or target figures for daily rates per berth sold.''
In the past, a part-time employee said, many bills and faxes sent to the cruise line would simply disappear. ''In places like the marketing department,'' she said, ''there were foot-high stacks of paper all around the office, on desks and on the floor.''
Travel agents, who book more than 90 percent of all cruises, said many of Cunard's telephone reservation agents had been haughty as well as incompetent. ''A lot of them had chips on their shoulder,'' said Miriam Rand, owner of Rand-Fields Travel in Beverly Hills, Calif.
What's more, a profusion of Cunard brands -- four in all -- diluted the Cunard name and made quality control difficult. One brand was for European river boats that Cunard did not own but with which it had a marketing agreement. Another, Royal Viking Sea Goddess by Cunard, was for five ships that it did own. Late last year, the marketing agreement was severed and the only brand left intact was Cunard. (Besides the QE2, the Countess and the Dynasty, the fleet now consists of the elegant Royal Viking Sun, the intimate Sea Goddess I and Sea Goddess II and the deluxe Vistafjord.)
But that change did not guarantee smooth sailing. Mr. Ward was in his job only a month when the QE2 was hit head-on by a 90-foot wave southwest of Newfoundland. A fire in the engine room of the Sagafjord last March stranded some 500 passengers in the South China Sea and resulted in the ship's removal from the fleet. Less than a month later, the Royal Viking Sun struck a reef in the Red Sea, ending a round-the-world cruise for more than 500 passengers.
Then, four months ago, the Kvaerner engineering and shipbuilding company of Norway bought Trafalgar House P.L.C., Cunard's longtime British owner, for $1.38 billion -- and promptly announced that it wanted only Trafalgar's engineering and construction business. The cruise line, the new owner said, did not fit into its ''core business.'' It dangled Cunard before a long list of potential buyers, but when they balked at the $380 million asking price, Kvaerner took the line, which has a book value of about $458 million, off the block.
For proud Cunard, the rejection was a humbling experience. The Disney Cruise Line, for example, which will begin operations in 1998, told The Financial Times: ''We have no interest in Cunard or the QE2. It is seen in the industry as something of a liability.''
A veteran sailor might have regarded all these incidents as omens, but not Mr. Ward, who is anything but a veteran sailor. Instead, the former college rugby player is a veteran of the rough-and-tumble car business, holding senior positions at Peugeot-Talbot, Jaguar and Rover Triumph before joining Rolls-Royce, a unit of Vickers P.L.C., in 1983. Four years later, he was named chief executive, and was made chairman in 1991.
Apparently unfazed by the tumult at Cunard, he has vowed that the line will turn a profit by 1998. And Kvaerner executives recently backtracked a bit. While reiterating that Cunard is a noncore business, they ruled out an imminent sale.
During an interview at Cunard's mid-Manhattan headquarters, Mr. Ward played down talk about a possible sale.The welfare bill passed by Congress last week will eventually bring sweeping change to the nation's poor, but, in most states, it will probably not cause any sudden disruption. A little-noticed provision allows these states to continue operating the welfare programs they now have in place.
In theory, most provisions of the bill will take effect from Oct. 1 of this year to July 1 of next year. But under the bill, the 43 states that have received Federal waivers to run experimental welfare programs may continue to operate them, regardless of whether they comply with the new requirements.
The bill may ''end welfare as we know it,'' in President Clinton's words, but it may be years before the new welfare system takes shape.
It is not known how many states will keep their waivers and how many will accept all the requirements of the legislation. The bill replaces guaranteed Federal benefits with block grants, which states may use as they like to aid the poor. The waivers allow states to alter one or more aspects of their welfare programs by, for example, setting their own work requirements or time limits or offering incentives for people to move off welfare.
The Department of Health and Human Services says that only seven states -- Alaska, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Nevada, New Mexico and Rhode Island -- and Washington, D.C., have not received waivers. Together, they have fewer than 5 percent of all welfare recipients.
In general, the bill says, if the new requirements are inconsistent with a state's waiver on some issue, the new requirements ''shall not apply.''
Typically, the waivers apply only to selected features, leaving the rest of a state's welfare program subject to the new requirements. When the waivers run out, states become subject to the full force of the new legislation.
Many waivers deal with work requirements, which are already emerging as one of the bill's most troublesome elements for states. Under the bill, most adults on welfare will be required to work within two years, and there will be a lifetime limit of five years on payments to any family. But the clock will not start ticking until a state submits a plan for complying with the new legislation, and that could come as late as July 1, 1997.
Representative Charles W. Stenholm, a Texas Democrat who supported the bill and helped devise the exemption for state waivers, said it gave states flexibility they would not otherwise have had. He said the states had been more realistic than Congress in setting work requirements.
In general, states with waivers have work requirements that are more stringent than current Federal law but less stringent than those established by the new legislation.
A Republican who worked on the bill said of the waiver provision, ''It's kind of a loophole, but it doesn't gut the bill.''
Governors of both parties urged Congress to let them continue operating under waivers. Congress minimized the criticism from state officials by granting this request.
Donna E. Shalala, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, said, ''At the 11th hour, a very interesting change was put in place in this bill, which allows states to keep the work requirements they negotiated with us in their waivers, as opposed to moving to the work requirements that are in the bill.'' The waivers, she said, were granted for varying periods, from 5 to 11 years.
About 14 percent of the adults on welfare -- 650,000 of the 4.6 million who get such benefits -- are now engaged in some type of work, job training or educational activity. The welfare bill requires a big increase in work participation rates, to 25 percent in the 1997 fiscal year and to 50 percent in the 2002 fiscal year. In addition, the definition of work becomes stricter. To qualify, a person must work at least 20 hours a week in 1997 and 1998, 25 hours a week in 1999 and 30 hours a week after that.
Since the average welfare recipient has the reading and mathematics skills of a typical eighth grader, these standards are very tough. But many states have waivers that permit them to define work in different ways. Some, for example, define work to include educational activities that are not recognized as work under the new bill. Such states may prefer to use their own definitions rather than the more stringent Federal standards.
That is an important exemption because states that do not meet Federal goals for the employment of welfare recipients will lose part of their welfare money unless they have waivers.
Likewise, many states have set time limits on welfare. But their rules, unlike the new Federal requirements, often apply to adults only. Missouri, Montana and Texas, for example, continue benefits for children after the time limit.
President Clinton has said he will sign the welfare bill even though he believes that it has ''serious flaws,'' like the large cuts in food stamps and in benefits for legal immigrants who have not become citizens. House Speaker Newt Gingrich said last week that the legislation would probably be sent to the White House on Aug. 13. The President then has 10 days, not counting Sundays, to act.
In some states, the restrictions on benefits for legal immigrants and cuts in food stamps will probably cause more disruption than other parts of the bill. In the year after the bill becomes law, Federal and state officials are supposed to review the eligibility of people receiving food stamps and Supplemental Security Income, check their citizenship and halt benefits for noncitizens.
Under another little-noticed provision of the welfare bill, a state that reduces its welfare caseload is given credit toward meeting the new work requirements. Thus, for example, a state is supposed to have 25 percent of its adult welfare recipients in jobs next year. But if the state's caseload has fallen by 10 percent since 1995, then, the bill says, the work requirement is reduced by 10 percentage points, so that only 15 percent of welfare recipients would have to be employed.Next up for the Summer Olympics: The Down Under Games in Sydney in 2000, to be staged in venues situated along Sydney Harbor during a usually pleasant Australian spring. (And if you believe the weather reports, the average September temperature is 68 degrees.)
The Sydney Games will, its organizers pledge, differ from Atlanta's in several ways: there will be no carnival-like sponsors' enclave; athletes and officials will be able to walk to most venues from a combined village, alleviating many potential transportation nightmares, and the New South Wales state government will finance most new venue construction, including a 115,000-seat Olympic stadium, and cover all debts.
That last point is crucial: Atlanta's venue construction was financed privately, from TV rights, sponsorships and licensing. Those areas, enhanced by NBC's well-in-advance $715 million deal, will finance the Sydney organizing committee's operations, not construction.
Every organizing committee likes to say it is prepared, that its airport will be ready, its new roads built in time, its mass transportation system able to accommodate the epic surge of Olympic humanity.
But as the Atlanta experience amply proved, every transportation, technology or security problem cannot be predicted. ''Be prepared to adapt to changing circumstances, from reacting to crowd flow to managing your financial forecasts,'' said A. D. Frazier, chief operating officer for the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games.
Sydney's organizing committee watched as the Atlanta committee operated, stumbled and adapted over the 17-day Olympiad. ''The biggest lesson we've learned here was the more you can put into early preparation the better you'll be down the track,'' said Mal Hemmerling, the chief executive of the Sydney Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games.
He added: ''The surprise is the effect of layering the Olympics over the infrastructure of a city and the effect it has on the city. Sydney is much larger than Atlanta and we won't have a lot of the problems that Atlanta had. In Atlanta, they put 600,000 people downtown every day in a city that was not designed for that.''
Sydney will not have to cope with record crowds that choked sidewalks, stadiums and the rail system. Similar numbers of athletes, news media and officials are expected in Sydney, but organizers will make only 5.5 million tickets available, half of what Atlanta organizers offered for sale.
When the final tally is in, an Atlanta official said today, 8.6 million of the 11 million tickets made available are expected to have been sold, a record. Bob Brennan, the Atlanta press chief, said 6.2 million sales in was originally projected, then that figure was revised upward. The 8.6 million tickets sold, Brennan said, would exceed even the revised projection.
The pipe-bombing in Atlanta's Centennial Olympic Park that killed one woman and injured 111 raised the consciousness about security in Sydney and in Nagano, Japan, and Salt Lake City, sites of the 1998 and 2002 Winter Olympics, as well as in the 11 cities vying for the right to be host to the 2004 Summer Games.
''We've taken it very seriously,'' Hemmerling said. ''It's one of our most developed areas.'' But is a relatively isolated island nation with little history of combatting terrorism ready? ''True, we have a very low incidence, but it's an issue in our plans,'' he said.
The cities eager to land the 2004 Summer Games were encamped in Atlanta, forming a sixth Olympic ring on the oval 11th floor of the International Olympic Committee's headquarters hotel. They offered brochures, videos, posters, chocolates and fruit, making their pitch to whomever roamed into their rooms.
An I.O.C. vote on the 2004 games is 13 months away, and the bidders are Rome; Athens; Rio de Janiero; Buenos Aires; Cape Town; Stockholm; Istanbul, Turkey; Lille, France; St. Petersburg (Russia, not Florida); Seville, Spain, and San Juan, Puerto Rico. An I.O.C. vote is 13 months away.
Handicapping the sweepstakes is like scoping out exactas. Atlanta was not a 1996 favorite. Athens was, certainly, as the historic choice for the centennial Games, because it had been the host for the 1896 Games. Various informal samplings of opinion have placed Rome, Stockholm and Cape Town at or near the top of the leader board, but ultimately, the decision will come down to I.O.C. politics. Some pre-vote speculation puts Cape Town atop the favorite list because it would be the first African city to host the Games, with South Africa having returned to Olympic favor in 1992.
The I.O.C. looks with pleasure upon cities that have government financial backing. Worried about an overdependence on private-sector fund-raising, and the commercialism that comes with it, bidding cities cannot hurt themselves by having government support.
''It is not required, but we'll take it into consideration,'' said Juan Antonio Samaranch, the I.O.C. president. And the Atlanta Committee's Frazier added: ''I'm not sure any other economy in the world can sustain the private investment we've made here.''
The next step is for I.O.C. members to visit each city, then for the bid groups to appear next spring before an evaluation committee that will narrow the field to four or five.
''The I.O.C. owns the brand and are looking for the best franchisee,'' said Bjorn Unger, the executive vice president of the Stockholm bid.
Yevgeniya Alexeeva, one of the people pitching St. Petersburg's long-shot bid, said that Russian President Boris Yeltsin has promised $3 billion to stage the Summer Olympics. Even in economically depressed Russia, Alexeeva said: ''The Olympics are the best thing to spend money on. Most of the venues will be built regardless of the Olympics. We need this.''
Now, regarding Pittsburgh, which wants the 2012 Games: it already has a Web site.SUDDENLY, like Atlanta itself once upon a time, the Olympics are gone with the wind taking them to Sydney in 2000.
And for the United States, the Summer Games might be gone for another quarter of a century. With so many capable cities and governments around the world eager to bid, the haughty International Olympic Committee isn't likely to risk taking a chance on what it disliked about Atlanta.
The line is too long for 2004 and beyond. Athens, Rome and Stockholm in Europe. Beijing in Asia. Istanbul, which bridges Europe and Asia. Cape Town in Africa. Rio de Janeiro or Buenos Aires in South America, eventually. And when it's North America's turn, Toronto is a likelier site than New York.
Please, anyplace but New York.
While looking through binoculars to 2008, when it's doubtful he'll still be in office, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani has proposed New York as a Summer Games site. But with the I.O.C. expected to demand governmental backing, any mayor will be unable to justify the billions it will cost by then.
Imagine the price of building an Olympic stadium large enough for the 400-meter track; the dinky one at Randalls Island won't quite get it. The Mayor has proposed turning over his proposed stadium to the Yankees or the Mets, but George Steinbrenner and Fred Wilpon aren't about to wait.
Imagine the traffic snarls in a city and its suburbs connected by too many bridges and tunnels as it is.
And imagine the political ramifications involved in New York's negotiating to use the needed New Jersey venues, such as Giants Stadium and the Meadowlands arena.
As for Atlanta, it will be remembered for the good, the bad and the bomb.
The Atlanta of the Olympics rose from the bloodstained bricks in Centennial Park just as the Atlanta of the Civil War rose from the ashes of General Sherman's torches. Revelers returned to Centennial Park. Spectators filled the venues.
Never before had 80,000 people attended the morning events of the track meet. Some three million filled the various venues and cheered the competitors from every nation, not just the Americans.
No boos for anyone. Not even the Cubans, the most obvious ideological rival since the Soviet Union's collapse. But with 197 nations here, America's first world Olympics, such Southern hospitality was to be expected.
Some haughty I.O.C. officials criticized Atlanta's county-fair atmosphere as unbecoming to what they like to call the Olympic movement. But the Olympic movement is really all about Olympic millions. And that's all Atlanta's county-fair atmosphere was about: attracting the millions to pay its Olympic bills.
If the I.O.C. is so serious about the Olympic movement, it should move to eliminate some of its silly sports.
Throw out synchronized swimming and rhythmic gymnastics. Any event that needs background music isn't a sport. It's a show. That goes for the floor exercises in gymnastics and figure skating, too. If figure skating is in the Winter Games, ballet should be in the Summer Games.
With ballroom dancing now under consideration, the I.O.C. has shown it can be as silly as some of its sports.
But as long as its zillion-dollar television contracts depend partly on gymnastics (alias subtle child abuse for little girls) and figure skating (more show-biz than sport), the I.O.C. won't dare move to forget those events.
Throw out tennis, too. To any tennis player, Wimbledon or the United States Open is the ultimate title. The best Olympic sports are those in which a gold medal is that sport's most important reward.
With that in mind, throw out the Dream Team. Their real dream is being on a National Basketball Association championship team, if only for their next contract. Their gold medals are mere trinkets.
But as silly as some sports are and as tragic as the bomb was, the most embarrassing Olympic moment occurred the morning after Alice Hawthorne was killed in the explosion. While her family was making funeral arrangements in Albany, Ga., a burglar stole a television and a VCR from the deceased's home.They came from all over the United States and Europe. Some spoke English only haltingly. They were industry executives, lawyers and musicians. Hardly any had ever met a reporter.
Nonetheless, in the frustrating hours after Trans World Airlines Flight 800 fell out of the skies over Long Island, the families of the victims coalesced into a formidable political force.
Their tearful, angry pleas over the slow pace of body identification and the bewildering morass of information from authorities served to focus unparalleled attention on an aspect of aviation accidents long overlooked by Government and industry.
The families' heartfelt stories caught the attention of politicians and, ultimately, of President Clinton, who proposed that a specific office in the Federal Government be set up to assist victims' families in aviation tragedies. ''I intend to work with Congress to see that it does happen,'' the President told relatives in the wake of the T.W.A. crash.
''This is a gray area that has been lurking out there,'' said Peter Goelz, the director of government and public affairs for the National Transportation Safety Board. ''It wasn't something that anybody felt they had the authority or responsibility to do anything about.''
The issue of how governments and airlines deal with victims' families first arose after the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, when some relatives learned their loved ones had died in Scotland from a message left on their answering machines by an airline representative.
Relatives of subsequent crash victims said they were treated little better, and with each bungled burial and mixed-up passenger list, more families have come together to demand change. But this year's crash of a Valujet jetliner in Florida and the TWA accident are the first to bring real improvements, family members say, mostly because families are getting savvier about how they make their demands and the N.T.S.B. is taking a more active role.
Congress also has begun to study the question. Representative Bud Shuster, a Republican of Pennsylvania who is a member of the House subcommittee on aviation, introduced a bill last week that would promote the concerns of family members and lead to better coordination between agencies.
And Senator John McCain, the Republican Senator from Arizona who is a member of the Senate subcommittee on aviation, plans to do the same next month.
''The auction price has been paid,'' said Douglas Smith, who heads the National Air Disaster Alliance, an umbrella organization for the survivors and relatives of victims of 10 airplane crashes.
Under Federal law, the N.T.S.B. has sole responsibility for investigating airplane crashes. But there is no one plan, no one agency, in charge of handling the needs of family members. Mr. Smith called it a ''vacuum of law,'' and it is a void families have railed against for years.
As a result, every airline and every locality decides crash bycrash how to respond to the families who descend upon airports after accidents, pleading for information and needing consolation.
Horror stories abound. Months after a USAir jet crashed near Pittsburgh two years ago, several families said they had to rummage through a bin of debris collected from the site to find their loved ones' clothing and belongings.
In the hours after an American Eagle crash in Indiana, Mr. Smith was told that his daughter was a passenger on the plane, then told she was not, until finally he learned she had, in fact, been on the plane. And in two cases, unidentified body parts were buried in mass graves without the families' knowledge.
''They had a burial just like that,'' said John Kretz, whose wife, Janet Stamos, died in the USAir Flight 427 crash. ''They didn't tell anybody. A good part of my wife was in there. I would have wanted to be there.''
A report by officials of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, on the Pittsburgh crash concluded last year that USAir had barred the county's mental health team from counseling family members as they gathered at the airport to hear the devastating news about the 1994 accident.
For the families of the T.W.A. victims, other complications arose, much of it relating to a lack of coordination. Families wound up waiting at least 12 hours for confirmation that their loved ones had boarded the plane. At least one person received conflicting reports about whether his relative was on the plane.
Nearly 30 agencies set up shop inside the Ramada Plaza Hotel ballroom, where families were ensconced, but no one group was in command. Briefings sometimes dissolved into shouting matches between anxious relatives and eager-to-please government officials, and politicians added to the confusion by releasing contradictory information.
But with the help of family advocates, some details fell smoothly into place. Information was delivered to the families at one central location, the hotel.
A T.W.A. team trained to deal with post-crash emergencies arrived at the airport soon after the plane plummeted into the Atlantic on July 17. T.W.A. employees assigned to each family were roundly praised for their willingness to help in ways large and small, arranging for transportation, gathering documents for family members and, in one case, driving a woman to a Kmart store so she could buy a portable headset.When AT&T embarked last fall on its one-year journey of discovery, dismemberment and downsizing, the company's 60,000 employees and their families in the New York metropolitan region were at the epicenter of a corporate earthquake.
But the shock wave did not stop at the company's front gate. What AT&T began in its drive to divide and remake itself has taken on a momentum of its own, changing lives and local businesses, altering perceptions about jobs and careers, and rewriting the equation for how the pieces of the regional economy might fit together as the communications revolution advances.
The wave was felt by the students at Lord Stirling Elementary School in New Brunswick, N.J., who saw many AT&T volunteers suddenly disappear from their classrooms. Some volunteers had been laid off or transferred. Others withdrew from the program, squeezed by time and longer work hours as they scrambled to hold onto their jobs.
It was felt by Jill Wagner-King, whose new assignment was as a spy. Her target: AT&T.
She watches the company's every new move from a second-floor command station, ''the Bunker,'' at the New Haven headquarters of Southern New England Telephone, the Connecticut telecommunications company. Every morning at 8, she briefs top executives about the last 24 hours' developments on the telecommunication war's field of battle, where the two companies are fighting for long-distance customers.
It was felt in the unpolished confines of the small Manhattan computer software company Ex Machina. Last month the company managed to lure away a top AT&T Internet programmer, Paul S. R. Chisholm, who gave up a private office and a 10-minute commute for two hours on the train, a cinderblock wall for a view and a spot on the ground floor of a growing company.
Mr. Chisholm, who joined AT&T as a college graduate 15 years ago, said his choice would have seemed wild in the old, regulated monopoly days of Ma Bell. But he said he thought that by introducing waves of constant change into its once static culture, AT&T has opened a kind of Pandora's Box that cannot now be closed. Change has become a force in its own right. New rules issued last week by the Federal Communications Commission encouraging local telephone competition promise to hasten the pace further still.
''I found myself adapting to change so well that I started to say, 'How much change can I handle?' '' Mr. Chisholm said. ''So here I am.''
This is the story of what happened outside AT&T when the floodgates of change opened within. One corporate decision has had a variety of effects, from Silicon Valley, where companies have been quietly recruiting AT&T talent and buying up small New Jersey companies to gain a foothold in an evolving telecommunications market, to Dayton, Ohio, where one of Sajid Malhotra's first calls upon arriving from his former life at AT&T and New Jersey to his new job at an AT&T breakaway company was to the first Indian restaurant he could find in the phone book. He needed a taste of home.
The company opened this new chapter last September, when it said that it would break up the company into three components: AT&T for telecommunications service, Lucent Technologies for hardware and the NCR Corporation for computers.
Three months later, the company announced that 40,000 jobs, 13 percent of its work force, would be eliminated. That number has since been muted by an increase in hiring, especially at AT&T and Lucent, and especially in the New York area.
AT&T now has slightly more employees in the New York region than it did at the beginning of the year, despite the 17,000 voluntary buyouts and layoffs worldwide. Lucent has shed 6,000 jobs, but has reduced its work force in New Jersey by only about 100 or 200 from its base of 17,500 in January, a spokeswoman said.
The job changes within the companies have been uneven as well, creating a checkerboard of effects as some divisions are decimated while neighboring business units clamor for new workers. The administrative offices in Basking Ridge, N.J., for example, have been the scene of deep bloodletting as middle-management ranks are thinned. But Mr. Chisholm, the programmer, said that his former corner of the company had seen only growth.
But the job numbers also mask what economists and local business people say is a much deeper shift. In a region still finding a new footing after the deep recession of the late 1980's and early 1990's, AT&T has become a symbol of the uncertainty about what comes next. Whether it grows or shrinks, the company is in motion, and taking a significant portion of the region's economy along for the trip.
''There's a whole bunch of uncertainty, and for the region, that's good,'' said Roderick K. Randall, a former AT&T researcher who founded his own company, Teleos Communications, in 1987, in Eatontown, N.J. Teleos was bought out by Madge Networks, a San Jose communications company, in February.
''Any time there is uncertainty, the venture capitalists come in and say, 'Isn't there a company in this?' '' said Mr. Randall, now a vice president at Madge.
But that uncertainty, despite the opportunity it presents, runs against years of ingrained traditions -- not to mention high costs and taxes -- that have given the New York region a poor reputation as a place for a new business.
AT&T itself has been responsible for some of that image. Until fairly recently, it epitomized stodgy stability and the lifetime job.
Because of its huge base in the New York region -- and especially in New Jersey, where it has long been the state's largest private employer -- those traits became a cornerstone of both the local business community and the work force as well: educated, conservative, hierarchical. The entrepreneurial spirit and market savvy that built places like Silicon Valley in California and Route 128 around Boston found shallow soil in the land of rigid giants like AT&T.
The question now is whether a leaner, faster AT&T can drive forward the very forces it once inhibited. In recent months, Lucent Technologies, from its new headquarters in the old Bell Labs complex in Murray Hill, N.J., has said it hopes to foster an entrepreneural spirit inside and outside the company.In the quest for information about the crash of Trans World Airlines Flight 800, computer users have turned in record numbers to the global computer network, in particular, the World Wide Web.
Several major news organizations, which had expected a surge in activity because of the Olympics, report that activity at their Web sites rose sharply immediately after the July 17 crash.
Individuals' sites devoted to the crash are reporting thousands of daily ''hits.'' That is an enormous number for such sites, which are usually uncatalogued and found through Web surfing.
The number of hits is not the same as the number of visits. Hits relate to the number of images on a Web page. The more complicated the page, the higher the number of hits when a visitor downloads, or views, it. Still, the operators say, these increases are so large that they are clearly caused by additional visitors.
CNN says traffic at its site quadrupled after the crash, to 3.9 million hits a day. The New York Times said the number of visitors increased by nearly half the day after the crash, with a total of one and a half million hits. That represents more than 500,000 pages downloaded.
USA Today, which has a section of its site devoted to the crash, said its site also broke records.
''When the T.W.A. crash occurred, the traffic in the news section surged,'' said Lorraine Cichowski, vice president and general manager of the USA Today Information Network in Arlington, Va. ''For the first time, we exceeded one million hits.''
What the visitors are seeing varies widely. Sites related to the crash range from the comprehensive to the cursory.
Among the most sophisticated are those created by news organizations like ABC News, CNN, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Newsday and USA Today. The sites offer articles, sound clips and video recordings of news conferences and maps about Flight 800.
Although it would seem logical to go directly to sites created by institutions directly involved in the crash investigation, visitors often find little of interest. The site at Boeing, which manufactured the 747-100 jumbo jet, has no information about the flight. A site about Kennedy International Airport is also unrelated to the crash.
A T.W.A. site has a news release dated July 21 about memorial services.
The site of the National Transportation Safety Board has a table that lists nearly all airplane accidents in the United States since 1983, noting the type of aircraft, the number of fatalities and the locales of the accidents. The board has a listing for Flight 800, but little more.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation site offers a press release dated July 19 and an appeal for information, with an E-mail address and a toll-free telephone number.
Few Government sites are updated daily. The Navy site is a fascinating exception. It runs new articles on the findings almost daily, and it has details on who the Navy divers are, equipment and photos of wreckage.
A few indviduals' sites are strictly informational. Harro Ranter, working in the Netherlands, created a site called Civil Aviation Safety Documentation Archive. That site, in English, includes a link to the latest news about the investigation and a history of 747 jetliner accidents. Mr. Ranter said he had 1,400 hits by Saturday.
''Every time there's a catastrophe in the U.S., the on-line services are the new way to communicate,'' said Joshua Harris, president of Pseudo Programs Inc., a Web service in New York. ''There are the official sites, and then there's the quarterback theorists. That's what makes the Internet interesting. You can get at what people think.''
The most impressive -- and unusual -- sites memorialize the victims. Residents of Montoursville, Pa., which lost 21 people including 16 youths on a trip by the high school French Club, have established a variety of sites. One resident, Steve Bonnell, created Point de Repere, for point of reference, with photographs and diary entries.
''After a week or so, most of the newspaper articles will be gone,'' Mr. Bonnell said. ''But I wanted something a little more permanent. To us they were real people. This site just personalizes their names.''
Another site was created by a local Internet provider, Pennet.
Some sites commemorate friendships that existed only on the Net. Ryan Freebern, 16, a high school junior in Hudson Falls, N.Y., created a page as a tribute to a victim from Montoursville, Ana Duarte-Coiner, 12, who was traveling to Paris with her mother, Constance, an associate professor of English at the State University at Binghamton.Auto sales in the United States have entered the doldrums, with sales of cars and light trucks slowing at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 14.3 million vehicles in July, down from a 15.1 million pace in June and a torrid 15.8 million pace in May.
The Ford Motor Company, the last big auto maker to release its July sales figures, today reported flat sales. Car sales rose three-tenths of 1 percent, while sales of Ford's sport utility vehicles, mini-vans and pickup trucks fell four-tenths of 1 percent.
The slack numbers are consistent with other statistics showing that the pace of economic growth slowed at the beginning of the third quarter after a torrid second quarter in which the economy grew at an annualized rate of 4.2 percent.
''We are settling down to what I would consider to be a more sustainable pace for the next several quarters,'' said Jack V. Kirnan, an automotive analyst with Salomon Brothers Inc.
Still, last month's sales slightly exceeded the results of a fairly weak July last year. Since then, strong growth in jobs and rising wages have given many Americans the money to buy new cars and trucks. Sales of light vehicles rose 1 percent from the period a year ago based on a daily selling rate. There were 26 selling days last month, but 25 in July 1995.
Continuing the trend of recent years, car sales were weak -- they dropped 2.4 percent -- but sales of mini-vans, sport utility vehicles and pickup trucks were strong. Sales of these high-profit light trucks rose 5.8 percent.
Indeed at Ford, sales of popular pickups and sport utility vehicles were held back by shortages, not by a lack of demand. Ford is increasing the number of factories building its F-series pickups.
''By the end of August, we'll have four assembly plants producing the new full-size pickups, so that our dealers will be able to begin satisfying the backlog of demand,'' said Robert L. Rewey, group vice president of marketing and sales for Ford Automotive Operations.
Some outside factors held down the July numbers, analysts said. ''The CNN effect'' was at work, said Ronald A. Glantz, an auto analyst at Dean Witter. ''Dealers report that showroom traffic fell after T.W.A. Flight 800 exploded and the bomb was set off at Atlanta's Centennial Park,'' he said.
Others blame the Commerce Department. Last month's sales rose 1 percent on a daily selling rate basis compared with July 1995 figures. But the Commerce Department's seasonal adjustment factors show that sales fell. Car and light-truck sales dropped from a seasonally adjusted pace of 14.5 million vehicles last year to 14.3 million vehicles last month, according to the Commerce Department's formula for seasonal adjustments.
Also today, the Chrysler Corporation announced rebates for a handful of its 1997 model cars and vans.
The 1997 Dodge and Plymouth Neon will carry a $500 rebate, while last year's model has a $1,000 rebate. The same goes for the Eagle Talon, Dodge Avenger, Chrysler Sebring Coupe, Plymouth Breeze, Chrysler Cirrus, Dodge Stratus, Dodge Intrepid, Chrysler Concorde LX and Eagle Vision ESi.
Some 1997 Dodge Ram models will carry rebates of $500 to $1,000, compared with rebates of $600 to $1,600 for the 1996 models.
Chrysler depends less on car sales and more on high-profit light-truck sales than Ford, the General Motors Corporation and most foreign auto makers. So it can afford to offer rebates on cars because tougher price competition in that segment of the market puts less pressure on its bottom line.
''Chrysler took some of the phenomenal profits it earned on trucks and is pouring them into cars,'' Mr. Glantz said.
Auto dealers said that July was a little slow.
''I think it was slow all over,'' said J. Renz Edwards, a Ford dealer on the outskirts of Kansas City, Mo. ''I don't think anybody had a killer month, but we'll make money.''
Mr. Edwards, who sells mostly trucks, said that sport utility vehicle sales were steady. The redesigned 1997 Ford Escort is selling well at his dealership, but the 1997 F-150 pickup is the real star.
''They are usually gone within a day,'' Mr. Edwards said. Last month, ''I had a couple of guys fighting over a blue flare-side,'' he said, referring to a pickup truck.
Michael R. Cook, a Chicago-area Buick and Mazda dealer, blames the Olympics for his disappointing sales.The new semiconductor agreement reached by the United States and Japan on Friday is supposed to end managed trade by governments. But will it give rise to a private cartel instead?
The agreement transfers some of the role played by the two Governments under their previous accord to a council of industry representatives from the United States, Japan and possibly other nations. The Semiconductor Council, as it will be called, is intended to promote industry cooperation and to gather data on trade flows and market conditions in Japan and other countries.
William (Pat) Weber, the chairman of the United States Semiconductor Industry Association, said here today that some of the main jobs of the council would be to assess semiconductor supply and demand, and to address such questions as: ''What are the implications in terms of capacity that will be required, and where should that capacity be put in place?''
Mr. Weber, who is also vice chairman of the semiconductor maker Texas Instruments, denied in a later interview that performing such assessments of capacity would make the new organization a cartel, since the decision whether to build a new factory would be up to each company and would not be regulated by the council.
Nevertheless, he said he hoped the information gathered by the council would help moderate the cycles of severe shortage and severe glut, of fat profit followed by heavy losses, that have afflicted the industry.
''It think it would be great if we can find a way to avoid these tremendous cycles,'' he said. ''Perhaps if we could do a better job of predicting demand, we could do a better job of bringing on the supply around the world.''
Any such statement suggesting attempts to balance supply and demand may create uneasiness among computer makers and other users of semiconductors, who bitterly remember the results of the Japanese-American semiconductor trade agreement signed in 1986. That accord required Tokyo to see to it that Japanese companies did not sell their chips overseas at unfairly low prices, a practice known as dumping. To keep prices above certain levels, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry began restraining production and the expansion of capacity, contributing to a chip shortage and a surge in prices.
Tsugio Makimoto, executive managing director of Hitachi Ltd., talking about the new council, conceded, ''We have to do it in a form that doesn't conflict with the anti-monopoly law.''
Mr. Weber and several representatives of the Electronic Industries Association of Japan appeared today at a news conference to usher in what they called a new era of cooperation under the recent accord. To promote that spirit, Mr. Weber, who spent sleepless nights in Vancouver, British Columbia, last week negotiating with his Japanese counterparts, flew all the way here to appear for an hour at the news conference.
He conceded that sources of tension remained. There is now a glut of memory chips and prices have fallen precipitously, spurring rumors that one or more American companies may file dumping complaints against Japanese chip producers.
''We do have some concerns about the rapid price declines,'' he said. But he added that the chances of such a suit had been reduced by the accord. ''It is much better that we have an agreement than no agreement,'' he said.U.S. Order Inc., an electronic commerce company and maker of of so-called smart phones, said yesterday that it had agreed to merge with the Colonial Data Technologies Corporation to create a new company called the Tritech Corporation.
The deal comes 18 months after U.S. Order, based in Herndon, Va., and Colonial, based in New Milford, Conn., entered an alliance to jointly design, manufacture and market a smart telephone. The merger combines U.S. Order's technology with the distribution reach of Colonial, the second-largest provider of caller-ID devices to telephone companies.
The merger, which values Colonial at approximately $158 million, would give U.S. Order shareholders 51 percent of the company and Colonial shareholders 49 percent.
The move creates a bigger company at a time when smart phones are also being developed by cellular phone giants like Nokia and Motorola. Philips Electronics of the Netherlands, meanwhile, currently offers a smart phone for $500; Northern Telecom sells one for about $300, analysts said. Such devices are meant to enable users to tap the Internet, send and receive E-mail and perform other on-line transactions.
Advocates of the technology say these mass-market information appliances, if priced at $250 or so, may have more consumer appeal than the stripped-down $500 ''network computer'' being touted by some computer industry executives.
News of the merger deal sent U.S. Order shares down $2.438 to close at $11.563, in Nasdaq trading yesterday, and Colonial shares up 62.5 cents, to $10.875, in Nasdaq trading. Analysts said that while the merger made strategic sense, it would be difficult to gauge its chances for success until the companies provided more financial data.
Colonial expects to announce second-quarter earnings of 12 cents to 14 cents tomorrow, while U.S. Order is expected to post a second-quarter loss.
William F. Gorog, U.S. Order's chairman and chief executive, will serve as chairman of Tritech. Previously in his career he founded the data-retrieval service Lexis-Nexis and the on-line transaction software company Verifone Inc.
Robert J. Schock, chairman and chief executive of Colonial, will be vice chairman and chief executive. John C. Backus, president and chief operating officer of U.S. Order, will hold the same position at Tritech.
In a telephone interview, Mr. Gorog predicted that the company's strategy of providing a complete system, including phones, networks and services, would allow it to triumph over far-larger manufacturers.
''There are a lot of people saying, 'Here is a screen phone, go do something with it,' '' Mr. Gorog said. ''But a market doesn't just need hardware, it needs end-to-end solutions.''
Correction: August 14, 1996, Wednesday
Because of an editing error, an article in Business Day on Aug. 6 about a merger between U.S. Order Inc. and Colonial Data Technologies Corporation misstated the background of William F. Gorog, the chief executive of U.S. Order. He was a former member of the board of Verifone Inc.; he was not the company's founder.Massachusetts New Factor in Race For a Senate Seat
The contest between Gov. William F. Weld of Massachusetts and Senator John Kerry for Mr. Kerry's seat in the Senate has been narrowing -- one poll had Mr. Weld trailing by 13 percentage points last spring, but by just 4 percentage points late last month -- but now Mr. Weld has another problem.
She is Susan Gallagher, a 37-year-old mother of four and real-estate agent, who has abruptly jumped into the Senate race as the candidate of the newly formed Conservative Party. Ms. Gallagher secured the 10,000 signatures needed to get on the Massachusetts ballot last month, and she plans a working-class campaign aimed at Mr. Weld's right flank and appealing to voters who favor national figures like Patrick J. Buchanan.
Nobody believes Ms. Gallagher will even come close to winning; her campaign budget is $20,000. But any votes she draws are all but certain to come from right-leaning Republicans and Reagan Democrats who were already disaffected with Mr. Weld's brand of moderate Republicanism, but had nowhere else to go until now. Some experts say she could collect as much as 4 percent of the vote. In a close race, even a few percentage points could prove fatal to Mr. Weld's chances.
Ms. Gallagher says her first goal is to be included in the next broadcast debate between Mr. Weld and Mr. Kerry, now set for Aug. 19. A spokesman for Mr. Weld said the Governor's campaign was not fazed by her late entry. Nevertheless, the state Republican Party is challenging the validity of the petitions, hoping to knock her off the ballot. That challenge will not be decided until late this month, at best.
The Polls Who's in the Lead? It All Depends
For several months now, opinion polls have suggested that Democratic hopes of making substantial gains in the House this November -- perhaps even retaking control of the chamber -- were looking up. Now two new polls are at odds over that notion.
The surveys, conducted late last month by Time Magazine/CNN and the Pew Research Center for People and the Press, asked respondents whether they would vote for the Republican or Democratic candidate if the House elections were held today.
The Pew survey shows Republicans gaining in popularity after a long stretch in the electoral doghouse. Of the 928 registered voters who were polled, 47 percent said they would vote for the Democratic candidate and 46 percent for the Republican, a statistical tie. Democrats held a 50 percent to 44 percent edge when the same question was asked in June.
But the Time/CNN survey, of 2,435 registered voters, gave Democrats a 47 percent to 41 percent edge, statistically identical to the 48 percent to 41 percent Democratic plurality in the last poll issued in mid-July.
The margin of sampling error in the Pew poll is plus or minus three percentage points; the Time/CNN poll has a sampling error of plus or minus two percentage points.
What does that mean? Not much, maybe; responses to this often-asked question can bounce up and down from month to month. In the Pew poll, the gap between the so-called generic Republican vote and Democratic votes is back at its historic level; until the 1994 elections, respondents generally gave Democrats a small advantage when answering this question.
But the Time/CNN poll suggests that the Republicans are still mired in a danger zone that could cost their party dearly in November. Many analysts say a party begins to run the risk of being buried in a Congressional-election landslide when it drops five or more points behind its rival in the generic vote.
The Strategy Dole's Best Effort At Keeping Secret
All too often, Bob Dole's campaign strategists have arranged for their man to make news -- a speech on welfare, a proposal to attack crime -- only to find that the Clinton camp had ferreted out their plans in advance and upstaged them.
No way was that fate going to befall the centerpiece of Mr. Dole's political agenda, the hefty package of tax cuts that he officially unveiled yesterday. So when Mr. Dole's advisers began explaining the package to the press last weekend, they handled the proceedings as if they were a state secret.
Campaign advisers invited selected reporters to receive private briefings on the plan -- on the condition, Mr. Dole's aides said, that the reporters promise not to contact President Clinton's campaign for comment in the course of preparing their stories. Those who accepted, among them representatives of The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today, were smuggled into Dole headquarters in northeast Washington through an underground garage, in a style befitting the Republican heavyweights who attend sessions on presumably weightier topics, like Mr. Dole's search for a Vice-Presidential nominee.
Alas, the Dole campaign's security proved little better than that at the Clinton White House under Craig Livingstone, the former head of the White House personnel security office involved in the review of F.B.I. files. Television network producers who stake out Dole headquarters spotted the reporters and identified them. Other news organizations, including The New York Times, obtained details of the economic plan from other Republican officials. Indeed, by midafternoon reporters were being briefed on the plan by the White House re-election team, which had gleaned a fairly complete and mostly accurate picture of the Dole proposal from reporters who were seeking comment on the package.
Mr. Dole officially announced his six-year, $548 billion tax-cut proposal on Monday. But by that time, many had already read Mr. Clinton's critique of it in their morning newspapers.
MICHAEL WINESThe first visit of Benjamin Netanyahu as Israeli Prime Minister to this neighboring Arab country ended today with reassuring words on several fronts, including the prospect of a resumption of peace talks between his new Likud Government and Syria.
At a joint news conference, Mr. Netanyahu and King Hussein said the two sides had discussed Syria's interest in renewed talks, as well as problems with economic initiatives that were supposed to have been carried out under the Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty signed in 1994. The Prime Minister also said he hoped that the Israeli troop redeployment around the West Bank city of Hebron, originally scheduled for March, would take place within two weeks if talks with the Palestinians resumed.
But no substantive acts to bolster recent diplomatic bustling emerged, though Mr. Netanyahu made a small gesture of conciliation: He announced that he would allow 5,000 additional Palestinian laborers from the West Bank and Gaza Strip to resume their jobs inside Israel, further relaxing a travel ban imposed after a wave of terrorist bombings in Israel in February and March.
Jordan had hoped for some sign that the agreements on development, trade, water sharing and other issues outlined in its 1994 peace pact with Israel would take a more tangible form. Instead, the morning of talks with King Hussein, separate economic discussions with Crown Prince Hassan and an afternoon visit to the ancient city of Petra were interpreted here as a photo opportunity for Mr. Netanyahu's constituents.
''Nothing material will happen from this visit,'' said Fahed Fanek, a Jordanian economist. ''He is showing his people that he can be tough and still be accepted in the Arab world and probably get a better deal. Like Cairo, it shows the whole world that there is no need to be too hard on him because he is already accepted in the Arab world.''
Mr. Netanyahu visited Cairo, capital of the only other Arab country that has made peace with Israel, on July 18.
His visit to Jordan comes after secret consultations with King Hussein in London and after reports, denied by both sides, that he had a clandestine meeting with a Syrian envoy on unfreezing their peace negotiations. King Hussein, fresh from his own reconciliation visit to Damascus over the weekend, said Jordan was not in a position to broker a deal between the two sides. But he evidently passed on President Hafez al-Assad's views to Mr. Netanyahu.
''There was a clear expression of a desire to resume the quest for peace in Damascus, and that is encouraging, that is something we will readily take up,'' Mr. Netanyahu said.
''We are prepared to engage in peace negotiations with Syria on all outstanding matters,'' he said, brushing aside suggestions that Israel was trying to limit the talks to the search for an agreement about an early Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon, where Syria garrisons thousands of troops. ''We are not limiting this to any one particular subject.''
But Mr. Netanyahu, who was elected on May 29, has rejected the land-for-peace idea pursued by the previous Labor Government under Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, who toyed with various formulas for an Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights, captured from Syria in the 1973 Middle East war. In addition, Mr. Netanyahu's Cabinet passed a measure on Friday easing restrictions on new construction at Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. And his new Minister of Infrastructures, Ariel Sharon, has revived plans for new roads in the West Bank and expressed skepticism about a common Israeli-Jordanian airport for their neighboring Red Sea resorts.
King's Hussein's response to that new policy has been muted, especially when compared with denunciations by other Arab leaders. The King said he believed that the Israeli Government would not ''create obstacles to peace.''
''I hope and I trust that the Israeli Government will act very prudently,'' King Hussein said. He also distanced Jordan from any talks on the future of Jerusalem, saying he was sure that the Palestinians and Israel would come up with a plan.
Given that at least half of Jordan's population is of Palestinian origin, the King's seeming indifference to issues of greatest concern to Palestinians deepened grumbling here that the peace treaty seems to be more between his Hashemite dynasty and Israel than between the two countries.
''The people have not felt any peace dividend,'' said Labib Kamhawi, director of the Organization for Human Rights in Jordan. ''People feel that this is not a Jordanian affair. It is more of a Hashemite affair.''
For instance, the Israel-Jordanian understandings stipulated that the two sides would find a way to deliver additional water from Israel to Jordan within 12 months after they signed their treaty, but no such arrangement has materialized. Plans for a park in the Jordan Valley, huge industrial projects and the export of more Jordanian textile, food or building supplies into at least the West Bank have also sputtered. The two leaders said today only that they were working on those issues.
Jordanians had hoped that the peace treaty would bring development and more economic aid, especially from the United States. Instead, direct American aid amounted to about $10 million last year, a paltry sum when compared with the billions showered on Egypt and Israel since they signed their peace treaty.
Jordan owes $6.3 billion abroad, one of the world's highest debt ratios, and is under pressure from the International Monetary Fund to end consumer subsidies, which led to a recent Government move to triple the price of bread. Peace was supposed to lessen unemployment, which is officially around 17 percent and could be as high as one quarter of the population.
''People tend to relate the two in that they say we were promised prosperity, and what we are doing is tightening our belts even more,'' Mr. Fanek said. ''We don't expect much anymore. We have gotten wiser.''
Correction: August 7, 1996, Wednesday
Because of an editing error, an article yesterday about a visit by the Israeli Prime Minister to Jordan misstated the timing of Israel's capture of the Golan Heights. The area was taken from Syria in the 1967 Middle East war, not the 1973 war.Ever since World War II, San Diego has chafed at being almost completely dependent for fresh water on a regional monopoly largely controlled by its nemesis, Los Angeles.
It was a marriage of inconvenience, a consequence of living on an arid coastal plain where control over water -- which has to be shipped in through hundreds of miles of aqueducts -- is power.
San Diego has finally fired the first shot in a campaign for its own source of power. Two weeks ago the city announced that it had reached a draft agreement to buy several billion gallons of water from a new source, farmers in the Imperial Valley some 120 miles to the east and beyond the reach of the Los Angeles-based government monopoly, the Metropolitan Water District.
City leaders characterized the move as a prudent step to diversify the water supply in this drought-prone region. But most Californians recognized it as a brash assertion of independence.
''We're finally taking our own destiny in our hands,'' the general manager of the San Diego County Water Authority, Maureen Stapleton, said. ''Maybe we're, quote, growing up.''
Mayor Susan Golding was blunter in describing the effect of the deal. ''It purely is a question of power and control,'' Mayor Golding said. ''Water is the basis of economics here. If we do this, they lose some control.''
The draft agreement is already being fiercely resisted, and not just by the water lords of Los Angeles. Some residents of the Imperial Valley complained that it would turn productive farmers into water merchants by encouraging big landowners to leave land fallow and resell allocations of water delivered here at subsidized rates.
Some farmers are also suspicious of the huge profits the water sales would earn for the Bass brothers of Fort Worth, billionaires who have bought 40,000 acres of farmland in the valley in recent years, apparently in anticipation of such an agreement.
''This agreement really breaks us down into two groups,'' said Don Cox, a retired farmer who opposes the deal and is a member of the board of the valley's water authority. ''There are the people who think we really need to just make ourselves more efficient in using our water, and those that want to be paid for not growing something.''
Not surprisingly, the Metropolitan Water District, known as the Met, has denounced the plan as a threat to billions of dollars in reservoirs, aqueducts and dams that have been built to carry water from the Colorado River and to the additional billions of dollars that are being spent to improve the system.
So the water district is playing hardball.
San Diego is counting on the Met to deliver new supplies from the Imperial Valley using surplus capacity in its aqueducts. Constructing a new aqueduct to the valley, which gets its water from the Colorado River, would cost San Diego up to $3.5 billion and take, perhaps, 15 years.
The Met has said that it will cooperate only upon payment of fees that San Diego has characterized as prohibitive.
''I've heard people in San Diego say, 'We're not a subdivision, we're a major city, and every major city has its own water supply,' '' the general manager of the Met, John R. Wodraska, said in an interview. ''Well, people are going to have to make a decision on how much more they're willing to pay for this independence.''
The development of Southern California, a desertlike region of 16 million people, has long been dominated by hard-edged water politics, memorialized in the movie ''Chinatown.'' Indeed, the current intercity conflict is rooted in the late 19th century, said Steven P. Erie, a professor of political science at the University of California at San Diego who is writing a book on the region's infrastructure.
Los Angeles began to assert its dominance back then by beating out San Diego to become the western terminus for the Southern Pacific railroad. As a result, Los Angeles developed a far larger port.
Los Angeles was later able to finance construction of a 340-mile aqueduct that carried fresh water from the Owens Valley in far east-central California, fueling the city's growth. That remains Los Angeles's principal water supply. The Met was formed in 1928 to control water carried to the area through a 242-mile aqueduct from a second source, the Colorado River, which was dammed thanks, in part, to Federal financing.
The states of the Southwest have fought bitterly over access to the Colorado River, and an elaborate series of laws and agreements involving Federal, state and local governments now controls the distribution of its water. The agreements give priority to farmers in certain dry areas like the Imperial Valley and to urban areas like Los Angeles.
The Met became a water wholesaler, the nation's largest, paying for supplies sent to the region and then selling them to local water authorities throughout Southern California. Los Angeles has still retained control over the Met supplies as an insurance policy.
As part of the mobilization in World War II, San Diego, now the nation's sixth-largest city, with 1.2 million people, had to give up some rights to Colorado River water and rely on the Met instead. The city now gets about 90 percent of its water from the Met and is the district's largest customer, using 25 percent of the annual supply.A 10-foot section of parapet wall high up on a garment center office building collapsed under the weight of what authorities called an improperly rigged scaffold yesterday, and a deadly cataract of bricks and coping stones roared down on workers and pedestrians on a busy sidewalk.
A workman holding a scaffolding rope on the sidewalk was struck and killed; another who was working on the scaffold at the third floor fell two stories with the rig and was seriously injured, and two pedestrians were hurt by debris that rained down at 10:45 A.M. from a 21st-floor setback of the 25-story Herald Square Building at 1350 Broadway, on the southeast corner of 36th Street.
Witnesses told of a thunder of bricks and stones that came without warning, of victims felled and bleeding on the sidewalk and of a steel-frame scaffold with a man in it that dropped like an elevator out of control and crashed onto the roof of a revolving door jutting out from a restaurant at the corner.
''I heard a big scary sound -- I can't describe it -- and then the bricks came down,'' said P. Jallow, a security guard for a clothing store across Broadway. ''People on the street were screaming.''
The police said that Pedro Ricardo Oblitas, 37, of 417 Humboldt Street in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, an employee of C.S.I. Cleaning Service Industries, which was hired to clean stainless-steel decorative window mullions on the facade, was killed when he was struck on the head and upper body by bricks and coping stones.
A co-worker, Augusto Malaspina, 25, who was strapped into the scaffolding and was cleaning mullions on the third floor, suffered injuries of the head and upper body as the scaffold fell and he, too, was struck by the rain of debris. He was listed in serious condition later at St. Vincent's Hospital.
On the sidewalk below, Francia Lopez, 44, of the Bronx, a garment center saleswoman, and her 9-year-old daughter, Luissanna, whom she had taken to work, were walking to an early lunch. Her husband, David, said she looked up, saw the bricks falling and had time only to push her daughter out of harm's way before being struck. She suffered serious leg and back injuries and was admitted to St. Vincent's Hospital. Luissanna was traumatized, her father said.
Another pedestrian struck by the debris, whose name was not released, was treated at St. Vincent's for cuts and bruises and was released.
Hours after the collapse, the intersection remained closed to traffic and the sidewalk at the southeast corner outside a Sizzler restaurant remained littered with fragments of brick and stone that, atop the parapet, had been 4 inches thick, 12 inches wide and up to 16 inches long. They had formed a decorative coping for half of a 20-foot wraparound balcony wall.
Given the accident's time and location -- late morning in the heart of the garment and Herald Square shopping districts, where tens of thousands of people crowd the streets and sidewalks on a weekday -- it was a wonder that more people were not struck by the debris, city officials said.
Nevertheless, in a city of vertical structures -- where falling masonry and decorative objects have killed many people over the years and led in 1980 to a local law requiring regular parapet inspections and reports to the city by the owners of 8,000 buildings of seven stories or more -- yesterday's incident was a startling reminder of what many residents recall as an old and familiar threat.
While the cause of the collapse was still under investigation, a spokesman for the City Buildings Department, Charles G. Sturcken, said that a preliminary examination of the scene indicated that there was no apparent weakness in the parapet, but that the crew hired to wash window mullions on the building facade had hung the scaffold with an improper rigging that put too much weight on the parapet.
Mr. Sturcken said that summonses for improper rigging had been issued to two companies -- Supreme Building Maintenance, of 99 Madison Avenue, which had been hired by the management of 1350 Broadway for maintenance services, and C.S.I. Cleaning Service Industries, which had been subcontracted for mullion-cleaning and was the employer of the dead and injured workers.
The workers, Mr. Sturcken said, had hung the scaffold with a ''spider rigging'' that required a special permit from the city. He said that neither the contractor nor the subcontractor had applied for the spider-rig permit, and said that ''the evidence we found today suggests that it would have been denied.''
Deputy Fire Chief Joseph Hovsepian, the Fire Department commander at the scene, said the workers had hung the scaffold on the facade by looping its twin steel cables over the 21st-floor parapet with spiderlike U-shaped metal brackets, so that the cables would not touch that parapet, and then had secured the cables with clamps to a second parapet behind and above the first.
Mr. Sturcken said the spider rigging found on the setback after the collapse had used the wrong size equipment for the task and had failed to attach a counterweight that would have balanced the weight on the parapet. The result, he said, was an improper rigging that forced the parapet outward.
People who answered telephones at Supreme Building Maintenance and C.S.I. Cleaning Service Industries said there would be no immediate comment.
Helmsley-Spear, the managing agent for the building, which is owned by G.S.L. Enterprises, issued a statement saying it was investigating ''the cause of this terrible accident.'' It also said it had been informed by the cleaning contractor that ''the appropriate permit'' had been obtained from the city.
While Helmsley-Spear did not amplify, city officials said the permit to which it alluded was apparently a general permit for work on the building, and not the special permit required for the use of spider rigging.
The building where the collapse occurred was designed by the Clinton & Russell architectural firm and erected in 1929. It houses scores of sales showrooms and offices for companies in the garment trades. Though owned by G.S.L. Enterprises, it is held on a long-term lease by a group that includes Peter Malkin and Harry Helmsley and is managed by Helmsley-Spear from an office in the building.A man from Manhattan who won early release from a prison sentence for his fourth rape conviction was arrested in a rape case over the weekend in Central Park, the police said yesterday.
The arrest of the man, John Suggs, and the resulting revelations about his long criminal history drew angry criticism from Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani.
The Mayor said Mr. Suggs's release from prison after having served 13 years of a 20-year term highlighted how the justice system was too quick to grant early releases to dangerous felons.
Mr. Suggs, 45, of 2698 Eighth Avenue, has spent most of his life in prisons. In addition to the four rapes, he was convicted of four robberies and a series of other crimes. His first arrest was for assaulting a police officer on May 6, 1967.
In his most recent term, for a rape and robbery in 1978, he was denied parole five times, but released under the supervision of a parole officer after having served two-thirds of his sentence.
Mr. Suggs was released from the Auburn state prison on March 20, 1992, under a law that allows the release of convicts after they have served two-thirds of their maximum sentences. ''This was an individual that the parole board looked at with a very jaundiced eye,'' a spokesman for the State Parole Board, Thomas P. Grant, said. ''They deliberately did not let him out. They did everything in their power to keep him in the correctional facility for the longest period of time.''
He was arrested at 9 P.M. on Sunday and was charged with raping a 22-year-old in the Sheep Meadow. The woman told investigators that she had met the attacker earlier in the day and had gone with him to a party. After the party, the couple took a stroll in the park and at 2:30 A.M. she was attacked, she said.
''The suspect forced himself on her and raped her,'' said Officer Valerie St. Rose, a spokeswoman for the Police Department.
The victim went to a nearby pay phone and called for help, the police said.
The woman provided a detailed description of the attacker, which contributed to a swift arrest after a joint investigation by the special victims squad and the Manhattan North Homicide Task Force, officials said.
Investigators said they would look into a possibility that Mr. Suggs had been involved in other crimes since his release. Officials said his picture would be shown to victims of unsolved sexual assaults.
Police officials also said that Mr. Suggs was being questioned about the rape and murder in September 1995 of Maria Alves, a jogger from Brazil, in Central Park, but that he was not yet a suspect in that crime.
Mr. Suggs had been meeting regularly with a parole officer since his release. He attended his last meeting at a parole office in the Bronx on Thursday, officials said, and his next meeting had been scheduled for next Thursday.
Mr. Grant of the State Parole Board said that Mr. Suggs had not missed any of his parole meetings and that nothing unusual had emerged in the conversations with his parole officer.
''What we have been told is unremarkable,'' Mr. Grant said. ''He had been looking for jobs on and off. Sometimes he had a job. Sometimes he didn't. At one point, he was a delivery person.''
State law allows convicted felons to earn one day off their sentences for every two days of good prison behavior.
The State Correctional Services Department keeps records of prisoner behavior and has a formula for tabulating early release dates. A spokesman for the department could not be reached last night after Mr. Giuliani faulted the system.
''This is just another example of why the system of parole as we know it must be abolished,'' the Mayor said in a statement. ''As this case illustrates, and for too many others, violent criminals are released onto the streets, where they commit horrible acts of violence again and again.''
The case also led to another call from Police Commissioner Howard Safir for a ''truth in sentencing'' law, to require convicts to serve complete terms.
''It is foolhardy to think that such an individual as John Suggs does not present a danger to society,'' Mr. Safir said in a statement.Testifying at the trial of three men accused of plotting to blow up American jumbo jetliners in Asia, an agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation related in Federal court how one defendant, Abdul Hakim Murad, talked about blowing up a nuclear plant in the United States.
The agent, Frank Pellegrino, testified that Mr. Murad told him that such attacks were supposed ''to make the American people and the American Government suffer for their support of Israel.''
The F.B.I. agent said that Mr. Murad made his statement in the course of six hours on April 12, 1995, while he was being extradited from the Philippines to New York City, where he is being tried with the other defendants, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef and Wali Khan Amin Shah. Mr. Yousef faces a second trial on separate charges that he masterminded the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan.
As Mr. Pellegrino told it, Mr. Murad said he underwent 18 days of training with explosives in Lahore, Pakistan, in 1994 before flying from Dubai to the Philippines, where he helped buy explosives and timing devices before he was arrested early on Jan. 7, 1995.
Mr. Pellegrino's testimony on the explosives generally supported details of what the prosecutors and Philippine police witnesses have described as an audacious conspiracy to smuggle bombs on as many as a dozen American jetliners flying around Asia.
Mr. Murad has already repudiated his statements to investigators, maintaining that he was tortured by Philippine police interrogators during his detention of more than three months in the Philippines. But when the prosecutor, Dietrich Snell, asked the F.B.I. agent if Mr. Murad indicated that he was mistreated by Philippine authorities, Mr. Pellegrino said, ''No, he didn't.''
Mr. Pellegrino, who escorted Mr. Murad on the flight to the United States, said that the defendant had been read his rights and had signed an Arabic-language waiver. The F.B.I. agent described Mr. Murad as ''cooperative'' and ''a gentleman'' and said that he ''answered all the questions without hesitation.''
In his testimony, Mr. Pellegrino was careful to avoid repeating any remarks attributed to Mr. Murad that incriminated the other defendants. Judge Kevin Thomas Duffy warned the prosecution beforehand that implicating the others without providing corroborating evidence could prompt a mistrial.
According to Mr. Pellegrino, Mr. Murad identified a man named Amaldo Forlini, one of Mr. Yousef's 11 aliases on the indictment, as his source for details about the bombing on Dec. 11, 1994, of a Philippine Airlines jet, in which a Japanese passenger died. Mr. Pellegrino said Mr. Murad told him that the bomb was planted ''as a test to make sure the timing devices worked properly.''Dr. Philippe Perez, a general practitioner in the Paris suburb of Thiais, used to think nothing of prescribing $500 worth of medicated salve a month for patients with painful herpes infection, because they would be almost completely reimbursed by the French national health insurance system.
But the state-run insurance fund, under Government orders to cut its huge deficit, is now threatening to take high drug costs out of the fees it pays to doctors if they write too many prescriptions. So Dr. Perez explains the problem to his patients, and some of them now pay for the medicine out of their own pockets instead of putting in claims.
Peter Konig, a retired post office employee in Bonn, has found that German doctors, too, are becoming more reluctant to prescribe remedies like cough medicine that used to go on the insurance bill. Television in Bonn, he says, is now full of advertising pitches to get people to buy over-the-counter remedies that used to be reimbursable by insurance.
In Britain, more than half of the general practitioners in the National Health Service now have budgets they cannot overspend for patients' medicines and hospital care, forcing them to think twice or bargain hard with hospitals and surgeons about the costs.
The high level of health care offered by the welfare states of Western Europe was long the envy of much of the rest of the world, but they can no longer afford the vast amounts required to pay for unlimited benefits.
So in country after country, administrators are turning to the same kinds of market-oriented cost-control measures used by managed care companies and health maintenance organizations in the United States, and raising many of the same ethical concerns.
The techniques include measures like encouraging hospitals to compete with each other in offering value for money, pressing doctors to follow the most cost-effective treatment methods and to order expensive tests only when necessary, and using computers to monitor their compliance.
Just like Americans, Europeans are being forced to think about what comprehensive medical care costs, something that never worried them before.
Britain
Tories Introducing Dose of Competition
The debate, and the pressures to hold down costs, are most intense in Britain, where the Government provides all health care, at a total cost of $61.8 billion this year.
British Conservative governments have been cutting taxes since the late 1980's. The state is still providing more money for the Health Service, but is also putting it under tremendous pressure to squeeze as much as it can out of every penny.
Since the early 1990's, the Conservatives have been introducing the idea of competition into the system, giving hospitals and doctors' practices limited control of their funds and urging doctors to shop for the best hospital service they can find.
In a sense, many general practitioners have formed what amount to independent health maintenance organizations that then negotiate contracts with hospitals and surgeons, much the way American H.M.O.'s do.
The system now involves about 433 such hospital ''trusts'' and about half the general practitioners in the country, and they are rapidly changing the way health care is provided in Britain, both for better and worse.
Dr. James N. Johnson, a vascular surgeon at a district hospital in Cheshire, took a dim view of one recent experience.
''There was a practice of four G.P.'s who wanted a contract that would let them come in on ward rounds with the specialists and tell us when we could discharge patients,'' Dr. Johnson said.
''They clearly saw this as a way of controlling their hospital admissions costs,'' Dr. Johnson said. ''We told them to get lost, and they took their business to another place.''
While a health maintenance organization might use the money saved to increase profits, British doctors who administer their own budgets can spend it only on equipment or other services, like drugs.
But since British general practitioners usually own their practices and can sell them before retirement, critics of the Government's measures say there is a built-in temptation for doctors to scrimp at the expense of their patients' welfare to build up nest eggs.Last week, Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, the majority leader, decided to help out his colleagues from Pennsylvania, who had had no luck in pushing for special legislation sought by a drug company that employs hundreds of people around Philadelphia and has given large donations to the Republican Party.
Mr. Lott tried a time-tested maneuver that works best when senators are loaded with work and itching to leave for vacation, as they were last week. He quietly attached the provision for the American Home Products Corporation to a major piece of legislation with wide bipartisan support -- in this case, the health insurance bill.
So common are such maneuvers that Mr. Lott's effort is remarkable only because it failed. And it failed because people noticed it, the death knell for special-interest legislation.
In the end, Mr. Lott retreated, saying, ''I ain't got no dog in this fight.''
But the skirmish demonstrates the ease with which special-interest legislation can often get through Congress as long as it draws little public attention.
At issue was a provision to add two years to the patent for Lodine, an arthritis medication manufactured by Wyeth-Ayerst of St. Davids, Pa., a subsidiary of American Home Products. The patent extension would mean millions of dollars in additional profit for the company, but would keep a cheaper generic form of the drug off the market.
The patent for Lodine is to expire next February, and Wyeth-Ayerst has been pushing for an extension for several years. Last week, Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, tried to attach the patent extension to bills in two committees, but was rebuffed both times.
With Congress about to break for summer vacation and time running out, Mr. Specter and Senator Rick Santorum, Republican of Pennsylvania, asked Mr. Lott for help.
At the same time, a House-Senate conference committee was meeting to iron out differences in versions of a health insurance bill that had been passed by both chambers.
Because conference committees meet in secret, Mr. Lott was able to attach the Lodine provisions to the health insurance bill with little notice last Wednesday. He said the company deserved the patent extension because a competitor, the Monsanto Corporation, had received an extension for a similar product, Daypro.
Because time was short, the likelihood was small that major objections would arise. And there was little chance that President Clinton would veto the legislation because of a relatively insignificant provision that would cost the Treasury nothing.
But the strategy only works if no one notices.
Senator Paul Wellstone, for one, did. Mr. Wellstone, a Minnesota Democrat, had been tipped off about the Lodine provision by former Senator Howard Metzenbaum, an Ohio Democrat who had made a practice of watching for such end-of-session maneuvers while he was in the Senate.
''I had no idea this kind of action could be taken really in the dark of night,'' Mr. Wellstone said on Friday on the floor of the Senate, as he forced a vote on whether the attachment of the Lodine measure had been improper.
And public-interest groups heard about it and put out a press release.
''This is a special-interest goody, a Christmas-tree bauble hung on this must-do legislation,'' said Joan Claybrook, the president of Public Citizen, a Ralph Nader group.
American Home Products, based in Madison, N.J., has been a heavy contributor to Republican causes. Since 1991, the company has given $50,000 to the the Republican Party, and its political action committee has given $81,500 to Republican candidates, according to Public Citizen. In that time, the Democratic Party has received nothing from the company and Democratic candidates have received $49,900, Public Citizen said.
To make matters worse for the Lodine supporters, Congress Daily, a publication of the National Journal, put out a report on Friday afternoon that Vicki Hart, a Lott aide who had worked on the insurance legislation, was married to Steve Hart, a lobbyist who represented American Home Products. A spokeswoman for Mr. Lott said Mrs. Hart had removed herself from any role on the issue and added that Mr. Hart had never lobbied Mr. Lott. But the damage was done.
The Lodine provision went down in a voice vote.
''No wonder people are cynical and skeptical and angry about the political process,'' Mr. Wellstone said today. ''This is outrageous. It's a rip-off. People were embarrassed, and they should have been.''Over the objections of America's trading partners, President Clinton signed a law today that would impose sanctions on foreign companies that invest heavily in Iran or Libya, which he described as ''two of the most dangerous supporters of terrorism in the world.''
In a speech after the Oval Office signing of the bill, Mr. Clinton went on to call terrorism ''the enemy of our generation'' and vowed that the United States would fight it alone, without its allies, if necessary.
''Where we don't agree, the United States cannot and will not refuse to do what we believe is right,'' he told students at George Washington University.
In a pointed message to America's allies, he added, ''You cannot do business with countries that practice commerce with you by day while funding or protecting the terrorists who kill you and your innocent civilians by night.''
''That is wrong,'' Mr. Clinton said. ''I hope and expect that before long our allies will come around to accepting this fundamental truth.''
Germany and France immediately condemned the measure, with France warning that the European Union would retaliate if the Administration carried out the sanctions law. The European Union also protested and is expected to challenge the law at the World Trade Organization, as well as another American law penalizing companies doing business with Cuba. Iran predicted that the law was ''doomed to failure.''
France has been particularly aggressive in investing in Iran, and the legislation, first proposed last year by Senator Alfonse M. D'Amato, Republican of New York, was prompted in part by a deal that Total, S.A., a French oil company, signed with Iran after Mr. Clinton forced Conoco Inc. to give up plans to develop two large offshore oilfields there. The Conoco episode led the President to impose an embargo on all American investment in Iran, but no allies joined the embargo.
Mr. Clinton's actions came after weeks in which the bombing of an American military apartment complex in Saudi Arabia, the crash of Trans World Airlines Flight 800 off Long Island and the bomb explosion at Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta have led to heightened national concern about terrorism. Terrorism is suspected but not confirmed as the cause of the T.W.A. disaster and the Atlanta explosion.
On Friday, Defense Secretary William J. Perry said in a radio interview that he expects that ''there will be an international connection'' to the bombing in Saudi Arabia, possibly implicating Iran. But other Administration officials played down the his remarks and said today that Mr. Clinton in his speech was not setting the stage for immediate further action against Iran.
The President signed the sanctions measure in the presence of relatives of the victims of the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland and of two Americans held hostage by Iran during the Carter Administration.
His speech after the signing at times seemed evocative of some of the anti-Communist oratory of the cold war. ''Fascism and Communism may be dead or discredited,'' he said, ''but the forces of destruction live on.''
He told his countrymen that each of them must remain resolute in an era in which ''America will remain a target because we are uniquely present in the world.''
''Our greatest strength is our confidence,'' Mr. Clinton said, ''and that is the target of the terrorists. Make no mistake about it, the bombs that kill and maim innocent people are not really aimed at them but at the spirit of our whole country and the spirit of freedom.''
The new law requires the President in most cases to impose two from a list of seven possible sanctions against foreign companies that make new investments worth more than $40 million for the development of petroleum resources in Iran or Libya. It also imposes sanctions on foreign companies that violate existing United Nations prohibitions against trade with Libya in certain goods and services.
The list of sanctions include some that are considered relatively minor: denying loans and loan quarantees from the United States Export-Import Bank, which helps American companies invest in projects abroad, and denying licenses to export United States goods to companies that violate the ban.
The other sanctions are considered more severe. The President could bar American banks from making loans of more than $10 million to companies that receive sanctions. He could bar financial institutions that violate the embargo from serving as primary dealers in United States Government funds or as a repository for them. He could also ban companies that receive sanctions from selling goods to the United States Government or bar all imports from the companies.
The law grants the President the ability, case by case, to decide that it is in the national interest to waive a sanction against a company for a particular investment. And he can delay sanctions for two successive 90-day periods upon determining that a foreign government is taking action to reverse an investment.
In months of negotiations, the legislation had been considerably changed from Mr. D'Amato's original bill, which had drawn protests from the State Department. The Senator had sought to punish companies that traded with Iran, rather than those that invest heavily there. And he had sought the most severe punishment Washington could muster: barring them from selling their products in the United States.
Nevertheless, Mr. D'Amato attended the signing ceremony today and said the measure sent ''an important signal'' and was ''an important first step.'' He said lawmakers now had to watch that the provisions were not waived.
The law would apply only to new investments, not those existing already. Officials said they were not aware of such commercial activity on the horizon and could not say how much investment would be deterred.Perhaps only a woman like Ivana Trump -- then wife of the Donald -- would have applauded when the Italian fashion house Gruppo GFT rolled out its first Emanuel collection five years ago. There were jackets and dresses in flamboyant French color mixes worthy of a Plaza Hotel couch, combinations of printed fabrics, brilliant gold buttons, and bodaciously feminine side-draped skirts.
And only on the set of ''Melrose Place'' would a company executive slink around in the sexy short suits introduced in 1994 by the fashion house Anne Klein in its top collection, accompanied by advertisements depicting the Anne Klein woman as a sort of pin-striped call girl.
Both collections bombed. ''It was a complete turnoff,'' said Alan G. Millstein, president of the Fashion Network Report and a former executive at Anne Klein. ''That perception of the Anne Klein woman was one of a mean and hungry woman, whereas I always thought she should look like Murphy Brown.''
Such fiascos are vivid evidence that the fashion business has been slow to recognize the changes in many American women's attitudes toward clothes. Women, particularly aging baby boomers, have recently wanted something less extreme -- clothes that were stylish yet practical enough to wear at the office, a business dinner and a P.T.A. meeting. And if they don't find what they want, they are happy to spend their money on things that now seem far more worthwhile, from vacations to home furnishings to plastic surgery.
Indeed, sales of women's apparel fell 12 percent, from the record $84 billion set in 1989 to $73 billion last year, according to Tactical Retail Solutions, a market research firm.
Some companies, like Anne Klein, are only now adjusting to this jilt from women. After switching designers and radically altering its advertising three times, Anne Klein finally closed its top line last April and is concentrating on its lower-priced, more casual collections.
Other businesses, like Emanuel, have better attuned themselves to women's new agenda, offering versatile, relaxed clothes, often at lower prices. And they have profited for it.
As with the apparel makers, many stores have failed to keep up with the changes in women. Retailing is littered with the graves of merchants like I. Magnin, Petrie Stores and Merry-Go-Round. And stores that once seemed invulnerable -- Ann Taylor Stores, Charivari, the Limited and Casual Corner, among them -- are deeply troubled. Women's apparel stores had their worst Christmas in nearly a decade last year.
But other retailers, including Searle, the Gap, Target Stores and Sears, Roebuck, have found ways to endear themselves to the female shopper, with an assortment of more practical clothes, reasonable prices and more convenient layouts.
The Losers
Too Much Change, Or None at All
By 1992, fashion's problems were becoming painfully evident. Fashion houses could not satisfy a customer who now wanted comfort rather than constraint, versatility instead of formality, and better value.
Some of the largest and most prestigious companies, like Calvin Klein in the United States and Gruppo GFT, which sold collections by top designers like Giorgio Armani, Valentino and Claude Montana, ran into financial trouble as women rejected expensive, tailored clothes.
Calvin Klein was bailed out that year with a loan from his friend David Geffen, the entertainment mogul. GFT closed several divisions and put itself up for sale before becoming profitable again with the help of the Emanuel line, where a typical jacket or skirt costs hundreds of dollars less than the clothes on which GFT had made its fortunes.
Perry Ellis and Adrienne Vittadini, two other well-known American sportswear labels, also shut down their designer businesses, the crown jewels of their operations, as the market for expensive business wear shrank. Growth stalled at companies that were leaders in career apparel, like Liz Claiborne and Leslie Fay.
A number of the most promising designers -- all creating expensive fashions, often formal career clothes -- have been forced out of business since 1990. The list includes Charlotte Neuville, Christian Francis Roth, Gordon Henderson, Stephen Sprouse, Mary Ann Restivo, Eleanor Brenner, Gloria Sachs and Carolyne Roehm.
The case of Anne Klein illustrates how urgent the need is for fashion's leaders to calculate what women now want from fashion.
The industry was stunned when Anne Klein announced it would close its top line, but the collection had lost $25 million since 1989, said Frank Mori, president of Takihyo, the company that owns Anne Klein and half of Donna Karan International.
Three talented designers had tried without success to restore Anne Klein's ailing business, which continued to offer expensive designer career wear even as women were moving away from it. The first casualty was Louis Dell'Olio, dismissed in 1993 after 18 years with the company designing conservative suits and separates for executives.
Then came Richard Tyler, a little-known Hollywood designer who attracted press excitement but drove away traditional customers with his sharp-angled, body-hugging short suits and jarring advertising featuring sullen models, heavily made up in a forbiddingly dark tableau.Investigators located a new trail of debris from Trans World Airlines Flight 800 several miles closer to Kennedy International Airport than any wreckage found before, and among the items scattered on the ocean floor, officials said yesterday, were large suitcases and pieces of clothing.
The discovery bolstered the theory that an explosion occurred in or near the Boeing 747's forward cargo hold, blowing the suitcases out of the plane first, even before the nose of the plane separated from the fuselage and fell into the ocean, investigators said last night.
The Diane G., a search vessel chartered by the Navy, made the important find late yesterday in an area several miles west of the spot on the ocean floor where the tangled wreckage of the cockpit was retrieved over the weekend.
By using an underwater laser camera that sends a detailed video image of the dark ocean bottom, salvage workers first saw the scattered pieces of luggage, some of them intact, and articles of clothing, including shirts and pants.
The laser pictures are so clear that investigators were able to identify first-class tags on some of the luggage on the ocean bottom. Divers began inspecting the new debris area yesterday, officials said.
The new debris area strongly suggested to investigators that chunks of fuselage, presumably from the Boeing 747's underbelly, may have been the first parts of the plane to hit the water after a catastrophic explosion on board.
Although investigators said yesterday that they did not know when they would begin plucking those pieces from the ocean, law enforcement officials said they were hopeful that the debris would provide important clues to why the Paris-bound jet exploded in midair off Long Island on July 17, killing all 230 people aboard.
One official said last night that the area could turn out to hold the most important clues to the cause of the crash.
Salvage workers are now trying to pinpoint the westernmost boundary of the debris and suitcases, which they say will help them reconstruct what happened to the plane during the 24 seconds from the initial explosion to the fireball that engulfed the rest of the aircraft. The debris line, now stretching at least six miles, coincides roughly with Flight 800's flight path.
So far, investigators have studied the miles-long array of wreckage to better understand how the plane first broke up in the air, 13,700 feet above the Atlantic. Nine days ago, investigators first discovered two distinct areas of wreckage -- one from the nose of the plane and, a mile and a half to the northeast, the midsection and tail of the aircraft. That finding indicated that the front end was severed in the explosion and that the rest of the plane continued to fly before being consumed by a giant fireball.
After some recovery workers shifted their emphasis from bodies to debris over the weekend, they found pieces of luggage, some of them too large to fit into overhead compartments above passengers' seats, lying in the waters several miles west of the cockpit debris area, salvage workers told officials.
One technical expert said that they had told lead investigators for more than a week that the salvage effort should focus more of its attention on the western debris line. One day late last week, a baseball cap was seen bobbing on the ocean surface over the new debris area.
The debris field was first located several days ago by sonar, but it was not until yesterday, when the laser scanner was used, that investigators determined that the pieces came from the aircraft.
Despite the developments, lead investigators conceded yesterday that they were facing a difficult and prolonged hunt for the cause of the crash. At least for now, investigators are not making important new announcements at the afternoon press briefings, as they did in the earlier stages when they announced their working theories of why the airplane crashed.
''Obviously, we would have loved to have had the first big thing tell us the whole story,'' said Robert T. Francis, vice chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board. ''This is systematic and can be a long-term process. So we just go through it and do it in the way that we've planned to do it and we find what we find and hopefully that leads us to where we're trying to go.''
A conclusive determination about the cause has not been made, mainly because no physical evidence, like chemical residue of explosives, has been found to confirm law enforcement officials' strong suspicions that a bomb blew up the aircraft, severing the cockpit and first-class cabin from the rest of the jet.
Several pieces of wreckage were recovered from the area near the cockpit yesterday, but they were not identified by investigators at yesterday afternoon's press briefing in Smithtown, L.I. But one official said they were relatively small pieces from the front section of the aircraft, which will be tested to see if they still hold any chemical residue of an explosion.
Another gnarled symbol of investigators' frustrations -- a one-ton ball of metal that was once the cockpit and electronic bay beneath it -- sat virtually untouched yesterday in the center of the former Grumman hangar leased by the Navy in Calverton, L.I., where the pieces of the plane are being examined.
Investigators did very little with the jumble of seats, dials, wires and switches, except stare at it and begin trying to figure out a way to begin untangling the twisted metal. ''It is quite an extraordinary puzzle,'' Mr. Francis said.
He added that investigators did not know if the explosion or the cockpit's impact on the water could have caused such extensive damage, but he said investigators were closely inspecting the ''mass of rubble.''THIS may strike some as premature, and it is one of those dry-as-toast topics that can send people searching for the sports section. But the time is at hand to decide exactly how the Census Bureau will calculate the United States population in 2000, under the Constitutional imperative of a national head count every 10 years. (Was that the riffling of newspaper pages we just heard?)
In fact, the next census is enormously important to New York City, a victim of what, in this age of three-word diseases, might be called chronic undercount syndrome. Every decade, the city ends up being credited with fewer souls than it actually has because its population is top heavy with the kinds of people often missed by conventional nose-counting techniques, like the poor, members of ethnic minorities and new immigrants.
C.U.S. (all good syndromes are known by their initials) hurts New York badly. It has meant millions of lost dollars in Federal grants that are distributed on the basis of population. It has contributed to the great weakening of the state's Congressional delegation, down to 31 members from as many as 45 in the 1940's -- and heading to 29 after 2000, if projections hold. And it has shortchanged the five boroughs in Albany, where upstate interests are disproportionately strong.
UNDERSTANDABLY, the Giuliani administration is throwing its full support behind new Census Bureau procedures that should, the experts say, beef up the city's totals in the next go-round. ''All we want is the right number,'' said Joseph B. Rose, chairman of the City Planning Commission. Like other officials, though, he is betting that in this case ''right'' and ''higher'' are synonymous.
Much is riding on the results. ''A more accurate census could help New York receive its rightful share of Federal funds,'' Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani said at what amounted to a pep rally for the Census Bureau, held the other day at City Hall.
The new procedures, for the first time, make no pretense of trying to track down every household -- something that had become impossible anyway in these skeptical times when fewer and fewer Americans return mail-in census forms. Instead, the bureau plans to stop the standard head count when it believes, based on available address lists, that it has contacted 90 percent of the population. At that point, it will use sampling methods to calculate the rest, essentially by knocking on some of the remaining doors and using statistical probability to infer what lies behind the others.
While many Americans bristle at the very idea of sampling, experts insist that it is more accurate, and it eliminates the need to send out many thousands of census-takers, often marginally trained and dubiously motivated. That makes it less expensive, no small consideration.
Besides, said Joseph Salvo, Mr. Rose's chief census specialist, ''people don't seem to realize that the census has always used some element of sampling and imputation.''
NOT everyone is happy, however.
Members of the Congressional Black Caucus have protested plans to begin sampling once the 90 percent level is reached in a given county. That is too big a geographical unit, the black officials said. You could hit 90 percent in Brooklyn, for example, by counting nearly all the whites in Bay Ridge but a much smaller percentage of blacks in Bedford-Stuyvesant, typically an undercounted area.
Instead, caucus members want the basic unit to be the census tract, which is smaller than a county and ethnically more homogeneous. At the Commerce Department, the Census Bureau's parent agency, officials say that this proposal, while somewhat costly, will probably soon be made official policy.
That would take care of one obstacle. But some Congressional Republicans have their own objections, and they are trying to block the bureau from using any of its start-up money to even test its sampling methods.
In discussing the census, the Republicans point out that the Constitution refers to an ''actual enumeration.'' To their mind, that rules out sampling in any form. But Constitutional interpretations vary. And among Democrats, suspicions run high that some Republicans simply want to insure a permanent undercount of minorities and other groups that tend to vote Democratic.
Meanwhile, time is wasting. When 2000 rolls around, census-takers will not appear on doorsteps out of nowhere. ''The time is now,'' said Anthony Phipps, a Commerce Department official. ''We have to settle on a plan and get it running.''
NYCOver the last few years political leaders of all stripes, Bob Dole foremost among them, have conditioned voters to see reducing the Federal budget deficit as Job 1 and to view with skepticism any promise of a free lunch.
So it is perhaps not surprising that Mr. Dole's pledge today to cut taxes by $548 billion while still balancing the budget by 2002 is being held to a high standard, perhaps more so than most election-year economic promises. And while Mr. Dole argues that his very standing as the nation's fiscal conscience imbues his plan with credibility, many economists and budget analysts who have looked at the plan's numbers are less impressed.
''It's a political document through and through that postpones serious deficit reduction until after what would be the end of a first Dole Administration,'' said Martha Phillips, a former Republican staff director for the House Budget Committee who is now executive director of the Concord Coalition, a fiscal watchdog group. ''It does not address the serious problems we've got with entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, and none of the specifics of how all of this would be paid for are outlined in any detail.''
More than almost any other issue in economics, the question of whether sweeping tax-cutting policies can succeed in promoting healthier economic growth without risking fiscal disaster divides into camps of true believers and fervent foes. Even those who say they have middle-ground positions ultimately tend to come down in one camp or the other.
Lyle Gramley, a former Federal Reserve governor who was appointed by President Jimmy Carter, said he supported the plan's call for further spending cuts, a simpler and fairer tax system and a reduction in regulations.
''But I don't think it's a fiscally prudent program,'' Mr. Gramley said. ''It's difficult to imagine you can balance the budget by 2002 when you're cutting taxes by $500 billion unless you're going to make major cuts in entitlement programs, and it's difficult for me to contemplate further major reductions in entitlement programs being made by the Congress.''
As he made his announcement in Chicago, Mr. Dole flanked himself today with a variety of Republican economists and politicians who put their credibility on the line with his. They included George P. Shultz, the former Treasury Secretary and Secretary of State; Donald H. Rumsfeld, a former Defense Secretary and corporate executive who is Mr. Dole's top policy adviser; John B. Taylor, an economist at Stanford University, and Wendy Gramm, an economist who is the wife of Senator Phil Gramm of Texas.
''We have a very conservative, sound proposal,'' Mr. Rumsfeld said, ''and I believe the American people will agree.''
Mr. Dole's plan assumes that cutting income-tax rates by 15 percent will reduce revenue by $406 billion over the next six years. Its reduction in the capital gains tax from a top rate of 28 percent to 14 percent will cost $13 billion, the plan said.
A $500-a-child tax credit for low- and middle-income families would cost $75 billion, the plan said. An expansion of Individual Retirement Accounts to promote more savings, plus education and training initiatives, are valued at $27 billion, with another $27 billion for a repeal of a 1993 tax increase on Social Security benefits received by wealthy people.
To offset the $548 billion cost of the tax cuts over six years, the plan assumes that the combination of lower taxes and less regulation of business will generate faster economic growth, increasing tax revenue by $147 billion over the period.
The plan proposes a combination of spending cuts and revenue increases of $217 billion. Included are $90 billion from a 10 percent cut in nondefense administrative costs, $34 billion from a sale of broadcast frequencies, $32 billion from the Energy Department's budget, $15 billion from the Commerce Department and $46 billion from what Mr. Dole's campaign described as a 1 percent cut in ''other spending programs.''
The remainder of the cost is made up by including the $122 billion set aside in the last Republican budget proposal for tax cuts, and around $75 billion from an assumption that an unexpected surge in tax receipts this year will be sustained over the next six years.
But the Dole plan left many analysts questioning the economic and political assumptions underlying it.
Among the assumptions in the plan that will be studied and debated are the following:
*The plan assumes that all spending cuts in the Republican budget passed by Congress and vetoed by President Clinton last year would be enacted again, providing a $393 billion down payment on balancing the budget over six years, with $217 billion of the cuts coming in 2001 and 2002. President Clinton portrayed the cuts in programs like Medicare as extreme, and it is unclear whether even a Republican majority would be willing to go out on such a political limb again. Republicans in Congress ''have cried uncle on further spending cuts,'' Ms. Phillips said.
*The plan starts with the assumption that an unexpected surge in tax revenue enjoyed by the Treasury this year will be permanent, providing almost $75 billion over the six years covered by the Dole plan. The surge this year is attributed to investors' taking gains from big increases in stock prices, and analysts said it was unclear whether it would continue. The Clinton Administration assumes the surge will generate $50 billion in additional revenue over the next six years. ''There remains a huge question about whether this is a permanent fixture or a temporary phenomenon,'' said Robert D. Reischauer, a former head of the Congressional Budget Office who is now with the Brookings Institution.
*The assumption that selling broadcast frequencies would yield $34 billion is open to question on both political and economic grounds. The Republican leadership in Congress is opposed to such sales, and analysts said that while the $34 billion figure was within the range of estimates for the frequencies' value, no one can predict just how much they would bring in even if the political opposition was overcome.
*The Dole plan's projection that additional economic growth would add $147 billion in revenue over six years is based on the idea that businesses will expand and individuals will consume and save more if taxes are cut, regulations slashed and corporations freed from frivolous lawsuits and huge jury awards. While most economists accept that tax cuts generate some ''feedback,'' there are no generally accepted models for how a broad-based program such as Mr. Dole's would improve economic growth. ''There is no credible economic analysis that would support that kind of number,'' said Sung Won Sohn, the chief economist at the Norwest Corporation in Minneapolis.
*The Dole plan takes no account of the bond market's possible reaction to the plan. If the market believed that the plan would be enacted in a way that risked enlarging the deficit, it would send long-term interest rates higher, reducing the nation's economic growth rather than increasing it. ''If the financial markets ever thought this was going to happen, they would react very negatively,'' said Felix Rohatyn, the investment banker, who is a supporter of the Clinton Administration. ''You'd see interest rates shooting up and aborting any attempt to achieve a higher level of growth even before it started.''This morning, Democratic aides showed up at the lobby of Bob Dole's campaign headquarters here to pass out releases to reporters who had just been briefed about Mr. Dole's economic plan.
Still more critiques came this afternoon from Joe Lockhart, the Clinton campaign's press secretary, who popped up at the Fairmont Hotel in Chicago, outside the ballroom where Mr. Dole announced his plan.
By the end of the day, the Democrats had rolled out for broadcast in swing states a new television commercial ridiculing the Dole plan as ''a risky last-minute scheme that would balloon the deficit.''
For all of the Clinton campaign team's studied calm about Mr. Dole's economic plan, their insistence that it was irresponsible and would never take hold with the American public, Democrats were anything but nonchalant in their drive today to undermine their opponent's centerpiece proposal.
That is because even Democrats concede that the notion of a tax cut has innate appeal -- an appeal that they were determined to shatter.
''Whenever you say 'tax cut,' people like those two words,'' said Donald R. Sweitzer, a former political director for the Democratic Party. ''And to the extent that the Dole campaign is trying to put Democrats in a corner to react, to say that we're not for tax cuts, is a potential problem.'' Democrats can only hope, he said, that after ''a momentary positive rush'' for Mr. Dole, once the plan is ''dissected and examined, voters are smart enough to recognize an election-year ploy over what is responsible fiscal policy.''
Mr. Clinton himself is well aware of the appeal of tax cuts. In a speech in Houston last October, he confessed that he had raised taxes too much in his first budget in 1993. And many Democrats are still fuming about Christine Todd Whitman's upset victory over incumbent Gov. James J. Florio of New Jersey in 1993 after she promised significant tax cuts to voters enraged by Mr. Florio's raising taxes.
Dick Morris, Mr. Clinton's chief outside political adviser, had been so concerned about Mr. Dole's plan that he repeatedly pressed the President to pre-empt the Republicans by proposing a major capital gains tax cut, according to several people involved in discussions at the White House. These people said Mr. Morris had been rebuffed, in part because Mr. Clinton has been so far ahead in the polls that he felt no particular pressure to respond with a grand, competing plan.
Judging by a New York Times/ CBS News Poll of 827 adults nationwide, conducted by telephone on Saturday and Sunday, before Mr. Dole made his plan public, offering a tax cut could carry both pluses and minuses.
Cutting the Federal income tax by 15 percent was ''the right thing for the country'' 36 percent of the public said, while 47 percent said it was the ''wrong thing.'' When the 36 percent who answered ''right thing'' were asked, ''What if that meant that the Federal budget deficit would increase?'' most changed their minds -- and the percentage of the public continuing to say such a tax cut would be the right thing shrank to 11 percent.
Even Republicans were divided on the 15 percent cut, with 40 percent saying it was the right thing, while 44 percent said it was the wrong thing. Among Democrats, 52 percent judged it was the wrong thing, as did 47 percent of the independents. Still, the 15 percent tax cut was attractive to a minority of independents and Democrats, and that could win votes for Mr. Dole. The poll's margin of sampling error was plus or minus three percentage points.
Three themes form the core of the Democrats' strategy to counter Mr. Dole'e economic plan: to deride it as reckless and posing dangers to the economy, to label Mr. Dole as hypocritical given his years of championing deficit reduction over reducing taxes and to explain that Mr. Clinton has proposed more modest efforts to help middle-class taxpayers, like tax incentives for education.
''The surface appeal of tax cuts is always attractive,'' said Gene Sperling, a White House economic adviser. ''But if we contrast targeted tax cuts for families that can be paid for, with reckless tax cuts that will blow a hole in the deficit, people will take the tax-cut option that they think the country can afford.''
The challenge for the Democrats, said George Stephanopoulos, Mr. Clinton's senior adviser, is to persuade voters that even if Mr. Dole's plan sounds appealing, it is unrealistic. ''Once people get the facts,'' he said, ''most Americans understand there's no such thing as a free lunch.''
But Nelson Warfield, the Dole campaign spokesman, said the White House was clearly nervous. ''They had an absolute panic attack today about the Dole economic growth plan,'' he said. ''They went so far as to have their campaign press spokesman infiltrate the Dole campaign to badmouth it. For weeks now, they've been trashing the plan before it even debuted. That's not being pro-active -- that's being frightened.''
The Times/CBS poll found that the public was split on whether the Government could reduce the Federal budget deficit and cut taxes for the middle class at the same time, with 49 percent saying it could and 43 percent saying it could not.
When forced to choose between two desirable goals, 51 percent said they preferred to reduce the Federal budget deficit, while 43 percent preferred cutting taxes. By 65 percent to 29 percent, the public preferred maintaining current spending on education to cutting taxes. But people were evenly divided on whether to maintain current spending on defense or cut taxes.
The new Clinton campaign commercial, which was filmed days ago, features pictures of people on the job and tries to make a case that the economy is so robust that Mr. Dole's remedies are not needed. ''America's economy is coming back,'' the announcer says. ''Ten million new jobs. We make more autos than Japan. Higher minimum wage.''
The advertisement refers to Mr. Clinton's modest plans for ''tax cuts for families,'' and for college tuition tax credits and for health insurance that people can take from job to job. ''President Clinton meeting our challenges,'' the announcer says in closing. ''Bob Dole gambling with our future.''
But the Dole campaign intends to introduce a new commercial of its own later this week, touting Mr. Dole's plan as the best way to invigorate the economy.Promising to ''finish the job Ronald Reagan started so brilliantly,'' Bob Dole today proposed a wide-ranging plan to spur the economy with $548 billion in tax cuts and a $500-per-child tax credit, all the while balancing the budget within five years.
''We are going to balance the budget, cut taxes and remove the dead weight of Government to unleash the full potential of the American people,'' Mr. Dole told an enthusiastic Chamber of Commerce audience here as he unveiled the long-awaited plan he hopes will breathe new life into his Presidential campaign.
Noting that advance reports had called the plan ''dramatic,'' he concurred: ''It is dramatic. Somebody said I was going to bet the farm -- I said, I'm going to bet the country.''
A longtime skeptic of the supply-side economics championed by President Reagan, Mr. Dole today adopted the Reagan formula as he tried to appeal to what he described as the besieged middle class. He pledged to cut taxes by 15 percent across the board and said he could still balance the budget by the year 2002.
Sketchy on what Government programs he would cut to make up for his forgone tax revenue, Mr. Dole, a former chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, nonetheless contended there was ''no magic'' to achieving his goal of a 3.5 percent rate of growth for the economy, now at 2.4 percent.
''With today's pro-growth Republican Congress,'' he asserted in his 42-minute speech, ''cutting taxes and balancing the budget are just a matter of Presidential will.
''If you have it, you can do it. I have it. I will do it.''
Mr. Dole said his plan would cut the Federal income tax bill of a family of four making $35,000 a year by 56 percent -- for a savings of $1,371 over what it pays now. Most of that would come from a proposed $500 tax credit for each child under 18.
President Clinton said Mr. Dole's plan would weaken the economy and hurt the American people. ''I am unalterably opposed to going back to the mistake we made before and having big tax cuts that are not paid for,'' the President said, referring to the soaring deficits of the 1980's.
But the White House was clearly worried that Mr. Dole might have struck political gold with his proposal for a relatively large tax cut, with Clinton aides suggesting that the President may propose more cuts. The appeal of such a proposal was immediately evident in the reaction of Mr. Dole's audience, which cheered when he promised tax cuts and sat on its hands when he asserted: ''Deficit reduction is in my blood, and a balanced budget will be my legacy to America.''
Mr. Dole emphasized that although he had built his reputation in Congress as a deficit hawk, he was embracing tax cuts with equal fervor. ''We have long had a debate in our party about which should come first,'' he said. ''Growth advocates say tax cuts first. Fiscal conservatives say a balanced budget first. I say they're both right.''
While critics contend that Mr. Dole's plan is based on overly optimistic economic assumptions, Mr. Dole stoked the anxieties of middle-class workers who, he said, were caught between high taxes and stagnant wages while the rich got richer.
He said that President Clinton was rejoicing in superficial indicators of a strong economy but that the Administration's policies had trapped ''millions of Americans'' into jobs they did not want because they were afraid they could not find better ones.
His plan, he said, ''will bring America back, I promise you that.''
Democratic aides tore into the plan, describing it as a gamble on the future. Joe Lockhart, a spokesman for the Clinton campaign, said the Dole plan was an even more radical version of Mr. Reagan's efforts at fueling growth and revenues through tax cuts and said Mr. Dole was preposterously expecting to generate more revenue than Mr. Reagan anticipated, with a smaller tax cut than Mr. Reagan offered.
Raising the Clinton campaign's ''rapid response'' efforts to a new level, Mr. Lockhart appeared at the hotel here for Mr. Dole's speech, explaining that he was in Chicago to plan the Democrats' convention later this month. He briefed reporters outside the ballroom where Mr. Dole spoke. He said the Clinton campaign was airing new television ads in about 25 battleground states to counter Mr. Dole's claims.
The ad says that Mr. Clinton created 10 million new jobs and that ''Bob Dole endangers it all with a risky, last-minute scheme that would balloon the deficit,'' raise interest rates and hurt families.
But Mr. Dole asserted his plan was sound, and that a host of supporters, from John Taylor, an economist at Stanford University, to George P. Schultz, chairman of President Reagan's Economic Policy Advisory Board, would not have endorsed a ''pie-in-the-sky'' proposal. They said that Mr. Dole's plan was especially plausible because the cold war was over and the United States was not spending as much on the military as it had in Mr. Reagan's tenure.
Mr. Dole's plan also includes cutting the top rate of the capital gains tax by half, to 14 percent, and expanding Individual Retirement Accounts. He wants to repeal the 1993 tax increases on Social Security benefits. And he said he would ask that a super-majority in Congress -- 60 percent of each house -- be required to raise income taxes.
But perhaps his most sweeping promise was to ''end the I.R.S. as we know it.''In laying out his economic plan, Bob Dole promised yesterday to bring ''tax relief'' to Americans. But through Democratic and Republican Administrations, going back three decades, the Federal tax burden has been remarkably steady -- as if paying too little in taxes, getting too much relief, arouses as much public ire as paying too much.
Since the mid-1960's, the revenue from Federal taxes -- individual and corporate income taxes, Social Security and Medicare taxes, gasoline and cigarette taxes, and half a dozen others -- has never fallen below 17.2 percent of the national income nor risen higher than 19.7 percent. When one tax goes down, another goes up. And the Dole proposals, if they were all to become law, would not break the bounds.
''That pattern is telling you something,'' said Robert D. Reischauer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former director of the Congressional Budget Office. ''It is telling you that Americans have an affinity for Federal taxes that take from them roughly one-fifth of the national income. They won't tolerate taxes above one-fifth, but neither will they tolerate the deficits that would arise or the spending cuts that would be necessary to cut tax revenues below 17 percent.''
Two major ''stabilizers,'' as some economists call them, seem to keep the Federal tax burden in its relatively narrow range, despite all the talk over the years of the benefits of tax cuts or tax increases. One is the public outcry that goes up when politicians propose spending cuts for social programs to justify tax cuts. The other is the reaction of Wall Street traders, who raise their own cry -- insisting that a bigger budget deficit would mean higher interest rates on everyone's loans -- if tax cuts are not balanced by spending cuts.
''From the standpoint of stock and bond holders, the issue is very simple,'' said Stephen S. Roach, chief economist at Morgan Stanley & Company. ''Tax cuts are certainly wonderful, but the issue is how do you pay for them. Neither Reagan in the 1980's nor Bob Dole now has given an adequate answer. They never specify adequate spending cuts.''
Federal taxes of all sorts collected this year will come to 19.1 percent of the national income, which is also known as the gross domestic product. That is $1.4 trillion of the $7.4 trillion in G.D.P, with nearly half of those taxes coming from individual income taxes. Mr. Dole, by his own calculations, would lower the tax bite to 17.5 percent by the year 2002, when the national income is expected to top $10 trillion. Most of the reduction would come through a 15-percent cut in income tax rates and a $500 tax credit for each child under 18 years of age.
Still, if Federal taxes have remained a steady portion of national income, the mix has changed drastically.
President Ronald Reagan's tax cut, enacted in 1981, reduced the individual income tax rate by 23 percent over three years, benefiting the wealthiest Americans in particular by bringing down the maximum tax rate on the highest incomes to 50 percent from 70 percent.
The 1986 tax bill brought another cut in the top rate, to 28 percent, although more income could be taxed. And in 1990 and 1993, Presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton gradually raised the top income tax rate to 39.6 percent for individuals. The income tax rate paid by businesses fell to 34 percent under President Clinton from 48 percent in the early Reagan years -- although the tax base of corporate America has broadened.
But while the tax rates on income fell, steady increases in payroll taxes, mainly to finance Social Security and Medicare, offset taxpayers' gains. So did increases in gasoline taxes and in other Federal charges, keeping Federal tax revenue in the range of 17 percent to 20 percent. To help pay public bills, the taxes paid at state and municipal levels have moved up slightly in recent years, to about 14 percent of national income.
''There has been a great improvement in the Federal tax-rate structure if you look at where we have come since 1980,'' said Martin Feldstein, a Harvard University economist and Dole adviser. ''We had top rates of 70 percent then and a lot of people paying at rates of 40 to 50 percent, and the changes have been a revolution.''
But if the rates are much lower, the Federal tax burden has shifted down the income scale. In the late 1970's, the wealthiest 20 percent of American households had an effective Federal tax rate -- that is, the percentage of their income actually paid out -- of 27.2 percent, while the poorest 20 percent paid out 9.2 percent of their income, according to the Congressional Budget Office. That shifted to 24.1 percent for the wealthiest group in 1985, in the wake of the Reagan tax cuts, a drop of 3 percentage points, and to 10.4 percent for the poorest 20 percent, a rise of more than a percentage point.
By this year, the tax increases enacted under Presidents Reagan, in 1986, President Bush, in 1990, and President Clinton, in 1993, had pushed America's wealthiest 20 percent, with an average household income of about $124,000, back up to paying 28.1 percent of their income, while the share paid by the poorest 20 percent, with $8,700 in average annual income, had been cut in half, falling to 5 percent.
The 15 percent tax reduction proposed by Mr. Dole would shift this mix, raising the amount paid by the lowest-income and lowering it for the highest-income households by percentages still to be estimated.
QUOTATIONS
Dole on Previous Plans for Tax Cuts
AUG. 15, 1982 -- Discussing whether the tax cuts of 1981 had stimulated investment and revived the economy:
''We have had a disappointment. The economy has not recovered. It's been disappointing to the President and felt very deeply by those who are out of work and continue to be out of work. That doesn't mean we back away from the President's program.''
When asked if he was a not very committed supply-sider:
''I never really understood all that supply-side business, and now the supply-sides are asking the consumers -- they want to turn out a demand side and say that somebody ought to bail us out of this recession.''MOST people who cook have favorite culinary guides, one or two old reliables whose pages are smudged by fingerprints and spotted with sauce. Rick Ellis, whose business is preparing food to be photographed, keeps inspirational cookbooks on hand, too: 4,500 of them. ''At least, that was the number the last time I took inventory,'' he said.
Twenty floors above Washington Square, his library about the art of entertaining invades nearly every inch of his office. Floors below in the same building is the apartment that Mr. Ellis, 41, and Thomas Jayne, 40, an interior decorator, share.
The books, arranged by year of publication and by subject -- desserts, salads, table settings -- are niched neatly in floor-to-ceiling bookcases, as well as on narrow shelves above doors and closets and underneath a windowseat.
It is a comprehensive cache, with everything from celebrity cookbooks ''written'' by stars who would seem to have only a nodding acquaintance with pots and pans (Liberace, ZaSu Pitts) to hulking 19th-century household manuals with equally unwieldly names like ''Mrs. Marshall's Larger Cookery of Extra Recipes.''
The prize, however, is a 1798 edition of ''American Cookery'' by Amelia Simmons, reputedly the first cookbook written and published by an American.
It cost Mr. Ellis $8,000, a far cry from his first acquisitions, 1960's cookbooks, which he bought at flea markets for 50 cents.
''They're cheap and fun to read and sort of campy,'' Mr. Ellis said. ''But Tom, who is the historian in the family, convinced me to start collecting seriously.''
Over the years, Mr. Jayne, for his part, has accumulated objects associated with the table, ranging from 1940's Russel Wright plates to English Georgian goblets. Several times a year, the couple's hobbies converge at special meals for friends and family.
''Old cookbooks are incredible social documents,'' said Mr. Ellis, who was hired as food stylist to oversee food preparation and presentation for ''The Age of Innocence,'' the 1993 Martin Scorsese film based on Edith Wharton's novel set in 1870's New York.
Among other books, he relied on the etchings of dizzyingly complicated desserts and entrees pictured in the 1870 cookbook ''Urbain Dubois.'' (More prosaically, he also prepares the food for photographs on Stouffer's frozen-dinner boxes.)
An old-fashioned menu, whether 20 years old or 200, he said, carries with it a theatrical promise. ''Everybody eats, everybody likes to try something new, and everybody likes to be surprised.''
One Ellis-Jayne supper featured 1950's food, including pineapple upside-down cake and spaghetti casserole (recipe courtesy of Mr. Jayne's mother, plates by Russel Wright). And after the premiere of ''The Age of Innocence,'' friends returned to the pair's apartment for an appropriately late-night, late-Victorian celebration: chicken curry prepared in a chafing dish.
''Chafing-dish cookery was very popular at the end of the 19th century,'' Mr. Ellis said. ''They were one-dish meals that someone without a cook or servants could make on their own as a light post-theater meal.''
The couple took their own culinary trip back in time a few weeks ago in honor of Mr. Jayne's 40th birthday.
Furniture was stuffed into another room and replaced with four folding banquet tables that were fitted together and covered with a white cloth. Out came the 1830's Paris compote dishes, their porcelain tiers loaded with silver and gold almonds, candied ginger and cardinal-red cherries.
And the hosts and their 12 friends and family members from as far away as California and Louisiana tucked into a cold summer supper inspired by the 1896 ''Original Boston Cooking-School Cook Book'' by Fannie Merritt Farmer.
Some of the recipes, like ginger sandwich hors d'oeuvres -- served with sherry, which Fannie Farmer believed was the perfect starter for ''a gentlemen's dinner'' -- were prepared just as the book decreed.
Others had to be adapted.
''Her recipe for tomato aspic was too sweet,'' Mr. Ellis said. ''Today's food is much spicier, so I added a lot of lemon juice and savory spices to bring it up to date.''
(''The Fannie Farmer Cookbook,'' Marion Cunningham's centenary revision of the 1896 book, is scheduled to be published on Oct. 7 by Alfred A. Knopf. The price is $30. And, yes, it still includes tomato aspic.)WITH the death last week of Sam Aaron, a founder 62 years ago of Sherry-Lehmann Wine and Spirits in New York, the American wine industry lost one of the few survivors of its romantic period, the years before and just after World War II.
It was a time when the industry, if it was large enough to be called that, was dominated by a small group of single-minded visionaries convinced that a nation of beer- and coffee-drinkers, a nation still uncomfortable with alcohol and most things foreign, would one day accept wine as part of everyday life.
Wine was not unknown in America, but almost all of it was consumed by immigrants from the Mediterranean countries and their descendants. Mr. Aaron and a few others wanted everyone to drink wine, and fine wine at that. Frank Schoonmaker, the writer and importer, was one of the group; so was Alexis Lichine, the so-called pope of wine, a promoter, salesman and showman. On the West Coast, Andre Tchelistcheff never sold a bottle, but he embodied -- and didn't hesitate to exploit -- the image of a Continental wine maker.
Philippe de Rothschild, while European to the core, loved America, particularly Hollywood, where he once produced films, and over a lifetime he introduced thousands of Americans to great wine at his famous chateau, Mouton-Rothschild.
These men are all gone now. Only one man of similar stature survives, Robert Mondavi of California. Like them, he is single-minded in his conviction that America will one day be a wine-drinking nation; like them, he continues to be a salesmen, a skilled showman and an indefatigable advocate of his favorite subject.
The entrepreneurial spirit lives on in the wine world; there are still small wineries run by courageous men and women who live from vintage to vintage, taking on unpredictable weather and a fickle market. But the wine industry is coming to be dominated by marketing specialists more comfortable with spreadsheets than vine canopies.
Merger on top of merger has turned what was essentially a cottage industry into big business. One insurance company in Paris owns half a dozen chateaus in Bordeaux, plus wineries in Portugal and Hungary. Chateau Lafite-Rothschild is involved in California and Chile. Kendall-Jackson owns wineries and vineyards all over California and has holdings in Italy and Chile.
Wine distribution, once in the hands of specialists knowledgeable about the wines they sold, is now handled by huge organizations, created by mergers. Each of these represents hundreds of wines, many of which stand little chance of ever reaching a retailer's shelves.
Mr. Schoonmaker was a travel writer who accepted an invitation from Harold Ross, The New Yorker editor, on the eve of Prohibition's repeal, to write some wine articles. His book on German wines and his later wine encyclopedia were standard references for many years. It was he who first urged California wine makers to drop misleading names like California Burgundy and California Chablis and use the names of the grapes from which their wines were made, like cabernet sauvignon and chardonnay.
Alexis Lichine brought European wines, especially those of France, to hometown America. Late in life, relaxing at his beloved Chateau Prieure-Lichine in Bordeaux, he could still recite the schedules of buses from Toledo to Akron, Ohio, and trains from Chicago to Springfield, Ill., during his years on the road selling wine.
If he brought French wine to America, Mr. Lichine, who was born in Russia, also brought American ways to France. He shocked his Bordeaux neighbors by erecting billboards in the vineyards inviting travelers to his chateau, and he shocked them further when he gave interviews complaining about their backwardness and insularity. Eventually, almost without exception, they adopted his once -- to them -- unthinkable methods.
For these men, as for so many others, Sam Aaron was adviser and confidant. He knew the intricacies of the American market and the vagaries of the American consumer. Behind the scenes, he settled disputes, matched importers with distributors, helped rich Americans to buy French chateaus and to invest in vineyards.
Mr. Aaron had a small deck behind his office at the rear of his Madison Avenue shop. It was not uncommon to find the head of a famous Champagne house, a prominent Tuscan vintner or a wine-making count from the Rheingau sitting there in shirt sleeves listening to Mr. Aaron explain the American market.
At the other end of the business, dozens of Sherry-Lehmann salesclerks he hired and trained went on to careers as wine writers, like Alexis Bespaloff, and to places in the wine and spirits industry.
But is the day of the flamboyant pitchman in the wine industry almost over? Perhaps not. When Baron Philippe de Rothschild died in 1988, his daughter Philippine took over Chateau Mouton-Rothschild and Opus 1, her father's joint-venture winery in the Napa Valley with Robert Mondavi.
Philippine de Rothschild spent many of her formative years on the French stage, and she can be as mercurial as her father was urbane. At times imperious and demanding, those who work for her say, and at times utterly charming, she is always on stage. She is an important player in the wine world who will never be mistaken for a business-school graduate.
Her Bordeaux neighbor May de Lancquesing, the owner of Chateau Pichon Lalande Comtesse, is less dramatic but equally forceful. One of the best-known Bordeaux chateau owners, she is as familiar to British and American wine enthusiasts as she is in France. Several years ago, after having spent millions of dollars upgrading her cellars and vineyards, she dismissed her senior staff members and hired the only Vietnamese wine maker in Bordeaux.
It may just be the women's turn.
TASTINGS Zind-Humbrecht Gewurztraminer Turckheim 1993 (Alsace). About $20.
Just getting to know the communities and vineyards from which the Zind-Humbrecht family makes its remarkable wines is a job in itself. Gueberschwir, Turckheim, Goldert, Brand, Clos Hauserer, Clos Windsbuhl, Herrenweg, Rangen Clos St. Urbain, the names roll on in that odd melange of German and French that is so characteristically Alsatian. The best way to learn the wines is to assume that anything from this house is first rate. This gewurztraminer, one of the more affordable wines in the Zind-Humbrecht panoply, comes from young vines in the Brand vineyard in the village of Turckheim. It may not display the astonishing complexity of the bigger Zind-Humbrecht wines, but it is intense, rich and flowery, with good acidity and a long, long finish.JEAN-CLAUDE IACOVELLI is scouting locations in SoHo for a pasta restaurant. He already owns Jean Claude and SoHo Steak in that downtown neighborhood and Caffe Lure nearby.
Suan Lee Cheah and his wife, June, have just opened Nyonya on Grand Street in the part of Little Italy that is rapidly becoming Little Asia. It will be the Cheahs' fifth Malaysian restaurant in the last five years. They also own two Vietnamese restaurants.
And by mid-August, Andrew Silverman's latest restaurant in the Flatiron district, the Flatiron Diner and Baking Company, will finally be ready for customers. A bakery that shares the space with the diner has started making breads for Mr. Silverman's restaurants and will open to the public on Aug. 19.
For a decade or more, star restaurateurs like Drew Nieporent, Alan Stillman, Jerome Kretchmer and Pino Luongo, who own high-profile places like TriBeCa Grill, Smith & Wollensky, Gotham Bar and Grill and Coco Pazzo, respectively, have dominated the New York restaurant scene. But since the early 1990's, newcomers like Mr. Iacovelli, Mr. Silverman and the Cheahs have played significant supporting roles. There are others worth noting, among them Michael Ayoub, who opened Cucina in Brooklyn Heights in 1991 and is now involved in a number of other places in Brooklyn, and Louis Lanza on the Upper West Side, whose latest venture is Ansonia.
And those roles are growing. No, these new players are not the ones invited to participate in big charity events, and their chefs are not writing cookbooks. But they have enriched the fabric of day-to-day dining out across the city, and they are even spawning disciples and imitators.
When the restaurant business went into its recent, not-yet-forgotten slump and customers kept demanding value, restaurateurs like these were there with steak frites for $13.50. And when restless appetites clamored for new tastes, their menus featured beef rendang and roti canai.
''These places ground and stabilize the restaurant scene,'' said Clark Wolf, a restaurant consultant. ''And they can satisfy their clientele several nights a week with a collection of different places.''
Without this new energy, ambition and imagination, the restaurant business would wither. Mr. Stillman compared it to the theater. ''You need those who can put on the equivalent of an $8 million Broadway musical, but you also need Off Broadway and Off Off Broadway,'' he said. ''You need people who can keep the market bubbling all up and down the line.''
Here is a closer look at some of the newer names in restaurant lights.
Cheap and Chic (And Successful)
Mr. Iacovelli, a congenial bundle of energy, came to New York 11 years ago from Paris, when he was 22. He started as a busboy, gradually working his way up at places like 24 Fifth Avenue, Le Bernardin and Bouley, where he became a captain.
''I saw you could make money in this business,'' he said. ''I decided to open Jean Claude four years ago, with the goal of doing the kind of food you got at the fancy places but for half the price.''
Jean Claude, a 45-seat restaurant at 137 Sullivan Street (Spring Street), cost him about $35,000 to build. His father was a stonemason. So, do-it-yourself came naturally. To save money, he went to the Fulton Fish Market downtown and to the Hunts Point Produce Market in the Bronx every day, armed with the expertise he had acquired while at Bouley. ''Nobody thought we'd make it, but it was a big hit,'' he said.
But success has not changed his cheap-chic approach. At SoHo Steak, Mr. Iacovelli's three-month-old restaurant, at 90 Thompson Street (Spring Street), the hanger steak is $13.50, and the railings above the banquettes are made of the kind of copper pipe you would find under your sink. The ceiling beams are raw wood without so much as a coat of sealer. David Rockwell was not here.
Mr. Iacovelli reinforced his success by owning more than one restaurant. At any level of the business, multiples make purchasing and hiring more economical. ''It's actually easier to open two, three or four restaurants than just one,'' said Mr. Stillman, whose company, New York Restaurant Group, owns five restaurants in Manhattan and is expanding elsewhere.
It did not take long for Mr. Iacovelli to set an example for others. ''Jean-Claude gave new young chefs a way to succeed without luxe,'' said Raba Belkadi, one of Mr. Iacovelli's childhood friends from Paris and now his partner in SoHo Steak.
Danforth Houle, who was the chef at Mr. Iacovelli's Caffe Lure, at 169 Sullivan Street (Houston Street), went on in the last year with a partner, Richard Sandoval, to open Savann, on the Upper West Side, and Savann Est, across town.
''Like Jean-Claude, we put more sweat than money into building our places, and we're also trying to serve three-star food in a bistro setting,'' Mr. Houle said.
A Look Takes Off, Bamboo and All
Mr. and Mrs. Cheah, who emigrated from Malaysia in 1991, rapidly began filling an empty niche, that of their native cuisine. The Cheahs -- he is 35, she is 34 -- opened Penang in late 1991 in Flushing, Queens, at 38-04 Prince Street, and cloned it about a year ago in Elmhurst, at 82-90 Broadway. Then in 1993 they leaped the East River with Penang SoHo, at 109 Spring Street (Mercer Street), attracting a clientele of Asians familiar with the cuisine and Americans intrigued by its curries, noodle dishes and exotically fragrant seafood.Art exhibitions built around themes rather than individual artists often seem to work when they focus on art movements, geographic regions or ancient civilizations. Shows examining how artists through the ages have tackled a specific subject generally fare less well, no doubt because works inspired by, say, religion or nature or the female nude are too varied or too numerous to make much sense.
To avoid such perils, the organizers of ''Comme un Oiseau,'' or ''Like a Bird,'' a new exhibition at the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris, have wisely clipped their own wings. They simply want to demonstrate how birds have long caught the imagination of artists. And they have done so effectively with just 110 works by named artists and 52 more by anonymous artists from Africa, Asia and the Americas.
True, the works in the show, which runs through Oct. 16 at the foundation's new headquarters at 261 Boulevard Raspail on the Left Bank, are as varied as art itself: drawings, paintings, sculptures, masks, movies, photographs, sound and dance (through video extracts of Merce Cunningham's ''Beach Birds''). The materials used include paper, canvas, wood, marble, bronze, stone, feathers and fossilized whale bone. There are even 24 real parrots darting about an aviary designed by the French artist Jean-Pierre Raynaud.
What holds this show together, however, is magic, the magic of birds, their flight, their song, their appearance. And more pertinently in this case, there is also the magic that artists apply in transforming birds from objects of ornithological interest into symbols of forces -- of good and evil, power and fragility, freedom and captivity, fertility and death -- that are essentially human.
Louise Lawler's ''Birdcalls,'' a sound installation at the entrance to the Cartier Foundation, and Mr. Raynaud's steel and ceramic aviary, a freestanding cube inside the ''cube'' of Jean Nouvel's ultra-modern building, remind visitors that birds are not just metaphors. Birds also come close to their originals in classic 19th-century aquatints and gouaches by the likes of John James Audubon, Jacques Barraband and Edouard Travies. But elsewhere in the show, they are thoroughly metamorphosed.
Sharing the center's first floor with the aviary are works by a French artist whose obsession with flying is reflected in his pseudonym, Panamarenko, which he adapted in 1965 from the name Pan American Airways. In reality, in his series of stylized renderings of the prehistoric archeopteryx, he seems more consumed by the difficulty of flying. Similarly, with ''Bernouilli,'' an installation comprising a platform with two propellers and two balloons, he pays homage to 19th-century efforts to defeat gravity.
But it is in the center's basement exhibition rooms that the traditional role played by birds in human dreams becomes most apparent. As the legendary anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss points out in an essay in the catalogue, many myths of the original inhabitants of the Americas deify birds and, in the case of Amazonian Indians, involve complex legends about how tropical birds acquired their stunning plumage.The show includes large feathered headdresses made to this day by Brazil's Kaiapo Indians, 16th-century feather mosaics of religious scenes from Mexico and several stunning items from 10th-century Peru, among them a feather-covered mummified head. Pre-Columbian peoples, from Aztecs to Eskimos, also routinely portrayed birds with human features and vice versa. One 19th-century Alaskan Eskimo mask, showing a man's face peering from the beak of a bird, evokes the Yupik people's belief that a great raven created the world. In ''Great Raven,'' a 1988 sculpture made from fossilized whalebone, Johanasie Illauq, a contemporary Inuit craftsman, recalls the same legend.
The bird was no less present in African and Asian art. On display are a 2,000-year-old mummified ibis from Egypt, a proud cockerel from the British Museum's collection of Benin bronzes, a large wooden frieze showing the outspread wings of a sea bird from the South Sea Islands and, from China, a delicate fourth-century B.C. wooden phoenix standing on a tiger.
Strangely, though, with the exception of ancient Rome's ubiquitous eagle, it was not until this century that Western artists, specifically the Surrealists, began to explore fully the magic of birds. Birds did appear in Renaissance paintings, all too often simply being fed by St. Francis or contributing to the notion of paradise. Then, in the 19th century, artists approached birds scientifically, eager to record species as accurately as possible and seemingly little interested in their poetic dimension.
But 20th-century works in this show by Max Ernst, Joan Miro, Paul Klee, Constantin Brancusi, Francis Picabia, Alexander Calder, Rene Magritte, Georg Baselitz, Frida Kahlo, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Louise Bourgeois and others tell a different story. Ernst, for example, uses the bird as a sexual symbol, while in Magritte's ''Deep Waters'' it seems to convey menace. A Kahlo self-portrait turns the artist's dark eyebrows into the wings of a bird, an image echoed in Picabia's ''Habia,'' in which his model's hair also serves as the wings of a bird.
Brancusi's ''Bird in Space'' series -- a bronze version is in the show -- is probably the strongest expression of the bird as a symbol of freedom. The bright colors used in Miro's semi-abstract ''Woman Surrounded by the Flight of the Bird'' in turn evoke the gentleness of birds, not unlike the mood present in a 1944 photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson of Matisse in the company of white doves. Calder's cheerful 1952 mobile, ''Birds,'' suggests that birds do not mind captivity.
Basquiat's ''Heaven (Dead Bird),'' a painted wooden collage that includes a self-portrait and a bird's head, is decidedly more ominous. But in a sense, the show successfully demonstrates that birds offer something for everyone. Rebecca Horn's mechanical sculpture, ''Floating Souls,'' recalls bird song by turning sheets of a musical score into gently moving wings, while in ''Beach Birds,'' Merce Cunningham's dancers seem ready to take off. Even the chattering birds of Walt Disney cartoons have not been forgotten.
In his review of the exhibition, Le Monde's art critic, Philippe Dugan, said the show could seem perfectly coherent or perfectly incoherent depending on the eye of the visitor. But in his view, the organizers' decision to mix the works in the show in such a way as to contrast, say, a feathered Peruvian tapestry and a watercolor by Turner proves successful. ''The question is not to determine what the bird means as such,'' he said, ''but rather to show that such a common motif can never exhaust itself.''''RELAX!'' is an admonition commonly heard by people with hypertension, or high blood pressure, a major risk factor for heart attacks, strokes and kidney disease. And indeed, a new study has shown that although hypertension may not always be caused by stress, practicing a form of meditation often used as a relaxation technique can be remarkably effective in controlling it.
In the study, Transcendental Meditation outstripped two other often-recommended nonmedical methods for reducing unhealthy pressures. Among 111 African-American men and women 55 to 85, T.M. was shown to be significantly better at lowering blood pressure than progressive muscle relaxation and instruction on healthier living habits. The findings were reported yesterday in the journal Hypertension, published by the American Heart Association.
The blood pressure reductions found in the patients randomly assigned to practice T.M. daily were similar to those commonly achieved with antihypertensive drugs. In long-term drug studies, such reductions have been associated with about 35 percent fewer strokes and heart attacks. The researchers said the findings were particularly impressive because all participants had multiple risk factors for hypertension, including obesity, high alcohol intake, high-sodium diets, low levels of exercise and high levels of psychological stress. The findings indicated that relaxation induced by T.M. can decrease blood pressure even in people who are not under unusual stress, as well as in those with other major hypertension risk factors.
T.M. was not compared in the study to other forms of meditation. For instance, another popular technique -- practicing the relaxation response -- was devised by Dr. Herbert Benson, a cardiologist affiliated with Harvard University Medical School. Dr. Benson describes his technique as a ''demystified form of meditation'' in which practitioners choose a soothing word and sit quietly focusing upon it twice a day for 10 minutes at a time. The relaxation response has also been shown to lower blood pressure significantly.
Dr. William Sheppard, the study's project director, said he expected that other forms of meditation, like Zen or yoga, would have beneficial effects on blood pressure as well, but that until they were studied scientifically, it was not possible to say which method was most effective.
T.M., which grew out of an ancient Indian practice, allows a person to achieve deep physiological relaxation while remaining awake and alert. It involves sitting quietly with eyes closed for about 20 minutes at a time while the mind focuses on a single soothing sound, or mantra. The technique was brought to the West about 40 years ago by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, founder of the Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa.
Dr. Charles N. Alexander, a Harvard-trained psychologist and a professor at the Maharishi University who is the lead author of the new study, said that T.M. involved only a one-time cost and could have lifelong benefits without causing any unwanted side effects. The technique is taught at T.M. centers in major cities throughout the country at a cost of $600 for students and $1,000 for adults, he said.
Dr. Alexander predicted that the regular practice of T.M. should allow many people with hypertension to avoid lifelong treatments with costly pressure-reducing medications, which can cause side effects like dizziness, impotence and higher cholesterol levels.
However, Dr. Edward D. Frohlich, the journal's editor, cautioned that patients who choose to practice T.M. and whose blood pressure is currently controlled by medication should continue taking the prescribed drug unless told to stop by their physicians. He added that the study's results might not apply to all patients.
The new study was run under Dr. Sheppard's direction at the Hypertension and Stress Management Research Clinic of West Oakland Health Center in California. Dr. Sheppard, who regularly practices T.M. and similar techniques, said in an interview that while there was still wariness about these mind-body approaches in the medical community, ''attitudes are changing because many physicians realize that what they have to offer isn't so hot.''
Accordingly, the National Institutes of Health has allocated $3 million for two further studies of the long-term effects of T.M., comparing it with other behavioral techniques for the ability to reduce blood pressure, stress and heart disease in African-Americans, who are twice as likely as Caucasian Americans to develop high blood pressure.
In the study just published, Dr. Alexander said, ''T.M. was twice as effective'' over all in lowering blood pressure as progressive muscle relaxation, which in turn was much more effective than instruction on healthier habits. While as many as half the patients on prescribed antihypertensives fail to take them regularly, Dr. Alexander said, 80 percent of the study's T.M. participants who were followed up five years later were still practicing it.
Blood pressure is expressed in millimeters of mercury: it is reported as the larger number -- the systolic pressure, or the pressure in the arteries when the heart beats or pumps -- over the lower number -- the diastolic pressure, or the pressure in the arteries when the heart is resting between beats. Blood pressure is considered dangerously elevated when systolic pressure reaches or exceeds 140 or diastolic pressure reaches or exceeds 90.
In the study, conducted over an initial period of three months, women in the T.M. group had an average reduction in systolic blood pressure that was 10.4 points deeper, and a drop in diastolic blood pressure that was 5.9 points deeper, than women getting instruction in improved living habits. For men, the comparable differences were 12.7 points in systolic pressure and 8.1 points in diastolic pressure. Progressive muscle relaxation reduced only diastolic pressure in the men and did not produce statistically significant reductions in blood pressure in the women.IN days gone by, children were often warned that reading in poor light or in awkward positions would ''ruin'' their eyes. Fortunately, problems rarely ensued. Not so among today's computer users; many experience preventable eye or vision problems.
With images on a computer screen fast supplanting the printed word, complaints about vision-related problems like eyestrain, blurry vision, headaches and neck aches are multiplying rapidly. Millions of people, from preschool ages on, who work or play the day away on video display terminals are suffering needlessly, experts say.
Although vision and eye problems have been overshadowed by carpal tunnel syndrome as a debilitating hazard of prolonged computer use, they are actually more common and should not be ignored. Virtually all can be corrected -- and avoided -- with proper adjustments in the work environment and the user's position in relation to the screen. Although there is no evidence of permanent visual damage from the prolonged use of VDT's, even temporary impairments can be troublesome. The problems can occasionally be dangerous; for example, if computer use at work impairs distance vision, driving home could be hazardous. Common Eye Problems
First, the good news. Repeated tests have shown that video display terminals do not emit hazardous radiation -- neither ultraviolet nor ionizing radiation -- so even daily use for decades should not cause cataracts or retinal damage. Nor is there evidence that computer use causes permanent myopia, or nearsightedness, or speeds development of myopia any more than reading books .
However, several surveys of people who work at video display terminals indicate that 70 to 75 percent experience one or more reversible vision or eye problems. The American Optometric Association has coined a name for the complaints: computer vision syndrome. Symptoms may include any or all of the following:
*Temporary myopia, the inability to focus clearly on distant objects for a few minutes to a few hours after using the computer.
*Eyestrain or eye fatigue, a tired, aching heaviness of the eyelids or forehead.
*Blurred vision for near or far objects, and sometimes double vision or afterimages.
*Dry, irritated or watery eyes.
*Increased sensitivity to light.
*Headaches, neck aches, backaches and muscle spasms from holding the body in awkward positions to maintain a desirable angle between eyes and screen.
Why should computer use cause such problems when reading a book or papers for hours on end rarely does? The American Academy of Ophthalmology and optometrists who study computer-related problems say several factors apply especially to computer use:
*Poor position in relation to the computer.
*Lighting that produces glare or reflections, fuzzy images or images that are too dim or even too bright.
*Failure to blink often enough to moisten the surface of the eyes.
*Use of corrective lenses that are inappropriate for the user's position and distance from the screen.
*Minor visual defects that might go unnoticed if not exaggerated by intense computer use.
For example, Dr. Kent M. Daum, an optometrist at the University of Alabama School of Optometry in Birmingham, showed that minor and otherwise unnoticed refractive errors, astigmatisms or imbalances between the eyes can cause pronounced discomfort after as little as half an hour at the computer. He showed that correcting such problems with properly fitted lenses could noticeably increase comfort.
With regard to dry, irritated eyes, Dr. James Sheedy, a clinical professor of optometry at the University of California at Berkeley, cited a Japanese study of how often people blink. When people converse, they blink, on average, 22 times a minute; when they read, they blink 10 times a minute, but when they use a V.D.T., that drops to 7 times a minute. In addition, Dr. Sheedy said, people generally look down when they read but stare straight ahead at a screen, so eyes are open wider and get dryer. .
As for aching necks and backs, Dr. Sheedy explained that people naturally try to look down at a computer screen at an angle of 10 to 20 degrees. If the screen is at or above eye level, the tendency is to tilt the head back to achieve the desired viewing angle, and that can cause stiff necks and backaches. People who wear bifocals or progressive (variable focus) lenses are forced to tilt their heads back to see the screen at all. Even with a head tilt, the image is not as clear as it could be because the prescription typically issued for a reading lens is adjusted for an eye-to-page distance of 16 inches at an angle of 25 degrees, but computer screens are usually 20 to 24 inches away at a angle of 10 to 15 degrees. Correcting ProblemsThere are some who insist that Virginia Hamilton Adair arrived like a comet, a spirited California poet of 83 blinded by glaucoma but with a lyric vision so clear that her first book inspired the sales executives to write verse in her honor.
Bruce Harris, an occasional poet and the marketing president of Mrs. Adair's publisher, Random House, waxed in a promotional letter to clients: ''Summer/ Picnics/Ants on the Melon/Virginia Adair/83 years old/First Book/Ants on the Melon/You don't read poetry?/ Try!/It's rewarding/Treat yourself/ Ants on the Melon/ Summer.''
Indeed, many have sampled Mrs. Adair's poetry collection, ''Ants on the Melon,'' which just entered its fourth printing with almost 19,000 copies published. The figure is unusual for first books by poets, who are considered fortunate if 1,000 copies are sold.
Mrs. Adair has been lauded by well-known writers, interviewed for a New Yorker profile and greeted by Time magazine as ''something of a miracle,'' all while avoiding such traditional tools of publicity as book tours and autographs.
But the literary acclaim has hardly been unanimous; within the nation's small inbred fraternity of poets, some express bafflement and resentment at the sudden popularity of this newcomer, a retired professor of English from California State Polytechnic University who awkwardly taps out poems on a portable Olympia typewriter in her one-room apartment in a Claremont, Calif., retirement lodge. They muse that it is Mrs. Adair's gripping story of solitary literary toil and tragedy -- her age, her blindness and her husband's suicide in 1968 -- that has driven the enthusiasm for her work. They grumble that personality packaging is the way to achieve publishing success.
''I share the opinion of most of the poets that I've talked to in being distinctly underwhelmed,'' said J. D. McClatchy, a poet and editor of The Yale Review and a newly elected chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. ''Her story seems to be the story, not the work. She seems to me to be a curiosity rather than a genuine discovery. The work has its pleasures and surprises, but it seems to me to be pretty loosely put together and not compelling at all.''
The essence of Mrs. Adair's rise is this: In her 80's, she reluctantly agreed to publish a collection of a few of her poems. She had been writing for pleasure for most of her life, and occasionally -- decades ago -- her verse had been accepted by literary journals. To get her first volume issued, she had to overcome her own reservations about the ''game'' of publishing and the potential fame, which she said had become an obsession for her husband, the historian Douglass Adair Jr., the author of ''Fame and the Founding Fathers.''
''To be acclaimed young is heady,/later on a drag,'' she wrote in her poem ''Red Camellias.'' But in the late 1980's, at the urging of Robert Mezey, a poet from nearby Pomona College, Mrs. Adair and Mr. Mezey started sorting through her life's work of thousands of poems.
Some dealt with sensual memories of the past: ''When the rains come/you remember/our old closeness. . . . '' Others dealt with her blindness, which came in the mid-1980's after several operations for glaucoma, leaving her in a world without color, a vision of black fog. A few poems reflected on the suicide of her husband:
In the year after our life ended,
When you put a gun to your head,
In the year that my eyes turned to glass,
That my heart turned to iron,
Only my hands remained human.
In 1990, Mr. Mezey started circulating a manuscript of Mrs. Adair's collected poems among about a dozen small presses, all of which sent back polite rejection notices. Undeterred, Mrs. Adair kept writing daily with the help of volunteers and people paid to read aloud her verse, which was often marred by typographical errors that the careful former scholar could not see.
''I really didn't get in the game,'' Mrs. Adair said of her decision to collect her poems. ''I did a book. I felt very good about having a collection of my poems in one place. And then what Bob did is to send some manuscripts around. I didn't even know he had done it.''
On a whim, Mr. Mezey sent a few of Mrs. Adair's poems last year to the poetry editor of The New Yorker, Alice Quinn, who agreed to publish several of them in the magazine. ''I didn't take the poems because of the story of her life,'' Ms. Quinn said. ''I was totally moved by them.'' She said the resentment of Mrs. Adair was not unexpected. ''A success like Virginia's upsets the apple cart,'' she said. ''Her poems haven't been preapproved by the cognoscenti.''
Ms. Quinn sent a package of the poems to five publishers, including Daniel Menaker, a former New Yorker colleague who is now a senior editor at Random House. The house has rarely published serious poetry in the last five years, but Mr. Menaker found Mrs. Adair's work accessible and modern enough to take a risk on.
Before the book's debut, Mrs. Adair started to received ecstatic reviews, most important among them a warm New Yorker profile quoting Galway Kinnell, the poet who declared that she had ''arrived in our world like a comet.''
Even Mrs. Adair's champion, Mr. Mezey, was a little startled by the accolades. ''I wasn't surprised that lot of people liked her work,'' said Mr. Mezey, who acted as Mrs. Adair's agent for the book project. ''I was a little taken aback by the intensity of the response -- poets saying that she had arrived like a comet. That struck me as slightly exaggerated, but it was a lovely thing to say. The poems began appearing in The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. And there was a lot of anticipation built for the book by Alice Quinn and her campaign.''THE time-honored advice for taking care of bee stings, quoted faithfully in medical texts and first-aid manuals everywhere, is wrong, according to a study published in the current issue of The Lancet, a British medical journal.
This challenge to tradition, expected to set the medical world abuzz, concerns the proper way to remove the stinger, or, as entomologists prefer to call it, the sting. Bumblebees and wasps, including yellow jackets, rarely leave these barbed weapons embedded in their victims, and so were not involved in the new study. But honeybees nearly always leave the stinger with the sting, and the fact that the bees rip off their hind ends in the process and die is small consolation for the pain they inflict.
The standard recommendation has long been to scrape or tease the stinger out of the skin carefully with the edge of a knife blade, fingernail or, nowadays, a credit card, and never to pinch, pluck or grab it. That might seem logical enough; a venom sac is still attached to the back end of the stinger, and it does look as if squeezing the sac would squirt more venom into the wound, making it swell and hurt even more.
''It was thought to be like squeezing the bulb of an eyedropper or a turkey baster,'' said Richard Vetter, an entomologist at the University of California at Riverside and one of the new study's authors. ''That makes sense until you test it.''
It was their own experience with bees as much as their training as scientists that led Mr. Vetter and two other entomologists, Dr. P. Kirk Visscher, also of Riverside, and Dr. Scott Camazine of Pennsylvania State University, to question the established wisdom. Longtime beekeepers, they have each been stung thousands of times, and it seemed to them that speed mattered more than style in removing stingers.
''I knew from my experience as a beekeeper,'' Dr. Visscher said, ''that if you get the sting out quicker, you're better off.''
''Medical people in general, and I can say this because I'm one of them, don't really know very much about about the practical aspects of treating bee stings,'' said Dr. Camazine, who was an emergency-room physician before becoming an assistant professor of entomology. ''
The researchers' theory was also based on their knowledge of honeybee anatomy. What few people realize is that the honeybee leaves its victim not only the stinger and the venom sac, but also a chunk of its abdomen, a cluster of nerves, various muscles and, as the scientists politely describe it, the end of its digestive tract. Even with the rest of the bee gone, enough nerve and muscle remain attached to the stinger to keep it twitching visibly, working its barbs deeper into the flesh and pumping more venom out of the sac by means of organs that resemble a valve and piston.
''It's the kind of thing insects are notorious for,'' Dr. Visscher. He compared the disembodied pumping action to the ability of some male insects to continue mating even after females have bitten their heads off.
He and his colleagues reasoned that if a person could pluck out the stinger before all the venom was pumped out of the sac, a smaller, less painful welt might result.
They set out to test their hypothesis by experimenting on themselves. First, to determine whether the size of the welt depended on the amount of venom entering the skin, Dr. Camazine gave Dr. Visscher a series of injections containing measured amounts of bee venom. Sure enough, the diameter of the welts, as well as their soreness, increased along with the amount of venom used.
Next, the team wanted to find out whether the amount of time it took to remove a stinger would affect the size of the welt. Dr. Visscher, as head of the research team and first author of the paper, was once again chosen as the volunteer subject, Mr. Vetter said, noting that this phase of the study involved a considerable number of bee stings. ''That's the price of fame and fortune,'' he added.
Standing alongside a hive in the laboratory, Dr. Visscher would catch a worker bee, grasp her by the wings and press her against the inside of his forearm until she stung. He did this repeatedly over the course of several days, scraping out the stingers at various intervals, from half a second all the way up to eight seconds after being stung. Mr. Vetter was kept unaware of how long each stinger had been left, and he measured the welts after 10 minutes.
Fifty stings later, the researchers had shown that time was indeed of the essence; the longer the stinger stayed in, the bigger the welt. When it was left in place for eight seconds, the resulting welt was a third larger than it was when the stinger was removed after one second. Leaving it in longer, they assumed, must have let more venom enter the skin.
Finally, the scientists compared methods of stinger removal: the medically correct scraping technique versus the heretofore forbidden grab-and-yank. Dr. Visscher and Mr. Vetter allowed honeybees to sting them, 20 times each, and compared the two methods of stinger removal. They found no difference in welt size.
''This matters,'' Dr. Visscher said, ''because when people get stung, they will spend time thinking what was I supposed to do, and looking for the proper tool.'' All that time, venom is being pumped into the wound. So, Dr. Visscher and his colleagues urge, do not hesitate. Just pull out the stinger as fast as you can. Do not fumble for a pocket knife or credit card, or stop to think about technique. Grab that stinger and yank.
''This has been an ongoing debate for a long time,'' said Dr. David Golden, an allergist and assistant professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore. The new study helps to resolve it, he said, but he cautioned that the data also confirmed other researchers' work showing that the venom is pumped out so quickly that a person must react almost instantaneously to make a difference.
Even then, the sting will still hurt, and a welt will form. That led the team to a second set of experiments, yet to be published, concerning what to put on the welt once the stinger is extracted. They tried various old favorites, including ammonia, mud, meat tenderizer and ice. None had any effect on the size of the welts.
But Dr. Camazine said ice might ease the pain a bit, even if it does not relieve the swelling. Anesthetic sprays and creams might also help temporarily, he said.
The only people who need medical treatment for bee stings are the 1 percent of the population who can quickly have a fatal reaction to even one sting.IT takes a hardy pioneer to carve out a community from a jumble of buildings bounded by concrete and asphalt. Marion Pinto was just that type of adventurer when she banded together with some of her artist friends in 1970 and converted the silent spaces of empty factories into the lofts of SoHo.
Three decades later, the color of money dominated the local palette and rendered the neighborhood a pricey backdrop for the cars, vendors and day trippers who clogged its narrow streets. Hunkered down against the crowds and a fickle public's whims, Ms. Pinto hardly saw her artist and writer friends. So much for community.
Perhaps it was an ember of the pioneering spirit that sparked to life in 1990 and compelled her to go in search of a place to belong. She found it in the agricultural town of Hikawa, Japan, where she became the first American artist in residence at a cultural colony of sorts sponsored by the local government. From the news crews who greeted her at the train station to the endless stream of visitors who trooped to her studio out of respect and curiosity, she knew things were different.
''I wasn't living an anonymous life anymore,'' Ms. Pinto said, taking a break from hanging an exhibition of her Japanese paintings that will open tonight at SoHo's Art 54 Gallery. ''Here, we value our privacy and anonymity, but at the same time you feel like crying in the wind. Nobody knows what you're doing.''
IN Hikawa, a village of 20,000 people some 500 miles west of Tokyo, everybody knew what she was up to. She had gone there, in part, to fulfill her growing desire to study Japanese art. The locals were more intent on studying her.
Was she married? Did she have children? How old was she? Did she like Japan? (No, no, X and yes, very much.)
It took some getting used to the constant visitors, so much so that she wound up having to paint late at night after spending entire days entertaining the guests who showed up at her doorstep toting gifts of fruits and vegetables.
She readily recalls how she would kneel at the doorway to greet visitors with a bow and a slow, smooth wave of the arm.
''They would be out there,'' she said, pointing to the imaginary entrance. ''I'd be kneeling on the floor and wondering, 'Who the hell are they?' Then I would take them into the best room in the house, sit them down and go do the tea. In SoHo, I'd probably just tell them to go away or I'm not there.''
The visitors became friends. Then they became subjects. In the year and a half she was there, she took thousands of photographs, which she later used as the basis for her detailed, realistic paintings: a young woman cradling her dog, a woman weaving traditional fabrics, friends and relatives bathing at a secluded spa.
The beauty of her surroundings did not escape her, surrounded as she was by misty mountains, old, twisty trees and rice paddies where birds drifted above in lazy arcs. The scenes came back to life in her New York show, once again surrounding her with the comfort of community.
''Here in the city, you tend to focus on people and their private, emotional states,'' she said. ''You don't look at the environment.''
SHE beheld her hometown with new eyes when she finally returned to SoHo in 1991. Why was everybody frowning on the street? Why was everybody so intense? And after 18 months of living out of one suitcase of clothing and one of art supplies, why did she need so much stuff at home?
The rituals of upscale urban life didn't seem so important.
''Here, you worry if you're not dressed right you won't get served, or if you're too old, too,'' she said. ''There, every person who is a member of that community knows who they are and they are a part of that town. I miss that.''
She admits to a spiritual awakening in Hikawa, which is fitting, since the area is considered in the Shinto faith to be where the gods descended to earth. She also said she was moved by the realization that in a society where nanoseconds are a meaningful measure of time, there's something to learn from a village where families trace their roots back dozens of generations.
''When I left New York I was fed up and angry at New York,'' she said. ''My generation, they were barely being heard, and then this new generation of upstarts was coming in. Now, I look at New York benignly. It is a resource for me. I rejoice in the young generation coming in and making it in their own image.
''Change in New York is a delight.''
About New YorkTHE most scrutinized executive in the television industry is sitting on a bar stool at Il Fornaio, a restaurant in the old town section here, waiting for her lunch appointment without a trace of impatience or tension.
Jamie Tarses has every reason to be impatient and tense these days, because she has just taken command of ABC-TV's troubled programming department after enduring four months of uncertainty and innuendo that surrounded her recruitment away from NBC.
But Ms. Tarses, who at 32 is the youngest person running a network entertainment division and the only woman ever, appears relaxed and upbeat. Wearing a gray wide-striped suit and a white blouse, her hair a floating curtain of black curls, she looks less like a woman who has been through the wringer this summer than a woman who has been through Tuscany on vacation.
In truth, she has been through both.
''I had four months off,'' Ms. Tarses says. ''Italy was really lovely. When I look back, I think I'll regret being tense while I was there because of everything that was going on this summer.''
What was going on was the repercussions from her decision in February to terminate her NBC contract as senior vice president for prime-time series, which had more than a year to run, to negotiate for the job of president of ABC Entertainment.
In analyzing what it is she brings to ABC, Ms. Tarses emphasizes her feel for strong writing, her background in casting and, totally unapologetically, her youth.
''My age is an advantage, because my sensibility is the sensibility that people seem to want to see,'' she says. ''The shows I helped develop are the shows I want to watch, that I will show up at home for.''
Ms. Tarses (the name is pronounced TAR-siss) is already looking for the next group of hot young writers. She says she benefits from knowing most of the busiest young agents in Hollywood, having grown up in the business with them over the last decade.
But she has been close to the world of television comedy virtually since birth because her father, the comedy writer Jay Tarses, was important in the success of the MTM Production studios in the 1970's. Ms. Tarses joined NBC in 1987 and worked up through the ranks until she became senior vice president of prime-time series in 1995.
NBC was unhappy about the timing of her leaving, because she was directing the development of new shows for the fall. NBC was also disturbed about rumors that Ms. Tarses was trying to break her contract by charging that she had been the target of sexual harassment.
Both Ms. Tarses and NBC executives have denied that she made such accusations.
During her negotiations with ABC, Ms. Tarses found herself in the middle of a management muddle. The network, which saw its prime-time ratings plummet last season, had to find places for both Ms. Tarses and the man who had the job she was being offered, Ted Harbert.
After protracted negotiations involving both ABC and its parent, the Walt Disney Company, Ms. Tarses became president of entertainment on June 24. Mr. Harbert was named chairman of the division, with Ms. Tarses reporting to him.
Sitting down to her chicken salad plate, Ms. Tarses says she is feeling a sense of relief not only because the summer's uncertainty is over but also because she is finding it easy to establish a good working relationship with Mr. Harbert.
There had been speculation -- a lot coming from NBC -- that ABC had set up an unworkable arrangement because Ms. Tarses would be trying to remake the prime-time schedule that Mr. Harbert had put in place.
At a news conference in late July, Mr. Harbert and Ms. Tarses went to some lengths (including using introductory theme music of the Turtles singing ''So Happy Together'') to project a solid alliance.
And at lunch, Ms. Tarses emphasizes the point. ''It hasn't been awkward at all,'' she says. ''I like working with Ted.''
For Ms. Tarses, much of her career can be summed up by her ability to work with others. In particular, she says: ''I love to work with writers. I love good storytelling.''
Indeed, she can trace her rise at NBC to her ease with writers, finding script flaws and suggesting improvements. ''Some of it is instinct,'' she says. ''I've always had good judgment, I think. And I think I offer specific, straightforward ideas. I have a reputation for being decisive. It's not hard to get a yes or no from me.''NEVIS WEXLER, a book editor in her 30's who lives in Manhattan, says she can remember the very moment, about six years ago, when she realized she needed serious culinary coaching. ''One of my first company dinners was a veal stew calling for four cloves of garlic,'' she said. ''I assumed -- who knew? -- that one clove was one head of garlic.''
And her guests, inundated with garlic? She declined to give details of their reactions.
Kevin Mills, 25, a screenwriter who lives in Los Angeles, remembers his first roast chicken, a few years ago, as ''a humbling experience.'' It arrived at the table with the heady aroma of burned plastic: the bird had been cooked perfectly intact, including the sealed package of giblets tucked in the cavity.
Meet the aspiring new cooks, a gastronomically disadvantaged group so desperately in need of hand-holding that they have inspired a whole new category of kitchen manuals. Call them the dummy cookbooks. At least a dozen have been published in the last few years, and many more will arrive in bookstores this month and through the fall. These ground-zero books are for people who need to know that the gas must be turned on for the oven to work, who cannot distinguish between a cleaver and an avocado, and who draw a total blank when asked to set the table.
Publishers, of course, are still putting out complex cookbooks devoted to those who have mastered the basics and want to learn, say, 1,000 uses for thyme. But while the average cookbook is expected to sell about 15,000 copies, some of the dummy books have vastly beaten those odds. ''Dad's Own Cook Book,'' for instance, published in 1993, has sold 185,000 copies; ''The Kitchen Survival Guide,'' published in 1992, has sold more than 100,000.
While publishers believe that novices will graduate to more complex cookbooks, they see this potential cooking generation as needing basic help in the kitchen.
The books are providing the simple advice that women, at least, used to learn simply by being at home around their mothers. ''We're seeing the first fast-food generation that was brought up by a fast-food generation,'' said Elaine Ratner, who, with her husband, Jay Harlow, owns Harlow & Ratner, a small publishing company in Emeryville, Calif. They are, she said, ''not idiots, exactly, but ignorant.''
As the publisher of ''Now You're Cooking,'' an award-winning kitchen primer that starts with how to hold a knife, Ms. Ratner sees an endless sea of beginners out there. ''The audience is college students and brides and grooms, of course, but it's also older adults who have never learned to cook and are now divorced or widowed -- anyone that needs help before they tackle ''The Joy of Cooking.''
Even that classic volume is now considered somewhat advanced. ''As wonderful as it is, 'The Joy of Cooking' leaves a lot out,'' said Bob Sloan of Manhattan, who has cooked for his wife and two children for 10 years and is the author of ''Dad's Own Cook Book.'' ''When my mom started cooking, she already knew all the left-out parts.'' Along with every other kitchen primer author, he lamented the lack of a cooking and teaching Mom, Dad or anyone else in the kitchen for the last 20 years.
''It's sad but true, many of today's noncooks seem never to have experienced family meals,'' he said.
Many cooking schools, too, are seeing increased interest in basic courses. For 23 years the most popular course at Peter Kump's Cooking School in Manhattan has been ''Techniques of Fine Cooking,'' an intensive 25-hour course in classic French techniques. ''But two years ago we realized that, for many people, our basic course wasn't basic enough,'' said Rick Smilow, the president of the school. The school now offers ''How to Cook (If You've Never Done It Before -- A Class for Absolute Beginners).'' The three-session course is always fully booked.
Just as the beginning courses try to overcome the fear of cooking, the new beginners' books are written in a conversational style, far removed from the formal format of traditional cookbooks. The tone is often gently to aggressively humorous, and the recipes recognize the new American menu: the veal Orloff, boeuf bourguignon and tarte Tatin of yore have been replaced. The new menu is guacamole; taco soup; fried eggs; salsa; vegetarian tacos; pasta; grilled fish, beef and vegetables; grains, greens and bean dishes; shortcut fruit cobblers, and almost anything with chocolate.
The recipes can be made quickly, most in 30 minutes or less, but almost all the new primers use fresh -- not convenience -- foods and explain how to shop for the real thing.
Along with very solid advice on ingredients, techniques, equipment and actual cooking, most of the recent primers include instructions on how to serve food and prepare a table to receive it.
Even the older, classic books have been revamped to make them more useful for novices. In the 11th edition of the ''Better Homes and Gardens Cook Book,'' due in bookstores next month, the basics section has been expanded and moved from back to front. The best-selling cookbook of all time, it has sold 30.5 million copies since its first edition in 1930.
''For the first time since the 1960's we've included a chapter on manners, menu planning and table setting,'' said Jennifer Darling, the editor of the new edition. ''We took it out in the last two editions, but we got so many letters wanting to know why, we've put it back in.''
There are risks, however, in being too dumb even for the dummies. Reaction to ''How to Boil Water,'' on the Television Food Network has been mixed, said Gita Ramini, the programming coordinator. The show features Sean Donnellan, a comedian, who is led through each recipe by Cathy Lowe, a culinary expert. Mr. Donnellan plays dumb and dumber as a kitchen klutz. ''Kids love him, but many of our older viewers find him offensive,'' Ms. Ramini said. ''They much prefer Michelle Urvater's ''Feeding Your Family on $99 a Week.''
Elaine Corn wrote the kitchen primer ''Now You're Cooking'' after a conversation with a reporter at The Sacramento Bee in California, where she was the food editor. She was stopped by a colleague in the hall who wanted to know how to make egg salad. ''For egg salad you need a recipe?'' asked an incredulous Ms. Corn, who subsequently called together groups of friends to find out what they needed to know and then went on to write an award-winning series on cooking basics for her paper.
''The new dysfunctional cook is the equivalent of 'Johnny Can't Read,' '' Ms. Corn said. ''You'd never know Johnny also can't cook because he isn't starving. He probably eats three meals a day that begin the same: he has a conversation with a waiter.''
Some of the books are written by cooking school teachers; others, by novices who are still in touch with beginners' kitchen confusion.Anyone who worked as hard as he did, Bach is supposed to have said, would have accomplished as much. That monumental bit of inanity came to mind during the recent four-concert stand by the Kirov Orchestra and Chorus of St. Petersburg, Russia, at the Lincoln Center Festival '96, part of an American tour that ended yesterday in Los Angeles.
Few conductors could match the dynamic leadership and inspiration Valery Gergiyev has provided as artistic director of the company, it is true. Yet it is equally true, as became blindingly clear during the festival run, that the Kirov's splendid achievements are built on a fearsome work ethic, which also emanates from Mr. Gergiyev.
You had to suspect as much from the remarkable quality and security of most of the performances at Avery Fisher Hall. Still, a listener was amazed to discover, largely by accident, the full reality of the situation, just how all-fired hard the conductor and the orchestra were working.
American and most European orchestras typically tour with three or four programs and work them up in advance, thoroughly rehearsing and performing them at home, so as to maximize the number of concerts and minimize the number of rehearsals on the road. The Kirov Orchestra, after a hectic festival season in Russia, came to the United States to give 11 concerts over 14 days, repeating only one program and half of another. But all the implications of this heavy scheduling emerged only gradually.
A request to query Mr. Gergiyev about something altogether different, his reasons for presenting two programs of Prokofiev and Shostakovich seemingly rife with Stalinist propaganda, resulted in an invitation to attend the rehearsal on the morning of the final Lincoln Center concert, and speak afterward. The experience would be painless, one had to think, and probably pleasant. On the day of a tour performance, rehearsal for these finely groomed steeds could hardly amount to more than a light workout, a few spot-checks, perhaps; at most, a quick jaunt through the entire program of Stravinsky, the brief opera ''The Nightingale'' and the ballet score ''The Firebird.''
Wrong. Mr. Gergiyev and the orchestra immediately waded hip-deep into ''The Firebird,'' laboring over each measure, sometimes each note, stopping and starting and stopping again. Mr. Gergiyev spoke at length, sprinkling his Russian with Italian terminology and stray English phrases.
He picked over every sound in the most minute detail, tending to articulation, phrasing, dynamics and expression, and results were usually apparent in the repeats. This was grinding, painstaking rehearsal, exhausting even for a bystander.
After a break, Mr. Gergiyev slogged on, still dissecting ''The Firebird.'' Whenever an arm was free, a kindly violinist gave another a shoulder rub, but everyone seemed to remain alert and attentive.
Mr. Gergiyev, checking his watch repeatedly, started skipping over pages here and there, and finally cut the work off well before the end, some two and a half hours into the session. Surely this would be the end. ''The Nightingale'' must already have met with Mr. Gergiyev's approval.
But no. On came the chorus and vocal soloists, and Mr. Gergiyev proceeded to put large sections of the opera under his microscope, starting in the middle, then working backward and forward. All told, the rehearsal ran four hours, well beyond anything major American ensembles are required, or contractually permitted, to undertake on tour.
And such practice, hasty investigation revealed, was the established routine for the orchestra's American tour, which also included the Tanglewood Festival in Massachusetts and the Hollywood Bowl Festival in California. The players returned to St. Petersburg yesterday, presumably drained.
Two weeks before, in fact, a timpanist overnapped one evening in New York, causing the performance of Berlioz's ''Romeo et Juliette'' to begin some 20 minutes late. ''We started without him,'' Mr. Gergiyev said, ''but I became worried, because I knew his part was coming up soon.'' The timpanist arrived with little time to spare.
Of the material in the four New York concerts, the group had recently performed only the Berlioz and Prokofiev's ''Cantata for the 20th Anniversary of the October Revolution'' at home. For the most part, the players were like harried teachers, trying to stay one step ahead of the audiences. And with what results!
The week at Lincoln Center and Tanglewood included 5 ambitious concerts with chorus, all different, and 7 rehearsals lasting three to four hours each: 12 ''services,'' in the lingo of the trade. Six days in Los Angeles included 10 services; 2 additional rehearsals scheduled tentatively were waived.
By way of contrast, the contracts of both the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic allow basically for seven services a week, with rehearsals limited to three hours each. In addition, the Met allows the possibility of two ''acoustic'' rehearsals totaling 90 minutes; the Philharmonic, three, of 30 minutes each. These sessions, also called ''sound checks,'' are intended to give the performers a sense of an unfamiliar hall.
The Kirov players undoubtedly had the sound of Avery Fisher Hall firmly, perhaps irrevocably, planted in their ears by the time they left New York. But they seemed game -- and Mr. Gergiyev, positively eager -- for more. On his way from the podium to a studio, to work separately with the singers for the evening, the indefatigable maestro chatted ebulliently, filling a tape with sung illustrations as well as talk.
He was most eager to talk about Prokofiev's ''Cantata for the 20th Anniversary of the October Revolution.'' Written in 1937 but not performed until 1966, this is a big, noisy work, all brawling bombast.
''Now, after working with this piece of music, I totally understand why it was not performed back then,'' Mr. Gergiyev said. ''The approach is sarcastic, and sarcastic in the worst way, about historical figures like Lenin and Stalin. It's one of the most hysterical monuments. What Prokofiev did to Lenin is not just negative. It is unbearable and impossible, the shouting chorus saying: 'We'll kill them all! We'll leave them naked!' And the way of using the accordions, which for us is a folk instrument, is the opposite of Russian high culture. It's hooliganism.
''So Prokofiev was intentionally hysterical. And this horrible noise, which I intentionally brought to New York, is what Prokofiev wanted to describe things in his own way. I think he was very brave, very courageous.''
It remains an open question, of course, how well New York listeners were able to negotiate this slippery terrain, whether in this context they could recognize sarcasm if it hit them in the face. Surely Mr. Gergiyev's all-out performance did that.The new Israeli Government has devised a policy for Jewish settlements in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip that could put additional land in these disputed areas under Jewish control. The displacement of Arabs who now live or farm there would create geographic and political obstacles to a durable peace with the Palestinians.
But Yasir Arafat's call for a campaign of confrontation against the new settlements policy is premature. The prospects for an eventual peace depend less on policy declarations than on what Israel actually does about expanding settlements. The Government has not yet fully spelled out its intentions, and has left room to exercise some useful restraint.
The main change in policy concerns approximately 135 existing settlements, where about 140,000 Jews live among more than two million Palestinians in the two areas. New settlements will still be tightly restricted, with full cabinet approval required for any such ventures.
For many years, the United States opposed all settlements in the occupied territories. But since the Oslo agreements three years ago, Washington has treated settlements as an issue to be worked out between Israel and the Palestinians.
After Oslo, the Labor Governments of Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres virtually froze construction in all settlements except those in the immediate Jerusalem area. Even with these restrictions, the settler population increased by more than 40,000 in Labor's four-year term. Now, in a return to pre-Oslo policy, all existing settlements can again seek to annex adjacent land to add new houses, schools and other buildings.
Procedures for filing expansion plans have not yet been worked out. But all such plans will be subject to a review on security grounds by the Minister of Defense. This allows the Government to block plans that take settlements provocatively close to Palestinian towns or other sensitive areas. By placing the review power with Defense Minister Yitzhak Mordechai, a moderate, the Government has limited the influence of Infrastructure Minister Ariel Sharon, who favors settlement expansion.
At a minimum, Mr. Mordechai should use his power to block any proposed expansions in the Gaza Strip, Hebron or other areas where Israel has agreed to transfer administrative authority to Palestinian control.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who ran on a platform of ending Labor's restrictive settlement policy, could hardly have been expected to do less than the policy changes he announced last week. Yet Mr. Netanyahu must now take care to prevent a reckless expansion of settlements that could undermine the campaign of pragmatic personal diplomacy he has launched in recent weeks.
The new Israeli leader has already met with President Mubarak of Egypt and King Hussein of Jordan, and on Monday announced his willingness to resume talks with Syria. Negotiations with the Palestinians on the most contentious issues remaining from Oslo -- Jerusalem, settlements and Palestinian political status -- are to resume in earnest later this year. The first direct meeting between Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Arafat is probably not far off.
Hope for a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians remains alive. But to sustain it, Israel will have to proceed with the utmost care and sensitivity in putting its new settlements policy into effect.Representative Wes Cooley of Oregon abruptly dropped his bid for re-election today, bowing to weeks of pressure from Republican leaders in the House who feared that questions about his war record and his wife's pension had rendered him unelectable.
Mr. Cooley's withdrawal ended a months-long political drama that began with an uproar, but grew into soap opera as fellow Republicans plotted again and again to force him from office and he again and again resisted them.
All the while, polls showed Mr. Cooley trailing his Democratic opponent in Oregon's Second Congressional District, a rural, conservative and reliably Republican area covering the eastern two-thirds of the state.
In a written statement today, Mr. Cooley said he was quitting because ''the chance that a liberal politician could win the Second District race is a risk that I am not willing to take.''
Mr. Cooley, 64, is one of the scores of conservative freshmen who were swept into the House in the 1994 Republican landslide. For much of his first term, he did not stand out. But in April The Medford Mail Tribune questioned his claim, in a state-financed pamphlet distributed to voters, that he had served with Army Special Forces in the Korean War.
Although Army records showed that he had never left the United States and that he completed Special Forces training after the war ended, Mr. Cooley insisted he had spent a few days in Korea and was sworn to secrecy about his mission.
The state is investigating whether he knowingly placed false information in the pamphlet, a felony under Oregon law.
Later news accounts questioned whether Mr. Cooley and his wife had kept their marriage secret in the mid-1980's so she could continue to receive veteran survivor's benefits from a previous marriage. That, too, is under investigation by the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Republican leaders have been trying to edge Mr. Cooley out of his re-election race all summer. Last month, Mr. Cooley's former campaign manager, Greg Walden, entered the House race as a third-party candidate with the backing of Senators Mark Hatfield of Oregon and Slade Gorton of Washington, two moderate Republicans.
More recently, Speaker Newt Gingrich sought to lure Mr. Cooley's predecessor, former Representative Bob Smith, back to the House by offering him the chairmanship of the Agriculture Committee if he would replace Mr. Cooley.
Mr. Smith has not said whether he will seek the nomination to his old seat. Mr. Walden said today that he would continue his third-party campaign and seek the Republican nomination to Mr. Cooley's House seat.
A Christian radio broadcaster who finished second to Mr. Cooley in Oregon's Republican primary last spring, Perry A. Atkinson, said today that he would seek the Republican nomination for Mr. Cooley's seat. The Second District's Republicans will hold a convention later this month to choose a new nominee for the November election.Netscape Communications' bitter software marketing war with Microsoft escalated into a threat of legal action today, as Netscape brought the dispute to the attention of the Justice Department's antitrust division.
In a letter to Microsoft, which was copied to the Justice Department, a lawyer for Netscape accused Microsoft of antitrust violations for placing limits on the number of Internet connections that can be made to a single copy of Microsoft NT Workstation software.
The limits, specified in Microsoft's customer-licensing agreements, impinges on Netscape's ability to sell one of its own software products for use with NT Workstation, the letter said.
Netscape has been promoting use of its $295 Fastrack Server software, in conjunction with Microsoft's $319 NT Workstation, as an affordable way for corporate customers to operate servers, or data storehouses, on the Internet.
But the Microsoft stipulation, which sets a limit of 10 simultaneous Internet connections with NT Workstation, is forcing customers wanting an Internet server to obtain a more expensive version of the Microsoft product, called NT Server. That product, when bundled with Microsoft's own Internet server product, sells for $699 -- a package price that Netscape says it cannot compete with if NT Server and Netscape's Fastrack must be purchased separately.
No Justice Department official who had seen the Netscape letter could be reached for comment late today.
NT Workstation and NT Server are both computer operating systems, which are a class of software that any customer needs before using an application software program like Netscape's Fastrack.
Gary Reback, the Silicon Valley lawyer who wrote the letter and who has made previous antitrust accusations against Microsoft, said the company was using its dominance in operating-system software to wrest an unfair advantage over competitors. He said he wrote the letter in response to Microsoft's recent letter to Netscape, accusing it of deceptive advertising in asserting that Fastrack and NT Workstation were the most affordable way to create an Internet server.
Mr. Reback said Microsoft's usage restrictions on NT Workstation were an unwarranted attempt to undermine Netscape's pricing advantage. ''It's like saying, 'I'll sell you a car but you can't drive it more than 70 miles per hour,' '' he added.
Microsoft executives who had seen the letter said today that Netscape was failing to acknowledge that NT Workstation and NT Server were two distinct products, with different designs. ''It sounds like we need to do some more work with Netscape to educate them,'' said Jonathan Roberts, a Microsoft director for product marketing.
Mr. Roberts said NT Workstation was primarily intended for single-user desktop computers, while NT Server was intended for systems in which many users retrieved files simultaneously.
For each program to work as intended, they need to be ''tuned'' by Microsoft engineers, Mr. Roberts said, adding that such alterations could not be made by customers.
But some Microsoft customers do not accept that distinction and said they think the company is arbitrarily setting the two products apart to fit a desired revenue model.
''I don't think that there are really any substantial differences,'' said Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly & Associates, a software publisher in Sebastopol, Calif. Moreover, he said, Internet technology made it difficult, if not impossible, for customers to enforce a 10-connection limit on NT Workstation, even if they wanted to.On a steamy day when Connecticut faced a risk of blackouts because safety concerns had shut down its four nuclear power plants, the head of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said that safety, rather than the state's need for power, would remain the agency's primary concern.
''We're not unmindful of the energy situation here,'' the chairwoman, Shirley Ann Jackson, said at Waterford's Town Hall, as officials of Northeast Utilities, the plants' owner, watched the heat and humidity drive the demand for electricity higher for the second straight day.
''We keep track of what your reserve margins are,'' she continued, ''but in the end we have to do our job, and we can't allow safety to be compromised.''
After touring the three nuclear plants at Millstone Point here, Dr. Jackson announced that on top of existing requirements to restart those plants, Northeast would have to pass an independent review, which she said could be done without adding to the time the plants would remain shut.
None of the plants had been expected to start before the end of the summer, and Northeast said its present goal was to restart Millstone 3 -- the newest of the plants -- before the end of the year.
The independent review, Dr. Jackson said, was needed to assure ''high public confidence'' after her agency's own failure to act on safety concerns at Millstone, and because of ''a pervasive problem with how Northeast Utilities managed its people and operated its plants.''
In addition, she said, while the fourth plant, Connecticut Yankee in Haddam Neck, was not on the agency's watch list of troubled sites, her staff had found ''complicated engineering and design issues'' during a full inspection, casting doubt on a quick resumption of operations.
The shutdown of the four nuclear power plants has eliminated 3,200 megawatts of generating power, half of the state's capacity, making it heavily reliant on power from utilities in neighboring states.
Peak demand today approached 5,300 megawatts, several hundred megawatts below Northeast Utilities' capacity, but the utility asked consumers to conserve power and barred its own maintenance crews from doing any work that might reduce power.
If demand does exceed supply, the utility has said it will ask large industrial customers to shut down and will order either a brownout (a 5 percent reduction in voltage) or rolling blackouts, in which power would be cut off a few hours at a time in selected areas.
A Northeast Utilities spokeswoman, Deborah Beauchamp, said the requirement of an independent review was welcomed by the utility as ''an additional opportunity for us to be provided feedback and observations from our regulators.''
''There are expectations to be met,'' she said. ''We will not ask the N.R.C. for an actual restart of Millstone 3 until we are convinced that the plant is positioned to operate safely and to the highest standards.''
Independent evaluations, which have been used to inspect some nuclear power plants before their original start-up, will back up not only the utility, but the commission itself, which has been sharply criticized for not responding to whistle-blowers' warnings that the utility was not complying with its operating license.
Dr. Jackson, who became chairwoman last year, acknowledged at a public meeting at Waterford High School today that the agency was too lenient in enforcing Northeast Utilities' licenses and had waited too long to put the Millstone station on its list of troubled plants.
Outside the school, antinuclear protesters greeted commission officials and residents with signs reading ''No More Nukes'' and ''N.R.C. Do Your Job.''
Once considered some of the best-maintained nuclear plants in the country, the Millstone plants were put on the watch list last winter, and on July 31 the agency designated them ''Category 3,'' the most serious condition. Because of that designation, the full commission, rather than its staff, will have to approve their start-ups.
Critics of Northeast Utilities have accused it of skimping on maintenance in recent years as low oil prices began to make the company's heavy investment in nuclear power a financial burden.
Dr. Jackson said today that preliminary analysis of the agency's inspections of the Millstone plants showed that the risk of an accident that could lead to the release of radiation was slight, but that the risk had been increased by a deterioration of the safety systems.
But the most serious finding, she said, was the broad range of problems, and Northeast Utilities' record of failing to correct them once its employees had identified them.
''There was a pervasiveness of problems, and a pervasiveness of non-conformance, that makes the N.R.C. question the licensee's ability and resolve to operate the plant,'' Dr. Jackson said.About 2,000 sympathizers of the Zapatista rebels came from around the world to meet for three days on a plain of oozing mud in an Indian hamlet in southern Mexico to ruminate about the shortcomings of capitalism.
Leftists from 43 nations bathed in a turbid river and slept in string hammocks under tin-roof shelters that barely kept out the warm jungle downpour. In free-form debates that stretched into dawn hours they denounced the global trend toward free trade economic policies and brainstormed about carrying the Zapatista cause to their home countries.
The gathering, which ended on Saturday, was a high moment for the masked Indian guerrillas and their enigmatic leader, Subcommander Marcos, who stunned Mexico with an armed uprising on New Year's Day 1994. But as the participants of this conference slithered through the rainy season bog, the conclave also became an example of the trouble the Zapatistas are having in holding the political ground they seized in their one-week war.
Their motley military force long ago ceased to pose any threat to the Mexican Government, if ever it did. Now they are holed up in distant rain forest canyons in the state of Chiapas, struggling to build on the fame and credibility they gained from the rebellion to mobilize an unarmed nationwide opposition movement.
In their ambition to grow, the Zapatistas organized a series of colorful conventions in Chiapas in recent months that brought together leftist intellectuals and activists to talk about political reform in Mexico.
Subcommander Marcos himself unstrapped his automatic rifle and traveled unarmed to a city outside the jungle to preside over some of the sessions. The meetings kept Zapatista leaders in the media spotlight and insured a steady flow of high-profile visitors through the Indian communities they control.
But these communities, in whose name the uprising was fought, by and large are still waiting to see the improvements in their lives that the Zapatistas said they hoped to bring.
As usual, the Zapatistas' strategy is novel. Rebel armies in Central America, like the contras the United States sponsored in Nicaragua or the leftist guerrillas in El Salvador, waited until the ink was dry on comprehensive peace accords before disarming and going into above-ground politics.
The Zapatistas, who have been in negotiations with the Government of President Ernesto Zedillo since October 1995, are not waiting for a formal peace before starting to change into an unarmed movement.
In 1995 they conducted a poll on the Internet to ask Mexicans what they wanted the rebels to do. A majority of 1.5 million people who answered by E-mail said the Zapatistas should give up fighting and become a grass-roots organization. So in a declaration they issued from the Chiapas jungle on Jan. 6, they said they would.
''The Government is capable of stalling the talks for years -- we have to move forward in spite of them,'' said Javier Elorriaga, a journalist who was jailed for more than a year for his ties to the Zapatistas and is now in charge of organizing their nonmilitary front as a ''landing field'' for the guerrillas after peace is reached.
On paper at least, the front is growing quickly. More than 400 civilian Zapatista committees have been organized, covering virtually all of Mexico. With their knack for communications, the Zapatistas linked together their civilian supporters through an Internet network. They are ready to go to CD-ROM format, making discs that would allow their followers to visit them in their jungle strongholds via computer without having to wade in the mud of this village, whose name means ''Reality'' in Spanish.
But the description Subcommander Marcos and top Indian commanders have provided of the purpose of the civilian front is so vague that even Mr. Elorriaga is not sure how to describe what it does. The commanders have mandated only that front members cannot run for political office or aspire to Government positions, and they must, of course, support the Zapatistas' eclectic socialist cause.
''It's a rainbow,'' was as concise as Mr. Elorriaga could be.
The Zapatistas made an alliance with an organization of bank debtors and emerged as Mexico's most effective popular movement during the recession of 1995. The biggest left-of-center political party, the Party of the Democratic Revolution, flirted with the rebels but then pulled back. No Zapatista front group has yet staged a protest action that has gained any attention.
The rebels are working hard on their civilian power base partly to leave no doubt about their commitment to nonviolence. They stuck to their position even when a new masked and armed group claiming to be leftist guerrillas appeared in the western state of Guerrero in June. Subcommander Marcos carefully distanced his rebels from the Guerrero group, denying there were any ties.
But Zapatista leaders are aware that the Government wins and they lose as the peace talks drag on over time. $(A new round of talks began Tuesday in a Chiapas village.$)
''It seems the Government delegation is just there to give the appearance of dialogue,'' Subcommander Marcos told reporters here. ''It makes us think those talks are bound to be a failure, and our stay up here in the jungle will be much longer than we thought.''
The rebels say they cannot build a powerful opposition group unless they can move around Mexico. While talks are under way all arrest warrants and military operations against them are suspended, but they must remain in the territory they control. They want to hold a demonstration in Mexico City, but the Government has denied their demands for safe conduct.
As a result of donations the Zapatistas attracted through their international ties, La Realidad and several communities like it have electricity for the first time. The Zapatista presence finally convinced the Government to fix the treacherous road into this village -- primarily so army vehicles could get through.In the aftermath of the worst rioting here in decades, the Government has taken the upper hand, moving aggressively to suppress a variety of opposition groups that had begun groping toward a common cause.
With arrests, interrogations, legal maneuvers and a show of strength, the Government and the military are seeking to insure their continued monopoly on political activity and fend off any strong challenge in parliamentary and presidential elections scheduled during the next two years.
The authorities are gambling that the newly energized opposition is small and fragmented enough to be neutralized by such a campaign, but some analysts warn that the Government's tough policies could in the long run spark further opposition.
A riot on July 27 took at least three lives, wounded more than 90 people and seriously damaged more than 20 buildings. It also shook the confidence of some foreign investors, causing a brief but sharp fall in the Indonesian stock market and the value of the Indonesian currency.
But although the riot pointed up a rising level of discontent after 30 years of strongman rule by President Suharto, the opposition remains small, disorganized and vulnerable to pressure.
A series of arrests and warnings during the last week has targeted human rights, labor and student groups as well as the small political party led by Megawati Sukarnoputri, who has emerged as the rallying point of this disparate opposition.
''This is a real cleanup,'' said Hendardi, a spokesman for an independent human rights group called the Indonesian Legal Aid Foundation. ''They are using this as a reason to conduct an all-around purge.'' Like many Indonesians, Hendardi uses only one name.
Ms. Megawati, the 49-year-old daughter of Sukarno, who became Indonesia's first president at the country's independence in 1949 and later assumed dictatorial powers of his own, has been summoned for interrogation as a witness in a Government case involving a free-speech forum she endorsed last month.
The Government issued a second summons today after she rejected the first one on Monday, calling it legally flawed.
The police said today that they were continuing to hold and interrogate 154 people after detaining 249 during the riot.
The most prominent arrest so far has been of Muchtar Pakpahan, the leader of an independent labor union, who faces a capital charge of treason. The authorities say they are also seeking to arrest Budiman Sudjatmiko, 26, the leader of an opposition group called the People's Democratic Party.
The Government has made this group the focus of its public campaign, likening it to the now-defunct Indonesian Communist Party, which was blamed for an attempted uprising in 1965 that touched off a wave of violence that took up to 500,000 lives and led Suharto to seize power from Sukarno in a military coup.
Mr. Budiman's party, which disavows any Communist links, was active earlier this year in organizing strikes.
The Indonesian armed forces chief for social and political affairs, Lieut. Gen. Syarawan Hamid, last week estimated the party's membership at just 125 people, but said it had the potential to destabilize the country.
''There aren't too many but they are very militant,'' he said. ''If they are left alone they will grow.''
Over the years, Mr. Suharto has succeeded in quashing protests and political opposition, but some analysts say strong-arm measures may no longer work.
The political landscape has been changed by mass communications, an expanding middle class, a growing weariness with one-man rule and a population explosion in a land of 190 million that will make 20 million young people eligible to vote for the first time in next year's elections.
The Government's attempts to try to sideline Ms. Megawati during the last six weeks, for example, have only served to stimulate her supporters and anoint her as a symbolic victim, many analysts say.
''If they really believe they can stamp out the opposition this way, I think they poorly underestimate the undercurrent for change,'' said Rizal Ramli, who heads an independent research organization called Econit.In Asia, the elephant is used for all manner of labor, perhaps most notably for hauling logs in areas where tractors cannot go. But Africans have traditionally steered clear of their elephants, a bigger, more skittish breed that kills people every year and is widely believed to be untamable.
So it was not all that surprising that the visitors from Zimbabwe's Institute of Agriculture Engineering kept a good distance and even a car or a tree between themselves and Nyasha recently when the four-and-half-ton, 10-foot-tall adolescent elephant was busy plowing.
''It is looking as though it is not pulling anything, and those furrows are very deep,'' said Basilio Chikwanda, a teacher at the Harare-based institute who had brought nine students to the spectacle. ''As a source of power it is quite interesting.'' Then he stepped behind a car.
The owners of the Imire Game Park here have started an unusual effort to train their six young elephants to work. Already, their rangers ride the enormous beasts on anti-poaching patrols around the 7,000-acre park.
''A chap on an elephant sees a lot further in the bush than when he's just on the ground.'' said Peter Musavaya, 22, the ranger in charge of the training. ''And it makes quite an impression on the poachers.''
The elephants also cart tourists around. And while the plowing is still in its early stages, everyone here expects the elephants to prepare the fields for next year's feed crops.
The game park business is competitive these days and it does not hurt to have such a novelty. But the owner of the Imire Game Park, Norman Travers, is also hoping that his experiment catches on elsewhere.
In much of southern Africa, there is no shortage of elephants and in some parts their overbrowsing is causing ecological damage that threatens other species, not to mention extensive damage to crops and risk to the farmers and their families when hungry elephants stray from their reserves. Whether culling is necessary is a constant debate.
''How can we make use of the surplus rather than kill them?'' Mr. Travers asked. ''Can we maybe see a future for them through this? Using them for anti-poaching, to me that is ideal.''
Despite the widespread belief that African elephants are untrainable, zoo keepers and circus trainers say they are actually more intelligent than their Indian relatives and, with patience, quite trainable. They point out that Hannibal rode African elephants over the Alps and into battle with the Romans.
''If you draw a parallel with a horse, the African elephant would be like the Arabian thoroughbred -- sensitive, very bright,'' said Jim Stockley, a South Africa-based trainer who has prepared African elephants for circuses, zoos and movies.
At Imire, the training system is love and reward, which means lots of talking, stroking and food. ''Our basic rule is to never hurt the elephant,'' Mr. Musavaya said. ''If you do something he thinks is unfair, if you hit him or don't feed him, he'll remember. And one day he'll bonker you.''
The training starts off by naming a part of the body -- literally pointing out a leg, saying ''leg'' and lifting your own dozens of times.
''He'll look at you for two days, thinking, 'What's this all about?' '' Mr. Musavaya said. ''But on maybe the third day he'll lift that leg just a little bit. That's when you shove his mouth full of oranges and pat him all over and give him lots of praise. The next day he'll be lifting that leg way up.''
Plowing took a bit longer. Mr. Travers has documented the first efforts on his home video system, and he is glad to show them off. ''Not exactly the straightest of furrows,'' Mr. Travers narrates over equally wobbly camera work. ''But for the first time ever, it's really not so bad.''
A big drawback to putting elephants to work is how much they eat -- up to 500 pounds of forage a day. A tractor would cost less. But at Imire, the tourists pay the bills, and when it comes to what they would rather ride, or see plowing the fields, an elephant will always beat a tractor.
Mr. Stockley said that as the elephants grow older they must be handled particularly carefully during certain periods of enhanced sexual drive, known as musth. Some people fear that when the trained elephants reach sexual maturity, at about age 20, they will become too ornery for domestic work, and that the problem of whether to kill them, retire them to their holding pens or release them back to the wild will arise again.
But basically he applauds the program. ''For elephants in captivity, work may actually enhance their lives,'' he said.
Finding young men willing to work with the elephants wasn't all that easy. When the Travers family first went looking for trainers, they did not get much response from the local community. But in a poor country a job is a job, and Morris Mukara, 20, was one of those who stepped forward.
Was he scared? ''At first, I was a bit worried,'' he said, ''but due to courage everything was all right.''Calling the measure a ''cornerstone in the foundation of security for American families,'' President Clinton today signed into law a far-reaching bill that would help states upgrade municipal water systems and require local water agencies to inform the public what contaminants have been found in the drinking water.
The legislation, which also revises Federal drinking water standards, had been tied up in Congress for nearly two years. But having suffered politically from some of their proposals to scale back environmental regulations the Republicans were eager to pass a major bill to bolster their record going into autumn elections.
The measure was passed by sweeping bipartisan majorities in the House and the Senate on Friday, the last day of the Congressional session before the summer recess, approved 392 to 30 in the House and by 98 to 0 in the Senate.
Its sponsors, local government officials and environmentalists joined Mr. Clinton for the signing ceremony in the East Room of the White House, where the President hailed the measure as an example of cooperation between the two parties.
''This legislation represents a real triumph because it demonstrates what we can achieve here in Washington and in our country when we turn away from partisanship and embrace shared values,'' Mr. Clinton said.
The law, considered one of the most significant pieces of environmental legislation to pass the 104th Congress, requires large municipal water systems to report annually to the public -- in most cases in their water utility bills -- on bacteria and pollutants found in tap water and how such contaminants could affect consumers' health.
Some states already require that water customers be notified when contaminants are detected, even if there is no violation of Federal standards. New York State, for example, requires water suppliers in Nassau and Suffolk Counties to publish notices in local newspapers annually about the results of water testing.
Advocates for the legislation had argued that the simple step of notification would prove a powerful incentive to water providers to maintain good water quality.
Systems serving 500 people or fewer would not be required to distribute such information but would have to make it available if requested by a consumer. And water systems serving 500 to 10,000 people could use local newspapers instead of utility bills to distribute the information on contaminants.
In addition the legislation would require municipal water suppliers to control some of the most harmful pollutants in tap water, including the organism cryptosporidium, which has caused outbreaks of disease in some cities.
And to help localities upgrade their water systems, the measure creates a $9.6 billion fund for state-administered grants and loans. While $2 billion of that money had been previously authorized but not distributed, $7.6 billion is being added to be spent over seven years.
While the legislation bolstered the record of the Republican Congress, it also gave Mr. Clinton an accomplishment to point to in his re-election effort. Political pollsters say that environmental issues are of particular importance to women and suburban independents, the swing groups that both Presidential candidates are fighting for.
Since January, Mr. Clinton has designed a strategy of appealing to these groups by emphasizing family issues and children, and today he and other administration officials portrayed the environmental law as particularly important to children and mothers. As he prepared to sign the bill, aides led up about a dozen small children to flank him, each wearing an oversized T-shirt emblazoned with the words ''Safe Drinking Water.''
Mr. Clinton said that ''American families, after all, have enough to worry about'' without having to be concerned that a glass of water ''you might offer to a child or a grandchild will be contaminated.''
Environmental groups had supported the bill, but expressed dissatisfaction when it did not pass the Congress by Aug. 1, a significant deadline. The delay resulted in the loss of $725 million that had been appropriated by Congress in past years for drinking water projects but had to be earmarked by Aug. 1.
Mr. Clinton said the law had passed with such strong support that he was confident the money would be restored when Congress returned after Labor Day. After the ceremony, Senator John W. Warner, a Virginia Republican, agreed, saying, ''We're not losing the money.''Wasn't it supposed to be capitalism that died of internal contradictions?
Today, in Moscow, there were plenty of contradictions on show, not to mention animosities, rivalries, anxieties and denial. But not among capitalists. This display, on the outskirts of Moscow, was the first meeting of the Russian Communist Party since Boris N. Yeltsin defeated the Communist leader, Gennadi A. Zyuganov, for the presidency.
It was a gathering of the major representatives of the nation's largest political party, and the stated purpose was to plan the Communist approach to the new Government Mr. Yeltsin intends to propose later this week.
But the real purpose was to assign, avoid and deflect blame for last month's crushing defeat at the polls.
Disoriented by their huge loss, many of the Communist leaders refused to acknowledge the decision of the voters. Others, chastened by the public rejection of a life's work, wandered around sounding more like participants at a Robert Bly-inspired camp meeting, where men meet to explore their inner selves, than Communist ideologues.
''We need to open a broad discussion in our party about what kind of society we want to build in Russia,'' said Valentin Kuptsov, the second-highest-ranking Communist official and a man not often given to public rumination or doubt. ''We need to take part in a revival. We need to broaden the base, broaden the coalition. If we do this work it will enrich us.''
Publicly, most delegates pledged their loyalty to the party and to Mr. Zyuganov on the eve of a huge assembly where dozens of leftist groups will once again form a coalition, the Popular Patriotic Union of Russia, to oppose the Government in Parliament and in crucial gubernatorial elections later this year.
But once they walked out of the meeting hall, the party faithful spent most of their time blaming each other, the people of Russia, the liberal press and above all the machinations of Mr. Yeltsin for their election loss.
''People who voted for Gennadi Zyuganov did not vote for our program,'' said Tamara V. Pletnyova, a Member of Parliament from the unswervingly Communist region of Tambov. ''They voted for the program of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Our program is much better than that and it will suit more people.''
Mr. Zyuganov, who sat next to Mrs. Pletnyova at a news conference when she made her comments, looked a bit startled. It seemed unclear to him, and to many others in the hall, whether his ally was attacking him, or attacking people for voting with insufficient enthusiasm and in insufficient numbers for the current party platform. Other speakers attributed the party's loss to election fraud, the lies of the press, money from the West and corruption.
Whatever the merits of those complaints, even taken together they hardly explain the large majority Mr. Yeltsin received, or the fact that Mr. Zyuganov, in receiving 30 million votes, was unable to broaden the party's base of support during the entire campaign beyond what it received in last year's parliamentary elections.
For his part, the leader of the opposition pointed out today that the ailing Mr. Yeltsin hadn't done a conspicuous lick of work since he was re-elected a month ago (today was the first day the President returned to the Kremlin in weeks), that the war in Chechnya grew worse daily, and that the Russian economy looked like it would fall apart in one good wind.
''We are standing on the field at Borodino,'' Mr. Zyuganov said this evening, referring to the famous battle between Russian and French forces in 1812 which ultimately led to ruin for Napoleon. ''We have not lost and our opponents have not won. We have preserved our forces and opportunities and are confidently moving forward.''
Unfortunately for the Communists, the battlefield looks a little more like Waterloo these days than Borodino. The party is filled with rural supporters, who have threatened to break away and form a new faction, and with elderly voters. Mr. Zyuganov again is under heavy pressure to shift to the middle. There is even talk of changing the party name, and the draft of the new Patriotic Union does not use the word Communism in its text. Mr. Zyuganov, who last year showed himself to be adept at acting like a social democrat with Westerners and an unreformed Communist among the people of Russia, is being torn from both sides.
''He lost because he made too many advances to his opponents,'' said Viktor Anpilov, among the most radical of Communist leaders, who was purged two weeks ago from the leadership of the Moscow branch of the Communist Worker's Party. ''Had he said firmly that our banner remains red the results could have been different.''
Lyubov Oleinik, a member of the local central committee from the Urals Mountains region of Kurgan, said: ''I don't know. We obviously need to adapt to a changing world. If we don't do that we are going to lose again in the future.''
By the end of the year all appointed governors -- 52 of Russia's 89 -- must hold elections for their seats. In a country where regional power is growing rapidly and the central force of Moscow is shrinking, those elections will have a huge impact on the course of the country. If the Communists do well they will control most of the regions and much of the Parliament. If they fail, most analysts here say, they will have a tough time ever winning again.
''People are always saying we are through,'' said Anatoly I. Lukyanov, a Member of Parliament and one of the ideological anchors of the Communist Party. ''We are not. We never will be. The presidential election was false and corrupt. That is obvious. Next time we won't permit corruption and we will win.''In a bitter speech that showed growing disillusionment with the policies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, Yasir Arafat today called the Israeli Government's decision to permit the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza a ''flagrant violation'' of the Palestinian-Israeli accords that should be resisted ''on the ground.''
Mr. Arafat's call to action at a meeting of the Palestinian legislative council in Ramallah raised the prospect of renewed confrontations between Palestinians and Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. It was the harshest response by the Palestinian leader to the positions of the new Israeli Government since Mr. Netanyahu took office in June.
The P.L.O. leader's remarks reflected mounting frustration among Palestinian officials at what they perceive to be Mr. Netanyahu's deliberate attempts to back out of signed agreements and put off talks on a final peace settlement.
Despite a meeting last month between Mr. Arafat and the new Israeli Foreign Minister, David Levy, that seemed to smooth over some differences, formal negotiations have not resumed on carrying out the self-rule accords or on a permanent agreement. Mr. Netanyahu has declined to meet Mr. Arafat, and he said on Monday that the terms of a long-delayed Israeli withdrawal from most of the West Bank town of Hebron would have to be renegotiated.
Last week's decision by the Israeli Government to lift curbs imposed by its predecessor on expanding settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip is ''the most dangerous'' threat facing the Palestinians, Mr. Arafat told the council.
''Nobody is going to confront settlement before we do,'' he said. ''Settlement is a flagrant violation of the agreement. This is a conspiracy not only against us, but also against peace. It means destruction of the peace process; it means tearing up agreements we have signed, and it means disregard of the Palestinian track'' in Middle East peace talks.
Mr. Arafat said Palestinians should use ''all means'' at their disposal to resist settlement. ''The most important thing is to confront this demon that swallows up everything, including the peace process,'' he said.
A committee had been set up to chart strategy, and district committees would be formed to direct anti-settlement action throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Mr. Arafat said. He urged adoption of ''a plan of comprehensive support for areas under threat of confiscation.''
''The most important thing is how to act on the ground,'' he said.
Saeb Erakat, a senior minister in the Palestinian Authority, said he had delivered a letter from Mr. Arafat to Mr. Netanyahu, in which the Palestinian leader cited a pledge given by the previous Israeli Government not to expand settlements, and clauses in the self-rule agreements that Palestinians argue forbid further settlement activity.
The clauses, incorporated into Article 31 of the accord signed in Washington in September 1995, say that the ''integrity and status'' of the West Bank and Gaza Strip will be preserved during the interim period of self-rule. It adds, ''neither side shall initiate or take any step that will change the status of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip pending the outcome of the permanent status negotiations.''
Israeli Government officials assert that expanding settlements does not change the legal status of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and that policy declarations of the previous Labor Party administration are not a legally binding commitment.
But Palestinian leaders insist that the thrust of Mr. Netanyhau's policies is to thwart peace efforts. Nabil Shaath, another senior minister in the authority, said the Palestinians were facing an Israeli Government ''that intends to do nothing about the peace process, that intends by stealth to start settlement again and is breaking its news gradually, so as not to provoke the anger of the world against its policy.''
The Palestinian legislative council adopted a resolution last week that called on the authority to consider suspending negotiations with Israel until it complies with the agreements.
There was particular anger today over Mr. Netanyahu's assertion that further negotiations would have to be held over the Israeli pullback in Hebron. ''The new Government is going in circles over Hebron,'' Mr. Arafat complained.
Ahmad Korei, the council's speaker who negotiated for months with the Israelis, said there was nothing more to talk about.
''We are not ready and it is unacceptable to renegotiate the issues which have been agreed upon,'' he said. ''Redeployment from Hebron should be implemented exactly according to the agreement.''
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Syria Rejects Talks Offer
DAMASCUS, Syria, Aug. 6 (Reuters) -- An influential Syrian newspaper indicated today that Damascus rejected the offer by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to resume peace talks, contending that his proposal was not serious.Bob Dole's plan endorsing a big tax cut was as notable for what it left out as for what it left in. He did not come out in favor of a flat tax of the type recommended by his election rival, Steve Forbes. While the supply-siders did not get everything they wanted, however, Mr. Dole stated that his ultimate goal is a ''fairer, flatter system that will allow Americans to file their tax returns without the help of a lawyer or an accountant.'' He also said he would ''eliminate the I.R.S. as we know it,'' and declared his proposed cut ''the opening salvo in a battle to repeal the current tax code.''
With important Congressional Republicans lining up behind some sort of ''fairer, flatter'' tax, it's worth pointing out that the system several of them have in mind would be neither. They are exploiting popular discontent with tax code favoritism, for which they themselves are responsible, to impose a solution that would make it worse.
The pure flat-taxers invoke a lofty principle called tax neutrality, which holds that the tax code should treat all income the same. But this obscures one minor detail: the flat tax does not treat all income the same. It taxes only salaries and leaves investment income untouched. If a C.E.O. makes $300,000, she would get taxed at 20 percent, or whatever the flat rate happened to be. But if she happened to prefer that $300,000 in stock options, then it would not be taxed at all. It's like the loopholes Republicans have supported for years. Only it's one giant loophole for all of them, instead of countless small loopholes.
Not that this is surprising. Each time actual tax reformers have tried to eliminate special-interest loopholes, it has been the Congressional advocates of the ''fairer, flatter'' tax system who have stepped in to restore them.
As an example, take the history of one particularly polluted region of the tax code: the special rules for oil companies. When a normal business buys capital -- say, a new factory -- it can deduct the purchase cost from its income taxes over the course of several years until the total deductions equal the cost of the factory.
During World War I, when the Government wanted to encourage oil drilling, it allowed oil companies a more generous way to deduct the costs of buying a well. Instead of deducting from their taxes what they paid originally, they would take off a percentage of the value of the oil they pumped every year.
The problem is, that amount has nothing to do with the cost of buying a well. So oil companies end up deducting more -- often, several times more -- than they shelled out to acquire the well in the first place. The subsidy has survived, thanks to Congress, and now costs the Treasury about $600 million a year.
This tax break is championed by, among others, Representative Bill Archer, the Texas Republican who is chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, where tax legislation begins.
Hundreds of deductions like this have left the system at a point where wealthy individuals and corporations go for years paying no taxes at all. More than half of the 250 largest, wealthiest companies in the country paid no income tax for at least one year from 1981 to 1985, according to the Citizens for Tax Justice.
The tax subsidies had such powerful allies that eliminating them one by one would have proved impossible. So tax reformers did the next best thing by strengthening something called the alternative minimum tax in 1986. The idea behind it was that no matter how many loopholes you use, you still have to pay at least a minimal tax. The law sets up a separate tax structure with lower rates and fewer deductions, just what flat-taxers say they're after. Companies and individuals must calculate their taxes under both systems and pay whichever is higher. It embodies many features that flat-taxers claim to uphold: fewer deductions, no loopholes, lower rates.
In 1995, the Republican Congress -- the same one that's now promising to clean up the tax code -- voted to eliminate the corporate alternative minimum tax. (Fortunately, President Clinton vetoed the bill.)
It's not that a few of the Republicans' self-styled tax reformers have occasionally contradicted their principles. It's endemic to the movement: the most ardent flat-tax advocates are also the most egregious defenders of loopholes. Jack Kemp, for example, is a flat-tax crusader and also the nation's most fervent advocate of enterprise zones -- which are based on providing preferential tax rates on certain investments.
Or consider the capital gains tax. Income from capital gains is taxed at a lower rate than income from, say, interest. A real tax reformer would want to tax all that income the same. But cutting the capital gains tax is an obsession with Republicans. Mr. Dole wants to cut it in half.
Here we get to the heart of the matter: ''Flattening'' the tax system would simply replace preferences for selected capital with a preference for all capital. No wonder the Beltway special interests aren't quaking in terror at the prospect of Republican tax overhaul.
Jonathan Chait writes on economics for The New Republic and The American Prospect.Beyond loud protests and warnings of reprisals, European officials today depicted President Clinton's threat of sanctions against foreign companies that invest heavily in Iran or Libya as an election-year ploy that would have little real effect on either trade or terrorism.
Moreover, officials in Germany, France and Italy said the new American policy would not deter them from dealing with the two nations, which Washington has cast as principal sponsors of terrorism.
Mr. Clinton signed the bill into law on Monday. The new legislation comes at a time of growing concern over terrorism in the United States, after the terrorist bombing of an American military complex in Saudi Arabia and the crash of a Trans World Airlines 747 jetliner off Long Island, in which a bomb is suspected.
At France's behest, the European Union is discussing possible retaliation against American economic interests over the new law, the French Foreign Ministry in Paris said.
But after vehement European protests on Monday, senior Italian and German officials played down the likely effect of the new legislation, seeking to prevent aggravating the dispute with Washington that could be intensified by the American Presidential election campaign.
''As for a dramatic trade war between America and Europe, I am not convinced that everything will be served as hot as it's being cooked,'' said Klaus Kinkel, the German Foreign Minister. Germany is Iran's biggest trading partner.
Lamberto Dini, the Foreign Minister of Italy, the former colonial power in Libya and Tripoli's largest trading partner, called the American measures ''symbolic.''
''We Europeans know this perfectly well but at the same time we can't just sit back in silence,'' he said, referring to the European stance on the new American law. ''We should react, but without hysteria.''
Nonetheless, the American legislation, and European reaction to it, again illuminated the differences between the United States and European attitudes on the issue of terrorism. While Washington insists that Iran and Libya must be confronted over their support for terrorism, the Europeans, seeking to protect economic interests, argue that dialogue will achieve greater changes in both countries than isolation.
Echoing views expressed by his Italian counterpart, Mr. Kinkel said in a radio interview today, ''Part of what is going on in America has to be seen as part of the election campaign.'' He added, however, reflecting a widespread European sentiment, ''this is a measure that the Europeans cannot accept.''
''We agree with America on most issues,'' the German minister said. ''On the issue of how to treat Iran -- with or without talks -- we have a different opinion.''
Collectively, European Union countries subscribe to a policy that they call ''critical dialogue'' with Iran, meaning that while they stand ready to castigate Teheran, they are not prepared to ostracize it.
''We think it is more correct to keep talking to Iran and not drive it into a corner,'' Mr. Kinkel said.
As evidence of the efficacy of this policy, German officials point to events last month when a senior German official, Bernd Schmidbauer, used what were described as close ties to the Iranian intelligence community to arrange an exchange of bodies and prisoners between Israel and Iranian-backed Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon.
By contrast, Mr. Dini said, the American moves ''are not going to effectively counter terrorism.''
The debate has widespread economic underpinnings.
In France, the Total Oil Company signed a $600 million deal with Iran last year to develop offshore oil fields, the biggest outstanding contract of its kind in the world. But the company said today that it did not regard the contract as being affected by the new American legislation. ''Our reading shows that sanctions will only apply to new business,'' a company spokesman said.
Iran and Libya account for one quarter of all the oil imported into the European Union countries, said Christos Papoutsis, a senior official in Brussels. Mr. Papoutsis expressed worries that sanctions against European suppliers of oil industry technology could have long-term effects on the Iranian and Libyan oil and gas industries, driving up world prices.
Italy, for instance, imports some 45 percent of its oil from Libya and Iran, according to official figures.
An important first test of the American policy could come soon in Turkey, which has close economic links with both Iran and Europe. Turkey's new Islamic Prime Minister, Necmettin Erbakan, plans a visit to Iran this weekend, his first foreign trip since taking office. The Turkish Energy Minister, Recai Kutan, is also to visit Teheran this week to discuss a 23-year, $20 billion deal for the supply of Iranian natural gas and the building of a pipeline between the two countries.One night in 1957, William Cass was watching what came to be a famous Mike Wallace television interview with Frank Lloyd Wright in the living room of his row house in Corona, Queens.
''Honey, come here, you've got to see this guy!'' Mr. Cass shouted. The Casses were in the market for a home on Staten Island, and Mr. Cass had just had the idea that Wright, who was declaiming to Mr. Wallace about America's need for affordable housing, might like to design a moderate-cost home for the Cass family.
''Write him a letter and tell him we're interested,'' Mr. Cass urged his wife. Catherine Cass said her immediate reaction was, ''Bill, you got to be crazy.''
But she did write the letter, and Wright wrote a warm letter back. And the result was a contract for the Casses to buy the first of a line of pre-fabricated houses the architect had developed with a Wisconsin builder, Marshall Erdman.
The house, called Crimson Beech after the tree out front, is one of the last works of America's master architect and the only house of his design in New York City, a metropolis he variously called ''a pig pile'' and ''a fibrous tumor.''
And now, Crimson Beech, a long, elegant sun-bathed house that hugs the summit of Staten Island's leafy Lighthouse Hill, is for sale. The initial cost was $20,000 for design and materials, a cost that escalated to well over $100,000 with installation charges and extras. The asking price now is $899,000.
If there is a buyer, the sale will mark the denouement of a loving but complicated relationship between Mrs. Cass, 72, a warm, loquacious woman of strong opinions, and the work of art in which she has made a home for 37 years.
Wright's representatives wanted Japanese art lining the gallery, a shower curtain in earth colors, no kitchen drapes. What they got, after fierce battles, were Mrs. Cass's collection of Greek dolls, a blue shower curtain, and the red, white and blue drapes featuring Benjamin Franklin that Mrs. Cass favored. But other Wright demands seemed eminently sensible, particularly his requirement that the house have a piano. And she marvels at how much sunlight swept into the house, making it easy to grow the plants she loves.
''There is a time to stay and a time to go, and I think it's time,'' Mrs. Cass said. She says that with her husband, who was the owner of an employment agency, dead and her children grown, the house is too big for just her. She said she could use the money from a sale to make many visits to her daughters and to pay for her grandchildren's educations.
Her eagerness to sell is apparent in the fact that she has reduced the price from $1.3 million when she put it on the market in the mid-1980's. ''Nobody could afford that,'' she said.
The four-bedroom, three-bathroom house is remarkably well-preserved, although a brutal winter caused the first roof leaks. The steel roof, designed to resist lightning, has never before needed repairs. Of original appliances, the stove and refrigerator have had to be replaced. Some of the carpeting chosen by Wright endures in the master bedroom.
Long ago, Mrs. Cass waged war with Morton Delson, the architect who looked after Wright's business in New York, to win electrical outlets in the long hallway that connects the front of the house to the bedrooms and is the spine of the building. Wright had deemed them esthetically obtrusive, but she could not vacuum without them. (And it is not a hallway. Wright insisted it be called a gallery.)
Mrs. Cass especially likes the times she was proved right in her battles. Wright had prescribed desert shrubbery as landscape, which Mrs. Cass protested would die as soon as it turned cold. It did.
''With Wright, everything had to be just so,'' she said. ''He had an attitude. And if that weren't enough, he had all these clones.''
But the house is more than a house, more even than a Wright house. It is a quixotic space where Norman Rockwell reproductions and a huge portrait of a bald eagle meld with the Asian screen selected to go with tables designed by Wright. It is a place where the Casses' three daughters grew up, even as Wright worshipers from more than a dozen countries knocked on the door for a look around.
In appearance, the horizontal sweep of the 5,200-square-foot structure, which is L-shaped and perches over Historic Richmondtown and New York Harbor, is most striking. The facade facing the street is one-story; the rear of the house, which is built into a hill and faces the sea, is two stories, both with wide windows. Philippine mahogany is used on both the outside and most inside walls.
A patio and heated pool designed by Wright's firm, Taliesin Associated Architects, under the leadership of William Wesley Peters, were added at the lower level in 1971. The landscaping is lush with pines, hemlock and mountain laurel.
The Cass house, or Prefab No. 1, as Wright scholars know it, is one of 350 remaining Wright houses in America. More than 100 have been lost to neglect or bulldozers.
''To Frank Lloyd Wright,'' said Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, director of archives at the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation in Scottsdale, Ariz., ''these houses were terribly important because they were trying to provide a solution to a very serious problem in this country: affordable housing. He always thought the house should go to the factory rather than skilled craftsmen to the site.''
Indeed, some Wright scholars contend the house, completed in 1959, and its four siblings around the country were vitally important to Wright -- as significant in their own way as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, which was completed in the same year in Manhattan, on Fifth Avenue at 89th Street. (The only other Wright building in New York City is the Mercedes-Benz showroom at Park Avenue and 56th Street.)New York City will make its first major service cut in recycling next month when it scales back collections for half the city's households.
The reduction -- from weekly to alternate week pickups -- is the first tangible effect of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani's $26 million cut to the city's recycling budget. The change is to begin Sept. 9.
The Mayor and Sanitation Department officials say that even though alternate week pickups may make recycling more inconvenient for homeowners and building superintendents, who will have to keep their newspapers, bottles and cans for an extra week, the change will not reduce the amount of material the city recycles.
But environmentalists, advocates of recycling and City Council members, who have pledged to fight the cuts, argue that any cut in service, added to the Mayor's recent characterization of the city's recycling goals as ''absurd,'' will discourage New Yorkers from recycling. In a city where living space is at a premium, they say, many New Yorkers may decide to throw out their recyclables rather than hunt for room to store them for two weeks.
The Sanitation Department will distribute notices on the reduced collections next week to households in the Bronx, most of Brooklyn and Harlem, Washington Heights and the Lower East Side in Manhattan. A few areas will get new recycling days.
Most of Manhattan below 110th Street and some neighborhoods in Brooklyn, including Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill, Park Slope and Fort Greene, will be exempted from the service cut because recycling trucks, which can hold 12.5 tons, are routinely filled, or nearly filled, when they make weekly rounds there. Queens and Staten Island already have alternate week collections.
Denise Virga, a resident of Dyker Heights in southeast Brooklyn and district manager of Community Board 10, which also includes the neighborhood of Bay Ridge, said homeowners and building superintendents in her neighborhood had already complained to the community board about the cuts.
''You've just gotten people used to one way and now you're going to tell them they have to accumulate more garbage in their homes?'' she asked. ''We just hope people don't get disgusted and say, 'The heck with this, I'm not going to recycle.' ''
Ms. Virga said people were worried about rats ''and a whole domino effect of other problems.'' She said the community board requested continued weekly service months ago, but did not get a response from sanitation officials.
John J. Doherty, the Sanitation Commissioner, said the decision on where to reduce pickups was based solely on where the smallest amounts of recyclables were collected. Collection is affected not only by how much people recycle, but by factors like population density and trash collection routes.
Since recycling trucks in districts like Ms. Virga's rumble through the streets every week half empty, scaling back to pickups every other week will merely cut costs and increase productivity, without reducing the city's recycling capacity, Mr. Doherty said. ''We only have so much money and we had to make some tough decisions, but we really didn't step back from recycling,'' he said. ''Maybe we started off providing too much service.''
But environmental advocates including Eric A. Goldstein, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, which is suing the city to enforce a court-mandated goal of recycling 25 percent of all residential trash, or 4,250 daily tons, disagree with that premise. The city now recycles about 14 percent of its residential garbage.
''Weekly pickups are essential for a successful recycling program because convenience for residents is key,'' he said. ''Asking people to stockpile their recyclables and then to keep Gregorian calendars for when they're supposed to put it out is more than can be expected.''
Mr. Doherty said, however, that the inconvenience caused by alternate week collections would be minimal. ''The vast majority of people won't see any difference because they live in apartment buildings and their maintenance people will deal with the change,'' he said. ''For everyone else, it means maybe you have to get a bigger garbage can so you can store it longer.
Richard Schumacher, superintendent of a 46-unit building on West 116th Street in Manhattan, said that he worried that keeping the trash longer would encourage rodents. He said the building also had a problem with people rummaging through bags for cans and bottles.
Mr. Goldstein said his organization would encourage what amounts to garbage anarchy, and would ask New Yorkers to ignore the alternate week notices and continue placing their recyclables on the street as they always had. He said he hoped that the courts or the City Council would force the Mayor to restore money for recycling.
Council leaders have vowed to protect recycling, but have not tried to stop the cuts. ''Our position is that the administration has the money to do what needs to be done,'' Stanley E. Michels, chairman of the Council's Environmental Protection Committee, said recently.So maybe this will be remembered as the brief, hot summer.
Finally, for one sticky, steamy hour in a summer of too-cool days and blanket-hugging nights, it was hot enough somewhere in the metropolitan area to actually feel like a sweltering, sweaty August day. Between 2 P.M. and 3 P.M., the thermometer registered 90 degrees -- not in Central Park, where the temperature has been stuck mostly in the mid-80's and below since June, but in Morristown, N.J.
Today is not expected to break the 67-day string of below-90-degree days in New York City, where there were 14 such days in June and July last year.
With high pressure stalled off the New England coast, it will be a same old, same old day: the early-morning fog will be a prelude to another warm afternoon -- but not quite warm enough for the big nine-oh.
And if the forecasters are right, not even Morristown will hit 90 today.
But yesterday was something else: a lazy, hazy day that brought to mind the so-far-forgotten rituals of baking and boiling and burning in the sun, of running the air-conditioner on maximum cool. Or trying to.
''I was driving around in my car, and the air-conditioning was not working,'' said G. David Newman of Morris Plains, N.J.
Mr. Newman was not sure which he found more disconcerting: the unexpected, heat-induced need for a cool blast from the dashboard, or the fact that he had had $2,200 worth of work done on his black 1986 Alfa Romeo in June and now the air-conditioning was on the blink again. ''They repaired the air-conditioning,'' he said. ''They said they took it out for a road test. They said it stopped working. They said it was a minor electrical problem and they fixed it. It hasn't been a problem until now.''
Of course, he had not thought to turn on the air-conditioning until yesterday.
On July days that were balmy rather than blistering, he would roll down the back windows with their circular cranks. The breeze would whip through his hair as he ran his errands, shifting the five-speed transmission and wondering why he needed that fifth gear on local streets.
Tom Piersel, who owns a garden store not far from Mr. Newman's house in Morris Plains, dreamed of such a breeze yesterday.
By the time the temperature hit 90, he had gulped down three big cups of iced coffee and had watered the plants out front twice. This was a record on both counts: last month, he never needed more than two iced coffees and one watering a day, and he did not have to worry about the merchandise wilting before it could be delivered.
''The irises pop in the arrangements,'' he said. ''They're going from hard stem to wide-open bloom in about 10 minutes. Of course, irises are a spring flower. They're beautiful when they're open, but they don't last in this kind of heat.''
Neither do the customers.
''People kept planting straight through July,'' he said. ''Once it gets above 90, business ceases. Nobody goes out to do that kind of work in extreme heat. Now we're looking at an empty store.''
Robert Bongo, though, was looking at a full pool.
''This is the busiest day that we've had all year,'' said Mr. Bongo, the manager of the Burnham Park Pool in Morristown. ''In fact, we had to put two extra guards up to account for the volume.'' (The usual complement is eight guards on duty.)
''We've had such poor weather this summer,'' he sighed as 450 swimmers crowded into the Olympic-size pool.
That was more than twice as many people as over the weekend, he said -- a weekend that was like so many weekends this summer: rainy, cloudy and cool. It was a weekend when people could leave the SPF-30 suntan lotion at home, when people who live near the ocean talked about finding mold on their dishes, when people longingly remembered a verse from Solomon: ''For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone.''
For a while, yesterday seemed to have the makings of a record-breaker. Couples debated whether to have an early-morning cup of coffee outdoors or to stay in the coolness of their favorite cafes, and having chosen the outdoor option, they felt the sweat in no time.Set back by conservatives who removed the compromise ''tolerance'' language on abortion from the Republican Party platform, moderates vowed today to wage a fight at the convention next week to reinstate at least an acknowledgment that some Republicans favor abortion rights.
Govs. William F. Weld of Massachusetts and Pete Wilson of California spearheaded efforts today to overhaul language approved on Monday in San Diego by a platform subcommittee. Every effort was overwhelmingly rejected and proponents could not even muster the 20 percent of the delegates on the platform committee needed to force a roll-call vote.
That failure increased the chances of a messy floor fight over abortion when the convention opens next Monday and delegates will vote on the platform. Bob Dole, the party's all-but-certain Presidential nominee, had tried to avoid the distraction of such a floor fight by yielding to conservatives in advance.
The new language says Republicans have different views on different subjects but does not mention abortion specifically as one of those subjects. It removes references to differences on issues of ''personal conscience'' that the Dole campaign had inserted last month. It also includes a new sentence that suggests that those who perform abortions will be prosecuted. It still calls for a constitutional amendment against abortion and opposes the use of any Federal money for abortions.
Mr. Weld said today that he, Mr. Wilson, Gov. Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey and Senator Olympia J. Snowe of Maine had succeeded in gaining pledges of support from leaders of eight state delegations, two more than the six needed to bring a matter to the convention floor. He also said that he had been in contact with senior Dole aides throughout the day and that they had given him their blessing in the hope that the matter could be resolved before the convention opens.
Mr. Weld, Mr. Wilson and Ms. Snowe released a joint statement today saying: ''We are deeply disappointed and troubled by this flawed decision, which flies in the face of Republican opinion across the country. We believe that abortion should be treated as a matter of conscience rather than an opportunity for government intrusion into a deeply personal decision.''
Gov. George E. Pataki of New York, who also supports abortion rights, stopped short of endorsing a floor fight but said the removal of tolerance language from the platform was ''clearly out of step with the majority of our party and with the majority of Americans.'' His spokeswoman, Zenia Mucha, said today that he had not decided what he would do if the matter could not be resolved before the delegates voted, ''but if it gets to the floor, he'll vote with the pro-choice forces.'' Governor Whitman said today that that Mr. Dole's yielding to the anti-abortion forces jeopardized his chances of winning the November election. She said she believed that many delegates were more concerned with keeping the tolerance language out of the platform than they were with getting Mr. Dole elected.
But as the moderates began mobilizing, the conservatives demonstrated that they were geared for battle throughout the convention.
Ralph Reed, executive director of the Christian Coalition, said that his forces had lined up 102 people to work as whips on the convention floor in the event of a fight. He said they have bought a computer system to allow the whips to communicate with each other and have set up a ''war room'' in a nearby hotel.
The renewed dispute over abortion erupted as Mr. Dole was reaping relatively favorable publicity for the economic plan he announced on Monday and as he prepared to make public his Vice Presidential running mate later this week, which the Dole campaign hoped would produce positive publicity.
After moving toward the moderates, Mr. Dole seesawed, then reversed himself and capitulated last month to anti-abortion forces. But his nearly complete capitulation was not complete enough, leaving him without the votes on Monday to stave off their insistence that he rid the platform of all language endorsing tolerance.
Speaking by satellite to the platform committee today, Mr. Dole, ignored abortion and discussed his economic plan instead. At a news conference in San Diego, Speaker Newt Gingrich avoided answering numerous questions about abortion.
The conservatives' hold on the platform was evident from a new New York Times/CBS News poll of Republican convention delegates, which showed that only 28 percent favored the tolerance plank offered last month by Mr. Dole.
The poll of all 1,236 delegates, conducted during July and August, showed that 4 percent would not permit abortion at all, 28 percent would permit it only to save the woman's life, and 38 percent would permit abortion in a wider group of circumstances, including rape and incest and to save the woman's life. Twelve percent more would permit it subject to somewhat greater restrictions than exist now. Eleven percent would permit it in all circumstances, while 8 percent expressed no opinion.
The poll showed that 49 percent of the delegates said the platform should officially oppose abortion, while 40 percent said it should take no official stand. Rank-and-file Republican voters nationwide are slightly less anti-abortion that their representatives at the convention.
In 1992, Governor Weld and others had vowed a floor fight at the convention, only to drop it at the last minute when their support from other party leaders fizzled. Governor Wilson, who was one of those backing off the floor fight in 1992, was asked tonight in San Diego what had changed this year.
Asserting that he represented a majority of Republicans, Mr. Wilson said that he and others were doing ''a doubtful kindness to George Bush'' by backing off, suggesting that had they taken the matter to the floor, they might have prevailed in making the party appear more tolerant.
He said abortion-rights supporters ''may be a minority inside the convention hall; it is a majority outside the convention hall.''
Asked if there were a floor fight this year, would he lead it, Mr. Wilson replied, ''If necessary.''
POLITICS: THE PLATFORMEarly most mornings, the Port Charlotte Town Center mall fills with brisk gray-haired walkers ready for their air-conditioned laps. The exercise can end with coffee at the food courtyard or a blood pressure check at the Bon Secours-St. Joseph Healthcare Group storefront, next to the video store.
With 34 percent of its population of about 127,000 aged 65 and older, Charlotte County is a retiree destination north of Fort Myers where hospitals are the major employers, upscale restaurants offer ''early bird specials'' for dinner starting at 4 P.M. and elderly voters who want to save public money clash with younger ones who want to spend it for improving waterways for boats. It is a place where the young and old work side by side in groceries and curse each other on the road.
It also provides a glimpse into the future. Federal demographers say that Florida, the nation's most popular place to retire, is a precursor of the population changes that await the rest of the country and are expected to transform it in ways big and small.
While the Bureau of the Census has projected a big increase in elderly people with the aging of the baby boom generation -- those born from 1946 to 1964 -- Florida already offers other states a laboratory for dealing with the needs of a graying population. It has by far the largest proportion of elderly of any state, 19 percent in a population of 14 million, according to 1995 estimates.
And it already faces issues expected to shape public policy as baby boomers begin turning 65 in 2011: the fiscal burdens of caring for the elderly, the need to adapt housing, transportation and services to an older population and the challenge of keeping older people productive.
As resources are strained, particularly as states are threatened with limitations in Federal aid to assist the poor, political experts warn of a more acute intergenerational conflict over government spending, whether on education or prisons or health care.
''Some of the baby boomers think the government should provide everything, and that's where we have a disagreement,'' said Pat Vondran, 65, a Punta Gorda resident who faithfully attends meetings of the county commission and school board to speak out against what she sees as wasteful spending. ''We worked for everything. Our generation was a pay as you go generation. We didn't grow up on credit cards.''
In a report this year, the Bureau of the Census said that while Florida was the only state with a population more than 16 percent who were 65 and over in 1993, 31 other states are projected to catch up to those proportions by 2020. Florida, however, is expected to hold on to its lead -- while nearly 1 in 5 of its residents are 65 and older now, that count is projected to swell to 1 in 4 by 2020.
Demographers say the aging explosion is inevitable but its effect is uncertain. A large proportion of the people who are 85 and older are frail and poor, and this age group is growing. On the other hand, baby boomers tend to be healthier and better-educated. Because more women are in the work force, they will have their own pensions and retirement income.
In Florida, many of the implications of an aging citizenry are evident, from the creation of retirement villages and adults-only condominiums to the priority elected officials give to issues like laws under which people can be committed to institutions involuntarily and scams that prey on the elderly.
To accommodate diminished eyesight, for instance, the State Transportation Department has a program to make road signs larger, space pavement reflectors 40 feet apart rather than the standard 80 feet and paint lane strips of 6 inches rather than the usual 4 inches. Accident statistics from the Florida Department of Motor Vehicles show that people 85 and older are the second most dangerous drivers, after teen-agers.
''They're going to be out there anyway,'' Dave Anderson, a state traffic engineer, said of the elderly drivers. ''Anything we can do to make it safer for them, we'll do.''
But the state has yet to grapple with problems that will soon creep up in other states as well, like the need for a public transportation network, particularly in rural areas, for those who can no longer drive.
''We call what's going to happen to the country the Floridaization of the United States,'' said Fernando M. Torres-Gil, first Assistant Secretary for aging in the Federal Department of Health and Human Services. ''States and local communities are working at different speeds to address what Florida is now facing.''
Florida officials say the elderly bring in about $53 billion in Social Security and other earnings yearly -- more than comes from agriculture or tourism. Throughout the state, they swell volunteer ranks in hospitals, as mentors for schoolchildren and lend expertise to local governments as well as serve many of the needs for companionship and caring of the elderly themselves.
But they also pose great fiscal concerns. The greatest, state officials say, is the mounting cost of dealing with disability and chronic illness. Most state spending on the elderly is currently for financing of Medicaid patients in nursing homes and other long-term-care facilities, a $1.4 billion annual cost that is shared with the Federal Government and is growing, said E. Bentley Lipscomb, Florida's Secretary of Elder Affairs.
Because of the growing need for custodial care of the elderly, Florida is seeking Federal authority to use some Medicaid money to pay for cheaper alternatives to nursing homes, such as houses in which the elderly can live together as a group and services provided by professionals in the individual homes of the elderly on a regular basis.
Even in Florida, where many residents are retirees who tend to be more affluent than the average elderly person, state officials say the elderly often find themselves scraping by in later years. They are also in need of government help, as they not only get sick but live longer than they ever planned for financially.
Fear of impoverishment and of facing the rising costs of health care on fixed incomes fuels many of the battles the elderly wage over government spending in Charlotte County. At a recent meeting of the Charlotte County Tax Watch group, five candidates for the county commission answered questions from the audience, like ''Do you approve of the use of cellular telephones by county employees at taxpayers' expense?'' ''How would you control the use of outside consultants?''
County officials say the most divisive political fights have been over special assessments, for projects like extending sewer lines or dredging a canal for use by boats. They say younger residents, including early retirees whose active lives can differ vastly from those of the advanced elderly, demand a higher level of services than older ones, who may not be willing or able to pay for them.Scientists studying a meteorite that fell to Earth from Mars have identified organic compounds and certain minerals that they conclude ''are evidence for primitive life on early Mars.''
The discovery of the first organic molecules ever seen in a Martian rock is being hailed as startling and compelling evidence that at least microbial life existed on Mars long ago, when the planet was warmer and wetter. The molecules found in the rock, which left Mars some 15 million years ago, are being described as the fossil trace of past biological activity.
In a statement issued yesterday, as unofficial word of the discovery spread, Daniel S. Goldin, the NASA Administrator, confirmed that scientists had ''made a startling discovery that points to the possibility that a primitive form of microscopic life may have existed on Mars more than three billion years ago.''
A detailed description of the research, conducted at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, is to be given at a news conference at 1 P.M. today at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in Washington. The journal Science is publishing a full report on the work in its Aug. 16 issue.
A draft of the Science paper, written by a team led by Dr. David S. McKay of the Johnson Space Center, identified the telltale compounds as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, called PAH's, which often have biological origins and are associated with coal and diesel exhaust, and the minerals magnetite and iron sulfide, both of which are related to bacterial action on Earth. In addition, they found some carbonate globules that are similar in texture and size to materials produced by bacteria on Earth.
''The PAH's, the carbonate globules and their associated secondary mineral phases and textures could thus be fossil remains of a past Martian biota,'' the researchers concluded.
Although the authors of the paper were under orders from NASA not to talk before the news conference, scientists familiar with the research spoke in unusually enthusiastic terms about the work. One scientist called the results ''unequivocal.'' Another said it was one of the most stunning discoveries in the solar system in recent decades. But they cautioned that it would take more research to assess the full implications of the discovery for the longtime quest for extraterrestrial life.
Dr. David C. Black, director of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, praised the research as being ''very, very cautious'' work that would not have been possible two or three years ago, before new analytical instruments for electron microscopy were available.
''The signs are all consistent with biological activity,'' Dr. Black said. ''But what makes the case much more interesting is that the compounds are found all together in proximity within the meteorite. That is really suggestive.''
Reservations about the interpretation of the discovery were expressed by Dr. Jack D. Farmer, a geologist and paleobiologist at the Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif. He said the meteorite, as one of the oldest rocks ever identified in the solar system, contained evidence that Mars had water early in its history and that this environment, with liquid water and organic molecules, was one where life could have existed.
''We didn't know this about Mars until now,'' Dr. Farmer said. ''It gives us a lot of compelling reasons to go back to Mars. But it doesn't tell us anything definite about life. It's interesting, but not convincing.''
Because of its possible scientific and philosophical ramifications, Mr. Goldin briefed President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore last week about the discovery. They were reported to be ''excited'' about the research.
After the space agency makes its formal announcement, White House officials said, President Clinton is likely to call for more study of the question of fossil life on Mars and may propose adding resources to ongoing NASA projects to place unmanned spacecraft and roving vehicles on the planet.
The last major thrust of Mars exploration by the United States was the Viking project, which landed two robotic craft on the cold, arid surface and conducted weeks of tests, sampling the soil for any trace of biological activity. The results appeared to rule out any lingering hope of Martian life in some microbial form, though other investigations showed that water must have flooded the Martian surface in the distant past, raising the possibility that life existed there soon after the planet's formation 4.5 billion years ago and then disappeared. The scientific plans for future missions call for focusing on searches for fossils in regions where water once stood and might still be present in a kind of subsurface permafrost.
The meteorite bearing the organic molecules is 1 of only 12 identified as having come from Mars, based on analyses of their chemistry, compared with that of Martian surface materials examined by the Viking instruments. It is the oldest, having crystallized from molten rock about 4.5 billion years ago, in the planet's infancy. The carbonates, chemicals closely associated with the PAH molecules, dated from 3.6 billion years ago.
About 15 million years ago, scientists estimate, a huge asteroid collided with Mars, gouging many pieces of rock from beneath the surface and scattering them into space. One of them eventually fell on the icy Allan Hills in Antarctica about 13,000 years ago. Scientists found the meteorite in 1984 and named it Allan Hills 84001, but identified it as Martian only recently. Experts believe that many other fragments of Mars probably lie unrecognized in meteorite collections.
As soon as the meteorite was found to be Martian, Dr. McKay and his colleagues began investigating its pitted and fractured dark surfaces, making thin slices of the rock where they detected the organic molecules. The work involved scientists from the Johnson center, Stanford University, the University of Georgia and McGill University in Montreal.
The scientists described the PAH molecules, which contain multiple connected rings of carbon atoms, as being clear and distinct. They studied the samples further to make sure the organic molecules had originated on Mars, not as the result of terrestrial contamination. One telling piece of evidence was the fact that the concentration of the molecules increased as the analysis moved inward; if those molecules had been contamination, they would have been concentrated on the surface.
These PAH molecules are common on Earth, and many of them have biological origins related to bacteria. They are abundant, for example, in ancient sedimentary rocks, coal and petroleum, the residue of the chemical changes that occurred to the dead marine plankton and plant life that were the source of these rocks and so-called fossil fuels. The PAH's also occur during partial combustion, as when a candle burns and when a steak is grilled on charcoal.
The scientists began to sense they might be approaching a big discovery when they noted other characteristics of the rock's chemistry and mineralogy. The highest concentrations of PAH's were associated with carbonates. The carbonates, found in the rock fissures, were younger than the rock itself. The magnetite and iron-sulfide particles inside the carbonate globules are in many ways similar to particles produced by bacteria on Earth.The man arrested and charged with a rape in Central Park over the weekend won early release from a prison sentence for his fourth rape and robbery conviction under a law that requires the state to free well-behaved convicts once they have served two-thirds of their maximum sentence. The release came even after he set a cell fire at one prison and assaulted a female correction officer at another, state correction and parole officials said yesterday.
The arrest of the man, John Suggs, 45, of Manhattan, and the revelations about his long criminal history set off criticism from Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and other officials who said the justice system was too quick to release violent offenders.
Changes to the parole system proposed by Gov. George E. Pataki and enacted by the State Legislature in October 1995 now make it harder for repeat violent offenders to be released, forcing them to serve more than 85 percent of their maximum term. The changes, however, do not apply to the majority of the state's prisoners who, like Mr. Suggs, were convicted before the law was passed.
During his most recent prison term, from Aug. 6, 1979, to March 20, 1992, Mr. Suggs appeared before a parole board five times. He was denied parole all five times, the last in December 1990, when he drew criticism from the board for his involvement in the assault on a female guard at the Fishkill prison in 1989.
As punishment for that assault, for the small fire he set in his cell at the Woodbourne prison in 1987 and for other infractions, he lost 12 months of ''good time.'' This loss would have kept him in jail for a year after he completed two-thirds of his maximum 20-year term, said James B. Flateau, a spokesman for the State Correctional Services Department.
Yet, in late 1991, a review committee of officials at Auburn prison, where Mr. Suggs was then held, restored 10 months of lost ''good'' time.
Mr. Suggs's case highlights the conflict in the criminal justice system between the desire for the longest possible sentences for serious offenders and the need to give prisoners incentives for good behavior in an effort to protect prison workers, officials said.
Mr. Flateau said that in the two years after the assault, Mr. Suggs remained on good behavior.
''We are talking about a very minor assault on a security officer and a small fire in a cell,'' he said. ''We are not talking about somebody who burned down a cellblock.''
Mr. Flateau said decisions on early release, which are now made at Correctional Services Department headquarters in Albany and not at individual prisons, have always been intended to make prisons safer and not to benefit the convicts.
Under the Governor's new rules, repeat violent offenders must serve six-sevenths of their sentences and are only eligible for early release if they have willingly participated in rehabilitative programs.The bridal party burst into the Ramada Plaza Hotel near Kennedy Airport in a blur of white chiffon and dainty lace, the bridesmaids fluttering like pink hummingbirds and the lovers locked arm in arm. Immersed in the celebration of the life they were beginning, the couple may not have noticed the tired man with red-rimmed eyes who was mourning the life he had lost.
The man, Olivier Michel, was signing the release forms for his brother's body in the hotel restaurant. He was smoothing the burgundy jacket his brother would wear in his coffin. He was steeling himself to hear exactly how his brother died, to learn whether he was killed instantly when T.W.A. Flight 800 exploded over the Atlantic Ocean or whether he was alive when he fell from the sky. And he was struggling to imagine how he would ever survive in a world that now seems so oblivious to his pain.
''The world is back to normal,'' Mr. Michel, 32, said yesterday as he polished the brown leather shoes that his 28-year-old brother, Pascal, would wear in death. ''People smiling, joking, marrying. I can't bear it.
''Everyone says we must think about new lives, but how can I imagine a life without my brother?''
The flags still fly at half-staff at the Ramada, the unassuming airport hotel that emerged as a symbol of sorrow after the T.W.A. crash three weeks ago when it became a temporary home for 194 families waiting to recover their dead. But the lectern in the parking lot, where grieving relatives once vented their fury and frustration to reporters, has been rolled away. The grand ballroom, where government officials once tallied the daily body count, now holds wedding banquets and computer trade shows. The nearby beach where the families gathered to mourn their relatives now draws sunbathers in bikinis.
Only six mourning families remain at the hotel.
Mr. Michel has spent 19 days there, longer than any other single family member. When he flies back to France today with his dead brother, his departure will mean more than the end of a long stay at a quickly normalizing hotel. It will also mirror the psychological journey already begun by other mourning families as they move from shock and denial to the business of somehow fitting their gnawing grief into the framework of their ordinary lives.
''The reality of the tragedy is going to be overwhelming now, especially as families return to empty houses or pass their lost child's room,'' said Steve Brody, a psychologist who counseled the grieving families as part of the American Red Cross mental health disaster team.
''It's going to be hard to deal with the everyday mundane realities,'' Mr. Brody said. ''How do you listen to someone struggle to match the wallpaper to the rug when you've just buried your children?''
Three weeks after the crash, Mr. Michel, a businessman from Montpellier, in southern France, no longer cries when he speaks of his brother. Instead, he fills the pages of his legal notebooks with the neatly printed names and phone numbers of the families he has met at the Ramada. And as he drinks espresso at the hotel bar, he calmly discusses his plans to create an association of the grieving families and raise enough money to build a memorial to the victims on the beach in Long Island.
But just as 35 unrecovered bodies still hide beneath the water, the pain that has shattered Mr. Michel remains just out of sight. ''If I think too hard, I throw myself into the sea with my brother,'' said Mr. Michel, puffing on a cigarette. He had stopped smoking, but now he keeps a Marlboro in his mouth most of the time.
The navy blue jacket he wears belonged to his brother. As did the white linen shirt. The blue tie. The black slacks. The clothes on the metal hangers in his hotel room. Mr. Michel says his sister, Marie Christelle, who accompanied him from France, has refused to touch the outfits, frightened by the feel of death. But to him it is a way to hold on to his brother a little longer.
''We always share everything,'' Mr. Michel said of their clothing and lives. ''And I love so much my brother. I will not let his death change that.''
But the explosion of Flight 800 has already changed everything. And as the families return to their old lives, they find that the crash -- and their belief that it was caused by a bomb -- has forced them to question almost everything they had ever believed in: the sanctity of life and family; the essential goodness of human beings; the love and protection of a higher power.
''I got the feeling I can't believe in God anymore,'' said Charlotte Bean of Flushing, Queens, who has buried her 48-year-old daughter, Sandra, and boxed away all of her photographs. ''The ministers say He needed her, that she's an angel now. But we needed her, too. Why would He snatch my beautiful daughter away?''
In the community of mourners, Mrs. Bean and Mr. Michel are among the lucky ones. They, at least, have bodies to bury.
Three weeks after the crash, Judy Sorenson of Sherman, Conn., still weeps whenever she remembers that the closest she may come to her 61-year-old unrecovered husband, Rod Foster, is standing barefoot in the Long Island surf.
And Ronald Yee of Honolulu, Hawaii, who was asked by the Suffolk County Medical Examiner's office last week to submit a sample of his blood to compare his D.N.A. with samples drawn from unidentified remains, now fears that the body of his sister, Judith, who would have turned 54 yesterday, may be unrecognizable or no longer whole.
For weeks, Mr. Michel also feared that his brother would never be found. He arrived at the Ramada on July 19, two days after the crash, and the days quickly blurred in a haze of morning and afternoon briefings from government officials.
When he managed to sleep, he tossed violently and woke sweating, tangled in his sheets. And he found that he could not remember simple things, like where he had left the key to his hotel room or what he had eaten or whether he had eaten. ''I think I eat chicken for 15 days,'' said Mr. Michel, who has lost five pounds.Seventy Republican freshmen, the self-styled revolutionaries whose election fate is the key to control of the House of Representatives, are out campaigning this week, some comfortable -- even safe -- and others battling to keep their careers alive.
Their strengths, and their vulnerabilities, are typified by Representatives Bob Barr, a Georgian who won narrowly in 1994 but is a strong favorite today, and Daniel Frisa, a Long Islander who won comfortably then but now faces a tough fight.
Although Mr. Barr won in 1994 by only four percentage points, he seems solidly entrenched, in tune with his district, near Atlanta, as when, even on the day of the Olympic bombing, he opposes involving the Army in fighting terrorists, or when he boasts of his authorship of legislation against homosexual marriages.
Mr. Frisa won in his Nassau County district by 13 points two years ago. He has been busy raising money from political action committees, $356,750 in 18 months, and on June 30 he had $563,756 in the bank, to his opponent's $84,828. But he is concerned that a lagging Presidential campaign by Bob Dole may diminish Republican turnout. His opponent, Carolyn McCarthy, scores against him by attacking his vote for Mr. Barr's effort to repeal the ban on assault weapons. Her husband was killed in the Long Island Rail Road shootings in 1993.
The Georgian is not among the Democrats' most serious targets. The Long Islander is, even though the disparity between Mr. Frisa's war chest and Mrs. McCarthy's is itself an exaggerated reflection of the huge financial advantage that Republicans enjoy in their efforts to retain control of the House.
For the Democrats to get from their current 198 seats to a majority of 218, they must oust quite a few freshmen to make up for likely losses in open seats in the South.
''It would be nice to take about 30 of them,'' said Representative Martin Frost of Texas, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
It is a tall order, as measured by history. Freshmen were once seen as especially vulnerable because they had not established roots in their districts. But in some recent elections, they have actually won bigger majorities than their elders, a so-called ''sophomore surge.''
After the last two big shifts in House seats, freshmen survived pretty well. Fifty of the Republican freshmen elected with Ronald Reagan in 1980 ran in 1982, and only 13 lost. Fifty-six of the Democrats first elected in 1982 ran in 1984, and, despite that year's Reagan landslide, only 4 lost.
Claims about the number of the 70 seats now held by Republican freshmen that are really in play vary widely. Democrats say 46 are real targets of theirs. But Representative Bill Paxon of New York, head of the National Republican Congressional Committee, said, ''I honestly think it comes down to about 15 that have truly come under sustained attack from the other side, that are truly in the cross hairs.''
Mr. Paxon said observers who looked only at vote totals from 1994 failed to notice how ''much time and energy we have put in'' since then, using prized committee assignments, fund-raising help and advice from senior members to cement the majority.
Each freshman's race has its anomalies, but there are common themes. Mr. Barr talks of cutting spending, Mr. Frisa of fighting crime. In Highland County, Ohio, a few days ago, one embattled freshman, Representative Frank A. Cremeans, was stressing welfare and term limits. The Republican message is that the revolution has begun, and must be maintained.
Opposition is always blunter, and the Democratic approach is to wrap the incumbents in Newt Gingrich and the threat of Medicare cuts, and promise to defend the environment and student loans against extremists.
If issues and image were all that mattered, the Democrats would probably have an edge. Protecting Medicare is a leading issue, and a recent poll by Harvard University and the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation found overwhelming opposition to cuts, whatever their purpose.
It may be too late for most Republicans to convince voters that their plan was not a cut as Democrats said it was, but instead ''saving Medicare by increasing the spending in a responsible way, by responsible amounts,'' as Mr. Barr told volunteers to explain the issue to the elderly.
But Republicans see the newly passed welfare legislation, a central promise in the Contract With America, as evidence that they are in touch with the national mood. Recent polls, they contend, show a narrowing in the general Democratic lead.
And if money were the only factor, Republicans would be home free. The freshmen have been raising money since they arrived in 1995. The typical Republican freshman had $276,726 in the bank on June 30; the average Democratic challenger had just $90,942. And the Supreme Court has just made it much easier for parties to spend as much as they want to help Congressional candidates. The Republicans have a lot more to spend, and are using it on television to counter the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s message against their freshmen.
Still, there are 17 freshman districts where the Democratic challenger had at least $150,000 in the bank on June 30, a sum suggesting that those challengers will get their message out, even if they are outspent. Serious challengers usually raise most of their money late, after word gets around that they have a decent chance, and so quite a few more will be heard.
Mrs. McCarthy is probably one of them. She did not enter the race until May 25, and so the $84,828 she reported on June 30 was not bad. Last week she said she now had $160,000 in the bank and expected to spend $600,000.
And she already has something most challengers must spend heavily to buy: name recognition. As a result of the shooting that took her husband's life, and the resulting trial, Mrs. McCarthy, a 52-year-old nurse, is well known in New York's Fourth Congressional District, which runs from the border of Queens through central Nassau County.I'M always complaining about my ponds,'' said Carolyne Roehm, the former fashion designer, glancing toward the extravagant series of interconnecting ponds and waterfalls on what was once a dry meadow at Weatherstone Farm, her sprawling estate in Sharon, Conn.
The watery idyll, for which she once had such high hopes, is now a sea of frothy green scum that her gardeners scoop -- to little avail -- once a week.
Walden was never like this.
''I bought little grass carp to eat the algae, and now they're practically the size of whales,'' Ms. Roehm lamented, ''but I still have algae.'' This week, a frantic call went out for a supply of Clear Difference, an algaecide, and Muckbuster, an enzyme that digests fish waste.
Ms. Roehm's enormous water garden was installed at considerable expense during her marriage in the 1980's to Henry Kravis, the billionaire leveraged-buyout specialist. So sophisticated is the high-tech recirculating system for her aquatic Eden that, at the flick of a dial, the water can be made to fall at three speeds: babbling, gushing or Niagara-torrential.
''My head groundsman turns it on full blast, and I'm forever asking him to turn it down,'' she said. ''I think many of us have a yearning for this great pastoral scene, but the reality doesn't quite match the fantasy.''
Still, the rush to create ornamental ponds in unprecedented numbers across the nation is creating a new chapter in American gardening history.
''Swimming pools are passe,'' said Alan Sperling, the president of the National Pond Society, in Marietta, Ga., who keeps a national register of the country's two million nonagricultural ponds (and reported $750 million in national sales of pond services and supplies last year). He says the number of ponds is growing by 10 to 15 percent a year, with an astonishing estimate of 250,000 new ponds expected this year and for each of the next five years. ''Happy pondering,'' is his cheery way of concluding telephone conversations. He gleefully reported that more new ponds are being installed than swimming pools.
But why this sudden preponderance of ponds?
''People want to be connected to their land,'' said Dorothy Kalins, the editor of Garden Design magazine. ''Creating a pond is a little like playing God with the aid of a recycling pump. In a way it's an act of supreme arrogance, but you get a big bang for your effort -- much more so than with a vegetable garden, which offers a subtler bang.''
Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University, said the link between people and ponds has a long pedigree: ''Ponds provide a prehistoric connection to the environment. As primates, we dwelled by shallow ponds and lakes, traveling from one body of water to another to survive.''
''Ponds have become incredibly popular in the past two years,'' said John Troy, the proprietor of Troy's, a garden supply store in Bedford, N.Y. ''This year, we've put in 35 already. We only began selling pond supplies three years ago because so many people were asking for them.''
Mr. Sperling defines a pond as ''anything larger than a fishbowl and smaller than a lake.''
Attempting to install a pond of any size that gives the impression of having been wrought by nature itself requires a level of artifice that is rarely achieved without considerable expense -- which can be very considerable when imported fancy fish are included. An exotic collectible koi can cost $10,000 and is nerve-rackingly vulnerable to any passing blue heron cruising for a buffet.
Any pond starts with a hole and a lot of plastic (or bentonite clay, if it is large enough to require a bulldozer). After the lining, without which the hole becomes just an oversize puddle that seeps back into the soil, comes the dirt; then plants, water and fish, in ecologically amenable proportions. Natural ponds are fed by streams or springs, but in those that are built, the water usually has to be kept moving with a pump. If it stagnates, it will be a fishy death trap and paradise for mosquitoes and algae, which can turn a water wonderland into a seething sea of green.
As Mr. Sperling put it: ''You never dream how much wildlife you have in your community until you build a pond. Butterflies, dragonflies, swallows, raccoons, snakes, frogs and toads appear, just to name a few.''
Barry Kieselstein-Cord, the jeweler and fashion accessories designer, extols the glories of skinny-dipping in his pond in Millbrook, N.Y. ''Nude swimming in it is very sensual,'' he said.
And perhaps slightly risky, given a pond's come-hither charm for snapping turtles.
''I've seen a turtle snap off the end of a broomstick with one bite,'' said Cynthia Rice, the owner of Beardsley Gardens, a nursery in Sharon. Even with a modest pond, she added, one should expect snapping turtles. ''They're very common, and you can't keep them out,'' she said. ''Somehow, they just arrive. They'll travel over land to find your pond, and they can be ferocious.''
The path to pond bliss is strewn with other obstacles, not the least of which is geese, whose droppings can be an irksome pollutant; torn and leaky plastic pond liners; muskrats, which chew the roots of the water plants (''Even Monet had muskrats,'' said Donald E. Deuster, a pond owner in Libertyville, Ill., who received Garden Design magazine's 1995 golden trowel award for water gardens); costly or unsightly fences (required for safety, depending on depth, as with swimming pools), and faulty acid-alkaline balance.The Government is talking austerity, the labor unions are talking strikes, unification has cost a fortune, jobs are scarce as hens' teeth. And now the trains don't run on time anymore.
It is, of course, axiomatic that punctuality on the railroads is a function of dictatorships. Mussolini, it is said, made Italy's trains run on time. The same achievement was ascribed to Hitler in Germany.
Conversely, railroad schedules that have more to do with the scheduler's wish-fulfillment than timely arrivals and departures are generally held to be the hallmarks of societies struggling toward, or receding from, their prime.
Britons like to say that the only train that leaves on time is the one for which you arrive with a nano-second's tardiness: all others leave late.
But in Germany, where the notion of punctuality is closely intertwined with the concept of perfection, schedules -- whether for trains, or meetings or auto production lines -- form a large part of the national spine.
So why are at least one-third of express trains running late -- late being defined as delayed by more than five minutes -- compared with only one-tenth just three years ago?
One answer, disputed by the German Railways, is downsizing after the fusion of the old east and west German railway systems.
Since January 1994, when the company began a long process supposed to lead to privatization by the year 2002, 100,000 jobs out of more than 500,000 have been lost, including those of some of the people who drive the trains. Some of Germany's most prestigious Inter City Express trains, resplendent in silver livery, have been known to run up to two and a half hours late because replacement crews did not turn up for work.
Then, there's the aging fleet of locomotives that are not sent for major maintenance checks as often as they once were, meaning that they break down more often, causing delays, especially in these hot summer days.
But, perhaps most incongruous of all, some people blame the schedules themselves for the problems associated with keeping to schedule.
In its drive to save time by reducing the waiting periods between train connections, German Railways has pared connection times to such a minimum that if one major train is slightly late, many other connecting trains have to wait, too, so the delays multiply.
Neither do the lean, mean schedules make room for delays caused by work on the tracks, particularly between eastern and western Germany: a Hamburg-Berlin express was listed in timetables last year as taking 2 hours 59 minutes for the journey, even though the trip routinely took well over three hours.
The opposition Social Democrats have already lodged a parliamentary protest against ''the at times dramatic delays in rail traffic.'' Pro Bahn, a private advocacy group in Munich representing rail travelers, said complaints were pouring in from people who said that between a half and two-thirds of the trains they took arrived late.
''Up until early 1994, 90 percent of the trains were on time,'' said Holger Jansen, a spokesman for Pro Bahn. ''Now it's 65 percent. These days, the railways won't even give out the punctuality statistics.''Charles de Gaulle Airport in this township just northeast of Paris handles 30 million passengers a year. About 45,000 people work here, servicing and refueling planes, processing passengers on 1,000 flights a day, and loading cargo and baggage.
The airport's staff is outnumbered by its rabbits -- as many as 50,000 of them, according to Jean Valissant, one of the two full-time gamekeepers the airport employs to try to keep from being completely overrun.
''It's a rabbit paradise,'' Mr. Valissant admitted the other day on a tour of their domain -- 5,000 acres of fenced-in short grass and cornfields lining the airport's two main runways. Electronic scarecrows emit scarifying noises to keep birds away from airplanes on takeoff and final approach, and incidentally from preying on rabbits.
That leaves the burden of rabbit population control on foxes.
Maitre Renard is clearly not up to the job here. Roissy rabbits nest right up against the main terminal buildings, and burrow brazenly next to the runways, apparently aware by now that the big metal birds roaring past will never swoop down on them.
There are other solutions, one of which is to try to turn as many bunnies as possible into civet de lapin. So, this fall, the airport will resume rabbit hunts for selected guests with hunting licenses, but only in safely distant reaches of the grounds.
''The rabbits are quite healthy,'' said Joel Genty, the airport's environmental supervisor. ''They eat very well here, and their meat doesn't taste like jet fuel or anything like that.''
But even the hunts are not enough. ''If they burrow too close to a runway or a taxiway, they can undermine it and start a process of erosion that can lead to collapse,'' said Mr. Valissant, who added that they can also nibble holes in cables to landing lights. So, from time to time, a ferreter is called in to literally ferret the rabbits out of their burrows.
But it is still mostly a lost cause. ''We took 3,755 rabbits last year with nets and ferrets,'' he said. ''But if you come out here at 8 in the morning you'll see up to a thousand of them hopping around everywhere you look.''
He dodged between taxiing planes in an airport patrol car toward one of the far runways. Fat rabbits nibbled placidly as a Japan Air Lines Boeing 747 came in for a landing. ''They're getting too close again,'' he said. ''Look at these ridges here -- they look like a big piece of Gruyere.''
The airport started becoming one big rabbit warren, Mr. Valissant believes, when the farmland and pastures taken over for the airport in the early 1970's were fenced in to keep out human beings, the main menace from a rabbit's point of view.
Despite rabbit problems of a similar dimension at Orly Airport, the other main Paris air terminal, south of the city, the authorities say they have not considered waging germ or chemical warfare against them.
Introducing infectious myxomatosis, a viral disease fatal to rabbits, carries too many risks, Mr. Genty said, and contraceptive chemicals sprayed on the grass they eat would not be acceptable unless the chemicals worked only on rabbits, and not other animals farther up the food chain. ''Until they find a rabbit-specific pill,'' he said, ''we won't use it.''
So peaceful coexistence seems likely to remain the order of the day. So far, no airplane has had to abort a landing or a takeoff because of rabbits on the runway, Mr. Genty said, and occasional collisions with birds remain a more serious problem.
''We're located on the eastern edge of a migratory path for ducks, geese and pigeons,'' he said, ''and we have 11 people who do nothing but try to keep them confined to areas away from the runways. The day a rabbit can jump 400 feet in the air, we'll get more serious about them.''
Roissy JournalOn March 24, 1944, SS Capt. Erich Priebke and several colleagues rounded up 335 Italian men and boys, took them to the Ardeatine Caves south of Rome and shot them in the backs of their heads. Mr. Priebke allegedly checked off the victims' names before the massacre, which was a reprisal for the killing of 33 Nazi soldiers by Italian partisans the day before. Fifty years later he was caught. But last week a botched trial in an Italian court set Mr. Priebke free. Italy quickly rearrested him, and must now move to fix this miscarriage of justice or pass him to a nation that will.
Mr. Priebke's case is the subject of intense passions in part because punishment of Nazis is so rare. The American Office of Special Investigations has removed 48 alleged Nazi war criminals from the United States in the 15 years it has existed. Only four of them have been tried, two in Germany, one in Yugoslavia and one in Israel. Germany, which has convicted about 7,000 since the late 1950's, is the only country that has made a determined effort to prosecute its own citizens for the murder of foreigners and members of minority groups while the Nazis were in power. Most other countries prosecute only when the killers are foreigners and the victims are not Gypsies or Jews.
After the war, Mr. Priebke escaped four times from a British military prison and eventually disappeared. But the Ardeatine massacre, the worst in Italy's Nazi occupation, burned in Italian memory. In 1994, after Argentina opened its files on Nazi immigration, ABC News found Mr. Priebke in Bariloche, where he had been living under his own name for decades. The Argentine Government, either newly enlightened about his past or simply newly embarrassed, extradited him to Italy. This year Mr. Priebke, who is 83, was brought before an Italian military court.
Last week a three-judge military panel found him guilty of murder, but acquitted him of the aggravating circumstance of exceeding orders. Because the judges found he was following orders, they placed the murder in a category covered by a 30-year-statute of limitations.
Germany has requested Mr. Priebke's extradition. Italy is holding him while it considers the request and an appeal by the Italian prosecutors. They contend that one of the judges, who allegedly argued for Mr. Priebke's acquittal before the trial, should have been recused from the case.
Mr. Priebke does not deserve to be a free man. Perhaps because military courts tend to treat orders with more reverence than civilians do, the judges misapplied the law about following orders. The Nuremberg Principles state that if a soldier commits a manifestly illegal act while under orders, the judge can lighten the soldier's sentence. But acting under orders does not absolve a soldier of criminal responsibility. It is hard to imagine an act more manifestly illegal than murdering 335 innocent civilians.
The massacre also clearly falls in the category of crimes against humanity. Germany can try Mr. Priebke on this charge without putting him in double jeopardy. In international law, such crimes have no statute of limitation and may be tried in any nation's courts. Italy may yet retry him, but if it does not, Germany should be given the chance.Since Trans World Airlines Flight 800 exploded on July 17, a team of leading medical examiners has worked long hours not only to identify the bodies of victims pulled from the ocean but also to help determine the cause of the crash.
In doing so, the medical examiners have conducted a wide array of tests seeking traces of explosive among the 195 bodies that were recovered.
After three weeks, and with many tests still to be completed, the team headed by the Suffolk County Chief Medical Examiner, Dr. Charles V. Wetli, has found no evidence of an explosive device. Evidence of an explosion might still be found in the unlikely event that the 35 bodies still missing are recovered, especially since those passengers and crew members might have been sitting in a part of the plane nearest an explosion, investigators said.
A team of 10 forensic pathologists, 30 forensic dentists and dozens of aides from New York State, New Jersey and France are conducting the autopsies and laboratory tests. The pathologists involved in the investigation represent about 10 percent of the forensic pathologists who work full time as medical examiners in this country. They are medical doctors trained as pathologists who specialize in investigating deaths that occur in accidents and under suspicious circumstances.
The forensic team looked for inhaled soot, carbon monoxide and other traces of chemical residues and fragments that might be evidence of an explosive device. Pathologists also looked for patterns of injuries, including burns and damage to the lungs, brain and other organs.
The investigators are not surprised by the lack of evidence.
The lessons learned from two previous crashes believed to have been caused by bombs would indicate that despite the intensive effort, the forensic medical team is not likely to provide the solution to the mystery of the T.W.A. crash. Precedent is limited, but it suggests that conclusive evidence of a bomb is more likely to come from an examination of the structural damage to the airplane.
Some of the passengers and crew seated in the front section of the T.W.A. Boeing 747 appeared to be more severely injured than those seated elsewhere. Investigators have cited the more serious injuries -- crushed skulls and damaged spinal cords -- to bolster the theory that a bomb blew apart the forward section of the 747.
But medical experts have cautioned against drawing any firm conclusions because the severity of the injuries could reflect the way the plane disintegrated and how each body fell from varying heights and hit the water. The front end of the plane broke off and fell from 13,700 feet while the rest of the plane descended to 8,000 feet before exploding in a fireball.
Dr. Wetli's team is feeding information from each autopsy into computers to more precisely analyze the patterns of injury. One goal will be to try to detect any distinct patterns of injury and to correlate the findings with the assigned seats. But since passengers often move to empty seats after boarding, and since there were more than 100 empty seats, an exact seating plan might never be known.
If the experience holds from similar investigations -- the crash of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 and the crash of an Air-India plane off the coast of Ireland in 1985 -- a clear-cut pattern may not emerge from the computer analysis of forensic medical evidence from the T.W.A. crash.
Because the Pan Am plane crashed over land, the Lockerbie investigators were able to recover a lot of the debris quickly; about three-quarters of the plane was found. By reconstructing the pieces, the F.B.I. and British investigators linked a fragment from an electronic circuit board to the manufacturer of the electronic timer used in the bomb. Investigators have said the bomb was in a cassette player in a suitcase in the cargo hold in the front section of the plane.
Also, medical examiners in the Lockerbie case were able to perform autopsies on 259 of the 270 passengers and crew members within 15 days of the crash, while toxicology and other laboratory tests of tissues took months longer. Metal fragments and shard were found in about 40 percent of the bodies.
Once the arduous task of removing the metal fragments was completed, each piece was carefully examined. But not one matched the explosive device found in the wreckage, said Dr. Anthony Busuttil, a forensic pathologist at Edinburgh University who participated in the Lockerbie investigation.
Many passengers in the forward section of the Pan Am plane, sitting directly above where the bomb went off, suffered severe head and spinal cord injuries similar to those described in the T.W.A. crash.
But Dr. Busuttil said, ''You could not distinguish a pattern,'' in part because spinal cord injuries are common in falls from great heights. ''Some passengers in the tail of the plane were as badly injured as many in the front of the plane,'' he said.
Comparisons of height during life and after death showed that ''quite a few of the deceased were shortened by a few inches'' due to compression fractures of the spine, Dr. Busuttil said.
To objectively analyze the information about injuries from the Lockerbie crash, the examiners fed the data into a computer and coded it so the analysts would not know the identity of the passengers or where they were sitting in the plane. In the end, the type of injury did not correlate with seating position.
The crash of Air-India Flight 182 in 1985 120 miles off the southwest coast of Ireland is one of the few previous instances when medical examiners have tried to find evidence of a bomb among victims submerged at sea.
The bodies of 130 of the 329 passengers and crew were recovered from that crash, and there was no evidence of fire or explosion found in the victims. The skulls of some victims were crushed as if they had been blown upward, said Dr. John F. Harbison, the state forensic pathologist for the Irish Republic who participated in the investigation. But a decision to take full-body X-rays of the victims was not made until after many autopsies were completed, thus vastly reducing the chances of finding important pieces of debris in the bodies.The amount of money flowing into stock mutual funds fell sharply in July to its lowest level in almost two years, an industry group reported yesterday, an ominous sign for the stock market that perhaps signals the end to a period of record growth in the fund industry.
And now that the news has turned considerably less positive, some of the largest fund companies have clammed up, declining to provide specific public information about how much money is flowing into or out of their funds and which categories of funds have been in or out of favor. That stands in contrast to recent months, when the money was rolling in and the fund companies talked freely about how popular their own funds were.
The new-found reticence at some of the industry's leading firms, including Putnam, T. Rowe Price and Twentieth Century, comes as many investors have stepped back from the stock market, and raises questions about whether the fund companies view the cash flow data as more of a marketing tool than an industry statistic.
The shift also comes as Wall Street pays increasingly close attention to the numbers, an acknowledgment that individual investors, through their purchase of equity mutual funds, have been the single largest source of fuel for a bull market in stocks that has lasted more than five years. Not once in the period -- dating back to October 1990 -- have investors made net monthly withdrawals from equity funds.
The Investment Company Institute, a trade group, estimated that investors put $3.5 billion into equity mutual funds last month, down from $14.5 billion in June. That is the lowest monthly total since November 1994, when $3 billion flowed in, and a 20 percent drop from the average monthly flow of $18 billion over the last year.
Bond funds suffered estimated net outflows of $1.5 billion in July, the second month that more money left those funds than came in. The institute will report final figures later this month.
To be sure, many fund companies continue to provide public data on their own cash flows, including the two largest, Fidelity Investments, a unit of the FMR Corporation, and the Vanguard Group. Others, like the American Funds and Merrill Lynch, the third- and fourth-largest fund companies, have never done so. And apparently all the fund groups continue providing data to the Investment Company Institute for its monthly compilation of cash-flow trends.
But the unwillingness of some companies to talk publicly about their own cash flows comes when many on Wall Street are uncertain whether the rebound in stock prices in the last few days from July's correction will be sustained by additional mutual fund purchases, or whether individuals have had their fill of gyrating markets.
After record amounts of cash flowing into mutual funds had made headlines all year, the industry got a particular shock on July 19, when, after a particularly volatile period, AMG Data Services, an independent collector of figures on fund cash flows, reported that shareholders withdrew $4 billion in a single week.
The resulting clamor caused some fund companies to impose self-censorship. Over the last two years, Twentieth Century Investors, based in Kansas City, Mo., has frequently talked about money flowing into its funds, which are known for a particularly aggressive investment style. But late in July, after some of its largest funds had lost nearly 25 percent of their value in a period of about eight weeks, Twentieth Century declined to discuss what its investors were doing.
Gunnar Hughes, a spokesman for the company, said that James E. Stowers 3d, Twentieth Century's president and the son of its founder, had questioned whether providing the data ''is making matters worse for investors instead of better.''
''We are generally concerned that it may be triggering a reaction on the part of investors, distracting them from their long-term investment goals and turning their attention to what others seem to be doing,'' Mr. Hughes said.
He added that the company might resume providing some type of cash-flow information in the future, but that it was now ''rethinking its policy'' to determine how and whether it could ''mine the information in the right way.''
William N. Shiebler, president of Putnam Mutual Funds, the sixth-largest fund company, said that while he had not imposed an outright ban on talking about cash flows, ''we slowed down our response.''
''We used to comment on them, as we were trying to build up our visibility in the media,'' he said. ''But as we got to be more of a sales leader, we felt it was not important to be out promoting it. We felt we wanted to de-emphasize the sales numbers.''
Rowena M. Itchon, a spokeswoman for T. Rowe Price Associates, 11th largest among mutual fund companies, said that executives there did not fear the effect of specific cash-flow disclosures on its fund investors. Rather, she said, they were worried that investors in its stock, which is listed on Nasdaq, would trade on the information.
Price will continue to provide information on general trends in cash flows -- last month, more money came into stock funds than went out, although the net inflows were below June's -- but will no longer provide specific amounts.
Some executives were troubled by the idea of clamping down on data disclosure. ''The risk of crowing about cash flows when they are good is that you have to stand up and say so when they are not so good,'' said John Brennan, Vanguard's president. ''It appears that's a bit of what's going on out there. I don't think it's fair to play it that way.''
Both Mr. Brennan and Jessica Bibliowicz, an executive vice president at Smith Barney, part of the Travelers Group, and head of its mutual funds unit, said they were troubled by the focus on cash flows over shorter terms than one month, be it weekly or daily. ''I think there has been hype on both sides,'' inside the industry and outside, Ms. Bibliowicz said.
''The industry has spent a lot of time and money to educate investors about taking a long-term perspective,'' said Tom Butch, marketing director at Stein Roe & Farnham. ''We ought to now be confident that investors can make intelligent decisions.''The Government's efforts to clarify the 1994 assassination of Mexico's leading presidential candidate all but collapsed today with the acquittal of the governing-party worker charged last year as the second triggerman in the shooting.
In clearing the suspect, Othon Cortes Vazquez, a federal judge shattered the 18-month effort of the Government to untangle what it has portrayed as a murder conspiracy. The judge, Mario Pardo Rebolledo, also acquitted two men charged with perjury in the case.
The decision leaves President Ernesto Zedillo's prosecutors with few options but to start over.
Ever since Luis Donaldo Colosio, the presidential candidate of the governing Institutional Revolutionary Party, was gunned down as he moved through a campaign mob in Tijuana on March 23, 1994, Mexicans have been clamoring for justice. But the verdict today left many in despair of ever receiving any clear accounting of who plotted the crime.
Minutes after the secretary of the judge read his verdict outside his chambers in Toluca, 40 miles west of Mexico City, Attorney General Antonio Lozano issued a statement announcing that he would appeal and his spokesman said: ''We'll continue trying to clarify this crime. We have a lot of work to do.''
Today's ruling was such a serious personal reverse for Mr. Lozano that there were immediate calls for his resignation.
''We beg, we request, we demand the resignation of Antonio Lozano,'' said Senator Guillermo del Rio, a member of a 13-member congressional committee appointed to monitor the investigation.
But a Government official said Mr. Lozano had the full confidence of President Zedillo. ''There is no consideration at all that he might leave his post,'' the official said. He said that in other law enforcement matters Mr. Lozano had racked up several recent successes, including the arrest of two fugitive bankers last week and of a major drug trafficking ring on Monday.
In the months after Mr. Colosio's death, two successive special prosecutors appointed by the President at the time, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, concluded that the crime was the act of a single deranged gunman, Mario Aburto, who during his 1994 trial confessed to shooting Mr. Colosio twice and is serving a 45-year sentence here. But few Mexicans were persuaded that Mr. Aburto acted alone, especially because Mr. Colosio's two wounds, one to the head at the right ear and a second to the left abdomen, appeared difficult for a sole gunmen to inflict.
Three months after Mr. Zedillo assumed the presidency in December 1994 and appointed Mr. Lozano, an opposition congressman, as his Attorney General, prosecutors arrested Mr. Cortes, a 28-year-old driver and errand boy who had been intermittently employed by the governing party in Baja California. The authorities also arrested the other two men cleared today: Fernando de la Soto Rodalleguez, head of an undercover security unit working for Mr. Colosio's campaign, and one of Mr. de la Soto's agents, Alejandro Garcia Hinojosa. Both were charged with lying to investigators in earlier investigations.
With that bold stroke, Mr. Lozano contradicted the Salinas Administration's version of the killing, proclaiming that it had been a conspiracy involving at least two gunmen and other unidentified accomplices. These, prosecutors said, separated Mr. Colosio from his bodyguards and later helped to destroy evidence at the scene of the crime.
Mr. Cortes was visible in video footage at the candidate's left side seconds before the shooting, and Mr. Lozano's prosecutors accused him of firing the shot that hit Mr. Colosio in the abdomen. In addition, videotapes showed Mr. Cortes chauffeuring away from the scene an army general who was Mr. Colosio's chief bodyguard and a member of Mr. Salinas's presidential general staff.
But there were deep flaws in the case against Mr. Cortes. Prosecutors were never able to produce the pistol they have accused him of firing, and the three witnesses who originally testified that they saw him fire at Mr. Colosio later changed their stories.
From the beginning, Mr. Lozano's prosecution of Mr. Cortes reinforced popular suspicions that Mr. Salinas, who had quarreled with Mr. Colosio in the weeks before the assassination, or some clique in Mr. Salinas's ruling circle might have ordered the crime. After Mr. Cortes's arrest, Mr. Zedillo's public approval ratings surged.
In recent months, however, as the prosecution has stalled and popular antipathy against Mr. Salinas has continued high here, a backlash has set in, since Mr. Lozano has said repeatedly that he has found no evidence incriminating Mr. Salinas.
Mr. Lozano has been bombarded by recommendations from politicians, not only from the opposition, but also from the ruling party, to subpoena Mr. Salinas, who currently lives in Ireland, for questioning. Today's ruling leaves Mr. Lozano with even less reason than before to question the former President. Bitter recriminations began immediately.
''The Attorney General has only two options now,'' said Jesus Zambrano, a member of the congressional committee monitoring the investigation. ''Either Lozano should make public all the evidence he's collected about the involvement of Salinas and his general staff in this crime, or out of minimal respect for the Mexican people he should resign.''A South Korean manufacturer, with ambitious plans to sell cars around the world, said today that it intended to enter the United States market by opening 200 to 500 company-owned sales outlets in the next several years near college campuses.
The plans by the Daewoo Group, South Korea's fourth-largest conglomerate, represent a break with auto marketing and distribution practices in the United States. American and foreign manufacturers currently supply the North American market by selling their cars and trucks to independent dealers.
While the major auto makers have discount programs for college students, Daewoo said that it planned to focus almost exclusively on college students, professors and their families -- a novel approach. The industry's pattern has been to distribute cars and trucks by geographic areas, rather than by the occupation of the buyers. Kia of South Korea, for example, is in the process of trying to elbow its way into the American market by selling its small, inexpensive cars initially on the East and West Coasts.
Kim Woo Choong, chairman of Daewoo, said that the company planned to enter the United States market late in 1997 or early in 1998 and to sell 100,000 cars a year by 2000. That would be about two-thirds of 1 percent of the nation's car and light-truck market, or about the same as Subaru, Volkswagen or BMW.
While cautioning that the company may yet change its plans, Mr. Kim said that Daewoo currently intends to lure young people with affordable cars and then sell them more elaborate vehicles as they grow older.
He spoke to several reporters here after delivering a speech at an auto-industry conference organized by the University of Michigan.
Daewoo's cars will be similar in size to the Chrysler Corporation's $11,000 Plymouth Neon, said Kyung Hoon Lee, the chairman of Daewoo's United States operations. The company plans three models for the United States, with 1.6- to 2.2-liter engines, and intends to display one or more of these models in South Korea in November, said Mr. Kim, who declined to indicate the prices of the Daewoo cars.
Cars are commonly sold through company-owned sales outlets in Asia, including South Korea, and Daewoo has already begun selling cars through company-owned sales outlets in Britain. The strategy has attracted considerable curiosity from the Big Three auto makers of Detroit.
Mr. Kim said that Daewoo had found that owning its outlets helped the company hold down distribution costs, which account for as much as a fifth of the cost of a car sold through a dealership. The outlets also keep customers happier, he said.
Daewoo is also studying ways to sell cars directly to customers in South Korea and the United States using the Internet, Mr. Kim said. The Big Three have also been studying this option but have been reluctant to pursue it for fear of angering dealers who might resent being bypassed.
John P. Peterson, the president of the National Automobile Dealers Association, said that he was not aware of any other auto makers selling cars or light trucks through company-owned sales outlets in the United States. He declined to respond to Mr. Kim's comments today, saying that he would wait for a formal announcement by Daewoo.
Many states have laws barring auto companies from selling cars directly to the public in competition with their franchised dealers. Often the result of intense lobbying by car dealers, these laws are intended to prevent auto makers from putting their dealers out of business by favoring their own sales outlets with popular vehicles in short supply.
But it is not clear whether these laws would apply to an auto maker with no franchised dealers, said James A. Moors, a lawyer at the trade group who specializes in auto-franchise agreements. In Virginia, for example, Daewoo would probably face a hearing before state regulators before it could open company sales outlets, but state law does not explicitly prohibit company-owned outlets for auto makers without franchisees, he said.
Porsche tried in the 1980's to open company-owned outlets, but withdrew in the face of suits from its franchised dealers.President Hafez al-Assad of Syria said today that an Israeli proposal to resume talks between the two countries had not offered ''the slightest hope of the possibility of a forthcoming peace.''
The blunt comment appeared to douse the glimmer of optimism raised by the Israeli proposal, which was to tackle differences between the two countries by resolving their dispute over Lebanon first.
Mr. Assad has insisted that Israel make plain its willingness to trade land for peace with Syria before negotiations, stalled since March, can resume. But that is a step that Israel's conservative new Government, unlike its predecessor, has steadfastly refused to take, and the stance that Mr. Assad displayed today left little room for common ground.
''Lebanon and Syria first -- at the same time, in the same steps,'' Mr. Assad said after meeting with President Hosni Mubarak in Alexandria, Egypt.
The influential Syrian newspaper Tishrin had already indicated that Damascus would reject the Israeli plan, which was conveyed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu through the United States.
But Mr. Assad's comments underscored that two weeks of public and private efforts by American officials to find a way to restart the peace talks had produced nothing more than continued deadlock.
''No one who read the invitation sent by Netanyahu gets the feeling that it is the road to peace and that those who wrote it are committed to peace,'' Mr. Assad said at a news conference with Mr. Mubarak that was broadcast live on television.
The meeting between the two leaders was the latest in the flurry of diplomacy that has followed Mr. Netanyahu's election, and it came just two days after the new Israeli leader, on a visit to Jordan, spoke in general terms about his plan to resume talks with Syria.
But even Mr. Mubarak, who met with Mr. Netanyahu last month and has expressed confidence that the new Israeli leader is committed to broader peace in the Middle East, sounded somewhat reserved today.
''As for the Lebanese and Syrian process, it still needs some time for it to be resumed,'' he said. ''But we are keen to talk and negotiate.''
American officials have said that Secretary of State Warren Christopher and Dennis B. Ross, the Administration's special Middle East coordinator, have been in contact with Syrian and Israeli officials in an effort to arrange new talks.
Mr. Netanyahu said in Jordan on Monday that Israel was willing ''to engage in peace negotiations with Syria on all outstanding matters.'' But he has said his first priority would be to resolve Israel's security concerns in Lebanon, where Syria is the main power broker.
Israeli officials have said Mr. Netanyahu would be willing to withdraw Israeli soldiers from southern Lebanon in return for a commitment from Syria to disarm guerrillas there who belong to Hezbollah, or the Party of God, and to guarantee the security of Israel's border.
But Syria has said such an agreement can only be part of a comprehensive peace accord.
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Israeli Rockets Hit Lebanon
BAALBEK, Lebanon, Thursday, Aug. 8 (Reuters) -- Israeli warplanes fired rockets at Muslim guerrilla targets in eastern Lebanon before dawn today, security sources said. The jets fired rockets at sites belonging to Hezbollah, or Party of God, just north of Baalbek, in the Bekaa.
The two attacks today follow the killing Tuesday of an Israeli soldier in a Hezbollah raid in southern Lebanon.The other day, Derek A. Baker, an unassuming, churchgoing former Oklahoman, sat in his office piled with computer books and software and remarked on the eternally repeating cycles of New York City: people like him -- writers, artists, hungry capitalists -- have always come here seeking success. And from his seat as an old-timer in the new-media industry of New York, he said he felt he was watching that unfold once again.
''It's the thing that has always gone on,'' said Mr. Baker, managing editor of Yahoo Internet Life, a magazine about Web sites and new technology. ''It's just a different medium.''
Mr. Baker is 31, a blond but balding ancient in New York's vibrant, volatile, if currently overhyped cyberworld. He has been, it seems, everywhere: at Prodigy before it had a single customer on line; at one of the first publishers of Internet guides; at Rupert Murdoch's attempt to plant the founding flag of an Internet empire from Manhattan.
But Mr. Baker came to New York in 1987 interested not in technology, but in writing for magazines. He has a journalism degree. He reads Trollope. And after two years of exploding growth in the new-media industry, it seems clear that people like Mr. Baker are the key to the early successes in New York: while a recent survey by the accounting firm of Coopers & Lybrand worried about the scarcity of hard-core programmers in New York, the study also suggested that the greatest strength of New York's new-media world is that it is made up largely of people who studied English or graphic design or business.
If San Francisco is home to techies who dream up the codes that make the World Wide Web work, New York is becoming the acknowledged new home for those who create the pictures, the stories, the advertising copy that makes someone actually want to call up a home page or buy a CD-ROM.
In short, the human face on the new-media world is largely that of the same artistic, literary type who has always come to New York. But now, they are being ''repurposed,'' a favored lower-Manhattanese verb that translates roughly as: to figure how to use what is available on the Web. And if the first wave of Web designers, coders and programmers seemed to be young computer jocks or graphic designers already in the city, a new wave appears to be winding in solely to get involved in the new media -- much as talented college graduates flooded the city to work on literary magazines here after World War I.
''I've now been working every day since last Sunday, not like 2 or 3 days ago but 10 days ago,'' said Jonathan P. L. Spooner, who came to Manhattan in May after graduating from college and now works for Wolff New Media, a computer publishing house that produces a new title every three weeks. ''I am just so clouded. I don't remember buying the bagel I had for breakfast.''
Mr. Spooner, 25, studied classical philosophy and history -- reading original texts in Latin, Greek, French and some Sanskrit -- at St. John's College in Annapolis, Md. Computers had always been his hobby, and over the last two years he made extra money as a freelance Web designer. He wanted to continue in the field, but felt he had to make a choice: New York or San Francisco. In the end, he stuffed two duffel bags full of summer clothes, boarded a bus in Baltimore and headed to the Port Authority Bus Terminal.
''I'd say the New York thing is more attractive just because I am more interested in the design aspect, and the capabilities of the Web,'' Mr. Spooner said, on a day when he had arrived to work at 10 A.M. after having worked until 3:30 A.M. He said Silicon Valley in California, as opposed to Silicon Alley in lower Manhattan, ''will always put out new stuff, but I'd rather be on the side that is actually using it.''
The image of New York's new-media industry so far is one of a downtown oil gush, with conversions of loft space to offices en masse, where huge corporations and young artists on the make come together over piles of money. There is some truth to that. This summer saw one of the first major corporate purchases, of Metrobeat, a popular Web site on entertainment, arts, food and cultural activities in New York, by City Search, an entity financed by Goldman, Sachs, AT&T Ventures and private investors. And companies like Microsoft and Samsung have prowled around the local cyberscene.
And there has, in fact, been a bonanza for many young Web designers and freelance programmers. Glen Lipka, 24, who opened a Web design business with his girlfriend, Katie Peters, recalled how he had been designing sites for Columbia Records without charge until one day about a year ago the company offered to pay him for his next one. He remembered his meeting with a Columbia representative:
''I was going to say like $350,'' said Mr. Lipka, who is from Rockland County. ''He writes on a piece of paper: 'We can't give you any more than $2,500.' I said: 'That's about the number I had in mind.' ''
Jonathan Ezor, a 29-year-old lawyer who works with with many new-media companies, said that beyond the cyber cafes and bubbling social scene, the new industry has begun, for the moment, to transform what has been for decades an often lowly existence for many New York artists.
''The art community has always been based here and so much of what is on the Web right now is artistic,'' said Mr. Ezor, who works for the firm of Davis & Gilbert, which has long catered to the advertising industry. ''The technology is the facilitator, but the vision is one of art.''
''All these creative people have been looking for income streams,'' he said, ''and this is a way for them to make money and have a higher profile and still stay true to their vision.''
For writers, the business has opened up entirely new possibilities -- another layer of jobs on top of the existing magazines, newspapers and advertising agencies.
Mr. Baker, the manager of Yahoo Internet Life, had several offers from magazines when he moved here in 1987 but Trintex, the predecessor to Prodigy, made him the best offer, for writing advertising copy.
Jennifer Pirtle, 28, has carved out a successful career, starting in her days in the new-media program at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, writing for Web magazines or about the Web for publications still on paper.
Margie Borschke, a 27-year-old Canadian, first came to New York several years ago as an editorial intern at Harper's, intending to become a magazine editor. After two years back home in Ontario, she returned last year and is now a section editor at Stim, an edgy on-line magazine aimed at twentyish hipsters and underwritten by Prodigy.
''A lot of times people are surprised when they come in here and I have a story printed out and I'm editing,'' she said. ''I don't know if they think I should have some kind of virtual reality helmet on. It's different from other experiences I've had. But there are still deadlines.''Nearly a decade ago, New York began an ambitious program to spur economic growth in distressed communities across the state by offering businesses tax breaks and other handsome incentives to move into those communities.
But a new audit released by State Comptroller H. Carl McCall raises questions about the state's handling of the program and whether the program has actually helped revive poor communities, including four in New York City.
The report, released Tuesday, provides the first significant analysis to bolster the arguments of critics who have long questioned the benefits of setting up special areas, called economic development zones, to lure businesses -- and new jobs -- to poor neighborhoods. The critics say the approach has simply transferred jobs from one community to another.
''It does not increase the size of the pie,'' said Frank J. Mauro, the director of the Fiscal Policy Institute, a labor-financed economic research group. ''The state is basically subsidizing the relocation of businesses from one site to another, and the businesses aren't being held accountable to create jobs.''
The audit found that the state agency administering the program had grossly overestimated the number of jobs created in a sampling of development zones. It also found that the agency, the Department of Economic Development, had virtually no way of determining what the state spent on the program or whether the state was reaping any benefits.
In one instance, state auditors found that only 163 jobs were created in a development zone in the Port Morris section of the Bronx in 1993, far fewer than the 4,421 jobs reported by the program's local administrators. In another case, in East New York, Brooklyn, program administrators claimed that 4,127 new jobs had been created in the same year, but state auditors identified only 147.
And in a third case, the administrators recorded 3,798 new jobs in a zone in South Jamaica, Queens; the auditors could account for only 423.
The Comptroller's office said that many of the inconsistencies resulted from poor record keeping, inadequate monitoring of hiring practices and a failure to remove companies from the program even after local officials had reported that the companies had failed to meet eligibility requirements. Mr. McCall also attributed some of the problem to arcane state and Federal labor laws that deny agency officials access to records like employment figures that businesses file with the state's Department of Labor each year.
Nevertheless, Mr. McCall said the development zones offered ''an opportunity to reinvigorate communities,'' and he urged state officials to monitor the program more effectively. ''Without a system to measure the program's benefits,'' he said, ''this money and the opportunity to create jobs may be needlessly wasted.''
But Caroline Quartararo, a spokeswoman for the State Commissioner for Economic Development, Charles A. Gargano, questioned the timing of the report, given that the agency this week is going to begin looking for an outside consultant to monitor the program. She also disputed some figures in the audit and said the audit had failed to look at some of the more effective development zones.
''This is a good economic development program,'' she said. ''We're working on making it more efficient with better oversight.''
New York has been running the economic development zone program since 1987. The zones generally cover a two-square-mile area, providing local businesses with investment tax credits, wage tax credits, reductions in utility rates and tax relief for construction materials. There are now 40 economic development zones throughout the state, including the 4 in New York City, all created under Gov. Mario M. Cuomo.
Mr. McCall's report did not deal with Federal empowerment zones like the one recently created to benefit distressed areas of upper Manhattan and the Bronx.
Supporters of the local enterprise zones contend that they are powerful tools for encouraging economic development in impoverished areas.
The program was expanded from 19 zones to 40 during the 1994 gubernatorial race, though Governor Cuomo denied that the expansion was timed to help his re-election effort. Still, Gov. George E. Pataki, who was then campaigning against Mr. Cuomo, accused him of using such programs for pork-barrel spending in Democratic districts.
In his report, Mr. McCall noted that the agency had yet to evaluate the program's effectiveness, even though state law required the administration to have done so. He also said that many businesses may have improperly received tax breaks because they failed to file certain reports required in the program.When New York City's largest trash-hauler was indicted last year on charges that it had Mafia ties, an independent monitor was appointed to make sure the owners did not divert the company's enormous wealth before the case went to trial.
Now prosecutors say that the company, V. Ponte & Sons, thought it had found a way to outsmart them by selling the business and funneling the proceeds through subsidiaries to its chief owner, Angelo Ponte. In a countermove, the Manhattan District Attorney's office exercised its right to veto the sale. The company could be worth as much as $70 million.
Prosecutors said the proposed deal would not only enrich Mr. Ponte but also allow him to collect rent from the company buying him out. Under its terms, his top executives would also run the takeover company, and he might even retain office space in its main plant.
Jody Kasten, a lawyer for V. Ponte & Sons, said, ''We are in a dialogue with the D.A.'s office'' and declined further comment. Lawyers said Mr. Ponte might revise the terms of the deal to gain the District Attorney's approval.
On June 27, an investment concern, the Mentmore Holding Company, announced that it had acquired the Ponte company and four affiliated companies and was seeking quick approval from regulatory agencies to begin operations. Mentmore, which has no experience in carting, disposing and recycling trash, created a new company, National Waste Services Inc., to run its new network of businesses.
Mr. Ponte, 70, was indicted last year on state charges that he was a leading figure in a cartel that for four decades was controlled by the Genovese and Gambino crime families. Prosecutors said the cartel inflated trash-hauling charges up to 40 percent for office buildings, restaurants, stores, universities and hospitals.
In recent years, 250 carting companies in New York City charged $1.5 billion a year in fees, and prosecutors have asserted that at least $100 million a year was funneled in kickbacks and protection payoffs to Mafia racketeers. The V. Ponte company, the jewel in the Ponte crown, collected $50 million in carting fees last year.
Prosecutors who have reviewed the sale terms for the Ponte companies said their chief concern is that much of the purchase price will go to unindicted companies controlled by Mr. Ponte and his relatives that are not subject to scrutiny by the courts or the District Attorney's office.
The final purchase price, which depends partly on the gross revenues National Waste Services reaps in the next few years from its new refuse-removal holdings, is estimated at $40 million to $70 million, prosecutors and lawyers said.
Prosecutors said that while they objected to the deal, they were not questioning the integrity of officials of Mentmore, the parent of National Waste, in agreeing to the terms.
Richard C. Hoffman, the general counsel for National Waste and Mentmore, said he was confident the sale would ultimately be approved. ''We are aware that the D.A. has some concern about the allocations,'' Mr. Hoffman said. ''But that is an issue the D.A. has with the sellers. Where the money goes and who keeps it is not our issue.''
Aides to Mr. Morgenthau, who have examined the three sales contracts for the Ponte companies, said that under the deal, about $20 million would be given to the Recycling Paperboard Company in Clifton, N.J., a relatively small company owned by relatives of Angelo Ponte.
Recycling Paperboard, which converts waste paper into paperboard products, was not indicted in the cartel case and therefore its assets are not frozen and its disbursement of money is not open for inspection.
Only $6.4 million would be paid to the much larger and more valuable V. Ponte & Sons. That amount includes payments of $4 million to Mr. Ponte and three brothers by National Waste for agreeing not to organize competing companies, money that might not be subject to seizure by the District Attorney's office, prosecutors said.
V. Ponte & Sons was indicted in the cartel case and is being audited by a court-appointed administrator.
''We think every dollar of the sale of V. Ponte & Son and related companies should be put in escrow,'' said Daniel J. Castleman, the prosecutor in charge of the case. ''Our claim is that the monies are the proceeds of criminal activity, and we stand ready to prove that.''
Prosecutors also object to a part of the deal in which National Waste will lease the Ponte company's offices and transfer station in Hoboken and in Jersey City from Ponte Equities, another unindicted company partly owned by Mr. Ponte.
National Waste agreed to buy V. Ponte & Sons and three unindicted affiliated companies, the West Street Trucking Company, the TriBeCa Recycling Company and the Unity Environmental Company, all on property owned by Ponte Equities at 111 Paterson Avenue in Hoboken and at 5 Hope Street in Jersey City.
Another sticking point, prosecutors said, was National Waste's plan to hire three top executives of the Ponte companies to manage the takeover company.
Angelo Ponte also is president and co-owner of another waste-hauling outfit, the Owners Maintenance Carting Company, whose offices are in the same Hoboken building where National Waste will be. Prosecutors said Mr. Ponte, in his role as president of Owners Maintenance, would be in the same building as the new National Waste company and could influence its operations.While Bob Dole's proposal of an across-the-board 15 percent tax cut has gotten all the attention, buried within his economic plan is a virtually unnoticed initiative to remake the nation's auto insurance system that could be worth billions of dollars to American drivers -- without requiring painful spending cuts or threatening to increase the budget deficit.
''Auto choice,'' as it has been dubbed by its proponents, would give car owners the option of buying less expensive injury coverage solely for medical bills and lost wages, letting them save hundreds of dollars a year by opting not to carry liability insurance against ''pain and suffering.''
The plan has already aroused organized opposition from trial lawyers, who have a big stake in the current system and a lot of influence among Democrats in Congress, and consumer groups with very different agendas for changing auto insurance.
But the potential saving -- as much as $40 billion a year by one estimate -- could make it a sleeper issue in Mr. Dole's attempts to stimulate his Presidential campaign by reaching out to skeptical voters. The nonpartisan Rand Institute for Civil Justice found that a nationwide auto choice program could reduce the average automobile liability insurance premium by 28 percent, for a saving of $221 a car.
The first two years of Mr. Dole's tax-cut plan would save Americans an estimated $70 billion; the auto choice program could be worth as much as $80 billion in the same period.
''Think of us as alchemists,'' said Michael Horowitz, a legal scholar at the Hudson Institute in Indianapolis, who, with Jeffrey O'Connell of the University of Virginia Law School, persuaded Mr. Dole to propose the radical change. ''We're transforming dry legal reforms into a consumer cause -- broccoli into ice cream.''
That's not the way opponents see it. Indeed, for all its apparent populist appeal, auto choice would not be an easy political sell. Trial lawyers, who would be cut out of the loop in a system that left little to fight about in court, are bitterly opposed.
''The so-called auto choice plan offers a phony choice,'' Howard Twiggs, president of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America, said. ''The high cost of buying extra insurance to maintain your constitutional right to the courthouse would mean choice is of, by, and for the insurance industry, not the people.''
Under current state laws, drivers buy insurance against their own negligence. If a motorist runs a stop light and injures someone in another car, he can generally count on being sued, leaving his insurer to either settle the claim or fight the case in court on his behalf.
Auto choice is somewhat different from current ''no fault'' insurance, which many states, including New York, rely on for minor damages.
With no fault, a driver's insurer pays out-of-pocket costs related to his injuries unless they exceed a certain expense threshold. This sometimes has the effect of giving injured parties an incentive to exaggerate damages to go to court. When Massachusetts raised the threshold from $500 to $2,000 in medical costs in 1988, for instance, the number of doctor's visits for the typical injury claim jumped from 13 to 30.
Nationwide, insurance premiums for bodily injury rose by 150 percent during the 1980's, the Rand Institute said, even as accident rates declined and insurance industry profits stagnated. One particularly unwelcome result was a rise in law-breaking: in California, about a quarter of all drivers are uninsured, largely because they cannot afford coverage.
Auto choice attacks the insurance cost problem by giving drivers the option of buying no-frills, loophole-resistant no-fault coverage.
Those willing to give up compensation for pain and suffering in all but the most extreme cases of negligence could buy ''personal injury protection'' from their insurers, which would compensate them for tangible losses even in one-car accidents.
Anyone who preferred the current approach could keep buying insurance against both economic losses and pain and suffering. In those cases, the current legal system would apply, but pain and suffering payments would come from one's own insurer rather than from the insurer representing the driver who caused the injury.
City dwellers would be the biggest beneficiaries of the new approach, a point not lost on the Dole campaign, which would like to broaden its voter base beyond traditional Republican suburban and rural strongholds. The Joint Economic Committee of Congress puts the potential average saving for New Yorkers who insured only against economic losses at $393, or 35 percent of the bodily injury part of their premiums.
''Auto choice would help low-income drivers in the inner city who often have to pay higher premiums,'' said Dennis Shea, a policy aide to Mr. Dole.
Any auto-choice plan faces a steep climb in Congress. Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York are both supporters, which might make other Democrats more receptive to a proposal lodged in a Republican campaign document. But it would take a strong coalition to overcome the opposition of the trial-lawyer lobby; insurers, for all the presumed benefits they might receive, are ambivalent about the idea.
Insurers fear that accident victims who failed to buy the optional pain and suffering coverage might not be satisfied with their compensation, retaliating by filing lawsuits blaming their insurance agents for steering them in the wrong direction.
More important, supporters will not get help from consumer organizations, which largely supported no-fault auto insurance in the 1970's but have since drifted into opposition. Consumers Union fought a similar, but much tougher, initiative on the California ballot in March, arguing that it would deny injury victims their day in court.Chechen rebels dedicated to humiliating President Boris N. Yeltsin on the eve of his inaugural took virtual control of their republic's ruined capital today, killing scores of Russian soldiers, wounding hundreds more and sending rings of fire spreading across the city.
The audacious assault on Grozny, which the Russian Air Force practically leveled in 1995, began on Tuesday and raged throughout the day as Russian helicopter gunships tried desperately to pick off the rebels with rockets. According to reports from the scene, the rockets killed mostly civilians, whose corpses were strewn on the bomb-scarred roadways.
After rolling through roadblocks and capturing two major militia stations and the central telephone exchange office, the Chechen separatists, working in groups of no more than 20 soldiers, spent most of the day besieging the fortified Government building in the center of the city.
Giant columns of black smoke spiraled into the sky as the rebels pummeled the stone building with rocket launchers from as close as 30 yards, according to reports from Russian journalists who were trapped in a bunker beneath the building.
Mr. Yeltsin made stopping the war in the southern republic one of the cornerstones of his re-election campaign. After the first round of voting, he named the army's best known critic of the war, Aleksandr I. Lebed, as his overall security czar. That convinced many skeptics that Mr. Yeltsin was serious about finding a way out of the war, which has taken at least 30,000 lives since it began in December 1994.
But since assuming his new role, Mr. Lebed has mostly sounded like a militant spokesman for Mr. Yeltsin. He has long promised to go to Chechnya to try to negotiate, but so far no dates have been planned for his trip.
The city of Grozny, already scorched and twisted, shook throughout the day with exploding rockets and bombs. Chechen separatists carried out a similar assault in March, but this attack has already proved far more deadly. Russian military officials said tonight that more than 50 of their soldiers had been killed in the past two days of fighting, and that more than 250 were injured. There is no way of verifying those figures, or most of the contradictory and confused information emerging from the city tonight.
Russian leaders alternated between vowing revenge and asserting that the battle was over.
''The situation in Grozny is perfectly under our full control now,'' said Doku Zavgayev, who was installed as the leader of the republic by Russian forces. He was speaking late this afternoon from a heavily guarded position at the Khankala airport, a major Russian military base, where he was evacuated along with most of the other Government leaders early in the day.
Reporters and military officials in Grozny laughed at Mr. Zavgayev's assertion that all was well. ''It is impossible to comment on these words because of their obvious absurdity,'' Valery Yakov, who is in Grozny, wrote in an article for Izvestia.
''At a time when the city is practically controlled by the rebels, the head of the Government is sitting at an airport and trying to tell the people of the republic he is in control of something,'' Mr. Yakov wrote. ''He is paying with the lives of hundreds of civilians.''
Mr. Yakov, who is not among those trapped in the Government building, spoke to a colleague there who said that the building was surrounded and that the Chechen leaders had vowed to capture it by Friday, the day of Mr. Yeltsin's inauguration.
In a television interview tonight, Mr. Lebed, the national security adviser and erstwhile critic of the war, explained: ''This war is beneficial for too many people. The roots of the war are economic. We have to create a way to bring the two sides to the bargaining table. It is a tortuous path but it is the only way.''
The trouble is that the two sides have been at the bargaining table several times in the past year -- most famously in the Kremlin this spring when Mr. Yeltsin and the leader of the separatists, Zelman Yandarbiyev, signed a peace accord that lasted only until the election was over. Negotiators have failed to make any progress on the central issue: Chechen rebels want independence and the Kremlin insists that the republic is part of Russia.
Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin, who has long been viewed as trying to find a way out of the war, will address parliament Thursday on the situation in the region.
For the past several weeks, in apparent defiance of a treaty signed in May, Russian forces have been relentlessly attacking villages throughout southern Chechnya.
But the rebels' retaliatory assault, which was unleashed not just in Grozny but in several other Chechen cities, seems likely to end soon. A column of Russian tanks, halted for most of the day by mines on the main highways, reached the center of the city this evening and started to attack the rebel positions there, according to Itar-Tass, which has a reporter in the Government building. ''They are shooting with guns, grenade launchers and rockets,'' he wrote.
The rebels have virtually no hope of defeating the vastly superior firepower of the Russian forces and they know it. So, as they did in March, they will probably withdraw after inflicting as much damage as possible on the already shaky Russian military.
''Our troops are preparing for the beginning of the second stage of this operation,'' said Movladi Udugov, the Chechen spokesman, speaking on television tonight. ''We now control most of the city of Grozny. The Russians should know that the war is not over.''F.B.I. agents today shut down and searched the Miami office of an airline maintenance company, looking for information related to the crash of Valujet Flight 592, which plunged into the Everglades on May 11, killing all 110 people aboard.
The company, Sabretech was under contract with Valujet. Sabretech workers had handled dozens of oxygen generators that were stored in the plane, a DC-9, and Federal aviation officials suspect that the generators ignited or fueled a fire. The generators have become the focus of investigations into the crash.
The Sabretech office, at Miami International Airport, was shut down today and the company's employees were prevented from entering by officers with the Metro Dade County Police Department. They assisted the Federal Bureau of Investigation in carrying out the search warrant. It is not clear how long the office will remain closed.
The warrant was sealed by the Federal District Court in Miami, said Wilfredo Fernandez, a spokesman for the United States Attorney here. ''I cannot talk about it at all,'' Mr. Fernandez said.
F.B.I. agents also refused to comment, but people close to the investigation say it seeks determine whether SabreTech personnel lied about the handling of the oxygen generators; whether Sabretech personnel were properly licensed, and whether hazardous materials were illegally transported.
Sabretech officials, who did not comment to inquiries from reporters, referred questions to two public relations firms. The firms released an identical two-sentence statement saying the company was cooperating with the investigation.
In June, Valujet ended its relationship with Sabretech, a unit of the Sabreliner Corporation in St. Louis. Valujet officials were not immediately available for comment today.
Although the National Transportation Safety Board has not officially ruled on the crash, investigators have focused their attention on the more than 100 oxygen generators were believed to have been stored in the forward cargo hold of the jet.
The generators had been removed from other aircraft because their shelf life had expired. They were loaded onto Flight 592 to be returned to Valujet headquarters in Atlanta. Such generators are extremely flammable when not discharged. Investigators have said the generators may have been mislabeled as empty.
Valujet's president, Lewis H. Jordan, has said he hopes his airline will fly again this month, after being grounded shortly after the crash.
In the meantime, the company's stock has not shown any signs of recovering. For the first six months of this year, Valujet earned $1.1 million, or 2 cents per share, compared with $25.9 million, or 44 cents per share, for the same period last year, the airline said. $(Details, page D6.$)
Crash-related costs, including those for ticket refunds, has totaled about $31.6 million.In the most extensive network blackout yet in cyberspace, America Online, the nation's largest operator of an on-line computer network, was out of action yesterday, leaving its six million subscribers, including many small businesses and home-office workers, without electronic mail and other key communications services.
The network outage, which occurred during the faulty installation of new system software beginning at 4 A.M., Eastern daylight time yesterday, also caused America Online's dozens of information publishers -- like the investment-advice service Motley Fool and the popular Health Respons Ability forum -- to lose many thousands of dollars in access fees or advertising revenues. And for the individuals and small-business users rendered digitally incommunicado yesterday, the blackout underscored how increasingly important E-mail has become to modern commerce.
''It brings you back to the days when there was no Internet,'' said Lynn Morgen, a founder and partner in Morgen Walke Associates Inc., a 120-employee investor-relations and communications agency in Manhattan.
The company was unable to exchange E-mail yesterday with its clients, or send electronic documents to its Paris office. ''We can fax and retype documents,'' Ms. Morgen said, ''but it certainly isn't as efficient.''
Network crashes are not uncommon in the on-line world. But for America Online, which casts itself as the user-friendliest service and which has blanketed the nation with its software diskettes -- even distributing them in the in-flight snack bags of some airlines -- yesterday's crash, which lasted until about 10:45 p.m., was an embarrassment.
''This is a great way to burn customer loyalty,'' said Gary Arlen, president of Arlen Communications, a market research firm in Reston, Va. ''Once you build a customer base of six million people, including folks who rely on you to do business, you can't knock out the network for the better part of a day.''
America Online said its service went down during a regularly scheduled maintenance update and software installation. Users who tried to log on throughout the day were greeted by text messages like the following: ''The service is temporarily unavailable. Please try again in 15 minutes. Thank you for calling.''
Steve Case, the chairman and chief executive of America Online, which is based in Vienna, Va., said last evening that the problem involved network routing software. He said the company would credit each subscriber's account for the lost day.
''The real concern is we have six million members who rely on us, and we've let them down,'' Mr. Case said.
To be sure, losing access to an on-line service is not yet tantamount, say, to doing without telephone service. And an estimated 15 percent to 20 percent of America Online subscribers have more than one on-line account, meaning that they could easily switch to another service yesterday.
Moreover, larger business customers increasingly get their E-mail and on-line access these days either through specialized Internet service providers or through their own corporate Internet host computers. So big companies for which electronic commerce is vital were unaffected by the America Online outage.
What is more, many on-line information providers that distribute material via America Online -- including The New York Times -- also operate their own sites on the Internet's World Wide Web and so were able to reach their audiences that way. But the investor-advice service Motley Fool, for example, operates its Web site through America Online and so was doubly doomed yesterday.
Motley Fool receives about a third of its revenue -- or about $5,000 a day -- from the hourly use fees America Online charges subscribers.
''I've come to expect that from time to time computers break down,'' said David Gardner, co-founder with his brother, Tom, of Motley Fool.
''As it is, we announced today sort of a holiday,'' Mr. Gardner said. ''But if it goes on more than a day, I'll be very upset.''
Ms. Morgen of Morgen Walke said her company frequently used America Online to tap into financial discussions -- or ''chat rooms'' -- on the Internet to keep tabs of industry scuttlebutt. Yesterday, her firm was receiving telephone calls that one of its clients was the subject of an on-line discussion in which the client was falsely rumored to be considering a merger with another company -- a rumor that she said could do untold damage to the client unless it was shot down.
But without America Online, Morgen Walke was unable to go on line and rebut the rumor.
''We have no way to access it or to respond to it,'' Ms. Morgen said.
America Online has been the default choice for many small businesses and independent contractors without corporate connections, or without the patience of technical savvy to deal with the arcana of direct Internet access.
''Without knowing it, a lot of consumers have developed real dependence on America Online, and maybe it doesn't become clear until the system goes down hard,'' said Jerry Michalski, editor of Release 1.0, an industry newsletter. ''In one sense, it shows the value they derive from A.O.L., but it also makes A.O.L. look real bad.''Divers have not recovered any bodies from the wreckage of Trans World Airlines Flight 800 in the last 48 hours, and investigators said today they would not be surprised if no more remains were discovered.
Having found all but 35 of the 230 people aboard the jetliner, the investigators said they could now turn their full attention to recovering wreckage and seeking the cause of the explosion.
Since the first days after the crash, investigators have said the search for bodies was the primary focus of the underwater recovery effort. Robert T. Francis, the vice chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board who is in charge of the investigation, said that that was still the priority, but that since no more bodies were being found, salvage workers were recovering large quantities of wreckage from the Boeing 747, which exploded, burned and crashed into the sea three weeks ago tonight.
Today, a Navy crane brought up a 75-foot-long section of the right wing, showing fire damage at the end that was nearest to the fuselage. Aviation experts think that the wing may give them more information about the breakup of the plane. It could, for example, show impact damage from parts farther forward that flew off and hit the wing in the first moments of the disaster.
The wing section is by far the largest piece raised; also recovered today was the window section of the cockpit. Recovery efforts in a second area where the nose was found, a mile and a half closer to Kennedy International Airport, are now so far along that the safety board and the F.B.I. are talking to the Navy about moving the Grapple, the salvage tug that has been moored in the area for a week, to another area.
Divers continued yesterday to retrieve pieces of wreckage and luggage from a third debris field, closest to Kennedy. A senior investigator said last night that the debris and luggage would be tested for explosives at the former Grumman hangar in Calverton, L.I., and that if explosives were detected, the material would be sent to the F.B.I. laboratory in Washington for further testing.
The debris field closest to the airport ''is the most important salvage area right now,'' the investigator said.
The answers to what caused the crash will have to come from the wreckage because other sources of information have proven unrevealing. For example, safety board technicians seem to have come to the end, at least for now, of analysis of the cockpit voice recorder, which picked up a loud noise and then cut off abruptly.
After that discovery, investigators said they would run a ''sound spectrum analysis'' to see if the sound reached different microphones in the cockpit at slightly different moments after traveling through the plane's interior air and its metal skin. Sound moves faster through metal, and the differential might help show where the explosion occurred. But an investigator said the sound was too loud to allow such an analysis.
Mr. Francis said earlier that recovery of all the bodies was unlikely, but he went further today, telling reporters here that it was ''increasingly unlikely'' that more remains would be found. ''There is not still the kind of wreckage out there where we expect to find bodies,'' he added.
Some bodies were probably lost in the initial explosion that destroyed the plane. Others may have been attacked by sharks or other sea animals, while still others were probably swept by currents to other areas.
''In fairness to the families that are out there waiting, obviously, time is not something that is helping,'' Mr. Francis said.
He also articulated a new strategy today for guiding the tedious work of recovering small parts from the bottom, 120 feet down. Until now, divers have been looking for whatever small parts are at hand, throwing them into big steel baskets to be hauled to the surface.
If the big pieces yield clues as to where on the airplane the explosion began, then the divers can focus on small pieces from that part of the wreckage field, he said. The point seems minor, but in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, rows of constables walking shoulder to shoulder combed the ground to turn up excruciatingly small pieces of wreckage, one of which helped establish the site of the bomb and the likely identity of the bombers.
Mr. Francis also said today that searchers hoped to raise the engines soon, which would help measure the forces on the airplane in its last seconds. Around the edges of each engine's fan blades are ''rub strips,'' he said, which would be marked by the blades if the plane had suddenly jolted up, down or to one side. A spokesman for Pratt & Whitney, the engine manufacturer, said these were of a ''fiberglass-type mesh.''
Two of the engines have been located mostly intact, and one in pieces. The fourth, Mr. Francis said, is presumed to be in the main debris field.
With the recovery of the wing, which engineers were trying to cut in half tonight so they could move it by barge and truck to a hangar in Calverton, L.I., about 25 to 30 percent of the plane has been recovered, Mr. Francis said. But it may not be necessary to recover all of it; searchers want more pieces from the area around the wings, the nose and the tail, Mr. Francis said, but are less interested in some rear portions of the fuselage.
On a separate issue involving the safety of 747's, Federal Aviation Administration officials said today that they would issue a new proposed rule in the next few days that would require regular testing and possible replacement of fuel pumps on the huge jets. The pumps -- there are 14 on each 747 -- have been shown to be prone to leakage.
A fire last year on a 747 owned by Japan Air Lines as it was being refueled in Singapore was caused by one of those faulty pumps and brought attention to the problem. There is no evidence that T.W.A. Flight 800 had a fuel pump problem, but as yet no one knows what caused the plane to explode.
In any case, Boeing engineers insist that the planes have design features intended to preclude an explosion, even if a pump leaks.For the first time in four years, the Democratic Party is viewed more favorably by voters than the Republican Party, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll.
Underscoring the challenges facing the Republicans as they gather here to nominate Bob Dole for President next week, the poll showed that the concerns that contributed to voters' repudiation of the Democratic-controlled Congress in 1994 have substantially subsided.
On several policy fronts, from specifics like fairness in taxation to broader themes like helping people ''achieve the American dream,'' registered voters said they trusted Democrats more than Republicans by wide margins.
Despite lingering qualms about President Clinton's character, voters found him far more appealing in several areas than Mr. Dole and were more inclined to favor Democratic candidates for Congress as well. Indeed, when asked how they would vote in their Congressional elections this fall, Americans gave Democrats a larger edge than the Republicans had in the 1994 election when they seized both houses of Congress.
The poll of 1,166 adults nationwide, which has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points, was conducted by telephone from Saturday to Monday. It was completed before Mr. Dole announced his campaign's economic platform on Monday and could not reflect whatever boost he might have received from that effort.
The survey found that the nation was divided over the notion of a 15-percent across-the-board tax cut, which formed the core of his proposal.
But the poll highlighted untapped reservoirs of potential strength for Mr. Dole and his party, particularly the anxieties of middle-class people over the future of their children. Nearly half of registered voters said they thought that the next generation would be worse off than people today, and close to 6 out of 10 said the Clinton Administration should do more to help the middle class. And, as they have for more than a decade, Americans said they trusted Republicans more than Democrats to insure a sound economy.
In announcing his economic plan this week, Mr. Dole made explicit appeals to the unease of middle-class Americans, and his advisers hope he can capitalize on those issues as the nation's attention turns to the convention, which opens on Monday. ''Let me suggest this simple test,'' Mr. Dole said in his speech. ''Ask yourself, do you believe America is on the right track today, and do you believe that we are building a future that is better for our children?''
Still, in making the economy a centerpiece of his argument that people should favor him over Mr. Clinton, Mr. Dole has a hard sell. Although they express long-term concerns, 63 percent of those polled judged the economy to be in good shape. Only 23 percent gave the economy such high marks in late October of 1992; it was those anxieties that helped set the stage for Mr. Clinton's defeat of President George Bush.
Beyond Mr. Dole's potential inroads on the economy, the poll showed that he maintained his advantage on character issues. Seven out of 10 voters said Mr. Dole shared the moral values most Americans try to live by; Mr. Clinton drew 58 percent on that count. But both Presidential contenders fared better on this than the collective members of Congress; only 39 percent said members of Congress shared those moral values.
Even with Mr. Clinton's vulnerabilities, the survey made clear that the party is in a more competitive position than Republicans as the convention phase of the campaign gets under way. The Democratic convention opens in Chicago on Aug. 26.
Over all, 55 percent of registered voters expressed a favorable opinion of the Democratic Party, while 39 percent were unfavorable. By contrast, 46 percent held a favorable opinion of the Republican Party, and 47 percent unfavorable. That is a striking turnabout in the image of the Democrats. Not since before Mr. Clinton's election in 1992 have more than half the voters expressed such a positive image of the party.
Mr. Clinton's announcement last week that he would sign the welfare bill only solidified his support. Fifty-two percent of voters said he did the right thing; only 6 percent said it was the wrong thing to do and 40 percent said they did not know enough about the measure. Even so, voters were about evenly divided when asked if they would still back the President's decision if it meant that many more children would be living in households below the poverty line.
There was no sign of erosion in the President's months-long lead over Mr. Dole: Fifty-six percent of registered voters say they would vote for Mr. Clinton if they election were held today, while 34 percent would back Mr. Dole.
The picture may be even rosier for Mr. Clinton should Ross Perot, as expected, win the nomination of his Reform Party and run again for President.
When Mr. Perot is included in the trial heat, Mr. Clinton's support rises slightly to 58 percent; Mr. Dole's falls back to 28 percent, and Mr. Perot draws 10 percent. Mr. Perot seems to have lost some luster: only 15 percent of registered voters have favorable views of him and nearly half hold an unfavorable view.
Nearly 8 out of 10 voters said they did not know enough to make a judgment about Richard Lamm, the former Colorado Governor who is challenging Mr. Perot for the Reform Party nomination. The party is holding two conventions, one on the eve of the Republican gathering, and the other the day after that convention ends.
The Democrats' positive image is evident at the Congressional level as well. Democrats also had a significant edge, 46 percent to 39 percent, when voters were asked which party's candidate they would support in the House race in their Congressional district. If maintained, that margin could enable the Democrats to recapture the House.
Mr. Dole's advisers say that after four nights of prime time attention, they hope that their candidate will depart San Diego with a clear ''bounce'' in the polls to give him momentum in the 11-week sprint to Election Day.
But the first challenge may be for Republicans to turn around a wide impression among voters, including many Republicans, this early that Mr. Dole will never make it to the White House. Seventy-five percent of voters said they expected Mr. Clinton to win in November. Even nearly half of those who plan to vote for Mr. Dole said they expected the President to be re-elected.A major international study has shown that bone marrow transplants can cure sickle cell disease in some children, a finding that experts say could herald a new era in treating the inherited blood disease.
Researchers involved in the study said they had achieved the cure in 16 of 22 patients with advanced disease by replacing the bone marrow that produces the defective red blood cells characteristic of the disease. But 2 of the children died after undergoing transplants.
Sickle cell disease is a family of inherited and previously incurable disorders that afflict several million people around the world. The disease is most common among people whose ancestors came from Africa, the Middle East, the Mediterranean or India. In this country, the condition primarily afflicts an estimated 80,000 African Americans and 1 in 12 black babies is born with a genetic tendency for passing on the disease.
In its worst form, the disease can result in severe episodes of pain in various parts of the body, stroke, damage to internal organs and death. Current treatments, which can only relieve symptoms, include blood transfusions and pain killers.
Although the study involved only children under the age of 14 who received donated marrow from siblings with highly compatible tissue, researchers said they hoped for a cautious expansion of the therapy to a wider range of patients.
Experts said bone marrow transplants were risky procedures that carried a 10 percent risk of death under the best of circumstances. This risk -- along with complications from the operation, including infertility resulting from drugs use to destroy the old, defective bone marrow -- means that the treatment cannot be considered for all sickle cell patients, the experts said.
The study, being published on Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine, is significant because it proves, in a well-designed trial, that marrow transplants can cure sickle cell disease, as other smaller studies had indicated. And finding a way to cure even a small percentage of sickle cell cases is a major development, specialists said.
''Our findings indicate that bone marrow transplantation can cure sickle cell disease in a significant number of patients with advanced disease,'' said Dr. Keith M. Sullivan of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, the lead author of the study. ''In the paper, we used the word 'curative' with a great degree of consideration and careful look at the data.''
The trial lasted five years, from 1991 to 1995, and involved 22 children who received marrow transplants at more than 30 centers in the United States, Canada, Europe and Brazil. After an average follow-up of two years, 20 of the patients survived. Of the survivors, 16 showed no symptoms of sickle cell disease. And 4 patients, or 18 percent, rejected the donor tissue and their sickle cell symptoms returned, the report said.
The study involved patients with advanced symptoms of sickle cell disease, including stroke, lung complications and organ impairment, who had a compatible sibling as a marrow donor.
While only about 7 percent of sickle cell patients meet the criteria of the study, the researchers said, further research should expand use of the procedure to more patients who are in danger of severe complications as the disease progresses.
Sickle cell disease describes a group of inherited disorders, including sickle cell anemia and sickle B-thalassemia. The disorders involve the body-producing abnormal forms of hemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying component of red blood cells. With the disease, red blood cells, which are produced by bone marrow, periodically stiffen and take on irregular shapes that block small blood vessels and cause vascular inflammation.
For treatment, many adults also take hydroxyurea, an anti-cancer drug that causes the body to make types of hemoglobin that do not sickle as readily, resulting in fewer complications for some patients.
''This is an exciting development in sickle cell treatment,'' said Dr. George J. Dover, a sickle cell specialist at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions in Baltimore. ''This work helps us define the risks and benefits of trying bone marrow transplants versus some of the more conventional therapies we have now, and new therapies that should be coming out in three or four years.''
Dr. Dover said new drug therapy for sickle cell, including wider use of hydroxyurea in the last year, and the better control of infections and other complications of the disease had increased both the life span and the quality of life for many sickle cell patients with fewer risks than marrow transplants.
''In patients who have shown severe complications, it is now reasonable to consider bone marrow transplants as an option,'' Dr. Dover said in an interview.
''But I don't think we should be matching every sickle cell patient with a donor and saying everyone should consider marrow transplants. We have to consider all of the risks and benefits of different options.''
Marrow transplants are routinely used for treating some forms of cancer and other blood conditions. The first case in the United States involving a marrow transplant and sickle cell occurred in 1984, when doctors gave a transplant to a young leukemia victim who also happened to have sickle cell anemia and the treatment cured both diseases. Similar results have been noted in pilot studies subsequently conducted in Europe and elsewhere.
In marrow transplants, doctors destroy a patient's marrow with chemicals or radiation. They then inject into the blood new marrow from a compatible donor that contains stem cells, which develop into both blood and immune system cells. Major complications of the procedure are graft rejection and potentially deadly graft-versus-host disease, in which the transplanted tissue attacks the host's cells.
In an editorial in the journal, Dr. Orah S. Platt and Dr. C. Eva Guinan of Children's Hospital in Boston warn that patients who are successfully treated with marrow transplants face an increased risk of infertility, as well as a greater risk of cancer years later, from the drugs used to destroy the old bone marrow.Scientists and space agency officials today reaffirmed their claim of finding strong evidence for past life on Mars and asked skeptics among the world's scientists to join them in conducting even more rigorous tests needed to confirm or disprove it.
Daniel S. Goldin, the NASA Administrator, said the possibility of Martian life, however primitive, would prompt a thorough review of the nation's program of exploring the planet. Some of the currently planned 10 robotic missions to Mars might be re-evaluated, he said, and serious thought would be given to speeding up plans for returning a sample of Martian rocks on a robotic mission that had been scheduled for no earlier than 2005.
Asked if the findings might bring more money for NASA, Dr. Goldin said science should dictate the scope and design future projects. ''I think exploration is necessary,'' he said, but he cautioned that NASA should not simply say, ''Give us money. Let's have a big mission.''
The White House announced that Vice President Al Gore would convene a ''bipartisan space summit'' by the end of the year to consider the future of the nation's space program, in light of the Mars discovery.
As he was leaving for a flight to California, President Clinton told reporters, ''A significant purpose of this summit will be to discuss how America should pursue answers to the scientific questions raised by this finding.''
Mr. Clinton pledged that ''the American space program will put its full intellectual power and technological prowess behind the search for further evidence of life on Mars.'' For if the discovery can be confirmed by others, he added, ''it will surely be one of the most stunning insights into the universe that science has ever uncovered.''
At a news conference today at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the research team explained and vigorously defended their reasons for concluding that a meteorite that fell to Earth from Mars bore strong chemical and possibly fossil evidence of primitive life on Mars several billion years ago, when the planet was warmer and wetter. They conceded that their evidence was not conclusive but said it certainly pointed to past microbial life on Mars as the most reasonable and simplest explanation.
The team's analysis of the 4.2-pound, potato-sized meteorite, which was found in Antarctica, was described in added detail after unofficial word of the discovery became widely known on Tuesday. A full report on the findings is being published in the Aug. 16 issue of the journal Science.
Dr. David McKay, a geochemist at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, who directed the research, pointed to four lines of evidence supporting the team's conclusion. These included the detection of an apparently unusual pattern of organic molecules, the carbon compounds that are the basis of life, and also several unusual mineral samples that are known products of primitive microscopic organisms on Earth.
Even more startling, and potentially controversial, was Dr. McKay's interpretation of microscopic but distinct black and white circles embedded in the dark rock as being fossils of the Martian microbes themselves. Highly magnified pictures of the tiny circles less than a hundredth the diameter of a human hair were shown at the news conference.
''This is the most controversial part of our conclusions,'' Dr. McKay said. ''But the explanation for these structures that we favor is that these are in fact microfossils from Mars. It's simply an interpretation at this point.''
As more scientists learned of the discovery, many advised caution and some were frankly skeptical that the researchers indeed had sufficient evidence to back up their conclusions about life on Mars. One somewhat skeptical scientist, Dr. William Schopf, a paleobiologist at the University of California at Los Angeles, was invited to speak at the news conference.
Calling the findings ''exciting and very interesting,'' Dr. Schopf said: ''I personally regard this as a preliminary report. I think a certain amount of additional work needs to be done before we can be sure that this report is really about life on Mars.''
Dr. Schopf recalled that Dr. Carl Sagan, the Cornell University astronomer and writer, once said, ''Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.'' Accordingly, he contended that several points of evidence made by the research team fell short of being extraordinary. The organic molecules and certain mineral compounds, he noted, could have been of nonbiological origin.
When asked what it might take to persuade him that the evidence indeed suggested Martian life, Dr. Schopf said he wanted to see a more detailed examination of the purported microfossils to determine if they show the presence of cell walls. He also wanted to see evidence for a ''population of organisms,'' not just a few, and traces suggesting cell division, showing the life cycle of such organisms.
Dr. McKay said future studies with electron microscopes should be able to identify the presence of membranes or other signs of cells walls, if they existed. Other investigations will examine the rock for signs of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins and of life. The researchers said they had already met other objections by skeptics, who argued that the meteorite has been exposed to great heat, by saying that the presence of iron sulfides and certain organic molecules was proof that the meteorite had not been exposed to extremly high temperatures.
In their report for publication in Science, the research team said the rock they studied was 1 of 12 meteorites that have fallen to Earth and been identified as Martian, based primarily on an examination of pockets of trapped gas in the rock. The researchers determined that the rock formed about 4.5 billion years ago, when the Martian crust itself was newly formed. The rock presumably came from underneath the Martian surface. And from 3.6 billion to 4 billion years ago, when the Martian climate was much less cold and arid than it is now, the putative organisms would have left their marks in the rock much like the formation of fossils in limestone on Earth.
Then 16 million years ago, a comet or asteroid struck Mars, ejecting the piece of rock and sending it off into space, where it eventually fell to Earth 13,000 years ago. The rock was found in Antarctica in 1984 and named Allan Hills 84001. Current research that led to the supposed discovery of Martian fossil life began two years ago, mainly at the Johnson Space Center.
Mr. Goldin, the head of NASA, set the tone for the news conference by cautioning that the researchers were not claiming ''ultimate proof'' of life beyond Earth, but circumstantial evidence that is highly suggestive of past life on Mars.
''All of us are skeptical, but thrilled and humbled by this prospect,'' Mr. Goldin said.Planning even for the networks' commercial breaks, Republicans here have scripted a four-day political television program, which they are calling a convention. Now the question is whether the networks will broadcast it for them.
For at least two decades, the high points of political conventions have been foregone conclusions, plotted as much for television viewers as for the delegates. This year, though, the delegates themselves seem like afterthoughts, or perhaps props. The Republicans have joined communications technology to new sophistication about network news, infomercials and entertainment to plan a tightly disciplined, fast-paced television variety show.
''Instead of putting on a news event they hope the networks will cover, they have come to the point where they're putting on a TV program, hoping they can get much of it past TV journalists, unfiltered,'' said Tom Hannon, the political director for CNN.
The paradox is that the Republicans have planned all this for the greater glory of Bob Dole, who, more than any other major-party candidate in recent memory, disdains the scripts and the set pieces of television politics.
From his skybox facing the podium, Paul J. Manafort, the political consultant who has masterminded convention preparations for Mr. Dole, will have direct telephone lines to the officials on the platform, to keep them moving through their brief, tightly scheduled speeches. He will also have direct lines to each state delegation.
''I want to move Governor Whitman from New Jersey over to California, so that CBS can do a picture,'' Mr. Manafort said by way of example, waving toward the floor while touring his box this afternoon. ''I'll ring down, she'll get the message, we'll have somebody there to escort her.''
Referring to the customary challenge of whipping delegates into line, Mr. Manafort added, ''If there are any political issues, which there won't be in this convention, I'll also have the capacity to do that from here.''
Such thorough programming is risky. By planning so carefully and transparently, the planners could prompt restless journalists to pounce on any deviation from the program, like delegates' grumbling over abortion.
''They just need to keep in mind,'' said Mr. Hannon, of CNN, ''that we're producing our coverage and they're not, and they're managing their convention and we're not.''
But the planners are managing their convention for Mr. Hannon's audience. In a reflection of how little emphasis has been placed on those actually attending the convention, the cramped hall here is, as one Republican official put it, ''the worst place in America to watch it.'' More than 7,000 Republicans with convention passes are expected to sit in rooms outside the hall and watch the proceedings on television.
From the platform itself, Haley Barbour, the Republican national chairman, will be able to monitor coverage of the proceedings on a five-inch RCA set mounted in his desk.
The gray, muslin-covered podium is flanked by 15-foot-square ''video walls,'' which will offer carefully produced presentations of speakers and scenes from across America. Convention planners want those screens to function like Trojan television sets: they hope the networks will happily haul the video presentations into living rooms nationwide, so that millions of viewers will watch what the delegates watch.
The networks say they have no intention of simply retransmitting what Mr. Barbour has taken to calling ''a festival of Republican ideas.''
''We're not there to be an unmediated conduit for their promotions,'' said Jeff Gralnick, vice president of ABC News and executive producer of that network's convention coverage.
But Mr. Manafort predicted that the networks would carry many video presentations, saying those videos were integral to the convention's messages. ''There's a moral responsibility to at least allow us to communicate with the American people,'' he said.
Network producers say they have a public-interest duty to convey the kickoff of the Presidential campaign to the public. The networks fulfill that duty with thorough coverage of both parties' conventions, ''to help people to form opinions in choosing their President,'' said Steve Jacobs, executive producer of special events for CBS News.
But Mr. Jacobs said it was ''longstanding CBS policy not to carry the infomercials, like the eight-minute biographies that parties make of their candidates.'' He said he hoped to get advance copies of the Republicans' videos, to evaluate each for news value.
For example, Mr. Jacobs is eager to review a videotape about Ronald Reagan, planned for showing in the hall at the convention's opening session, on Monday night. The public has seen so little of Mr. Reagan recently, he said, that ''it probably represents news'' and is ''not a political commercial.''
Having studied the practices of network news, the Republicans have included some video presentations that they expect the networks not to carry. That filler material is intended to provide time for commercials and such.
''We analyzed television coverage of the conventions over the last 20 years,'' Mr. Manafort said, ''and there is a pattern as to when the anchors would be on the air, when they would do cut-aways to commercials, when they would go to correspondents on the convention floor. It averages about 15 to 16 minutes'' an hour.IF there is one overriding theme of the Yankees' magical march toward the post-season, it is one of second chances and new beginnings.
Darryl Strawberry and Dwight Gooden epitomize the second chance.
Joe Torre is enjoying a rebirth in the biggest city going, a feeling only those men bounced from the managers' offices at Shea and Yankee Stadiums can truly appreciate.
Cecil Fielder, freed from purgatory in Detroit, can't stop smiling because of a new lease on his baseball life.
With all these second chances coming as quickly and cleanly as Yankee victories, with all these changes proving to be as solid as the Yankee chances for their first division title since 1980, only one chapter remains unwritten.
Yankee fans should acknowledge that George Steinbrenner has changed, for the better. And they should show appreciation by inviting and insisting that come the post-season, Steinbrenner come down from his box and into the stands without fear of harangues and rude chants, replacing those sentiments with some ''well dones'' for the Boss who pulled back enough to let his team shine through.
The Yankees, even those who survived the ice-age relations between the players and the abrasive Boss, agree.
''Every human being should be able to go where they want without being insulted or harassed,'' said Willie Randolph. ''Having owners in the stands is good for the game, too. The fans should recognize what he has done.''
''Giving people the opportunity to prove that things can change and do change is what he's done, and there's no question he deserves a second chance, too,'' said Strawberry, whose three home runs Tuesday night underscored the rebirth of one of the game's most feared hitters. ''The fact that he's turned his franchise around and brought a winner to this side of town, people should look at him differently, just like all of us.''
People with longstanding Yankee ties like Randolph should remember that the hostilities were won on merit. Overt and ornery interference cost Steinbrenner the ability to sit unharassed in the stands, as does the Colorado owner Jerry McMorris, the Mets co-owner Nelson Doubleday and Pittsburgh's Kevin McClatchy. ''I think a lot of what he's taken from the fans is because of the firings, and some of the players being unceremoniously let go,'' Randolph points out.
Still, what seemed impossible a decade ago -- a kinder, gentler Steinbrenner with a deft touch as opposed to a heavy hand -- has evolved. Maybe it's the big lead the Yankees are holding dear -- it's a nine-game advantage over the Baltimore Orioles in the American League East after New York's 8-4, 10-inning loss to the Chicago White Sox last night.
Maybe, too, it's Steinbrenner himself.
''It's not like it was in the real needy days, where he was always being quoted in the papers and stuff,'' Randolph said. ''The way it is now is the way it should be.''
''He has mellowed,'' said Yankee General Manager Bob Watson, yet another man who played here when the Yankees were Team Turmoil. ''During the interview process, he said he was not going to be involved in a lot of the decision-making process and, for the most part, he hasn't.''
Yes, Steinbrenner has been involved in big-ticket players, like David Cone, Fielder and Kenny Rogers, and big rehab projects, like Gooden and Strawberry. ''His opinion is obviously strong, and that's the way it's always been,'' Randolph said. ''But it seems to be he's really listening to what Joe and Bob need and want. And we've put together a team that fits real nice. In the past we always went and got a surplus of talent that didn't mix.''
Then there is the relative peace that has surrounded Torre. That peace, denied so many former managers here, is no fluke. ''One of the things I asked him before taking the job was not to call the manager at weird hours; if he needed to talk to Joe, to go through me,'' Watson said of Steinbrenner. ''He has done that.''
It will be hard for many to forgive, to look past prior transgressions, of which there were many. But the astute fans should listen to Randolph, who says: ''It bothers him that people have that view of him. Deep down inside, George loves the game. He's obsessed with winning, but I think we all are a little.''
In a season in which so many other Yankee second chances have been given, Steinbrenner's performance and behavior should be enough to merit some applause.
Sports of The TimesBob Dole and other Republican leaders found a way today to avoid a divisive floor fight over abortion at the Republican National Convention next week.
They agreed that all measures rejected this week by the Platform Committee, including about a dozen advocating abortion rights, would be published as an appendix of minority views at the end of the platform.
The platform, which was approved by the committee tonight after three days of discussion, endorses a Constitutional amendment that would make abortions illegal in all circumstances. Republicans who believe abortions should be legal had tried all week to put language in the platform stating that their views were welcome in the party, but they were routed by the anti-abortion forces.
After a day of cross-country telephone calls and backroom negotiations here, Representative Henry J. Hyde, the Platform Committee chairman, announced this evening that he would attach the appendix to the official platform. The appendix will also contain speeches to the committee by leaders like Mr. Dole and Speaker Newt Gingrich.
Under Republican rules, Mr. Hyde has the authority to take such a step on his own.
All week, stalwarts on both sides of the abortion issue had insisted that they would cause a platform fight at the convention if the matter was not resolved to their satisfaction.
Opponents of abortion like Ralph Reed, executive director of the Christian Coalition, and Gary Bauer, head of the Coalition to Keep the Republican Party Pro-Life, said an appendix would be satisfactory to them.
At a news conference here, Gov. Pete Wilson of California, a prominent Republican advocate of legal abortions, said: ''We are satisfied. This is the accommodation we sought.''
After talking with other abortion-rights Republicans involved in the platform negotiations, Gov. Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey said she was relieved to hear that the platform committee had agreed to connect ''a formal appendix'' to the platform.
''What we have been talking about is something that becomes a permanent part of the record,'' Mrs. Whitman said tonight in an interview on an airplane to San Francisco, where she is scheduled to deliver two speeches before the party convention next week. Mrs. Whitman said that under the deal most of the ''tolerance'' language the committee rejected earlier this week would now be included in the addendum.
''The permanent record should show that there are active and real pro-choice Repulicans,'' she said.
For all the threats and bluster from both sides this week, all the Republicans seemed deep down to be eager to avoid a floor fight when the platform is debated next Monday night, the first night of the convention.
In 1992, President George Bush prevailed on Republicans who favored legal abortion not to bring the matter before the full convention, and they agreed.
The last time opponents of platform planks generated a floor battle at a Republican convention was in 1964, when moderates offered amendments on the John Birch Society, civil rights and nuclear weapons.
The moderates were overwhelmingly defeated by forces loyal to Barry Goldwater, the party's Presidential nominee. But one of the lasting images of that convention is the delegates booing Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York, one of the most prominent moderates. The platform fight on television was said at the time to have hurt the Goldwater candidacy.
In Washington, President Clinton said today that the Republican platform represented ''more of the extremism'' that he maintained characterized the Republicans' budget last year.
The Dole camp doubtless hopes that the agreement tonight puts an end to a somewhat embarrassing set of circumstances for the prospective candidate.
In June, Mr. Dole said that the platform would express in the abortion plank the party's ''tolerance'' of Republicans who opposed a Constitutional amendment outlawing abortions. Then he was forced to retreat step by step.
First, he agreed for the tolerance section to be taken out of the abortion plank and put elsewhere in the platform. Then he agreed to change the wording so that other matters were included with abortion in the tolerance language. Finally, this week, the word ''abortion'' was dropped altogether from the tolerance passage.
One Plank Is Shored UpNever mind that they have been divorced since May, following a four-year separation, but yesterday, PRINCE ANDREW and his former wife, the DUCHESS OF YORK, celebrated their 10th wedding anniversary at a party at the home they once shared, Sunninghill Park, near Windsor, the Press Association reported.
The event was held in conjunction with a party for the eighth birthday of PRINCESS BEATRICE, the (former) couple's elder daughter. The 100 guests included the Princess of Wales and David Frost.
A spokesman at Buckingham Palace said that it was a private party and that no information about it could be given out.
NADINE BROZAN
CHRONICLETomorrow, New Yorkers wistful over the fate of the Central Park Children's Zoo will be invited to say a final goodbye to Jonah, the spouting cement whale, and his fairy-tale neighbors. Then, the Children's Zoo, long derided as a prime example of 1960's kitsch, will be demolished.
The zoo is getting a $6 million replacement, after protests and an unsuccessful lawsuit by preservationists. The old zoo was a gift from Herbert H. Lehman, the former Governor, and his wife, Edith, in 1961.
''This is really a public farewell to what has been a very nice part of New York for a generation,'' said the Parks Commissioner, Henry J. Stern. The decision to open the zoo from 11 A.M. to 2 P.M. marks the first time in almost five years it will be open to the public.
Many of the fanciful structures, most reflecting Biblical or children's stories, will be preserved. Some will go to the Museum of the City of New York, and Jonah the Whale has been requested for display in Far Rockaway, Queens, by Community Board 14. Some pieces may be auctioned off, the Commissioner said.
Mr. Stern said he had considered charging a dime for admission, the price for years. ''Then we realized there weren't any animals and it wouldn't be fair,'' he said.For the last seven hours, Suryami and Mimin, 21-year-old factory workers, had been sitting at their sewing machines, stitching Nike sneakers for export, and they were bored.
Like most of the thousands of other young women streaming from the factory gates at the end of their Sunday-morning shift, they had traveled here from rural villages seeking to escape poverty and make their way into Indonesia's growing middle class.
''I don't want to work here forever,'' said Suryami, who like many Indonesians, uses just one name. ''I'm really bored sitting at a sewing machine all day. I want to earn money so I can open my own shop.''
Mimin added, ''It's boring but it's better than being unemployed at home.''
Neither Suryami, the daughter of a farm laborer, nor Mimin, whose father is a village official, had ever heard of Michael Jordan, who is earning millions touting the brand of sneakers they make. Nor were they aware that a pair of those sneakers can sell in America for the equivalent of more than a month's pay at the factory.
And they were only vaguely aware of the controversy over celebrity endorsements of goods manufactured in harsh working conditions in Asia and Central America, like Mr. Jordan's commercials for Nike and the line of clothing manufactured under Kathie Lee Gifford's name by Wal-Mart in Honduras.
''I don't care about any of that,'' said Suryami, who wore a colorful blouse and neatly ironed slacks that she could not have afforded to buy at home. ''What is important for us is that we came from here from our villages and got a job and and we get paid for it.''
They are part of a demographic and economic migration that is turning the rice fields surrounding Jakarta into an industrial zone that is helping to fuel an economic transformation in what was recently a largely poor, rural nation.
And the pay is not all, Mimin said, voicing new social aspirations that are also changing the face of the country. ''I want to be independent,'' she said. ''If I stay at home I will be a farmer forever.''
It may be a slow climb up the economic and social ladder. Like many other factory workers here, making everything from sneakers to tires to wire fences, Suryami and Mimin send a large part of their pay home to support their families.
This steadily spreading wealth is a significant element in the nation's overall stability, despite a recent eruption of violence that underscored a political malaise after 30 years of autocratic rule by President Suharto, said Dennis de Tray, director of the World Bank office here.
''This is not an Iran or a Peru,'' he said. ''People have benefited from growth here. They do not want to destroy this machinery. They would like more freedom and they would like more democracy. But I think they would be unwilling to bring the economy down in order to achieve these other goals.''
Since a riot on July 27, the Government has moved aggressively to stifle political opposition, and one of its targets has been unofficial labor groups that in recent months have led strikes at some factories for better pay and working conditions.
The Government -- and economists like Mr. de Tray -- argue that cheap labor is essential to the country's economic growth and they say it is unreasonable to apply Western standards to the labor market in developing countries.
On a sparkling Sunday afternoon, liberated from their work behind the high walls that surround their factory, many of the thousands of Nike workers headed to Tangerang's new malls and cinemas for a taste of urban life here on the northern outskirts of Jakarta.
The city is part of a fast-growing urban sprawl known as Jabotabek -- for Jakarta, Bogor, Tangerang and Bekasi -- where the population has soared over the last five years from 17 million to more than 20 million and is expected to grow to 30 million by the year 2010. Jabotabek is now home to one-fourth of the urban population of this nation of 190 million.
The seizure of farmland for this rapid growth, here and around the crowded island of Java, is another source of discontent in Indonesia, where power is in the hands of a few and the government and judicial system offer little redress.
Much of the growth here comes from urban migration, another national problem that is straining resources and contributing to a social and economic imbalance between the cities and farming areas.
The city of Tangerang itself has grown by one-third over the last five years, to more than 1.2 million and is projected to reach 5.8 million over the next decade.
A taxi driver, visiting for the first time in three years, could not recognize downtown Tangerang, its badly paved roads now lined with shopping malls, new apartment complexes and, everywhere, more construction.After a hunger strike was held in front of the White House this spring, the Clinton Administration agreed to declassify thousands of United States Government documents concerning human rights abuses here. But Guatemalan prosecutors scrutinizing the papers are now wondering whether all the prodding and the protest was worth the effort.
Guatemalan officials had expected that the documents, which cover the period January 1984 to March 1995, would shed light on a dozen notorious cases in which American citizens were killed, tortured or raped. They also hoped that the papers might reveal useful information about the longstanding links between the Central Intelligence Agency and the Guatemalan Armed Forces, which have been accused of committing most of the crimes against the Americans.
''But the truth is that not one of these documents has any value at all in a judicial proceeding, not as proof, not as investigative leads,'' Julio Arango Escobar, head of the special prosecution team the Guatemalan Government has appointed to examine the papers, said in an interview here. ''What we have seen is nothing that has not been disclosed publicly already.
''These are not declassified documents,'' he added, waving a sheaf of papers in which many names are blacked out and some long sections of text have been excised. ''They are censored documents.''
John D. Roney, a spokesman for the American Embassy here, said: ''We've released what we could. But even with the documents that were made public, there are still portions which for privacy and national security reasons were withheld.''
In the past, the Guatemalan Government has dragged its feet in investigating controversial cases that received much publicity in the United States, like the deaths of Michael DeVine, an American innkeeper, and Efrain Bamaca, a guerrilla leader married to an American lawyer. But President Alvaro Arzu, who took office in January, replaced the country's Chief Prosecutor this spring and is facing mounting public pressure here for an accounting of human rights abuses by the military during the country's 35-year civil war, in which more than 100,000 people have died.
Thus far, nine boxes of State Department documents have been shipped here, totaling an estimated 20,000 pages. Mr. Arango and his unit have examined only one box, which deals with the case of Dianna Ortiz, an American Ursuline nun who says Guatemalan Army personnel kidnapped, tortured and raped her in November 1989, freeing her only after an American agent named ''Alejandro'' intervened.
Because 503 documents Washington deemed ''restricted'' are not available, it has been hard for Mr. Arango to gauge how much the United States knows about the cases. But the papers made public indicate that Thomas F. Stroock, a Wyoming businessman who was the Bush Administration's envoy here, viewed local human rights organizations as left-wing fronts, initially doubted the nun's account, and then mounted a wide-ranging public relations effort to distance American officials from the incident.
''You can clearly see the concern of the American Embassy regarding the management of the Ortiz case,'' said Vicente Cano Ponce, another member of the special investigative team. ''That seems to be their principal consideration.''
The documents were first made public in May, after Sister Ortiz had staged a hunger strike and met with Hillary Clinton, the First Lady. At the time, the State Department spokesman, Nicholas Burns, called the release ''a demonstration of the strong commitment of President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Warren Christopher to clear up these cases and the participation, if there was any, of the United States.''
Copies of the 5,847 documents, many of which are newspaper clippings or letters from members of Congress, were made available to the Guatemalan Embassy, which arranged for them to be flown here in three shipments that ended last month. The arrival of the first consignment was full of drama, with an armored car, escorted by motorcycle policemen and television cameramen jostling for position, taking the papers from the airport to the office of the Attorney General.
Shortly afterward, someone broke into Mr. Arango's unguarded office at night and rifled through some of the documents and other papers. On another occasion, the investigators returned to their office after a long weekend to discover that their computers had been tampered with.
''There are a lot of people with guns who thought their names were going to turn up in the documents,'' said Mr. Arango, who previously worked on the Bamaca case. ''Those fears have diminished as the press has made known how little we really have to work with.''
Prensa Libre, Guatemala's largest newspaper, complained in a recent editorial that on this occasion, as in the past, ''all that became known was what the C.I.A. wanted.''
In fact, said Helen Mack, a Guatemalan human rights campaigner whose sister Myrna, a prominent anthropologist here, was killed by the military, Washington continues to cover up its knowledge of abuses here by exempting both the Central Intelligence Agency and Department of Defense from public disclosure.
''Those are the documents that really matter, because they are the ones that have the comments of Guatemalan military sources,'' she said.RETAIL advertising dabbles almost exclusively in fantasy, creating worlds that most shoppers only wish they inhabited. In these ads, models mow the lawn in evening wear, couples with immaculately clean houses sip espresso and well-dressed husbands take over the child care with aplomb.
An exception is newspaper circulars, in which even retailers that promote fantasy through TV commercials become grounded in reality as they try to identify with the shopper. Price is the important message.
Nowhere is this more true than in the competitive discount store sector, which depends heavily on Sunday newspaper circulars to draw customer traffic. Discounters are increasingly trying to improve the productivity of their circulars, making them a bit more esthetically pleasing and reflective of their shopper's lives. And they are pushing the point of low prices through their pages even more heavily, in an attempt to draw more shoppers, more quickly.
''Circulars are getting dramatically better,'' said Walter Loeb, a retail consultant in New York. ''Retailers realize that more dramatic presentations are needed, with fewer items on the page. They see that if they devote three-quarters of a page to a shirt, they can expect more productivity out of one item.''
Indeed, instead of featuring cluttered pages covered with a mishmash of socks, rakes and shampoo, circular pages now tend to focus on just a few related items, with the prices in bold print.
The Kmart Corporation, for example, which features Penny Marshall and Rosie O'Donnell in its television campaign, recently devoted six months to studying carefully the 73 million circulars it distributes nationally each Sunday. The result was a complete redesign.
''There were too many products, which made it harder to read and harder to communicate value,'' Kmart's chief executive, Floyd Hall, said in a telephone interview from the company's headquarters in Troy, Mich. ''Using national brands, strengthening the price message, and using more bold red colors has become key here.''
The cover of a back-to-school circular that comes out this Sunday, for example, features a family decked out in Brittania jeans, with a bright red $13.99 placed front and center in the copy. Backpacks and stationery fill the margins. The back page has more back-to-school items like pencils, crayons and Elmer's glue.
In contrast, last year's back-to-school circular featured three pairs of jeans in a closet, with brands like Denim Republic and No Excuses listed in the margin. Prices were hidden deep in the copy. The back page was a hodge-podge of dog food, toilet paper and indigestion medicine, many with unknown brands.
Caldor, the retailer based in Norwalk, Conn., which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last September, also features giant-sized prices in its circulars. ''Your Choice $10'' is written in bold blue letters next to a selection of cookware in its current circular.
Further, more people have replaced the old product shots of deodorant and dishcloths lying about. ''Now, they show the product the way it is supposed to be used,'' said Kurt Barnard, publisher of Barnard's Retail Marketing Report. ''More action makes the look more interesting, and the layout is better.''
Discounters tend to use small local advertising agencies to produce circulars rather than their leading agency, or do the work in-house. The newspaper campaigns have also been using models with a more down-to-earth look, as retailers have realized that they need to feature folks who look like their shoppers.
Mr. Hall said that girls wearing jumpers in the current circular reminded him of real children who popped into Kmart with their parents, and that an effort had been made to show a diverse range of would-be shoppers. Family Bargain Center, a discount store based in San Diego that caters to a mostly Hispanic population, uses store employees in its circulars, which saves the company money and adds a residual benefit of a realistic flavor.
''Knowing who the target audience is is a very critical part,'' Mr. Barnard said.
Bradlees, another troubled discounter, may have missed the mark on this point. A recent circular of the chain, based in Braintree, Mass., depicts a softly lighted dinner table on its cover. Inside, a harried businessman in a suit reads his newspaper near a luggage display. The merchandise is depicted in a way that suggests elegance over value. ''Bradlees' circular looks too much like a department store, which may be too upscale,'' Mr. Loeb said.
AdvertisingSales fell sharply for many major retailers last month, a consequence at least in part of cooler temperatures cutting into sales of seasonal goods like summer clothing and air-conditioners.
Several retailers even pointed a finger at Atlanta, contending that the Summer Olympic Games, which held the nation's attention throughout the second half of July, had kept shoppers out of stores.
''We had severe tapering-off during the Olympics,'' said Floyd Hall, chief executive of the Kmart Corporation, which saw a drop of 3.8 percent in same-store sales, comparative sales for stores open at least one year. ''So we pulled out prior Olympic years, and found that we had 3 to 6 percent decreases those years, too.''
Even Sears, Roebuck & Company which has well outperformed most retailers all year, reported a half-percent decrease in its same-store sales, the first decrease the company has had since March 1993.
According to the Goldman Sachs retail composite index, which tracks sales data from about 60 retailers, the results were the worst performance for the month of July in the eight years the index has been tabulated. The index gained 1.9 percent last month. In July 1995, it rose 3.6 percent.
The overall results for July, which tends to be the weakest month in sales except for January, were the latest indication of an economy moderating from stronger levels of growth in the spring. Still, to some analysts, the decline in sales seemed out of sync with recent data indicating that while the economy was slowing a bit, consumers had taken steps to accommodate their discretionary spending.
''The weakness with retail sales in July is at odds with most of the broad economic fundamentals,'' said Louis Crandall, the chief economist at R.H. Wrightson & Associates. ''Growth has been strong, consumer sentiment hit cyclical highs in July, and while there has been concern about consumer debt, that too is well below the late 80's.''
Indeed, consumer installment debt grew at an 8.7 percent clip in June, the Federal Reserve said this week, the third straight month increases ran at less than 10 percent after a period of much larger increases. Also, outstanding credit card debt rose in June at a 7.6 percent rate, the first single-digit increase this year after five monthly rises averaging 16.9 percent.
Further, a Labor Department report last week showed wage increases, including benefits, rose nine-tenths of 1 percent in the second quarter, which Mr. Crandall said was slightly milder than the first quarter but still faster than sustainable long-term trends.
Retailers love to blame weather for their travails -- if it's too hot in August, they argue, no one wants to buy clothes -- just as when it is freezing in February. If it's too warm in February, however, they complain that sweaters and coats don't sell, and when the temperature stays cool in July, air-conditioner and fan sales flop.
So it was this July, when cooler temperatures were said to hinder seasonal sales. Further, retailers complained, America's attention turned to the television, and the Atlanta Games.
But it may be the retailers' careful attention to inventory -- last year they were hurt when they were stuck with too much of it -- that may have contributed the most to weak sales.
''Inventories both going into July and coming out of spring and summer merchandise are about the cleanest that I have seen in several years,'' said Richard N. Baum, a retail analyst at Goldman.
''If you are running inventories that are down 20 percent, it is very hard to have a positive sales comparisons.''
As for the Games? ''The Olympic telecasts were mostly at night,'' Mr. Baum noted. ''I do think it impacted the weekend business, but retailers who did well did not cite the Olympics.''
Poor showings could be found in all sectors of the industry. Department stores were generally weak: Dayton Hudson squeaked in with a gain of eight-tenths of 1 percent, while Federated Department Stores Inc. reported a 1.7 percent loss. The Ann Taylor Stores Corporation saw a 9.8 percent decline, and the Limited Inc.'s sales were flat.
There were some winners. Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the nation's largest retailer, came in with a 3 percent increase. The Gap Inc., the specialty retailer, enjoyed a 7 percent increase, lifted perhaps by the easy comparison of a 6 percent decrease in July last year. Ross Stores Inc., an off-price merchant, reported a 9 percent increase, and was the only off-price store to rise above gains posted in the sales a year earlier.
Among consumer-electronics retailers, the Best Buy Company skated over its competition with an 8 percent increase. Circuit City Stores Inc. reported an 11 percent decrease, and the Tandy Corporation's same-store sales fell 3 percent.
So it may be that rain, chills and gymnasts really did kill sales. ''All of this means that the technical excuses retailers are making are plausible,'' Mr. Crandall said. ''Hurricanes are never terribly good for retailers.''They have a ''war room.'' They have ''rapid response capability.'' They have 102 crack infantry whips. And best of all, leaders of the Christian Coalition say, they have the technological weapons -- a hot new wireless, digital paging system -- to give them tactical superiority at the Republican National Convention here.
''Our goal was to have the largest number of religious conservatives ever on the floor of a national convention,'' said Ralph Reed, executive director of the coalition, ''and to have those delegates linked in a sophisticated high-tech communications system that would be real time and instantaneous.''
The system was still being field-tested today as the Republicans got ready to nominate Bob Dole for President. But it did appear that while other party factions make do next week with the usual frenzy of scampering runners and semaphoric hand signals, the Christian Coalition's floor whips will have an advantage with their hand-held computers in constant contact with a command center.
The whips' small computers, called personal digital assistants, use a new wireless frequency recently approved by the Federal Communications Commission and can get around the traffic jams created by conventional cellular phones. The system will use software specifically designed for the coalition.
The technical concept is simple enough, but it appears that no other group came up with it, at least not in time to put it in motion.
''I don't think anyone was thinking as far ahead or on this scale of planning,'' Mr. Reed said.
The coalition's planning and commitment of resources to next week's convention has, in fact, been so far ahead and on such a scale that the results are reflected in much more than technology. The group labored intensively at state conventions to get its delegates elected -- like-minded opponents of abortion as well as its own members and staff assistants -- and has budgeted about $750,000 for its overall convention efforts, Mr. Reed said.
Partly because of pre-convention maneuvering, too, the Platform Committee of the convention has a far greater proportion of abortion opponents than does the Republican Party at large.
Still, all this technological girding for battle may go unused because there may not be any dispute on the convention floor requiring such high-tech weapons. Party leaders found a way to avoid a divisive floor fight over abortion with their agreement on Wednesday to include an appendix to the platform that gives the minority view supporting abortion rights. And it appears that Mr. Dole will choose a running mate who opposes abortion.
But just in case, the technological system is ready, and Christian Coalition officials are eager to run it through its paces. Mr. Reed, sitting in the coalition's temporary headquarters here, said that at this convention he would be among the delegates for the first time.
The system he will be marshaling would work like this:
The coalition's members and supporters among the delegates, which it says number about 500 from among the 3,980 delegates and alternates, will be told on Sunday how to recognize their whips. (They will probably wear brightly colored caps, rather than the white cowboy hats that all the anti-abortion delegates will wear.)
When an important vote is coming up, the whips will try to tally who will vote and how they will vote by canvassing delegates in advance in their hotels, but they will also do it quickly on the floor. When the whips have an accurate tally they will send it with a runner to one of 15 communications hubs on the floor, where it will be punched into the hand-held computer and sent to the war room.
In that room -- in a hotel that coalition officials refuse to name, saying they fear penetration by would-be imitators or opponents -- strategists with tally sheets, personal computers and more conventional tools of political battle will assess their strength.
After deciding what tactic to use, the strategists will relay instructions back to the whips, who will then inform the delegates. The coordination will be so tight, said Mike Russell, the coalition's spokesman, ''that there can be not just a message of the day, but a message of the hour or the minute.''
Although lacking the coalition's centralized choreography, other Republican delegates will also have a new level of connectedness at the convention. Companies offering Personal Communications Services, or P.C.S. -- wireless phones that employ digital technology and can also be pagers and faxes -- are using the convention to introduce the new technology to politicians and members of the news media.
The P.C.S. phones not only allow delegates to talk to one another, but can also connect through a computer with the Internet. Delegates were already using cellular phones at the 1992 convention, but the system quickly overloaded and callers were plagued by busy signals.
The P.C.S. phones also allow for more secure conversations, said Kathy Egan, a spokeswoman for the Ericsson Corporation, which is providing 300 phones free for delegates to test. ''There can be no eavesdropping,'' Ms. Egan said.
POLITICS: THE INTEREST GROUPSWhat do you do when the value of one of your greatest investments ever is waning but the profit is still huge? You do what a family corporation that is the largest shareholder in Micron Technologies has done: sell $150 million in stock in a way that will defer paying any capital gains taxes for six years.
The sale, coming on top of direct sales by a family member, helped to send Micron shares plunging last month. All told, sales by J. R. Simplot, the 87-year-old potato magnate, and the family corporation he founded that is now controlled by his children, amounted to 12.6 million shares, or nearly 6 percent of Micron.
The shares sold by the family corporation were bought more than a decade ago, long before Micron became celebrated, at a cost of no more than a few dollars a share. And while Micron is down a lot from the peak of $94.75 a share it reached last September, the average price of $19.75 that the family corporation got still represents a huge profit. The taxes that were saved amounted to at least $39 million.
By using complicated Wall Street techniques, including a forward sale and an equity swap, the family company apparently will not pay taxes until 2003. In addition, the maneuver enabled the family company to retain voting rights on most of the shares, which could be useful should a proxy fight erupt.
The transactions are contained in reports to the Securities and Exchange Commission that in some cases do not provide complete information. But tax avoidance appears to be the reason for structuring the family company transactions.
Such tax avoidance has aroused the ire of the Clinton Administration, which earlier this year proposed legislation to outlaw it. But Congressional Republicans promised that no such change would be passed with the retroactive effective date proposed by Mr. Clinton, and the tax deferral remains legal.
In this case, the family company agreed to a forward sale -- meaning the shares will not change hands until later, in this case 2003. It also entered into what is called an equity swap, in which it gave up all the economic benefits of owning the stock for the interim period but also gave up the risks of owning it. The counterparty, which assumed all those risks and benefits, is the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, which went ahead and sold the stock immediately to get rid of the risks.
Essentially, the bank bought the stock and resold it. But under the tax law, because the Simplot company will not complete the sale until 2003, it will not owe capital gains taxes until then. If the average cost of the shares it sold was $5 -- and it probably was less -- the taxes being deferred come to $39 million, based on a 35 percent corporate tax rate.
The family company was founded by Mr. Simplot but is now owned by his children. It took in about $150 million from the transactions, saying the money was needed to finance other investments.
Micron, a leading maker of dynamic random access memory chips, or D-RAM's, zoomed in price last year as demand for the chips soared. But prices for four-megabyte chips, which are the company's principal product, have fallen 75 percent as the PC industry has moved to new machines that need more memory.
This fall Micron, based in Boise, Idaho, will move to a 16-megabyte chip as its primary product. But it has warned that such chips will have lower gross profit margins. It is trying to renegotiate a bank loan agreement because its profit levels have fallen below those required in the old agreement.
Remarkably, the sales, both by Mr. Simplot and by the family corporation, have largely been accepted as not being indicative of a negative outlook on Micron, a company on whose board Mr. Simplot sits. Mr. Simplot, in selling six million shares directly, said he was forced to because of margin calls from his brokers at Merrill Lynch & Company.
''It got so far down, I agreed to let them sell it,'' he told a reporter for The Idaho Statesman. ''I wouldn't sell a share of stock unless I had to.''
Mr. Simplot had long boasted that he had been a buyer of Micron, but never a seller. And he did pay as much as $62.875 each for his shares. But because most of his stock was bought at far lower prices, the five million shares he sold for $107 million brought him a profit before commissions and taxes of about $63 million, based on his latest S.E.C. filings and information on his earlier filings provided by CDA/Investnet of Fort Lauderdale, Fla. His average cost for the shares being sold was about $8.75 a share, while the average price realized was about $21.35 a share. Mr. Simplot did not return a phone call seeking comment.
How could an account with such a huge profit face margin calls, which arrive when an account no longer has enough equity in it to support the money that was borrowed on a margin loan? The answer appears to be that Mr. Simplot had long since cashed in much of the profits. Perhaps he just used the profits to buy more Micron shares; perhaps he used them to buy shares in other companies. Or maybe he took out the cash for other uses.
Margin loans are secured by the value of stock. While they are most often incurred to buy stock, they can be for any reason. While they enable a person to cash-out profits without paying taxes, they do not remove the risk of owning the shares, and the Administration has not sought to tax such loans. Now that he has sold, it appears that Mr. Simplot will have to pay capital gains taxes, unlike the family concern.
The sales by Mr. Simplot included 4.2 million shares, at an average price of $21.82, on July 11, and 800,000 shares, at an average price of $18.91, on July 17. That selling pressure was a big reason for the stock's plunging, hitting a low of $16.625 on July 24. It closed at $24.625 the day before Mr. Simplot began selling. Yesterday, in New York Stock Exchange trading, the shares lost 37.5 cents, closing at $25.50. But a day earlier, aided by a recommendation from Merrill Lynch, the same firm that Mr. Simplot blamed for forcing him to sell, the stock surged $3.625.
The stock sales do not come close to wiping out the Simplot family's position as the largest holders of Micron. It appears from the filings that the family, including the father and the Simplot company, still have the economic ownership of more than 31.7 million shares of stock, or 15.2 percent of the company, worth about $800 million at current prices.
Market PlaceAfter a one-day disruption in air service between the United States and Venezuela, United Airlines restored service late yesterday, but American Airlines decided not to begin flying until this morning.
John Hotard, a spokesman for American, attributed the disruption to a disagreement between Washington and Caracas about aviation-safety standards, saying, ''Our airline and its passengers were definitely pawns in a dispute between two Governments.''
The dispute began last August when the F.A.A. downgraded the civil aviation authority in Venezuela to Category 2. That allows Venezuelan carriers to fly to the United States but requires the country to develop a plan to address the deficiencies that the F.A.A. found to exist in Venezuelan air-safety standards.
Amid industry speculation that Washington was planning to downgrade Venezuela further, to Category 3, which would bar its airlines entirely from the United States, several Venezuelan carriers were detained this week while awaiting departure from Miami to Caracas. Venezuelan officials described Wednesday's and yesterday's delays of United and American flights as reciprocal action but not retaliation.
Then late in the day -- less than 90 minutes before United's scheduled 5:10 P.M. departure from Kennedy Airport in New York to Caracas -- Venezuela assured the United States carriers that they could resume normal service.
The assurance the carriers wanted was that they would not be ''hassled by local authorities,'' as a spokesman for American Airlines, a unit of the AMR Corporation, put it.
At least one aviation consultant believed the four Venezuelan airlines that incurred restrictions on their flights to the United States, had also been pawns of the F.A.A.'s international safety assessment program.
''The F.A.A. is right to inspect individual countries,'' said Robert C. Booth, the publisher of Aviation-Latin America & Caribbean, a monthly newsleter published in Miami. ''But those Venezuelan carriers are all privately owned, they're basically well managed and safe, and to punish them in order to put pressure on Venezuela is unfair to the carriers.''
Those carriers, which operate about a dozen daily flights to the United States, are Viasa, the flag carrier, as well as Avensa, Zuliana and Aserca. They have suspended most flights to the United States, awaiting further safety inspections.
To bring pressure on countries whose civil aviation authority is considered unsafe, Mr. Booth added, the F.A.A. should apply restrictions on United States airlines that fly to those countries whose aviation standards are reportedly unsafe.
Similar criticism of the assessment program was raised two weeks ago by Ivan Michael Schaeffer, the chief executive of Woodside Travel Trust, a large travel-management organization. He suggested that the F.A.A. list, which is dominated by Caribbean and South American nations, ignored countries with questionable safety records if they were important trading partners.
Barry Valentine, an F.A.A. acting administrator, denied the charge, saying the United States was ''comfortable'' with those countries' aviation safety records from personal experience.
Both American and United, a unit of the UAL Corporation, had canceled flights on Wednesday, stranding hundreds of passengers in both countries. A number of passengers booked on those carriers had been flown Wednesday and yesterday to Bogota and Aruba on other carriers, then flown to Miami and beyond on American.
American Airlines, which is suing Venezuela because of losses that the carrier attributes to currency restrictions, was particularly vexed by the dispute. While it managed to fly its two morning nonstops from Caracas on Wednesday, the airline had to cancel its two afternoon nonstops and ferry the planes without passengers from Caracas to Miami.
''The authorities in Caracas found some obscure circular that said the nose-gear wheel well had to have a sticker relating to the use of nitrogen to inflate the plane's tires,'' Mr. Hotard said. ''We offered to produce such a sticker but they said it wasn't enough. Then they demanded paperwork from American and the F.A.A. certifying as to the airworthiness of our plane.''
After being told they could ferry the planes to Miami without passengers, American canceled its morning flight and put 185 would-be passengers into two Caracas hotels while it tried to resolve the dispute. When Venezuelan authorities then gave the carrier permission to fly the passengers out of Venezuela, American decided not to assemble them for fear the promise would be rescinded.In a major infusion of corporate cash that housing experts say has come at a crucial time, executives of 19 large New York City companies said yesterday that they had invested $147 million in a program to rehabilitate rundown city-owned apartment buildings.
The investment, which is to be matched by $147 million in city money, represents the largest commitment so far by the New York Equity Fund, an 8-year-old program in which companies pay for housing rehabilitation in exchange for Federal tax breaks. It was announced at City Hall by Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, Walter Shipley, chairman of the Chase Manhattan Corporation, and other executives.
Since the program was established in 1988, companies have invested $590 million, paying for the renovation of 11,000 apartments. The corporate involvement has been a cornerstone in what housing experts have called the nation's largest urban housing program.
City officials and advocates for the poor said yesterday that the fresh commitment had an unusual urgency because it came as cuts were being made in other government-backed housing programs for poor people, including Federal subsidies for low-income rental construction.
In addition, the city is reversing its long-held policy of taking over buildings from delinquent landlords.
''The assumption that the city is responsible for whatever development takes place has been replaced with a new spirit of entrepreneurialism,'' Mayor Giuliani said.
Attending in addition to Mr. Shipley were top executives of Salomon Brothers, the Bankers Trust Company, Republic National Bank and the Bank of New York, whose companies all invested heavily in the program.
Officials estimated that the money would pay for renovating about 3,200 apartments. They said much of the work would be done, as it has over the last eight years, by neighborhood groups in the South Bronx, and in Williamsburg and East New York, Brooklyn, as well as in other areas where the city has taken over blighted buildings.
But the new money is to be used mainly to renovate occupied rental buildings, not vacant city-owned buildings, as in the past. And under an initiative announced by Mayor Giuliani a year ago, the city will offer some of its blighted apartment buildings to commercial developers, who would be responsible for renovating and managing them for low-income tenants.
''It is certainly a more difficult approach than in the past,'' said Paul S. Grogan, president of the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, which works with another housing organization, the Enterprise Foundation, to raise corporate investments and match them with neighborhood groups and projects.
Although the logistics of low-income housing renovation have always been complicated, several neighborhood groups have mastered the skill, renovating almost all vacant city-owned apartment buildings. This has left the city's vast inventory of occupied buildings as its last major segment of housing in need of repair.
Mr. Grogan said neighborhood groups would meet with tenants of the blighted buildings, to persuade them to have their apartments renovated. In many cases, he said, the tenants will be relocated during the renovation. Some of the tenants will be asked to accept small rent increases for their renovated homes, he said.
In focusing on occupied city-owned buildings, officials have been forced to change the rules of the renovation program, largely because of cuts expected in Federal aid to poor rental tenants under the Section 8 housing program.
The Federal program provides rent subsidies, making up the difference between what a family can afford and what is deemed the fair market rent. Although the program has not been abandoned, many housing experts expect it to be eliminated or sharply reduced by Congress.
Kathren S. Wylde, president of the New York City Housing Partnership and a principal engineer of corporate-backed rehabilitation programs in the city, said that with the cuts, even a huge commitment of cash like the one announced yesterday could not keep housing renovation moving forward.
A large part of the corporate financing is now helping subsidize poor people's rents instead of simply replacing bricks, mortar, windows and plumbing.
''Those of us who are involved in housing are not at all sanguine,'' she said. Even though the new $147 million investment is much needed, she added, ''there is much more work in the pipeline than we will be able to get done.''Since Radovan Karadzic was indicted on war crimes charges and was forced by the West to relinquish his position as Bosnian Serb leader, a philosophical soul mate and a close colleague has increasingly become the public face of the Bosnian Serbs.
For months now, American and European diplomats have driven up a hill from Sarajevo, the city the Bosnian Serbs bombarded from this village perch, to talk, often testily, with Momcilo Krajisnik, the speaker of the self-proclaimed Bosnian Serb Parliament.
This week it was the new commander of NATO-led forces in Bosnia, Adm. Joseph Lopez, who stood beside Mr. Krajisnik, a self-confident figure in a blue suit and tie, on the steps of his headquarters at the run-down Panorama Hotel here.
During the war in Bosnia, Momcilo Krajisnik (pronounced MOHM-chee-loh CRY-shneek), 51, a hard-line nationalist, who was a senior executive of Yugoslavia's largest power company before the country disintegrated, was seen by many Serbs as a calculating political power behind the theatrical Dr. Karadzic.
Through control of key elements of the economy, his grip on the police and through arms deals with his brother, Mirko, Mr. Krajisnik was critical in keeping the Bosnian Serb war machine afloat, Serb officials in Belgrade said. He was also shrewd enough, they asserted, to leave few traces that would attract the attention of the International War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague.
He often sat silently alongside Dr. Karadzic at the diplomatic table, officials said.
Now, Mr. Krajisnik is doing the speaking as Washington tries to confront him over lapses in the Bosnian Serbs' commitment to the Dayton peace accords.
Foremost among the issues is the agreement Mr. Krajisnik signed under pressure from Washington last month that calls for Dr. Karadzic to leave the political scene before of the Sept. 14 national elections.
During an interview in his office at the hotel today, Mr. Krajisnik declined to say when he had last spoken with Dr. Karadzic, who was apparently holed up under heavy guard somewhere in the hills of Pale.
Dr. Karadzic no longer appears on Pale television, and while campaign posters with his face still decorate a few storefront windows, his presence has generally receded in his stronghold, the eastern part of Serb-held Bosnia.
Mr. Krajisnik said the Bosnian Serbs would adhere to the agreement negotiated with Richard Holbrooke, the Clinton Administration's envoy to the Balkans.
''We do respect danger,'' he said. ''Whatever we agree on with someone, especially with a representative of the United States, especially Mr. Holbrooke, we wish to respect it. Mr. Holbrooke is a very strict person and a good politician.''
But Mr. Krajisnik refused to discuss the possibility that Dr. Karadzic would be exiled to Montenegro, as American diplomats recently proposed. He has said on several occasions that authorities in Pale would not hand over any of the indicted Bosnian Serbs to the war crimes tribunal in the Hague.
Mr. Krajisnik derided the ideal of a multi-ethnic Bosnia, which is the declared goal of the Clinton Administration.
''Bosnia must be transformed into three entities with a thin roof over it,'' he said referring to the central government called for in the Dayton agreement. ''I think in the international community there are a great number of capable people who have a clear-cut picture on Bosnia -- and they know bananas can't be grown in Bosnia. You can grow bananas in Africa. This solution for Bosnia and Herzegovina could function somewhere, but not here.''
Bosnian Serb officials say the only advantages they expect from a Bosnian state are access to passports -- residents of Serb-held Bosnia are currently ineligible for passports -- and the prospect of financial help from international institutions like the World Bank.
Mr. Krajisnik is running as the candidate of the Serbian Democratic Party, which until last month was headed by Dr. Karadzic. He is seeking one position in the three-member national presidency, which is to consist of one Bosnian Serb, one Bosnian Croat and one Bosnian Muslim.
One of the fears of American diplomats is that Mr. Krajisnik could win the presidential election in the Serb part of Bosnia on Sept. 14 with enough votes to become the first president of the new federal structure.
Diplomats say his scorn for the new Bosnian state is so intense that in discussions he has seemed to envision that the new federation's government building would have separate entrances for Serb and non-Serb officials.
Unlike Dr. Karadzic, who was born in Montenegro and came to Sarajevo later in life, Mr. Krajisnik was born in Zabrdje, a small suburb of Sarajevo. His multi-storied house set in a large garden now appears looted, although the nearby home of his nephew, Slavko, is now being rented by a British Government aid agency.Daniel Lang, a straggly haired Yale sophomore, was getting a crash course in hardball union tactics as he and 11 other students picketed a tidy brick house on a tree-lined street in Queens.
They shouted: ''What do we want? Justice! When do we want it? Now!''
As the chanting shattered the noonday quiet, roller-skating children and the elderly man next door rushed over to watch the students and five union members who were trying to embarrass the owner of the house.
Far from academia's ivied halls, Mr. Lang was getting a hands-on lesson in a new labor tactic: take the dispute to the boss's home. Their target was the president of a janitorial company, Navarro Special Cleaning, who has refused to sign a contract with health benefits and higher pay.
Mr. Lang loved it: the action, the chanting, the solidarity with Hispanic union members. And the workers, members of Unite, the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees, loved having a dozen representatives of academic privilege bellowing on their behalf.
''This is great,'' Mr. Lang said. ''I'm seeing the problems that workers face with my own eyes, and I'm seeing what unions are trying to do about it.''
Mr. Lang and 25 other young people were in New York as part of Union Summer, an A.F.L.-C.I.O. project in which 1,200 interns from across the country spend three weeks of immersion in the labor movement. Union Summer's aim is to strengthen the movement by building bridges with youth after decades in which unions ignored the young and the young viewed labor as stodgy, uninspiring and often corrupt.
This spring, with 3,500 applicants, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. had to scramble to establish enough Union Summer projects. Interest was strong, applicants say, because they see unions as a good way to fight problems like sweatshops and the widening gap between haves and have-nots. They also view unions as a potential ally in their own battles, with their uncertain job prospects and with corporate downsizing affecting their parents.
Union Summer is modeled after Freedom Summer of 1964, when 1,000 students registered black voters in Mississippi -- even though participants acknowledge that fighting for a larger paycheck is not as sacred a cause as civil rights.
Andrew Levin, the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s coordinator of the 22-city program, said, ''The point of Union Summer was not mostly to have young people get our work done, although they are helping us do that, but to provide an incredible experience to young people so they would feel that the labor movement was the most effective way to fight for social justice in this country.''
But of course, Union Summer has another purpose: to help unions recruit organizers after a decade in which union membership has fallen and many corporations have treated unions like punching bags.
The summer program is one of several smart tactics the 13-million-member labor federation has adopted to help revive itself since John J. Sweeney was elected president last October. Last spring, it staged 30 well-publicized town meetings nationwide with the theme ''America Needs a Raise.'' It has sponsored rallies and television spots clamoring for a higher minimum wage. It has earmarked $20 million to attract new members and $35 million to elect pro-union candidates.
The interns, who like to call themselves Union Summeristas, receive a $210 weekly stipend. They are helping to organize strawberry pickers in California and have held poolside demonstrations to unionize hotel workers in Hilton Head, S.C. In Detroit, they picketed alongside striking newspaper workers, and in Denver entered drugstores as supposed shoppers to distribute fliers.
Union Summer has also taken its show on the road -- a bus is taking 33 interns through Alabama and Mississippi to visit historic civil rights sites and to organize nursing home workers. Last week, Helen Petrozzola, a junior at Marymount Manhattan College, was in Mobile, Ala., with the tour, visiting nursing home workers at home to urge them to unionize.
''For a lot of students, there is the stereotype that unions mean big Cadillacs and Mafia control,'' said Ms. Petrozzola, who lives in the Bronx. ''Union Summer has dispelled those ideas for me. It shows me that the union is the workers.''
During the three-week bus tour, she has been shocked at meeting full-time workers who live in shacks and remain below the poverty line.
In New York, the 26 interns, who are sponsored by Unite, have distributed handbills at Bloomingdale's to protest its practice of buying men's clothes from a Canadian manufacturer they say is anti-union. They have gone to rallies in Brooklyn for 6,000 striking hospital workers and to jewelry factories in Queens to bolster an organizing drive.
The New York summeristas even have some victories under their belts. In their first few days, they picketed Just Cynthia, a garment district dressmaker, and several sweatshops that make its clothes to pressure it to shun sweatshop labor. A few days later, Just Cynthia agreed to stop using sweatshops.
''The first time we went to Broadway and gave out leaflets and yelled at the top of our lungs, it was weird,'' said Milana Zaborodnev, a Sarah Lawrence sophomore who lives in Co-Op City in the Bronx. ''We're used to it now. When everyone does it together, it feels great.''
The New York interns range from 19 to 28 and come from as far away as Miami and Los Angeles. Six are black, four Hispanic and three Asian, and among the schools represented are Oberlin, Fordham, City College and Pasadena Community College.On any sultry Acapulco night, Mexican boys move among the partying crowds on the oceanside boulevard, doing whatever they can to make a small living.
For a dollar or so, the street boys will dive from a high rock into roaring surf. At busy street corners they become human flame throwers, spitting mouthfuls of lighted kerosene into arcs of fire, then passing the cup to motorists before the traffic signal turns green.
Some of the boys who roam the streets used to earn a meal and a place to sleep by following American men to their Acapulco hideaways and having sex with them or with one another in front of a video camera.
With a series of arrests that began in May, the United States Postal Service said, it closed down the biggest child pornography production and distribution ring American law enforcement had ever seen. The $500,000-a-year business was run by three Americans, investigators said, and was based in a high-priced hillside home overlooking Acapulco's world-famous bay.
In the thousands of videos and photographs seized from the business by Mexican and American police officers, investigators counted about 300 boys who appeared to be under-age Mexicans. Many were recruited on beaches, in public parks and on the doorsteps of bars in Acapulco, they say. The youngest children looked to be no more than 7 years old.
So far, 56 people across the United States have been arrested and charged with receiving by mail order videotapes showing sex involving under-age boys. Officials expect the number of arrests to exceed 100.
Postal investigators say the ringleader was Clair Anthony (Troy) Frank, a fugitive from American justice with a criminal record for molesting minors and selling child pornography that stretched from Colorado to the Netherlands. He made hundreds of videos in and around Acapulco, including many at poolside on his own front patio. In some of the films, sex with minors was accompanied by violent beatings.
The breakup of the operation, which has prompted Mexico's Attorney General to call for tighter laws, has exposed an underside of the global economy that is rarely seen. The explosion in travel and free trade between the United States and poorer countries like Mexico and the myriad new possibilities for cross-border electronic communications have made it harder to track the international flow of child pornography, investigators and child abuse experts said.
With enforcement more difficult, the market in the United States for child pornography is expanding, and with it the risk that foreign children will be used to meet the demand.
American officials said Mr. Frank's film business was finished. On Aug. 2, 1995, he was found dead at the age of 46 in his residence here with a gunshot wound to the head, in what the local police have so far described as a suicide. One man wanted in the United States and Mexico as a partner, John William Willets of Sunnyvale, Calif., is a fugitive. Another man accused of being a partner, James Leroy Kemmish, was arrested in San Diego in 1994 and pleaded guilty seven months ago to charges of distributing child pornography through the mail. He is serving a five-year sentence.
But many young people who inhabit Acapulco's central square, where the lush shade trees and the quaint gazebo serve as shelters and the stone benches serve as beds, still talk about the ''gringos'' -- the Americans who offered to pay them to perform on camera.
One boy who dwells on and off in the square is a spindly 11-year-old known on the street as Juanito G. After leaving home to escape the blows of his mother's boyfriend, he said, Juanito lived for months in the square and recently sought refuge in a public shelter for boys.
He recalled the evening when an American came to the square to invite more than a dozen boys to his home -- ''a rich man's house,'' Juanito said -- to see some movies.
''He showed us the film, and then he asked us to help him make one,'' Juanito said.
Like several boys who spoke about the films, Juanito said he had not taken part himself but had known a friend who did. The rates started at 100 pesos, or about $15. After being paid, his friend was able to go grocery shopping at the supermarket, he said, a great luxury for a street child.
Counselors at the shelter say they found out about Juanito's knowledge of pornography one day when they put a cartoon on the video player for the boys to watch. Juanito objected brashly and demanded to see a movie with explicit sex.
But as he talked about his experience, his blase smile disappeared, his thin shoulders hunched, and he nervously shredded a paper cup.
''I never said a word to that gringo,'' he said fiercely. ''I just watched. I'm only doing that with the girl I marry.''
Another boy who said he was solicited to make a pornography film is a 9-year-old named Eaobedad J. who lived for a time in a cash machine booth in the main square. After he was hit by a car in May, he was taken to a home for boys sponsored in part by the Presbyterian Church. He told supervisors at the home he believed his parents were dead.
Some minors were paid in drugs to make films, he said, while others were not paid at all in order to pressure them to return for another session. Many Acapulco street children are drug users, prowling for pesos to buy paint thinner, glue or marijuana.The Eastman Kodak Company announced yesterday that it would pay $56.1 million for 51 percent of the CPI Corporation's Fox Photo Film unit, a chain of 550 photo-finishing stores. ''This gives us a core of stores that we can use to launch a retail identity program throughout the country,'' Jerome W. Johnson, general manager of Kodak's domestic Consumer Imaging business, said.
The deal will give CPI the financial resources to keep up with photo-finishing technologies. ''It requires extraordinary investments to be a major player in today's photo-finishing industry,'' said Alyn V. Essman, CPI's chairman and also chairman of the joint venture.
Both CPI and Kodak say they expect to maintain the joint venture indefinitely, but the contract provides for Kodak to take full control in 1999, if the alliance hits any snags.
Although Kodak has close to 16,000 overseas outlets, either owned or under licensing agreement, until now it has been content to sell through independent photo stores and mass merchandisers in the United States.
But lately, Kodak has experienced growing frustration with what it sees as a lack of marketing acumen at many retailers. For example, Kodak now has machines that can scan a conventional print, digitize it (translate the visual image into computer language), and enable a customer to enlarge it, print one part of it, or otherwise manipulate it.
Kodak complains that few stores promote such services well, or display frames or other products that would likely be impulse purchases for someone who has just made an 8 x 10 enlargement. It is particularly irked because it believes that greater use of the photo-manipulation machines would spur sales of film and processing paper, Kodak's highest-margin products.
''People who get more use out of pictures will take more pictures,'' said David P. Biehn, Kodak's president for consumer imaging, who says that only 2 percent of photographs are used more than once.
Of course, Kodak's competitors know that, too. A spokesman for Fuji Photo Film, which in June wrested away Wal-Mart, a plum Kodak photo-finishing customer, refused to comment on the Kodak-CPI deal, but analysts noted that competition among all the photographic companies had intensified. Thus, they say, Kodak may view having its own stores as an insurance policy.
''Kodak has good technology, but so do Fuji and others,'' said Jack L. Kelly of Goldman, Sachs. ''Kodak may want to be sure that any new products or services are assured a retail outlet.''
Wall Street apparently does not expect any major impact on Kodak for now. Eastman Kodak shares lost 87.5 cents on the New York Stock Exchange yesterday, closing at $77.375. The reaction was more enthusiastic regarding CPI; its shares gained $2.875, closing at $17.625.The Time: Soon The Place: Almost Anytown, U.S.A. The Problem: House-hunting
John and Jane Jones are a young, two-income couple without much time to make the most important financial decision of their lives. Which is why they have come to Century 21.
Through the real estate company's America Online site, the Joneses take an electronic look at dozens of houses, sifting out the three they choose to visit with an agent. When they settle on the house of their dreams, the couple sit down at the agent's computer to select a mortgage and buy title insurance. And when they close, the Joneses sign up for a half-dozen extras from Century 21's portfolio: a satellite dish, a burglar alarm, new siding -- and a motel room to stay in while it's all installed.
The real estate transaction of the future? HFS Inc., Century 21's new owner, says it is remaking residential real estate in this image today, in hopes of winning more customers, raising its agents' incomes and wooing more franchisees into a system that makes HFS the nation's No. 1 seller of homes.
In less than a year, the Parsippany, N.J., company, America's biggest hotel franchiser, has bought not just the Century 21 Real Estate Corporation, but also Electronic Realty Associates and the Coldwell Banker Corporation. The purchases gave HFS 11,000 offices, 160,000 agents, a 21 percent share of the national market and unbeatable name recognition almost overnight.
But HFS is not content with being big. To make the returns it wants on its $1 billion investment in real estate , HFS needs to transform home buying.
With technology, the company hopes to compress the search process, cutting the average number of properties a buyer visits to eight from 12 and in turn raising agent productivity. With its program to offer house buyers home improvements and other housing-related products, HFS plans to tap a stream of fees from outside vendors and capitalize on the ''synergies'' among its various businesses, including the 5,200 hotels and motels it franchises under such brands as Days Inn, Howard Johnson, Ramada and Super 8.
''We will use our size and scale to do things that nobody else can,'' Robert W. Pittman, a managing partner and chief executive of Century 21, boasted.
Competing companies are at the very least nervous about the new giant in their midst. ''They have made a big splash by spending a lot of money, and you are foolish if you don't take notice of it,'' said James Shapiro, chief executive of Windemere Services, a residential real estate franchiser with 147 offices in the Pacific Northwest.
''They are outsiders, and they are posing a high-profile threat,'' added John Tucillo, chief economist at the National Association of Realtors.
But while HFS is riding high at the moment -- Wall Street has bid the company's stock up to $65.375 from $17 a little more than a year ago -- some of the people who are supposed to be turning the grand vision into a reality are unimpressed.
Real estate franchisees are grumbling about being asked to pitch ancillary products in return for small commissions and wondering aloud whether three competing chains can thrive under the same corporate roof. A handful of Century 21 franchisees has formed a dissident group to keep on eye on headquarters, and hundreds of Century 21 agents have defected to rival companies.
Competitors are seizing on the dissension as evidence that HFS -- which acknowledges that it knows more about franchising than selling houses -- is stumbling. And they argue that the company's investment in technology -- about $30 million this year -- will not give it much of an edge in a business that depends on the personal touch.
''So far, the technological revolution has only impacted the top producers'' among agents, said Dave Linegar, chairman of RE/MAX International Inc., HFS's biggest rival. ''The rest don't need technology. They need customers. That is a real challenge for Century 21.''
Mr. Pittman acknowledges that the technology will not take shoe leather out of house-hunting, but he is betting it will speed it up.
''No one is going to click a mouse to buy a house, because too much money is involved,'' said the executive, who previously started MTV for Viacom Inc. and ran the Six Flags theme parks for Time Warner Inc. ''But as a consumer, I am motivated by convenience. If we can get them to narrow down their choices, I have dramatically altered the business.''
Initially, HFS's biggest selling job may be persuading its real estate agents to sign onto the ''preferred vending program'' that the company is beginning. Many cringe at the idea of peddling home improvements and even vacations at Disney resorts, saying it will distract them from their main job of closing sales.
William Eldridge, president and owner of Century 21 Associates in Rochester Hills, Mich., predicted that only 10 percent of Century 21 agents would actually promote such products. ''Most see themselves selling real estate, and nothing else,'' he said. ''They don't want to confuse either the seller or the buyer.''
Peter M. Schultz, the owner of a Century 21 franchise in Medway, Mass., was emphatic about his distaste. ''I am not in the siding or satellite business,'' he said.
And it isn't just the vending program that upsets Mr. Schultz. He and 55 other Century 21 franchisees -- many of them in the New York City area and New England -- started an association this spring to protest some changes HFS instituted shortly after taking over the real estate operator. They were particularly upset by an increase in renewal fees for their franchises, by HFS's attempt to lengthen their contracts from five years to seven years or more and by the elimination of regional offices and other support services.DEREK JETER didn't spell out exactly what he meant, but his comment aptly summed up one of the beauties of the game of baseball, the opportunity for rapid redemption.
''That's why we play every day,'' the Yankees' rookie shortstop said. Obviously, they play every day so players don't have to wait a week to atone for their mistakes or poor performances.
Jeter and Bob Wickman, the Yankees' workhorse relief pitcher, redeemed themselves yesterday only 15 hours after they made mistakes. Darryl Strawberry continued to redeem himself after four years of trouble -- trouble with a bad back, trouble with drugs, trouble with taxes, trouble with child and spousal support.
''It's a great story,'' Strawberry said of his comeback, after hitting his fourth and fifth home runs in nine times at bat against the Chicago White Sox this week. ''I've never been bitter about anything. I've learned my lesson from the hard times in my life and the mistakes that I made. Now I take baseball very seriously. Not that I didn't before, but I had a lot of hangups about a lot of things. At this point I don't have any hangups about things.''
Powering the Yankees to an 8-4 victory from the seventh spot in the lineup, Strawberry showed for the second time in three days how awesome he can be if he gets ''the pitch I'm looking for and do what I need to do with it.''
And he showed once again why George Steinbrenner has to be Major League Baseball's executive of the year. While everyone else viewed another Strawberry comeback as absurd, the Yankees' owner brought him back, practically forcing him on his baseball people.
You don't hear any of them complaining now.
You don't hear Strawberry flinging ''I told you so's'' around the clubhouse, either.
''I don't want to look at it as a personal thing,'' he said, steadfastly refusing to discuss his renewed success on a personal basis. ''I want to look at it as an opportunity and a team situation. That allows me to be able to do the things that I'm doing because it's for the team. It's not just for me.''
If Strawberry has been able to change his focus from himself to the team, he also has matured in the way he looks at his presence in the lineup. His outspoken anger at his removal from the sixth game of the 1986 World Series in a double switch will long be remembered as a negative part of the Mets' post-season adventure. But yesterday he actually asked out of the game because he has problems with shin splints.
''I told them that was it; they were aching,'' Strawberry said. ''I don't want to overdo it. If I do, it could be a setback and I don't want to get set back now when things are starting to fall into place.''
Was that move a sign of maturity? he was asked. ''I'm looking out for what's best for the team,'' he said. ''I understand my health is important for the team.''
It's important for any player on any team to get the chance to overcome a mistake, and Jeter and Wickman had their opportunities yesterday.
On Wednesday night, Jeter was unduly blamed for the Yankees' loss after he threw away a ball he should have held on to in the top of the 10th inning. The observers who singled him out exaggerated the significance of the error and ignored the awful relief pitching the Yankees got after his error.
''It doesn't make a difference to me because it's over with,'' said Jeter, whose leadoff single in the first inning yesterday led to the Yankees' first two runs. ''I don't know if people made a big deal out of it. I didn't read anything. It's over with. It's a different day. You can't take one day into the next day. Yesterday's over with. Today's over with.''
Wickman relieved in that same inning, coming into a one-run game. By the time he had faced two batters, the White Sox led by five runs. Yesterday Manager Joe Torre summoned him in the fourth inning of a game that was getting closer, and he retired the first eight batters he faced.
''I'm a sinkerball pitcher; I'm not a strikeout pitcher,'' Wickman said. ''I do have a tendency to give up base hits. Today I came out with the same mentality I had yesterday and tried to make the same pitches. Fortunately, I had the ball hit right at people.''
Like Jeter, he likes the idea of playing every day. ''That's one nice thing about baseball,'' he said. ''That's one nice thing about having a manager like Joe Torre. He gets you in there right away.''
Sports of The TimesSince Trans World Airlines Flight 800 went down three weeks ago, virtually every one of the daily briefings on the Federal investigation has included the same discouraging moment. That is when James K. Kallstrom, the F.B.I. supervisor, recites a toll-free number and an E-mail address, then appeals for the public's help. He did it again yesterday.
Although a standard investigatory practice, the daily plea underscores the sense that what caused a Boeing 747 to fall from the sky and into the Atlantic Ocean, killing all 230 people on board, remains an open question. At the briefings, all the investigators will concede are the three possible causes, the recitation of which has become a kind of solemn mantra for those deeply immersed in the case.
A bomb. A missile. Mechanical failure.
Behind the scenes, the situation is subtler, although in a sense no more certain. The investigators know many things about the crash, including that whatever occurred happened suddenly, without warning, with a very loud noise, and that the plane then split apart and went down in flames. Those facts are most simply explained by the theory that a bomb exploded on the plane. Many investigators are convinced by the accretion of circumstantial evidence that this is what happened.
But circumstantial evidence is not proof. The bomb theory has one continuing problem, and it's a big one: so far, laboratory testing has found no definitive proof of the residues or blast damage that a bomb would be expected to leave.
''All three of the theories are still up there,'' Mr. Kallstrom said. ''They're still viable. It's not a game we're playing. We just don't know.''
Investigators said yesterday that they still had not recovered any wreckage that had clearly tested positive for bomb residue.
In the absence of definitive proof of a bomb, other theories continue to draw attention from investigators.
This much is known. The Boeing 747 is big and reliable, a craft not generally known for mechanical failure; an investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board described it as ''bulletproof.'' On the night of July 17, one of those 747's took off from Kennedy Airport and made its ascent over Long Island's South Shore toward Paris.
Some 11 1/2 minutes after takeoff, at 13,700 feet, something went wrong. There was no distress call, but the cockpit voice recorder contained a split-second noise, and then nothing; the on-board power system failed.
Then the plane was decapitated; something caused it to break apart. First to fall was some luggage from the front cargo hold and other debris. Then came the forward areas, the cockpit and first-class section. The headless 747 pitched; then, at about 8,000 feet, it exploded into a fireball and plummeted into the ocean. With the fuel still burning on the water, the hunt for a cause began.
The safety board is exploring several possibilities in which the airplane itself -- and no external force -- was at fault. But none of these theories appear to mesh easily with the facts.
Looking for an event that would explain why the plane broke apart so quickly, experts have discussed the possibility of an explosion in the 747's main fuel tank, in the lower part of the fuselage where the wings come together. Investigators know that the tank was nearly empty, containing about 50 to 100 gallons, but they also know that fuel vapor can also ignite.
Problems with this scenario begin with the fuel itself. Jet fuel usually burns as a vapor but not readily as a liquid, the form it is in while in tanks. Also, there is no explanation for the genesis of a spark.
With the exception of an Iranian Air Force cargo plane that exploded near Madrid in 1976, there is no record of such explosions in 747's. The Iranian accident was never thoroughly investigated, but experts think that plane was hit by lightning. T.W.A. Flight 800, meanwhile, crashed on a clear night.
There is also the theory that a leaking fuel pump touched off a catastrophic explosion. Last year, a 747 owned by Japan Air Lines was being refueled in Singapore when it caught fire. The electrical insulation for one of its 14 fuel pumps shorted out and ignited fuel in the pump's case. But Boeing officials say it would be unlikely for fuel leaking from a pump to explode or burn in flight.
If mechanical failure downed Flight 800, it was a failure that has not happened before. Still, the aviation-accident investigators say, they are in the business of finding things that have not happened before.
Then there is the missile theory, perhaps the most intriguing, and most disturbing, of the three possible causes. It would suggest that someone, on a boat in the Atlantic or on the eastern Long Island shore, used a sophisticated military weapon to blow up a commercial airliner.
Helping to keep this theory alive are the many witness accounts that F.B.I. agents have gathered from people who were watching the dusky skies that night. Mr. Kallstrom has repeatedly said a number of witnesses reported seeing something streaking toward the doomed plane.
While some experts contend that the plane was beyond the range of the Stinger ground-to-air missile, there are a number of other portable antiaircraft missiles that could have reached a jumbo jet flying more than two miles in the air.Sweeping through the grounds of King Hussein's palace in Amman, Jordan, this week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel was accompanied by a retinue of about 25 senior aides and Israeli businessmen that was remarkable for one glaring omission: Not a single representative of the Israeli Foreign Ministry was present, aside from the departing ambassador.
The slight helped provoke a public mudslinging festival between the Prime Minister's office and the Foreign Ministry, something of a tradition in Israel. More important, it underscored how Mr. Netanyahu retains unheard-of control over Government policy even by Israeli standards, formulating plans within a small group of aides known more for their loyalty than for their experience.
''The old joke here is that the Prime Minister's office made foreign policy and the Foreign Minister carried it out, but that is not even true in this case,'' said Joseph Alpher, head of the Israel-Middle East office of the American Jewish Committee. ''It is a striking characteristic of Netanyahu's staff that they are by and large people who have no significant policy experience, but they are completely loyal to him and to the kind of highly centralized operation he favors.''
Old hands at the Foreign Ministry have been grumbling in the press and in private this week that the peace talks are languishing while Mr. Netanyahu is busy modeling his administration on the American Presidency. Foreign policy experts complain that he is relying heavily on a circle of mostly 30-something Likud Party loyalists, some recognized for writing in English rather than Hebrew.
The loyalists admit that Mr. Netanyahu, aside from his longstanding personal animosity toward Foreign Minister David Levy, mistrusts the ability of the ministry to relinquish the vision of its former boss, the Labor Party leader Shimon Peres.
''The Prime Minister believes that the professionals in the Foreign Office are very much to the left and agree with the policies of the previous Government,'' said a Likud member of Parliament. Most members of the Likud coalition, not wanting to get caught up in the fight between the Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister, either declined to comment or spoke on condition of anonymity.
In a vain attempt to quiet the complaints, Mr. Netanyahu went on television this week to remind everyone that he was the first Israeli Prime Minister to be chosen by direct election. ''I was elected in personal elections in order to promote a certain policy, and the heart of the policy is the Palestinian issue,'' he said. ''I mean to control it in partnership with the Foreign Minister, but I mean to lead. There is only one Prime Minister.''
Mr. Levy's camp responded with rumblings about his leaving the Government. Before the May elections, Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Levy, his longtime unsuccessful rival to head the Likud Party, forged a marriage of convenience in order to unseat the Labor Government.
''In Israel, foreign ministers are not appointed because of their qualifications but because of their political leverage,'' said Shlomo Ben-Ami, a Labor member of Parliament and former Ambassador to Spain, noting that Mr. Levy had been named to his post in a political quid pro quo. ''They acknowledge his political power, but did not respect his qualifications.''
Mr. Levy has a strong power base among Jews of Middle Eastern and North African origin. There is a social gap with Jews of Eastern European descent, which in the Likud takes the form of grumbling that a man who does not speak English, like the French-speaking Mr. Levy, should not be Foreign Minister. But if Mr. Levy pulled his five Parliament members out of the governing coalition, he might be able to force Mr. Netanyahu into a tortuous attempt to form a new government.
The tiff this week flared over negotiations with the Palestinians. As the only member of Mr. Netanyahu's Cabinet ever to have met with the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat, Mr. Levy sought to be overall coordinator of the many strands of the talks, a position Mr. Netanyahu planned to fill with one of his own aides.
There was also the matter of the way the Foreign Ministry was being treated. Besides leaving its experts at home during his regional trips, diplomats said, the Prime Minister's office had not provided transcripts of telephone conversations with foreign leaders, and Dore Gold, Mr. Netanyahu's foreign policy adviser, had been dispatched to Washington for talks with Secretary of State Warren Christopher without having informed the Israeli Embassy.
The animosity between Mr. Levy and Mr. Netanyahu is personal as well as professional. In the bitter fight over the Likud leadership in early 1993, Mr. Netanyahu strongly suggested that Mr. Levy planted the story of a salacious videotape that led Mr. Netanyahu to confess to adultery on television.
Their differences seem to stem more from questions of prestige than of policy.
''It is unthinkable that the crucial issues of foreign policy wouldn't be done by the Foreign Minister with the right qualifications.'' said Michael Kleiner, a member of Parliament from Mr. Levy's party.
Although Mr. Levy can be hawkish when he wants to, he has a reputation for being more flexible than other members of Likud. He spoke out against the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Working with James A. Baker 3d, then Secretary of State, Mr. Levy agreed to Israel's role in the 1991 peace conference in Madrid despite the objections of his boss, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. Israeli politicians said Mr. Netanyahu wanted to avoid such independent maneuvering.
Such wrangling is not limited to Likud. When Labor took power after Madrid, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin tried to relegate Foreign Minister Peres to the sidelines by assigning him the multilateral talks on issues like water and economic development. ''Rabin despised the multilateral talks, and he used to joke about it, asking if Peres had created a regional bank yet,'' said Mr. Ben-Ami. Instead Mr. Peres used the mandate to maneuver Israel into the direct negotiations with the Palestinians that gave birth to the current agreement.
Political analysts said that in the sparring with Mr. Netanyahu, Mr. Levy had not been going to his office in the Foreign Ministry, thus further pushing actions on foreign affairs into the hands of the Prime Minister's advisers, including Mr. Gold, Danny Naveh, Mr. Netanyahu's Cabinet Secretary, and Avigdor Lieberman, the director general of the Prime Minister's office.
Right after the election, Mr. Netanyahu also heralded the formation of a National Security Council, but foreign policy experts said Mr. Netanyahu had trouble recruiting because of his reputation for making his own decisions.
''Bibi is a National Security Council of one with a personal staff,'' said Mark Heller, a senior research associate at the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies of Tel Aviv University, using the nickname by which Mr. Netanyahu is widely known.Scuba divers collected hundreds of small pieces of wreckage yesterday from T.W.A. Flight 800 that investigators suspect came from the fuselage beneath the front baggage compartment. If their suspicion is confirmed, investigators will have another indication that the explosion that doomed the plane originated in that cargo hold.
The pieces of debris, some as small as a fist, were found in the debris field closest to Kennedy International Airport, an indication that they were among the first parts to come off the plane immediately after the explosion.
The cargo hold is of particular interest, because some investigators say they believe that a bomb in a piece of luggage there exploded and brought down the plane. None of the plane's underbelly has been found in the other areas of debris, they said.
Divers are also hunting for a large metal baggage container, the last of four that had stored luggage in the forward hold. Three other bins have been found. But no residue from a bomb was found on any of them. Law-enforcement officials said they want to examine the fourth container for pitting and test the metal for residue from explosives. ''It could be the most important thing we will find,'' a senior investigator who insisted on anonymity said last night. ''A bomb blast does not leave residue all over everything. It leaves residue in a very small space.''
Three weeks ago, Flight 800 exploded and plunged into the Atlantic 11 1/2 minutes after having left Kennedy for Paris. All 230 people on board were killed.
Since last weekend, investigators have focused much of their attention on what they call Debris Field 3, an area of the ocean floor with wreckage closest to the airport. The first pieces of the aircraft, and some suitcases, fell there immediately after the initial explosion. ''Obviously, things that come off early are of some interest,'' Robert T. Francis, the vice chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said yesterday.
Technical experts scanning the westernmost edge of the crash site with sonar and laser probes have been finding fragments of the fuselage that are generally much smaller than those found in the other two debris fields to the northeast, which have both small and larger items. Also scattered on the sandy bottom are pieces of luggage.
Those findings bolster the theory that an explosion in a forward cargo bay might have blown out the belly of the plane, presumably below the forward hold that contained luggage, officials said. The underwater discovery of smaller pieces to the west is consistent with early analysis of the disintegration of the jumbo jet, members of the search team said.
''Radar traces showed a whole bunch of little stuff falling'' west of the main debris fields, one expert involved in the search said. ''That's what we're focusing on.''
Rear Adm. Edward K. Kristensen said the Navy was planning to move the recovery vessel Grapple to the area. The ship has nearly finished raising the large pieces of the front of the airplane. Investigators say they expect the accompanying hard-hat divers and large underwater robot will speed the collection of debris in area 3.
Yesterday, divers wearing heavy metal boots simply walked across the floor, scooped up parts and dropped them in large wire-mesh baskets.
The underwater robot, equipped with two mechanical arms and operated by continuous shifts of pilots, can work 24 hours a day, picking up small pieces and placing them in the baskets, the Admiral said.
The Diane G., a search vessel that the Navy has chartered, will work just north of field 3, almost directly below the fight path. With laser video, the Diane G. will presumably search for heavier pieces of wreckage that the wind and currents did not carry further south.
Law-enforcement officials plan to begin testing the smaller pieces today at a temporary laboratory in a former Grumman hangar in Calverton, L.I. If agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms obtain positive results there, investigators will send the debris to Federal Bureau of Investigation laboratories in Washington for further tests.
In the three weeks of the investigation, A.T.F. agents have detected traces of explosives on some pieces of wreckage from the cockpit and first-class cabin. But later tests at the F.B.I. turned out negative.
If tests of the new small items also prove to be negative in Washington, that would only deepen the frustrations and impatience of officials, who say they privately believe that the most likely cause of the crash was a bomb in the forward baggage compartment.
After recovering nearly 30 percent of the plane, the F.B.I. lab has not found any clear trace of explosives. But the assistant director of the agency in New York, James K. Kallstrom, said he was not surprised. ''There's still an awful lot of the plane down there,'' Mr. Kallstrom said. ''Seventy percent isn't up.''
Two investigators said tests at Calverton had detected residues consistent with Semtex, a plastic explosive that is manufactured in Eastern Europe. But later, lead investigators denied those reports.
For two weeks, investigators have focused on the forward section of the plane for the source of the initial explosion, since they found on July 27 that the cockpit and first-class cabins had been separated from the rest of the aircraft, which continued to fly for several seconds before being engulfed by a fireball.
In another indication of the focus on the forward hold, Mr. Francis said investigators wanted to reconstruct a section of the fuselage 25 feet wide and 45 feet long, beginning at the rear of the forward hold and extending toward the back of the wings. The reason is ''there's a lot of fire damage around it,'' Mr. Francis said. Asked whether the fire was from the initial explosion, which crippled the plane at 13,700 feet, or the fireball that followed at 8,500 feet, Mr. Francis said that would be ''part of the question that we'll be looking at.''The nationwide rate of juvenile violent crime fell slightly last year for the first time in almost a decade, and the rate of homicide by juveniles decreased for the second year in a row, down by 15.2 percent, Attorney General Janet Reno said yesterday.
At her weekly news conference, Ms. Reno said preliminary data compiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation from local police reports showed that the arrest rate for homicide for youths ages 10 to 17 had fallen 22.8 percent since reaching an all-time peak in 1993. The overall rate of juvenile violent crime, which includes assault, robbery and rape as well as murder, declined 2.9 percent last year, she said.
Law-enforcement experts hailed the news as an indication that a variety of efforts by law-enforcement, school and community groups in the last few years to combat juvenile violence might finally be producing some results, though they cautioned that two years is too short a time to declare a victory.
''This is wonderful news, because the homicide rate is down quite a bit,'' said James Alan Fox, dean of the School of Criminal Justice at Northeastern University. But, Professor Fox added, because the juvenile homicide rate almost tripled in the past decade, ''it was inevitable that at some point it would go down.''
Also tempering officials' elation was a slight increase in the number of arrests among those who are 18 and older for violent crimes, although murder arrests among adults also dropped.
President Clinton was quick to cite the figures at a campaign stop in Salinas, Calif., yesterday. In recent weeks, Mr. Clinton and members of his Administration have sought to score political points on the crime issue, even as criminologists and local officials have cautioned that it is difficult to pinpoint the causes of the drop in the crime rate nationwide.
The F.B.I. reports are usually released by the agency itself. But in this case, the Attorney General issued them at her weekly news briefing. Ms. Reno warned that the juvenile crime rates were still far too high. But the real significance of the new figures, Professor Fox said, is that ''they should give us some confidence that we can do something'' about the epidemic of juvenile violence, that it is not a hopeless, overwhelming problem.
Geoffrey Canada, the president of the Rheedlen Centers for Children and Families in Harlem, said he had not expected to see such a drop for three or four more years.
Mr. Canada, who directs a number of school and neighborhood programs for young people from poor and troubled families, said he believed that the decline reflected ''a real sense among young people that this business about murder has gotten out of control.''
''I think some of the glamour of being a thug, walking around with a gun,'' he said, ''is being removed, because people 13, 14 and 15 years old have seen so many of their friends or relatives being killed or going to prison.''
Mr. Canada added, ''I think the most violent group of young people, those who were the first group to catch the crack cocaine trade and have the huge number of guns, have aged out.'' These youths, he said, were 15, 16 and 17 a decade ago and are now in their mid- to late 20's.
In releasing the data, Ms. Reno said: ''I share this data to encourage communities to renew their efforts. We cannot relax. These rates are still far too high.''
She and other experts noted that the number of teen-agers in the United States would increase by about one percent a year for the next 15 years. This means that even if the juvenile crime rate held steady, the total number of crimes committed by young people would rise.
Asked to explain the drop in the new F.B.I. figures, Ms. Reno pointed to a number of strategies that are being used by law-enforcement and community groups around the nation, some of them sponsored by the Clinton Administration.
One is the growth in popular new laws allowing states to try violent juveniles as adults, but the Attorney General cautioned that such efforts ''have got to make sure we focus on the truly violent offender,'' not any young person who breaks the law.
In addition, she credited prevention programs that teach parents how to better supervise their children or provide more outlets for young people in the after-school hours, when most juvenile crime take place. Prevention, Ms. Reno stressed, is ''a lot cheaper than a detention facility.'' (The cost of keeping a juvenile incarcerated in New York State is now about $80,000 a year, enough to send three students to Harvard or Yale for a year.)
The F.B.I. data did not include any breakdown by race or sex, nor totals for cities and regions of the country. The agency publishes its final figures in November, when more complete statistics are available.
The data released yesterday showed that the homicide rate for young people aged 10 to 17 rose to 14.5 per 100,000 in 1993, up from 5.4 per 100,000 in 1984. Then in 1994 it dropped to 13.2 per 100,000 and in 1995 to 11.2 per 100,000.
In 1987, there were 311 arrests for violent crime per 100,000 youths aged 10 to 17. The rate reached a peak of 527 in 1994 and declined to 512 in 1995.
Alfred Blumstein, a professor of criminology at Carnegie Mellon University and one of the nation's most respected experts on crime, said the juvenile homicide rate had fallen more sharply than the overall juvenile violent crime rate because ''murder is more sensitive to some of the interventions that have been going on over the past several years, particularly in the big cities.''It was intended as a celebration of Bill Clinton's strong support among New York Democrats. The opening of the Clinton-Gore campaign's New York headquarters at 300 Park Avenue yesterday was a made-for-television event that brought out the firmament of the state's best-known Democrats: former Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, former Mayor David N. Dinkins, State Comptroller H. Carl McCall and a throng of congressmen, City Council members and state legislators.
But the opening ceremony turned out to be a far more raucous affair than any of its organizers expected. Of the hundreds of people who attended the event, nearly half were protesters, voicing their disdain for the far-reaching Federal welfare bill approved by a Republican Congress and destined to be signed by the Democratic President whom the event was intended to laud.
The freshly opened campaign headquarters was adorned with red, white and blue Clinton-Gore signs, but there seemed to be an equal number of protesters' signs saying, ''Veto the Welfare Bill.'' And while many of the speakers were taken aback by the vehemence of the protests, they found themselves largely agreeing that the welfare bill the President has embraced would be devastating to the New Yorkers they represent.
As speaker after speaker mounted the podium, each was heckled, booed and, ultimately, outshouted by the protesters.
''The one thing we know is that we can't permit Dole and Gingrich to be in there,'' Mr. Dinkins said, struggling to be heard over the roar.
''What's the difference,'' the protesters shouted. ''Veto, Veto, Veto,'' they chanted in unison, drowning out the former mayor.
When Mr. Cuomo took his turn at the lectern, he told the protesters that he, too, shared their concerns about the bill, which requires states to establish a lifetime limit of five years on welfare payments to any family and abolishes a major Federal welfare program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, replacing it with grants to states.
Mr. Cuomo said that, in a letter to the White House, he had urged the President to veto the bill. He said that the best hope for Democrats was to elect a Democratic-controlled Congress and to re-elect the President. He said he supported Mr. Clinton, recognizing that as President ''sometimes you have to do things you're not totally comfortable with.''
That drew the loudest chants of the afternoon, with protesters offering a chorus of ''Shame, shame, shame'' that left the former Governor visibly shaken.
Protests at political functions and press conferences are no novelty in New York City. But what was notable about yesterday's protest was how it seemed to touch a nerve among the politicians, who often respond to protests with nonchalance.
The protesters who disrupted yesterday's event came from an array of social service and welfare rights organizations, from the Community Food Resource Center and the Bronx Welfare Advocacy Network to Jews for Racial and Economic Justice and Housing Works.
Most of the officials at yesterday's event indicated publicly or in interviews afterward that they, too, were deeply disappointed by the President's decision to sign the welfare bill. Their disappointment, they said, reflected a major difficulty facing Mr. Clinton's campaign in the state, which has a long history of generous welfare policies.
Mr. Clinton is still expected to win handily in New York. But many of the politicians at the opening of the new headquarters questioned how enthusiastic about the President Democrats in the state would remain and whether voters' growing ambivalence might keep many of them from going to the polls in November.
''I don't like a lot of what the President's doing,'' said Deborah J. Glick, an Assemblywoman from Greenwich Village in one of the few moments when a speaker could be heard. But, she said, he was better than having Bob Dole, the Republican, as President. ''And the best way to keep him from caving in to the Republican Congress,'' she said of Mr. Clinton, ''is by getting rid of the Republican Congress.''
In the end, some politicians said, New York Democrats would overwhelmingly support the President because they find Mr. Dole's policies too distasteful. ''Let's face it,'' said Representative Charles E. Schumer, a Democrat from Brooklyn. ''There is a lot of concern about this welfare bill and its effect on New York. But the overwhelming number of people who disagree with the President on this issue are going to wind up voting for Bill Clinton.''
But several officials made it clear that the President's position on the welfare bill would require his campaign to devote more attention to New York. Judith Hope, who is chairwoman of the New York State Democratic Committee, said that resentment among some Democrats ''means that there will be more work for the state party and for the campaign.''
Mr. Cuomo was perhaps the most outspoken after the news conference. Speaking of the President's support of the welfare bill, he said: ''There is no justification for it. It's political. He chose to do what's popular. Reagan did what was popular and it was devastating to us. Some of the time what's popular is wrong.''The world's second-largest stock market, Nasdaq, has been dominated by a small group of brokers who fixed prices with impunity while those who were charged with regulating the market ignored the illegal behavior, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged today as it announced tough measures to change the way that market is administered.
The commission imposed a formal censure on the National Association of Securities Dealers, the self-regulatory organization that oversees the Nasdaq market. It was the first time the commission had ever censured a major stock market.
The Nasdaq market has grown rapidly in recent years, with a roster of companies that includes leading technology companies like Intel and Microsoft. One commission official estimated that investors in Nasdaq stocks had lost tens of millions of dollars in recent years as a result of the price-fixing.
Arthur Levitt Jr., the chairman of the S.E.C., said the commission had found a pattern of conduct in which brokers coordinated what they charged customers. ''Investors paid too much, and received too little, when they bought and sold stock on Nasdaq,'' he said.
Mr. Levitt said the anticompetitive practices, far from being a secret, were routinely taught to new traders, and became a part of expected behavior. ''Where was the N.A.S.D., the cop on the Nasdaq beat?'' Mr. Levitt asked. ''The N.A.S.D. was not blind to these practices in the marketplace,'' he said. ''It simply looked the other way.''
When some dealers nonetheless tried to compete on the basis of price, the S.E.C. said, they were discouraged through harassment and intimidation by other dealers. The commission said N.A.S.D. officials knew of such actions, but did nothing to stop them.
The N.A.S.D. is an organization that includes virtually all the nation's brokerage firms. It is charged with regulating the Nasdaq market, which, unlike stock exchanges with trading floors, is essentially a computer system that links brokers, who generally make trades by telephone. The word Nasdaq originally stood for National Association of Securities Dealers Automatic Quotation system, but that was dropped years ago.
The N.A.S.D. accepted the censure without admitting or denying the charges, and issued a statement emphasizing the changes it had already made under the prodding of a commission headed by Warren B. Rudman, a former Republican Senator from New Hampshire. Among other things, they separated the regulatory responsibilities from the running of the stock market, and put Mary L. Schapiro, a former member of the S.E.C., in charge of the regulatory activities. Mr. Levitt said he had confidence in the people now running the N.A.S.D.
While the commission said N.A.S.D. officials knew of the illegal practices, it did not name any of them and apparently has decided to bring no charges against individual officials. But the inquiry remains open, and brokerage firms may yet be charged.
The S.E.C.'s settlement with the N.A.S.D. calls for that organization to spend $100 million over the next five years to step up monitoring of the market to prevent further abuses.
The money will come from Nasdaq's budget, which is raised from trading fees and other assessments on brokerage firms. Of that, $25 million is to be spent this year, representing just a 7 percent budget increase for the regulatory operation.
The settlement also calls for a number of changes, some of them already put into effect, to prevent such things from happening again.
The settlement, many of whose terms had been leaked earlier in the week, was announced this afternoon, less than 24 hours after the end of negotiations that had gone past midnight for three consecutive nights and involved the heads of major brokerage firms as well as executives of the N.A.S.D.
It appears clear that the practices outlined by the S.E.C. cost investors large sums of money by forcing them to pay more for securities when they bought them, and to get less when they sold them, than might otherwise have been the case.
To some extent, those losses may have been offset by reduced commissions, but the net effect was to raise profits of the brokerage industry substantially.
Those profits are likely to come under some pressure as a result of the settlement today, but they could be hurt even more if the S.E.C. goes ahead with its plans to impose new trading rules later this years. Those rules, as proposed last year, were aimed at assuring that investors got the best possible price in trading.
Many Nasdaq traders were outraged by the proposed rules, warning that they would devastate brokerage profits and reduce liquidity in the Nasdaq market by driving brokers out of business, and efforts have been made to get Congress to block the rules. But the picture of dealers contained in the report released by the S.E.C. today, as well as in a similar document released by the Justice Department last month, when it settled antitrust charges against the major dealers, may make it difficult for the dealers to arouse sympathy.
Quoting liberally from tape recordings of Nasdaq traders -- tapes that had been made by the brokerage firms to protect themselves in case of disputes over particular trades -- the commission provided evidence of traders at one firm telling others about customer orders, of putting pressure on other firms to fix prices, and of delaying trading reports to deceive customers.
In one case, a trader called the N.A.S.D. regulators to report that he had traded a stock during a trading halt, and to ask what to do. Such a trade was against the rules. The N.A.S.D. official, who was not named, responded by recommending that the trade be resubmitted to show, inaccurately, that it had taken place before the trading halt.
In the last 25 years, the Nasdaq market has grown from a tiny backwater of over-the-counter stocks, most of them in small companies, into a market whose trading volume, measured in dollars, is second in the world only to the New York Stock Exchange.The Government is focusing its public response to a riot last month on a small leftist group, accusing it of treason and Communism, an accusation that harks back to the kind of violent uprising that brought President Suharto to power 30 years ago.
The President was quoted today by the Information Minister, Harmoko, as saying the protest group, the Democratic People's Party, ''committed activities with the character of treason.''
At a Cabinet meeting on Wednesday, Mr. Harmoko said, the President said the group ''clearly acted and thought'' like the banned Communist Party of Indonesia, which the authorities blame for a coup attempt in 1965 that led to widespread bloodshed and as many as 500,000 deaths.
The authorities are seeking to arrest leaders of the group, and the official Antara news agency reported today that several had been barred from leaving the country. The group drew publicity earlier this year by organizing factory strikes for higher wages.
Officials have also sought to link the Indonesian Democratic Party, the officially recognized opposition party, with the leftist group, saying the leftist group had infiltrated rallies and was responsible for the riot, which followed a police raid on I.D.P.
For nearly a month before the riot on July 27, hundreds of young supporters of the party leader, Megawati Sukarnoputri, had occupied the party headquarters, refusing to leave after the Government engineered her ouster as head of the party. The riot erupted after the police stormed the building and violently ejected the occupants.
$(In response to a second summons by the police, Ms. Megawati reported on Friday to answer questions regarding the riot, Reuters reported. There had been fears that the police summons might spark further demonstrations, but about 100 journalists formed the biggest crowd.$)
Ms. Megawati has denied any links with the leftist group, but her advisers have expressed worries that her movement could be infiltrated by extremists. The opposition leader, who is 49, is the daughter of the first President, Sukarno, who was ousted by Mr. Suharto in 1966 after the massacres.
In an interview on the morning of the riot with the newsmagazine Gatra, Budiman Sudjatmiko, 26, leader of the Democratic People's Party, denied his group is Communist. He is now in hiding.
''We chose the ideology of democratic socialism because it is the actual need of society,'' he was quoted as saying. He also rejected the prominent role the military plays in Indonesian politics and society, saying, ''We do not hate the military but we hate militarism.''
An independent human rights group, the Indonesian Legal Aid Foundation, urged the authorities to exercise restraint in pursuing Mr. Sudjatmiko and other suspects.
''The charge of Communism has been used as a weapon that kills all the civil and political rights of leaders and activists who are pioneering democratization,'' the group said in a letter to Gen. Feisal Tanjung, commander of the armed forces.
Antara reported today that 20 members of Mr. Sudjatmiko's group were wanted for arrest. Seven members of a student group, the Indonesian Students Solidarity for Democracy, were arrested on Wednesday in central Java, Antara reported.
In another step to tighten the leash on the opposition, the Home Affairs Minister, Mochtar Yogie, announced on Wednesday that his office would require any non-governmental social groups to register or be banned.
The National Commission of Human Rights, a Government group, said today that it had been visiting hospitals and interviewing relatives to compile its own report on the riot.
''The most difficult part is to collect information on the missing people,'' said Clementino Dos Reis Amaral, a commission member.
The military has said two people died in the riot; the Legal Aid Foundation said at least three and perhaps seven or more died. Close to 100 people were reported hurt and more than 20 buildings were damaged.A state appeals court gave New York City the right yesterday to evict defiant squatters from four city-owned buildings on East 13th Street in Manhattan, setting the stage for a resolution of a long-simmering housing battle in the East Village.
City officials said last night that the ruling, by the Appellate Division of State Supreme Court, meant they could immediately proceed with the eviction, although they refused to say when, or even if, they would act.
Shortly after midnight today, several police vehicles parked in front of the buildings, between Avenue A and Avenue B. Numerous police officers milled about in riot gear.
''They really have no legal right to be there,'' an assistant corporation counsel, Lorna B. Goodman, said of the squatters. ''We want to rehab the properties and turn them into low-income housing.''
Squatters and local residents seemed more baffled than anything by the police presence.
''I just heard rumors,'' said John Potak, who lives at 535 East 13th Street, a squatters' building that is not involved in the current lawsuit. ''The government is trying to push out people who have pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, destroying the very housing that was recreated out of rubble and decaying infrastructure.''
Another squatter, Pablo Semiglia, said: ''There must be some misunderstanding. I don't believe the city would come into these buildings with families and children with no previous notice and say, 'You have to get out of the building now because we are going to renovate it.' ''
The squatters' continuing presence in the building has proven an embarrassment for the administration of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, which sent in police officers in riot gear a year ago in an attempt to remove the squatters and blocked off the street in the ensuing standoff.
In its 4-to-1 decision that the squatters could be removed, the appeals court panel found that a lower-court judge had erred last October in granting an injunction that prevented the city from carrying out the evictions. The squatters had claimed a right to the buildings based on the doctrine of ''adverse possession,'' which holds that a person who has had continuous use of someone else's property can keep it if the owner has made no formal objection.
The appeals panel, however, ruled yesterday that the squatters did not meet the requirements of ''adverse possession,'' which includes continuous occupancy for 10 years.
''Our review of the record reveals that the petitioners are not likely to prove ten years of actual, continuous, open and notorious possession of the subject buildings between 1984 and 1994, the period here in question,'' the decision stated.
A lawyer for the squatters, Jackie Bukowski, said she was appalled by the court's decision. ''It is an outrage that they want to throw people out,'' she said.
''These people literally kept the buildings standing,'' she added. ''The city relied on their efforts to keep the drug dealers out and the roofs repaired. Now, they want to throw them out so they can put in more deserving people. It is an outrage.''
At the buildings early this morning, many of the squatters said they had not known of the ruling, but predicted that if the city did move in, it would do so early in the morning, around 5 A.M., when the police have traditionally taken action in the past.
Ms. Goodman said the squatters could appeal the lifting of the preliminary injunction only if they were granted permission by the panel that had overturned it, which was unlikely. Ms. Bukowski said the squatters would seek an appeal.
A spokesman for Mayor Giuliani, Jack Deacy, said the Mayor was pleased by the ruling.
''Today's court decision represents a substantial victory for the East Village community and for the city,'' he said. ''It opens the door for the city to finally move ahead with a low-income housing project.''
The granting of the injunction by Justice Elliot Wilk of State Supreme Court initially surprised many.
Mayor Giuliani said at the time that he was certain the decision would be overturned on appeal. ''The judge is obviously making up the law rather than applying the law,'' he said then.
The squatters were mostly left alone by city housing officials, some for more than a decade, until the summer of 1994. Since then, the city has tried by various means to regain control of four adjacent buildings -- 537, 539, 541 and 545 East 13th Street -- citing plans to renovate the buildings for low-income families.As Russian troops continued a bitter three-day battle to regain control of Grozny today, a rebel leader in Chechnya stated in an article to be published in Izvestia on Friday that the rebel forces had accomplished their mission and would soon withdraw.
The ferocious assault, which left several hundred dead, was a brazen show of force intended to cast a pall over Moscow on the eve of President Boris N. Yeltsin's inauguration on Friday. Rebels who invaded the capital of the breakaway republic of Chechnya on Tuesday said they did so to underscore the collapse of peace proposals by Mr. Yeltsin during his re-election campaign.
Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin, who has led short-lived peace talks in the past, tried to damp fears that the war is widening. ''The fighters will get a response but this will not be a full-scale military action,'' he assured a group of parliamentary deputies today. ''We cannot allow the worsening situation to take the Afghan path.''
Mr. Chernomyrdin also demanded an investigation of the 36-hour delay by Russian troops in responding to the rebel assault.
More than 30,000 people have died since Russian troops invaded Chechnya at the end of 1994, and the war has turned into Moscow's worst military quagmire since defeated Soviet troops withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989 after 10 years of war. Mr. Yeltsin pledged during his campaign to find a peaceful solution, but fighting has intensified since his victory.
As reports of gunfire and bloodshed filled Russian newspapers and television news shows today, the Kremlin quietly scaled down its more ambitious plans for Mr. Yeltsin's triumphal swearing in.
Perhaps in deference to Mr. Yeltsin's fragile health, the ceremony that was originally planned to last an hour was cut to 30 minutes. Mr. Yeltsin, who suffers from heart disease and was hospitalized twice last year, retired to his dacha after the election and has not made a public appearance since June 26. He returned to work at the Kremlin on Tuesday, but has only been shown fleetingly on Russian television.
Plans to stage the event outdoors in the Cathedral Square were also scrapped. Explaining that an outdoor ceremony would be too expensive, the President's press office said Mr. Yeltsin would take his oath in the spacious Kremlin Palace, a venue inauguration committee members had rejected because it had been the site of too many Communist party meetings in Soviet times.
The fierce battle in the Chechen capital this week followed weeks of Russian attacks on rebel-held villages, violence that spread after a truce negotiated in late May between Mr. Yeltsin and the rebels' leader, Zelimkan Yandarbiyev, collapsed.
Russian troops backed by helicopter gunships and jet fighters pounded Chechen rebel positions in Grozny in an effort to push them out of the city, which Russia bombed and shelled into submission 19 months ago.
Mr. Yeltsin's envoy in Chechnya, Deputy Prime Minister Oleg Lobov, said today in Moscow that Russian troops were gradually pushing rebels out and that ''the situation is under control.''
But as of this afternoon, Russian journalists pinned down in a Government complex in the center of Grozny reported that the rebels still controlled the downtown area, and that Russian troops had failed to force their way through to troops under siege in the center of town.
$(The Government building came under heavy fire again on Friday, Reuters reported, quoting a Russian television correspondent who was in the compound. The correspondent, Abrek Baykov, said: ''The federal troops are fighting without the support of armoured equipment. The convoy of armoured equipment that came in on the night of the 7th has been destroyed.''
$(Referring to official statements on Thursday that Government forces were extending control over the city, he said, ''This is not lies; it is worse than lies.''$)
Doku Zavgayev, the Moscow-appointed leader of Chechnya, fled Grozny today and returned to his apartment in Moscow.
The privately owned television network NTV said tonight that rebels remained in control of some areas of Grozny, but not the entire city. Camera crews showed images of masked Chechen rebels slouching in buildings under their control, and Russian soldiers firing machine guns on the outskirts of town.
Casualty figures differed sharply, with both sides claiming to have killed hundreds of their enemies. With shelling and gunfire still resounding around this evening, it was impossible to estimate the number of dead and wounded.
Accounts of the fighting and devastation were few and sketchy. In a report published today in the daily newspaper Segodnaya, a journalist in Moscow who cited reports from journalists in Grozny reached by cellular telephone, wrote that bodies of soldiers and civilians were left lying on the streets, bloated by a scorching heat wave.
The news agency Interfax quoted two leading Russian members of a Government delegation in charge of settling the conflict -- the Minister of Nationalities, Vyacheslav Mikhailov, and Sergei Stepashin, a former head of the Federal Security Service -- as stating that the severed heads of Chechens who refused to cooperate with the rebels had been found in Grozny on Wednesday.
Mr. Yeltsin's national security adviser, Aleksandr I. Lebed, has indefinitely postponed plans to travel to Chechnya. Today he told reporters that force could not solve the conflict and that a new round of talks should be organized.Unless matters improve fast for Bob Dole he may have to settle for the sympathy vote. The campaign already feels as if it's been on since the Creation with Dole never gaining an inch. No other candidate in the history of living politicians has had absolutely everything working so relentlessly against him.
This includes the man he refers to as Bob Dole, as well as most of the Republican Party. Even his supporters would gladly deep-six him if another Eisenhower, another Reagan appeared on the scene. Only a person with a heart of mush, namely the incurable liberal, can watch his struggles without weeping.
Typically, Dole's party, locked in the iron grip of true believers who would rather lose than compromise, has just endorsed a constitutional amendment against abortion, thus wrecking his effort to gain a little ground with female voters.
Party platform writers refused to grant him even a throwaway line saying Republicans were tolerant folk. All they've allowed is a footnote in which moderates testify to toleration's virtues.
On abortion, the party as now constituted belongs to Pat Buchanan, famous for his intolerance on this matter. At the last Republican convention, Buchanan orated against tolerance with a passion that made the pulse pound, the gastric juices boil and the hair stand upright on the back of the neck.
Buchanan depicted a war being fought for the soul of America. Tolerance would put the party on Satan's side.
Buchanan's performance is sometimes offered as the cause of President Bush's defeat, but this seems far-fetched. Its only obvious result was to keep Ronald Reagan, the man Americans loved to love, waiting in the wings while Buchanan's gaudy stem-winder hogged all the prime time in television's big Eastern market.
This afforded a rare view of the affable Gipper quietly steaming. When he finally reached the podium his impatient hand gestures to stop applause suggested a man eager to get home fast.
The Republicans' refusal to give Dole a break on abortion reflects the power of the Rev. Pat Robertson to goad churchgoers into Republican activities. Reverend Robertson ran for the Presidency himself a few seasons back, did poorly and decided to settle for a career as the Republican Rasputin.
Press shorthand for the church people he has brought to Republicanism suggests they are some specialized Christian breed: ''the Christian right'' or ''Christian fundamentalists.'' This spreads the foolish notion that Christianity is an arm of the Republican Party and its adherents an intolerant bunch.
Such is the power of ambitious preachers to damage the reputation of those who follow the Gospels. It is not Christians who withhold the forbearance Dole needs to escape humiliation. It is Reverend Robertson's political organization of churchgoers.
Robertson's Republicans are not Dole's worst enemy, however. Dole is. Not content, for instance, to let President Clinton walk away unchallenged with the title of Man Most Eager to Sell Out for a Boost in the Polls, Dole now comes out for balancing the budget by cutting taxes.
This is in a class with Clinton's endorsement of the Kick-a-Kid-in-the-Kidneys welfare bill, which abandons the Democrats' tradition of mercy for the poor while presumably adding points to the President's voter-approval polls.
With his tax-cut proposal Dole abandons his career as a sound-money man and goes for poll points by endorsing Reagan's ''voodoo economics.'' Sending in old Mr. Tax Cut has worked political wonders for Republicans lately while producing the same budget deficits Republicans so deplore.
Now here is Dole indulging in the same old tax-cut juju he resisted until this campaign, which seems destined to hang up new records for candidates double-crossing themselves.
It is worth noting that a Dole tax cut would be partly offset by large cuts to come in welfare costs resulting from Clinton's welfare bill. In short, we would have a transfer of money from the poor to the overclasses. One might suppose Reverend Robertson would denounce this offense to the spirit of Christian charity. Perhaps he will.
Shall we now expect President Clinton to top Dole by offering an even bigger tax cut? It probably depends on what the pollsters learn over the weekend.
ObserverEthiopian troops, tanks and helicopter gunships have crossed the border into western Somalia and attacked three towns, killing scores of people, a Somali Muslim fundamentalist faction charged today. Workers for a Kenya-based Western relief organization confirmed the attack.
High-ranking officials of a Somali group called the Union of Islam said two battalions of Ethiopian troops with tanks and helicopter gunships had seized the Gedo region of southwestern Somalia in fighting on Thursday night and this morning.
The group said that the troops, tanks and helicopter gunships had swept through the towns of Dolo, Beled-Hawo and Lugh, and that the fighting was continuing.
The area of the fighting is adjacent to the Ogaden, a harsh desert region controlled by Ethiopia but populated almost entirely by ethnic Somali nomads. In 1977, Somalia and Ethiopia waged a bitter war over control of the region. Ethiopia eventually prevailed with heavy support from the Soviet Union and Cuba. Still, nationalist sentiments still run high among many of the Somalis living there.
The towns under attack are a stronghold of the Union of Islam, a fundamentalist Islamic group that with the collapse of central authority in Somalia, has carried on the fight for the Ogaden's independence from Ethiopia.
The group has claimed responsibility for three bombings and one attempted assassination inside Ethiopia since January.
In a statement released in Nairobi, Kenya, the fundamentalists said that more than 100 civilians and an unknown number of militiamen had been killed and that thousands of Somali families were fleeing because of the Ethiopian attack.
The group said Dolo and Lugh had been captured by the Ethiopian forces and warned that the Ethiopian Government would have to bear the consequences of what it called a savage attack on Somalia.
''We declare a holy war against the Ethiopians,'' said the group's leader, Sheik Hassan Dahir Aweys. ''The invasion just shows the longtime desire of Ethiopia to occupy part of Somalia.''
Michael Gerber, director of the African Medical Research Foundation, told Reuters that four members of his staff had been evacuated by air from Lugh to Kenya today after the town was attacked.
''They heard gunfire at 6 this morning,'' he said, ''and it got more and more extreme, so they called by radio two hours later for evacuation.
Mr. Gerber said the European Union Humanitarian Operations agency had sent in a plane for the evacuation but it had been unable at first to land because three helicopter gunships had been flying in the area around Lugh.
''Our people felt they definitely came from Ethiopia,'' he told Reuters. ''They were attacking Lugh. Our staff at the airport as they left saw Lugh under missile or artillery fire from across the Ethiopian border.'' No faction in Somalia is believed to have any aircraft.
An Ethiopian Foreign Ministry spokesman in Addis Ababa declined to comment on the reports of the invasion, Reuters and BBC Radio reported.
Since the collapse of central authority in Somalia after the overthrow of President Mohammed Siad Barre in 1991, rival clans have carved the nation up into fiefs, ruled mostly by young clansmen with guns.
The Islamic Union is a faction made up of fervently religious people, mostly from the Ogadeni clan in Somalia. The group controlled Dolo and Lugh, having turned them into tiny Islamic city-states ruled according to strict Koranic codes. Even cigarette smoking was considered a crime in Lugh.
The group, which has offices in Mogadishu, has also claimed responsibility for a violent campaign inside Ethiopia aimed at gaining independence for the Ogaden region. In January, a bomb at a hotel in Addis Ababa killed one person. A month later another bomb at a hotel in Diredawa took three lives. On Aug. 5, a third blast killed another man at a hotel in the capital.
The Islamic Union has also said it was behind the attempted assassination of an ethnic Somali who is the Transportation Minister in the Ethiopian Government, Dr. Abdul Majid Hussein.
Dr. Hussein heads a political party in the Ogaden that opposes breaking away from Ethiopia and is seen by some Somalis as a tool of the governing party. He was seriously wounded by gunfire outside his office in Addis Ababa in early July. He is now recovering at a hospital in Israel.Inflation is nowhere to be found these days.
After more than five years of solid economic expansion -- and a spring surge at perhaps twice the sustainable pace -- producer prices for finished goods showed no change in July while goods at an earlier stage of production declined in price for a second month, Labor Department figures showed today.
David Orr, an economist for the First Union Corporation in Charlotte, N.C., called it ''an amazing performance,'' adding that it would be hard to imagine any reason for the Federal Reserve to raise short-term interest rates at its Aug. 20 meeting.
The bond market rallied on the figures, which were better than most analysts had expected. The yield on the 30-year Treasury bond fell 10 basis points, to 6.69 percent. Stocks, however, finished lower.
The prices of finished goods -- those ready for sale to the final business or individual user -- remained flat last month, helped by the third consecutive monthly decline in energy prices. When the volatile energy component was excluded, prices rose one-tenth of 1 percent.
Over the last 12 months, producer inflation has been at an overall rate of 2.6 percent. The rate was only 1.5 percent without energy or food, another erratic component.
''This is an excellent reading,'' William V. Sullivan Jr., a senior economist at Dean Witter Reynolds, said of today's report. ''What was particularly impressive was the total absence of pressures in the pipeline,'' he said, referring to the price of goods at the next-earlier stage of production, like bolts of cloth or sacks of flour. For these goods, prices fell three-tenths of 1 percent last month to generate the first back-to-back decline in nearly five years.
Raw materials climbed 1.2 percent in price last month, recovering about half of the June decline. Crude goods other than food and energy fell a hefty 1.6 percent, a bit more than in June, to bring the 12-month decline to 13.5 percent.
The only apparent inflation risk might come from a tightening labor market. With the unemployment rate at 5.4 percent, many employers have been forced to step up efforts to attract and retain workers.
If the still-subdued pace of pay increases was to accelerate, the shift would probably show up in the Consumer Price Index -- 57 percent of which reflects the price of services -- before it would push up the Producer Price Index, which only indirectly reflects pay.
The consumer index for July, to be released Tuesday, is expected to show a moderate rise of two-tenths of 1 percent, further reassuring an inflation-wary Federal Reserve.
Still, with a nod toward the possibility of surprise, Mr. Sullivan and other analysts did not entirely rule out a Fed move to tighten monetary policy this month.
The flat showing of producer prices in today's report was heavily influenced by a decline of nine-tenths of 1 percent in the price of energy. Gasoline prices fell 2.8 percent while residential electricity prices dropped eight-tenths of 1 percent.
Food, meanwhile, edged up just two-tenths of 1 percent, after June's surge of 1.6 percent. Last month, the price of fresh fruits and melons tumbled 15.4 percent, pork prices dropped and the prices of dairy products, beef, veal and processed chickens rose at a slower pace.
Passenger car prices registered a drop of nine-tenths of 1 percent, essentially erasing a June rise, while textiles for the home jumped 1.7 percent and capital equipment rose three-tenths of 1 percent, the largest increase since November.
Among intermediate goods, which as a group are now two-tenths of 1 percent less costly than in July 1995, nondurables used in manufacturing dropped eight-tenths of 1 percent. In June, nondurables were unchanged. The prices of plastic resins, chemicals and paint materials turned down and paper prices fell again. But, the price of wood pulp accelerated, jumping 5.3 percent after advancing 2.9 percent in June.
For durables used in factory processes, overall prices turned down by nine-tenths of 1 percent as aluminum ready for fabrication fell faster and various forms of hot-rolled steel rose at a slower pace than in June. Copper, aluminum and plywood prices also fell less than in June, while the price of flat glass turned higher.
The index for construction materials eased one-tenth of 1 percent in July, after a rise of four-tenths of 1 percent. Softwood lumber slumped 3.2 percent, reversing a June rise.When Daniel Saavedra fell ill with a rare pancreas disease three years ago, he went to see Miguel Angel Gaitan, and within weeks, he says, he made a full recovery.
When Carmen Gorriz needed a car after her brother wrecked her old Ford, she traveled 300 miles by bus just to touch Miguel Angel. The next week she won a new Peugeot in a church lottery, and sent a thank-you note to Miguel Angel, along with a copy of her winning ticket.
And when Suzy Ipinza, 11, wanted high marks on her spelling test, she too visited Miguel Angel and later sent him a copy of her perfect score.
For decades, thousands of Argentines from across the country have been descending on this desolate northwest town of 600 people seeking Miguel Angel's miracles.
But he is no modern-day prophet, nor is he a saint. In fact, all that remains of Miguel Angel, who died of meningitis in 1966, just short of his first birthday, is a small, wrinkled corpse, which is remarkably well preserved after 30 years.
The miracle seekers bring offerings of flowers, teddy bears, toys, clothing and money to the cemetery where Miguel Angel's body is displayed in a glass-top coffin.
''We call him the miracle child because God has kept his body from decomposing so that all the world can come and see him and be blessed,'' said Mr. Saavedra, a taxi driver, who raised his shirt to show the scars on his abdomen from his many operations.
Argentina has other legends like that of Miguel Angel.
The 19th century produced Difunta Correa, who supposedly died of thirst in the desert but was survived by her infant son, who lived for weeks on milk from his dead mother's breasts. Today, Argentines bring bottles of water to a tomb in San Juan Province devoted to Difunta Correa in hopes of receiving miracles.
Iris Guinazu, an anthropologist who specializes in Argentine folklore, said such myths were a vestige of an indigenous culture that has been all but wiped out in Argentina, the most heavily Europeanized of Latin American nations. She said the Difunta Correa legend is related to that of the Inca god Pacha Mama, or Mother Earth, who after becoming dust still generates life.
''These simple, small rituals help preserve the American identity,'' Ms. Guinazu said of the mixed-race people who predominate in rural Argentina. ''For these people, Christianity is too much of an abstraction. They believe in what they see or touch. These rites help them to identify with their true selves.''
If the miracle seekers who come to Miguel Angel's remains are lucky, the dead baby's mother, Argentina Gaitan, who attends his tomb daily, opens the locked coffin and allows them to touch the corpse's head.
If they are really lucky, she dresses the corpse in the baby clothes they bring, like the small soccer uniform provided by a fan of Argentina's championship team Boca Juniors.
''Normally they don't get to touch him, but if they ask, I unlock the case and let them,'' said Mrs. Gaitan, 64, a robust woman who bore 15 children. ''But you'll get a miracle whether you touch him or not.''
Pilgrims typically leave small offerings, and Mrs. Gaitan sells cards and trinkets with Miguel Angel's picture for $2 and pamphlets that chronicle his life and death for $15.
Miguel Angel's coffin is housed in a two-story concrete tomb that is filled with colorful artificial flowers and testimonials in which Argentines give thanks for the miracles they say the corpse has brought.
''Miguel Angel, thank you for the miracle: Jose proposed to marry me yesterday,'' reads a letter from Patricia from Cordoba, a province 450 miles south of Villa Union.
''Thanks to you, Miguel Angel, I got 100 on my neonatal exam,'' wrote Juanita, a medical student in Buenos Aires, 900 miles to the southeast.
The Rev. Ricky Alberto Martinez, Villa Union's priest, said that while the Roman Catholic Church officially recognizes as saints only those who have been canonized by the Vatican, the church cannot ignore ''unofficial saints'' like Miguel Angel.
''We can't negate the feelings that people have for this child and the faith that he has inspired in them,'' Father Martinez said. ''You can't dismiss them as a bunch of uneducated people from the backwoods. This is a national phenomenon. People are reporting miracles all over the country.''An armed group claiming to be a new leftist guerrilla army sought to dispel doubts about its authenticity and goals by meeting with journalists this week in remote mountains along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, across the country from where the group first appeared.
At a news conference on Wednesday in a mango grove in the Sierra Madre Oriental, three masked men and a woman who said they were top commanders of an organization called the Popular Revolutionary Army declared they were beginning an armed struggle against the Government, which they accused of being repressive and anti-democratic.
A small number of reporters were taken to the clandestine meeting by the self-styled rebels after a three-day march through the mountains. They did not know exactly where they were and made an agreement with the guerrillas not to identify anything about the location except the name of the mountain range, which stretches for hundreds of miles along the coast of the states of Veracruz and Tamaulipas.
What apparently was the first appearance of the group took place when a similarly uniformed, masked and armed band calling itself by the same name burst into a political rally on June 28 in a village in the state of Guerrero, in southwestern Mexico. The intruders read an anti-Government diatribe before disappearing into the hills.
The journalists who attended the news conference, from three Mexican publications and The Associated Press, published their accounts and pictures today.
The four commanders were dressed in olive green military uniforms and used brown bandanas with small eyeholes to conceal their faces, a video shot by an A.P. cameraman shows. They wore red and green arm patches with the letters E.P.R., the initials of the group's name in Spanish, and were armed with AK-47 and R-15 automatic rifles and sidearm pistols.
In all the reporters saw about 50 people in military uniforms, carrying large army-style backpacks and mainly AK-47 rifles.
Many here have doubted that the Popular Revolutionary Army is truly a guerrilla organization opposing the Government. It appears to have virtually no links to established leftist political parties, grass-roots organizations or human rights groups. Some leftist political leaders have raised suspicions that it could be a gang of paid provocateurs mobilized by officials in Guerrero State, and Government officials suggested it might be made up of common highway bandits.
The news conference seemed to be the group's answer to these suspicions. It helped to demonstrate that the group does exist and is present in more than one state, but shed no additional light on how big it is, who is backing it or what kind of military action it is prepared to carry out.
Three ambushes of army troops in Guerrero have been attributed to the Popular Revolutionary Army since it emerged late in June. In the most recent incident, on Wednesday, the same day as the news conference, one soldier was killed and two were wounded in an attack by masked and uniformed assailants on a garrison near Coyuca de Benitez, the village the guerrillas first appeared.
No reports of attacks on the army in the Gulf Coast region have been reported. But the Mexican armed forces increased their patrols in the region in the last few months in response to reports of armed groups moving in the highlands.
One commander, who called himself Francisco and said he was from the national command, said the Popular Revolutionary Army was founded in May 1994 and is now made up of 14 organizations, including groups of peasant farmers and Indians. The commanders read a 45-point list of demands, which included a mixture of calls to nationalize the holdings of major United States corporations and cancel the foreign debt, along with debt relief for middle-class Mexicans who cannot pay their bank loans.
''An armed response has once again become necessary to confront the undeclared war the Government is waging on the Mexican people and to stop its repression,'' said another masked commander, who gave his name as Jose Arturo. ''We do not consider the state is invulnerable. We believe we can strike at it and defeat it.''
The rebels said they would not increase their attacks immediately but would wait to see the Government's response to their manifesto. However, a commander calling herself Victoria said the E.P.R. would never agree to talks with the Government.
There have long been small armed opposition groups calling themselves guerrillas in some of Mexico's most destitute and inaccessible areas, especially in Guerrero. The only group to have a national impact was the Zapatista National Liberation Army, which seized four towns in a brief war in the southern state of Chiapas in January 1994. The Zapatistas are now in peace talks with the Government.Two weeks after a Boeing 747 exploded over the Atlantic, thousands of fax machines across the country started to churn out a financial plea that began, ''Assistance Fund Established to Benefit the Families of T.W.A. Flight 800.''
''There is a real financial dilemma for the individuals who have lost a loved one in this crash,'' read the appeal, which suggested that people send checks to a post office box in St. Louis that was listed under the name ''Families of T.W.A. Flight 800.''
But the group soliciting the money, Families of National Tragedies, has no connection to T.W.A. or to the relatives of the 230 people killed in the July 17 crash. It is not registered to solicit money in any of the states -- including New York -- where people received the appeal. It was not incorporated until 12 days after the explosion, and its officers have no experience running a charity.
And it has quickly attracted the scrutiny of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the United States Postal Inspection Service and Better Business Bureaus and attorneys general around the country.
While the group has clearly violated the fund-raising laws of most states, which require charities to register with the state before soliciting money, Federal investigators said they had no proof that it had misappropriated any money.
The organization's directors, who say they now plan to register their charity in all 50 states, acknowledged that they did not have the addresses or even the names of the T.W.A. families who are supposed to be the fund's beneficiaries. They said they had no idea how much they had collected because the donations lay uncounted in the post office box under their lawyer's advice.
''I'm not going to say what took place was right, that it was perfect,'' said Len Fellez, the group's president, referring to the decision to fax the appeal without first registering the organization. ''But we're not a bunch of hooligans out to take advantage of a tragedy. We're a couple of guys that went about trying to do a good thing, but probably went about it in the wrong way.''
Mr. Fellez said he hoped he could work with T.W.A. to get money to the families. Mark Abels, a spokesman for T.W.A., said the company was not working with the charity and suggested that the group turn over any money it raised to the United Way of New York City. Mr. Fellez said he was willing to do so.
Consumer advocates said the group might be legitimate, but urged potential donors to exercise caution before contributing.
''They do not have their proper filings with the Internal Revenue Service, and they don't have a track record,'' said Michelle Corey, the vice president of the Better Business Bureau serving the St. Louis area, where Trans World Airlines is based. ''And with any company formed in the aftermath of a disaster, you have to ask yourself, what is their real purpose? Is it to help the victims, or is it to get rich?''
Donations to an organization are not tax-deductible until the I.R.S. has approved it as a charity. In its initial appeal, Mr. Fellez's company said it had applied to the I.R.S. for charitable status; Mr. Fellez said Thursday the company had not applied when it said it had but was doing so now.
Consumer advocates and law enforcement officials say that charities, both legitimate and illegitimate, often spring up after disasters.
On May 16, five days after a Valujet plane crashed in Florida, an Atlanta bank appealed for funds to benefit relatives of the victims. Advocates for the families questioned bank officials and discovered that the fund-raising effort was legitimate. The bank, First Capital, has raised $5,000 which will be used to build a memorial for the victims.
But it was a different story in Oklahoma City. On April 20, 1995, one day after the bombing of the Federal building, a company based in Las Vegas began soliciting funds. The company, named Feed America, was ultimately charged with soliciting without having registered as a charitable organization. In March, an Oklahoma state judge barred the company from contacting Oklahoma residents and ordered it to pay $10,520 in restitution to two people who had been defrauded.
''All too often we see criminals out there that take advantage of these types of situations,'' said James K. Kallstrom, the F.B.I. official who is directing the criminal investigation of the T.W.A. crash.
The F.B.I. has not determined whether Families of National Tragedies is a legitimate charity. But earlier this week, F.B.I. agents visited the Issaquah, Wash., home of Mr. Fellez, who said he promised to stop soliciting money until his company's paperwork was in order.
Mr. Fellez said neither he nor his partner, Paul Eugene Palmer of Effingham, Ill., knew the fund-raising rules because they had never run a charity before. Mr. Fellez, 30, a one-time vitamin salesman, said he runs National Communications Technologies, a telecommunications company he started with Mr. Palmer, 32, who described himself as a former stockbroker and youth minister.
On July 29, Mr. Fellez incorporated the charity in Washington state, records there show. Two days later, the partners said, they began faxing their appeal for funds to news organizations and publishing companies. At least one newspaper, The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Va., published the appeal on Aug. 3. And as the appeal circulated, it reached relatives of the T.W.A. victims.
''This is just unacceptable,'' said Frank Carven, a 44-year-old lawyer who lost his sister and nephew in the crash. ''We haven't even buried our dead yet, and these people are collecting funds in the names of survivors? They certainly did not call us.''He could not get Colin Powell, and he apparently felt that neither the new-generation Midwestern Governors like John Engler nor the low-recognition Senators like Connie Mack and John McCain could help him close President Clinton's 20-point lead. So after a last-minute courtship, Bob Dole is said to have settled on Jack Kemp as his running mate. Given the relative obscurity of those who were still on the leader board as of mid-week, it was not a dumb choice.
Mr. Kemp does not have Mr. Powell's national allure, but his careers as a football star, Congressman and Cabinet member have made him highly visible. He is a strong campaigner who looks younger than his 61 years, he actually believes in Mr. Dole's newfound economic views, and he is just enough of an original thinker to give the Democrats something to worry about. His independent turn of mind may also cause Mr. Dole anxious moments.For the first time in its history, the Securities and Exchange Commission has formally censured a major stock market. The target of Thursday's ruling was Nasdaq, the world's second-largest stock market, where millions of shares are traded daily in thousands of stocks, including many of America's most prominent high-technology issues like Microsoft and Intel.
The essence of the S.E.C.'s complaint was that ordinary investors were cheated of millions of dollars by brokers who fixed prices while the National Association of Securities Dealers, which is supposed to regulate the market, turned a blind eye. But the S.E.C. did more than complain. It negotiated a settlement that commits dealers to weed out sleazy practices, and in the process save investors millions if not billions of dollars.
Arthur Levitt Jr., chairman of the S.E.C., is waging a campaign to rewrite the rules of Wall Street so that they favor investors rather than brokers and dealers. The censure action against Nasdaq, and the agreement with the dealers' association, are important new steps in that direction.
The S.E.C., citing tape recordings and other condemning evidence, accused Nasdaq dealers of colluding to force investors to buy shares at artificially high prices and sell shares at artificially low prices. The wide spread between these buy and sell prices produced huge profits -- perhaps totaling billions of dollars -- for the dealers at the expense of investors. Dealers who tried to break ranks, and offer investors a better deal, were harassed and threatened with sanctions. The commission also accused dealers of reneging on offers to trade posted prices and other unprofessional practices.
At the core of the commission's complaint, however, is documentation of the association's startling failure to monitor sales practices, let alone stop collusive behavior. Under the settlement, the association agreed to spend $100 million over the next five years to monitor sales practices and improve audit trails so that it, and the commission, would be able to spot unprofessional conduct. The dealers also agreed to tighten grievance procedures and give more power within the organization to representatives of the public.
The S.E.C. took its first step to end cozy dealer-driven practices when it recently pressured the association to split off its regulatory function from its profit-making function. This week, the commission won specific commitments from the dealers to improve regulatory oversight. The commission's next task is to issue new and fairer trading rules that guarantee investors the best prices for their trades. This might require dealers to display all offers made by investors. It might also require Nasdaq to allow investors to post bids that are better than the dealer offer.
The campaign to put investors in charge is not glamorous. But capital markets can function well only if investors are confident that they are being treated fairly.JOHN DAGBOVI SENAKWAMI, the would-be Olympic swimmer from Togo by way of the Bronx, thought he knew something about endurance. He swam thousands of laps in the last two years in the hope of being the first of his compatriots to compete in the Summer Games.
But those laps were no match for the circles that Togo's Olympic officials ran around him. Although Mr. Senakwami was eligible under the rules, the gatekeepers back home stymied his Olympian efforts. He said they told him he was too old, that he had missed the deadline, that he was not fast enough. They told him to stay home.
Mr. Senakwami went to the Games, though. As a spectator. The only gold he saw were the yellow-hued tickets that admitted him to the swimming events.
''The Olympic spirit is not about winning only, but about participating, hard work and proudly representing your country,'' he said, sitting outside the tiny rectory room that had been his training home at Our Lady of Victory Roman Catholic Church, near Claremont Park in the Bronx. ''The difference between me and the people who swam is that they jumped in the pool and I did not. They're called Olympians and I'm not.''
Such was the frustrating finale to a quixotic journey that took the 30-year-old music teacher from his first lessons at a Bronx health club two years ago to the bittersweet brink of Olympic competition. To get there, he lived a near-monastic existence, scraping by on savings and kindness, sometimes walking to swim practice through winter snows that were a workout in themselves.
''Swimming was everything for me in the last couple of years,'' he said. ''The Olympics were everything for me. For that not to happen really hurts me.''
PERHAPS he was a victim of his own celebrity. Since first appearing in this column in March, Mr. Senakwami's tale has been retold in countless American, European and African newspapers and magazines and on television.
He sent clippings to Togo, hoping to persuade his nation's Olympic committee to approve his entry. As the only swimmer from his country, international rules permitted him to compete regardless of his times in the freestyle and butterfly events.
He said an official from the Ministry of Sport welcomed him to the team. But soon afterward, an official with the Togo Olympic Committee reversed the decision. He was told, incorrectly he said, that he had missed the April deadline.
In his gut, he said, he thinks that Togo's Olympic Committee officials felt their authority had been usurped by those in the Government who gave Mr. Senakwami the go-ahead.
''The whole thing became an argument, a power trip to see who is in charge,'' he said. ''A relative told me she spoke with a member of the Togo committee who said that with my story all over the world, people are jealous and envious at all the attention I was getting.''
Officials at Togo's embassy aren't saying much, except that Togo sent no swimmers to the Games. ''The decision came from our country,'' said Adje Amegavi, the attache who was in charge of Olympic preparations. ''The decision was not my decision.''
UNDAUNTED, Mr. Senakwami hitched a ride to Atlanta with an African journalist and went in search of his countrymen to plead his case. He had about as much chance of finding them as he did of snagging a gold medal.
''He was trying to make some headway with the grand poo-bahs from Togo, but they were partying in some hotel and he couldn't get through to them,'' said John Collins, his coach at the Badger Swim Club. ''There were some people who swam who were slower than him. It exasperated him to see that.''
Back in the Bronx last week, Mr. Senakwami rooted through the pile of books, clothes and swim gear until he grabbed the gym bag he had carried with him in Atlanta. On television, American Olympians milled about the White House for their day of honor. He held out a lapel pin of crossed American and Togolese flags. He also took out copies of canceled checks, donations from strangers who were moved by his story.
''I could not have done all I did without the generosity of the people of New York,'' he said. ''The so-called American dream, it only happens when you work hard. This country probably has lost faith in itself, but me, as an outsider, I have proof.''
He held the pin with two flags. It even had gold on the edges.
''Realistically, I knew what I was up against when it comes to competitive swimming,'' he said. ''I did not want to embarrass Togo in any way.''
Looks like they've done a good enough job on their own.
ABOUT NEW YORKHoping to let bygones be bygones, Willie King, the Harlem man charged with mugging the mother of Vincent Gigante, accused boss of the Genovese organized crime family, pleaded guilty to grand larceny in Manhattan Supreme Court yesterday.
Mr. King's lawyer, Steven Wershaw, said his client entered a plea because he wanted to ''put this incident behind him, and hopefully have the Gigantes put it behind them.'' Mr. Wershaw said Mr. King had not received any threats, but correction officials had put him in protective custody.
Yolanda Gigante, 94, was walking in Greenwich Village with another son, the Rev. Louis R. Gigante, a Roman Catholic priest, on July 21 when they were approached from behind by a man who grabbed a wallet from Mrs. Gigante's housecoat. Mr. King, 37, was caught a few blocks away, unaware of the woman's identity.
Vincent Gigante, 69, faces trial in Federal Court in Brooklyn on murder and racketeering charges. His lawyers say he is unfit to stand trial.For Bob Dole, abortion is like the shark in ''Jaws.'' Every time he thinks it's safe to go into the water -- AARGGH!
This week, replaying his now habitual flip-flop scenario, Mr. Dole once more got bloodied and once more beat a hasty retreat to dry land. In the latest phony truce within his party, the four pro-choice horsemen of floor-fight apocalypse (Wilson, Weld, Whitman, Snowe) capitulated to the pro-life delegate majority, agreeing to be quiet next week in exchange for a token mention in an appendix to a platform no one reads anyway. Thus will Mr. Dole be able to preside over an un-Houston convention that promises to marry the ersatz harmony of the Politburo to the nonstop hucksterism of QVC.
But those in politics and the press who see this latest ''compromise'' as the end of the abortion story in '96 are as deceived now as they were when they previously declared peace at hand -- after Mr. Dole announced his first allegedly non-negotiable ''tolerance'' plank in June, for instance. Abortion isn't going away, especially with the pro-life Jack Kemp completing the ticket; it's hiding just beneath the surface of the political culture, biding its time until after the revelers have left the shores of San Diego.
Why will the abortion debate keep flaring up? Logically, it shouldn't. Polls show that abortion ranks low among issues that matter most to voters in choosing Presidents. What's more, it's common knowledge that the abortion-banning ''human life amendment'' called for by the G.O.P. is never going to happen; even in a Republican Congress, pro-lifers have made no effort to bring it to the floor.
These facts, which are ritualistically trotted out each time Mr. Dole is said to have at last ''put abortion behind him,'' belie the closet resonance of abortion as an issue with those who may not regard abortion per se as a high political priority. ''It isn't about abortion,'' says Ann Stone, the leader of Republicans for Choice. ''It's about how you view women in contemporary society. Do you really believe women should be equal partners, have control over their lives, have the ability to make all the choices available to them? It's not a liberal vs. conservative issue, a Democrat vs. Republican issue -- it's those who trust and respect women vs. those who do not.''
And that's not the only symbolic pull of abortion. Because of Ralph Reed's prominence in every negotiation Mr. Dole has conducted on the issue, abortion has become a sort of Dow Jones index of just how much control the religious right has over the G.O.P. Since Mr. Dole has retreated each time -- sadly failing even at so modest a goal as retaining the word ''tolerance'' -- he now looks like a complete tool of the Christian Coalition. If a Presidential nominee is so weak he can't even get some Hallmark-card rhetorical window-dressing inserted in his own party's platform, who believes he would stand up to Mr. Reed and his boss, Pat Robertson, when it really counted in the White House?
Given his obeisance to the religious right and his own 100 percent pro-life voting record (as rated by the Christian Coalition), a President Dole would be certain to roll back Roe v. Wade -- killing it not with the preposterous ''human life amendment'' but with a thousand stealthier, incremental cuts ranging from anti-choice judicial appointees to the signing of more legislation like that already passed by the Gingrich Congress to restrict both abortion rights and family-planning programs. As Kate Michelman of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League puts it, the G.O.P.'s call for a ''human life amendment'' may be only a pie-in-the-sky, long-term goal, ''but it sets the context for aggressively assaulting a woman's right to choose at every turn.''
Political polls show that most Americans object to that assault. More revealing still, a survey of 1994-95 abortion patients released this week by the Alan Guttmacher Institute reveals that women of all faiths now take abortion rights for granted; 18 percent of women getting abortions identified themselves as ''born again'' or evangelical Christians and 31 percent as Catholic. Since 1.3 million American women have abortions each year, who can be surprised that the issue roils almost everyone? Only Bob Dole, apparently, who just months ago was describing the resolution of abortion disputes within the G.O.P. as a ''piece of cake'' and even now may not see the shark waiting to bite his head off no later than the fall's first debate.
JournalLandmark International Equities, a Westbury, L.I., brokerage firm best known for taking public a company run by Oliver L. North, is being investigated by the National Association of Securities Dealers in the wake of running afoul of net capital requirements and quitting as a Nasdaq market-maker on Wednesday, according to a person familiar with the inquiry.
Landmark quit making markets at about 11:30 A.M. Wednesday in seven Nasdaq-traded securities, including shares of Guardian Technologies International, whose chairman and president is Mr. North. Landmark executives were not available for comment yesterday. Guardian makes, among other things, body armor.
George Johnson, president and chief executive of the Hanifen Imhoff Clearing Corporation of Denver, which operated as Landmark's clearing agent, said Landmark was trying to raise new capital to reopen its market-making business.
Mr. Johnson said that Landmark became imperiled when the stock price of Guardian, among other companies in which Landmark made a market, fell sharply in the last half of July and early August. As a clearing agent for Landmark, Hanifen guaranteed that Landmark trades would be completed and paid for.
Within minutes of Landmark's withdrawal as a market-maker on Wednesday, those stocks plunged even more. Guardian's stock price, which more than doubled from its $5 offering price on its first day of trading in May, had already fallen to $6 in late July and to $4 early this week. On Wednesday morning, it fell to $1.75 from $3.75. Yesterday, the shares rose 6.25 cents, to $2.1875.
Also on Wednesday, shares of the R. F. Management Corporation, which serves outpatient surgery centers and whose shares Landmark took public in July 1995, fell to 87.5 cents from $2. Yesterday, the shares rose 43.75 cents, to $1.50.
Market-makers are securities firms that stand ready to buy and sell shares in a given stock on the Nasdaq securities market. For the largest Nasdaq-traded stocks, like Microsoft or Intel, dozens of companies make a market, and a market-maker's withdrawal would be unlikely to affect the shares.
But for smaller companies trading is often highly dependent on the underwriter, and its retail clients usually make up the bulk of the shareholders. Thus, the underwriter's withdrawal as a market maker can have a catastrophic effect on the stock price.
In Guardian's case, when Landmark stopped making a market in the stock and associated warrants, so did six other firms, said Reid Walker, an N.A.S.D. spokesman. Landmark also quit making a market in the stock and warrants of R. F. Management, shares and warrants of Greenman Technologies Inc. and shares of the Atec Group Inc.
Mr. Walker declined to disclose whether the agency, which oversees the Nasdaq market, was investigating Landmark.
On Thursday, Guardian issued a press release stating that it was ''not aware of any business event or action on the part of the company that would explain the recent drop in the price of its securities.''
Officials of Guardian did not return phone calls yesterday. Herbert M. Jacobi, a lawyer in New York who represents Guardian, said there had been no fundamental change in the company's business outlook. He said Guardian expected to file its second- quarter report with the Securities and Exchange Commission next week.
Guardian went public in May, selling 850,000 units, each comprising one share of stock and one warrant to buy another share, at $5.10 a unit. On the first day of trading, the units closed at $12.
Mr. North co-founded Guardian in 1989 with Joseph F. Fernandez, the former station chief of the Central Intelligence Agency in Costa Rica. Like Mr. North, Mr. Fernandez became known for his association with the Iran-contra affair. Mr. Fernandez is Guardian's only other executive officer, and together the two men own about 23 percent of the company's shares.
The company's market valuation was $54 million at its height on the first day of trading.
When Guardian initially filed with the S.E.C. for permission to sell its stock to the public, its preliminary prospectus said it had a contract with the General Services Administration, giving it inroads to potential business with Federal agencies.
But a check with the G.S.A. showed that no such contract existed. Mr. Jacobi said it was a typographical error.
Landmark, too, attracted attention to the offering. According to records kept by the North American Securities Administrators Association, a group of state securities regulators, in the two years leading up to the Guardian offering, three Landmark executives had been charged by customers with unauthorized trading in the customers' accounts.
At the time of the offering, one of the charges had been settled and the two others were pending. A lawyer for Landmark did not return phone calls yesterday.A young woman and a teen-age girl who sneaked into a public swimming pool in Harlem after hours with two male companions were raped at gunpoint early yesterday by two robbers, the police said.
The four friends were on the deck of the pool in Marcus Garvey Park at East 124th Street and Fifth Avenue when two men came through a hole in a fence surrounding the pool just before 5 A.M. and fired a shot to announce a robbery, said Police Officer Olga Mercado, a department spokeswoman.
''They robbed all four people,'' she said. ''They then sexually abused, raped and sodomized the females while holding the males at gunpoint.''
The Marcus Garvey Park pool was one of 10 city pools to receive new surveillance video cameras this summer. Detectives at the 25th Precinct were reviewing the videotape yesterday to determine whether any part of the attack had been recorded, police and parks officials said.
The security camera, mounted on a wall at the east side of the 60-by-75-foot pool, is designed to operate 24 hours a day. Twenty of the city's 57 public pools are equipped with the cameras, which were first installed two years ago after a spate of sex attacks on young female swimmers.
It was unclear last night whether the victims had been swimming or had simply been sitting on the concrete bleachers overlooking the water, Officer Mercado said.
Police investigators were also interviewing a night watchman who was assigned to the pool, said Parke Spencer, a Parks Department spokesman. Mr. Spencer said he did not know if the watchman, who was unarmed, had been in the area of the pool at the time of the attack.
Yesterday's attack came little more than 24 hours after a 19-year-old woman was raped on the East 120th Street side of the park. The woman was assaulted by an unidentified man at about 3:20 A.M. on Thursday. The police provided no other information about that crime but said they were investigating possible links between the incidents.
Parks Department officials acknowledged yesterday that swimming after hours is a common problem at public pools across the city, particularly on the hottest summer nights. ''If there's razor wire at the top they go through the fence,'' Mr. Spencer said. ''If there is a chain-link fence and no razor wire, they go over the fence. We try to make the facilities as secure as possible.''
But he added: ''We are unable to provide adequate supervision and protection to people who utilize our facilities when they are not open to the public.''
At the pool in Marcus Garvey Park, which is also known as Mount Morris Park, the perimeter chain-link fence has been cut through and repaired so many times that it looks like a metal patchwork quilt. There is no razor wire and there were holes in the fence on the eastern and southern sides of the pool, which sits on the southern slope of Mount Morris.
Investigators believe that the attackers came from the plateau of Mount Morris down the southern slope along paths and stairways littered with empty malt liquor cans, used condoms and feces.
The attackers carried a gun, which they kept pointed at the two men as they took the woman and the girl a short distance away, the police said. Investigators found three shell casings, which they believe came from a 9-millimeter handgun, on the pool deck, but they said they were not certain that the casings were related to the rape and robbery.
The police did not say what was taken in the robbery. The victims were treated at North General Hospital and released.
People who live near the pool, which is open from 11 A.M. to 7 P.M., said it was common for youths in the area to take moonlight swims. ''They go up there and just climb over the gate,'' said 10-year-old Dupree Drummond.
Many said it was inevitable that young people would seek refuge from the heat in a nighttime swim. They said that city officials should trim the trees and bushes that surround the pool on two sides.
''A lot of times I walk around the pool perimeter, I look in the wooded area and I see men smoking crack and girls turning tricks,'' said Antoinette Smith. ''We don't know what maniac is hiding in there. There's all these children here.''Once the butt of sexist jokes, women drivers now pose a genuine hazard: they are acting too much as men do behind the wheel. Having already drawn about equal in their numbers on the road, women are making gains in categories in which they have always lagged far behind: accidents and deaths.
As they compete with men in the working world and otherwise erase differences in roles, women under 25, in particular, are also paying heftier auto insurance premiums.
''What we see today is a considerable blurring of differences between American men and women compared to 10 years ago and surely 20 years ago, and this is being reflected in highway accident statistics,'' said Brian O'Neill, president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, an industry-sponsored research group based in Arlington, Va.
''Women used to get in the right- hand lane and stay there,'' observed Capt. Patrick McQueeny of the Rhode Island State Police. ''Now you see them speeding more and weaving in and out of traffic. It's not unusual to find them bombing up behind you at 80 m.p.h.''
As a group, men still far outdistance women in the speeding and drinking associated with high-risk driving. But as fatalities among male drivers held steady over the last decade, the death rate for women climbed. Two decades ago, more than five times as many male drivers were killed in traffic crashes as were female drivers. Today, the ratio has narrowed to 3 to 1.
And during a period when public campaigns against drunken-driving cut the number of fatal accidents for both sexes, the death rate for women in alcohol-related accidents has not dropped as sharply as the rate for men.
From an actuarial perspective, the historic advantage women under 25 held on auto insurance rates has been pared almost in half the last 20 years, according to insurance industry figures.
In 1980, for instance, unmarried women ages 17 to 20 paid 47 percent above the adult base rate for insurance, while men in the same age group paid 187 percent more, according to the Insurance Services Office, a New York nonprofit organization that advises the industry on rates. By 1995, comparable rates for women jumped to 115 percent above the base rate; rates for young men, meanwhile, dipped slightly to 185 percent of the base. There was an even greater convergence of premiums for men and women in the 21-24 group.
''The accident frequency of younger women as reflected in our claims certainly has increased, while it remains comparatively constant for males over the same period,'' noted Dale Nelson, an actuary for State Farm, the nation's largest underwriter of auto insurance.
Researchers point to a variety of economic and social reasons for the change. Clearly, they say, more women are driving today than have ever before. In 1994, the nation's 175 million licensed drivers were almost evenly split between men and women. In 1963, women represented less than 40 percent of 93.5 million licensed drivers.
Not only are there more female drivers on the road, but they are also driving many more miles a year than their mothers did -- often at night and in bad weather, conditions when accident rates spike. Besides commuting to jobs, women do more than their share of ferrying children to day care, school and weekend activities.
''Men drive longer distances, but women take more trips,'' said Patricia Waller, director of the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute.
''What is troubling is how societal pressures are putting more women at risk,'' she said. ''Single moms make the most trips daily of any group, often under great stress and distractions. Racing to pick up a child at a day center so you won't be penalized $1 a minute if you're late can be very stressful.''
Still, Mr. Nelson of State Farm, among others, said he doubted that women drivers would ever match men, either in overall aggressiveness or in high-risk behavior like road racing, drunken driving and using vehicles as weapons against other motorists. It is an axiom of the industry that testosterone is the most powerful drug on the road contributing to accidents.
Indeed, critics of ''unisex'' insurance rating in Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Hawaii and Montana contend that the laws, intended to prohibit insurance companies from discriminating between the sexes, effectively leave young women subsidizing the bad driving records of men. Diana Lee, an assistant vice president of the National Association of Independent Insurers, estimated that in a unisex-rating state like Michigan, young woman pay $400 a year more for auto insurance than they would based on actuarial standards used in other states.
''Women are being more aggressive in their careers, competing with males in the same fields, and it's no surprise this pattern would naturally carry over to their life styles and driving behavior,'' Ms. Lee said. ''But young female drivers still have substantially lower loss costs than male drivers.''
Capt. Paul Krisavich of the Connecticut State Police agreed that women as a group tended to be more safety conscious than men were. ''But you find more today who are assertive in a negative way on the roads,'' he was quick to add. ''You run into as many obnoxious female drunks behind the wheel as males.'' He added that when he is driving in an unmarked patrol car, he finds that female drivers are just as likely to make obscene gestures as are male drivers.
''I think if I do anything on the road that guys do all the time, people say, 'Look at that woman driver,' '' said Amy Hughes, a 19-year-old from Philadelphia. Defiance edged into her voice as she waited outside the Dover Township Municipal Court in New Jersey with a friend who was answering a charge that she was going 72 miles an hour in a 50-mile-an-hour zone on the way to a beach resort.
The friend, who spoke only on condition of anonymity, said she was fearful her insurance premium would shoot up if she pleaded guilty to the charge; it would be her second moving violation this summer. ''But I can't afford to take time off from work and come back and fight it,'' she explained, adding with a shrug that it would probably be a losing cause, anyway.
Steven A. Zabarsky, the Dover Township traffic court prosecutor, said the rate of tickets issued for moving violations is now ''gender neutral,'' though men continue to hold a big lead in charges involving alcohol or drugs.For decades, most businesses in New York City had little say in determining who picked up their garbage, the prices charged or the length of the contracts with the garbage carters.
But yesterday, a new city agency, in its first significant move to overhaul the private garbage-carting industry, gave 10,000 customers the right to cancel contracts with 14 major companies immediately and to negotiate deals for lower prices with other carters.
The 14 companies had sought approval to keep their clients, contending that the city had no right under a new law to cancel contracts.
Twelve of the companies whose customers are now up for grabs have been indicted on state charges that they were in a Mafia-run cartel that inflated prices and allocated customers among themselves. Their industry grosses $1.5 billion a year in fees.
''For thousands of New York customers in the garbage industry, this is independence day,'' said Randy M. Mastro, acting chairman of the agency, the Trade Waste Commission, that ruled against the companies.
Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, in signing the law in June that created the commission, said that Mafia overcharging siphoned $500 million a year in a ''mob tax'' from industry customers.
Buildings affected by the commission's decision include midtown office towers and landmark structures, such as the Plaza Hotel, the Woolworth Building, the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the I.B.M. Building, the J. P. Morgan Building, The New York Times and The New York Post's printing plant.
Gerald Walpin, a lawyer for the Sanitation and Recycling Industry of New York, a group representing most of the city's carting companies, said the city had used ''unconstitutional procedures'' in allowing the contracts to be summarily canceled.
''The carting industry,'' he added, ''applauds any attempt by the city to clean out rotten apples in any industry as long as it is based on due process and on actual facts.''
A city law that went into effect in June established the commission to license and regulate companies that collect refuse from office buildings, factories, stores, restaurants, hospitals and universities. The city's Sanitation Department is responsible for removing trash from residential buildings and public schools and hospitals.
As part of a plan to increase competition and reduce prices, the law gave each of the city's 250,000 customers the authority to void a contract before its expiration date and to sign up with a rival carter.
A carting company, however, could seek to retain its customers by applying to the commission for a waiver on the ground that its contracts were fair and that it did not engage in coercive or corrupt business practices. The deadline for applying for a waiver was July 25.
Mr. Mastro, who is also Mayor Giuliani's chief of staff, said 206 of the city's 335 carters had sought waivers for permission to keep all of their clients, including the 14 that were denied. The commission, Mr. Mastro said, would rule in several weeks on the remaining 192 companies that have sought waivers.
He said an undetermined number of customers would also be notified of their rights to end contracts with 129 companies that did not apply for waivers.
Twelve companies were singled out for the first reviews, Mr. Mastro said, because their owners were indicted last year and in June on charges brought by the Manhattan District Attorney's office accusing them of being leading figures in a cartel that rigged bids and funneled payoffs to the Genovese and Gambino crime families. All of the officials have pleaded not guilty and are to be tried next year.
The 12 included the V. Ponte & Sons Company, which last year was the city's largest carter, with fees of $50 million, and the Vaparo Company, which operates one of the 10 largest companies in the city under the name Five Brothers Services.
In addition to the criminal charges facing the 12 companies, the commission asserted that they compelled their customers to sign so-called evergreen contracts that committed them to terms up to five years. The companies, the commission said, also traded clients among themselves, rigged bids, inflated fees and failed to turn over all of their financial records for inspection by the agency.
The Hillside Carting Company was denied waivers, the commission said, because its owners have pleaded guilty to Federal and state civil charges of engaging in anticompetitive practices on Long Island. The Casalino Carting Company was rejected because it had applied for waivers after the July 25 deadline and had overcharged customers, the commission said.
The cartel indictments and the recent entry of three national waste-removal companies into the city's garbage industry have led to sharply lowered prices and mergers and sales of companies. A proposed purchase of the Ponte Company is being blocked by the Manhattan District Attorney's office because of fears that much of a sales price of $70 million would be improperly diverted to Angelo Ponte, the company's chief owner, who is under indictment on racketeering charges.
Philip S. Angell, an official of Browning-Ferris Industries, one of the country's largest waste disposal companies, said the commission's decision would further roil the industry. ''We are certainly going after many of those 10,000 suddenly available customers,'' he said.The South African rand is getting its second hammering of the year as foreign investors and currency traders worry that President Nelson Mandela's Government may be losing its will to force through the economic-liberalization measures it has proposed to increase growth and curb the country's mounting social ills.
The rand took a beating earlier this year when rumors about Mr. Mandela's health swirled through the currency markets. Now, the latest assault on the rand, which has been building since the installation of a new Finance Minister and the subsequent unveiling of an economic plan, represents the first signs that international confidence in post-apartheid South Africa is faltering.
The concern is that the Government may lose its will to construct an open, liberal economic order and stem a slide toward political instability at a time when a third of the black population remains unemployed and violent crime is rising sharply.
''The A.N.C. knows what to do,'' said Jean-Francois Mercier of Salomon Brothers, referring to the governing African National Congress. ''The question is: Can it afford to do it politically? They have a plan to raise growth and ease social tensions. But they can't implement it because it looks like a present to the whites.''
Not everyone agrees that President Mandela's honeymoon with Western investors is coming to an end. Some South Africa-watchers remain deeply impressed by the pragmatism his Government has displayed and its readiness to embrace Western capitalism.
''The bulk of the political risk is behind us now, but there are always investors who see a political disaster coming,'' said Douglas Clark Johnson, senior international investment strategist at Merrill Lynch, adding, ''South Africa has a lot going for it.''
But the fact remains that the Mandela Government is having increasing difficulty convincing its supporters that sacrifices are needed now to foster economic growth later and with it, a lasting reduction in poverty, unemployment and homelessness.
In a vote of confidence in President Mandela's restrained economic policies, the rand strengthened sharply early last year, rising from around 4.25 to the dollar, or 23.5 cents, to the 3.70 range, or 27 cents, where it held roughly steady until February. Then it started to slide, reaching an all-time low of 4.58 in intraday trading late in April before climbing back to around 4.35 to the dollar, where it again held steady until a second bout of weakness set in around mid-July. Late yesterday, it settled in New York trading around 4.53 to the dollar.
Just why the rand began falling in February is less than clear. Andre Jonker of Rand International Securities, a New York trading house, thinks that the decline was set off by rumors about Mr. Mandela's health and reports that the Government might dismiss the conservative governor of the South African Reserve Bank, Christian Stals.
Mr. Johnson of Merrill Lynch thinks it fell victim to the bond selloff in the United States, which encouraged investors to move out of South African bonds, as well. Whatever the case, many economists say the rand was basically overvalued at 3.70 to the dollar and ripe for a correction.
In March, confidence was shaken when Finance Minister Chris Liebenberg, a politically nonaligned white former bank chairman, was replaced by Trevor Manuel, an ex-Communist from the A.N.C.'s ruling elite, who says he has now converted to the virtues of free enterprise.
Late in April, Mr. Manuel visited the United States to reassure bankers, investors and Government officials that he would continue his predecessor's moderate policies. But the effect was ''rather negative,'' according to Carsten Hills of Standard of New York, a subsidiary of the Standard Bank Group of South Africa, ''because his background was not in finance.''
Now, rumors are again swirling that the Government is unhappy with its central banker, Mr. Stals, about high interest rates.
And there is renewed concern over the relatively low level of South Africa's foreign-exchange reserves. The reserves fell 8 percent in July, to $2.4 billion.
Further contributing to the bearish sentiment last week, dealers said, was the central bank's failure on Thursday to again raise interest rates in hope of stemming the rand's descent, as some had expected it to do.
But a more fundamental concern, traders said, was the view that the Mandela Government was not moving fast enough to carry out its promised economic changes, with the purpose of stimulating growth. In June, it introduced a package of measures intended to lift the growth rate to 6 percent from about 3 percent and to create a more stable political environment by starting to ease glaring social ills.
The package, which the Government said would create 400,000 jobs and 100,000 new houses a year by the end of the century, involved extensive privatization, deregulation of the labor market, wage restraint and a cut in the budget deficit to 4 percent of national output in 1997 from a target of 5.1 percent this year.
These pledges won enthusiastic backing from South Africa's predominantly white business establishment. But they ran into heavy opposition from many of the Government's black supporters. The Congress of South African Trade Unions, usually the African National Congress's closest political ally, called the package ''a recipe for economic disaster.''
The unions regard appeals for wage restraint as blocking their campaign to close the gap between the pay scales of blacks and whites, their highest priority. They are strongly opposed to privatization and dismayed by promises of new budgetary rigor.
''The market suspects it's talk and no action,'' Mr. Jonker of Rand International said. ''There's an underlying skepticism about the whole package,'' Mr. Hills added.An 80-year-old man convicted of running a multimillion-dollar Ponzi scheme was sentenced today to 18 months in prison, making him one of the oldest people ever sent to a Federal penitentiary.
''There have been few cases involving a defendant of 80 years of age -- in fact I could not find any,'' Judge Arthur D. Spatt said in Federal District Court here as he sentenced Sidney Schwartz. ''Maybe the reason is that people, when they get to the age of 70, don't commit crimes like this -- but not Sidney Schwartz.''
Mr. Schwartz and his son, Stuart, pleaded guilty to a mail and wire fraud conspiracy in which they bilked dozens of friends and relatives with a Ponzi scheme, in which money paid by later investors is used to pay high returns to earlier investors, to attract more phony investments.
Stuart Schwartz began a 43-month sentence last month in Federal prison in Fort Dix, N.J. His father is to begin his incarceration on Sept. 30. The prison has not been determined.
The Bureau of Prisons said it does not keep records on the oldest entering prisoner, but some inmates have passed the age of 80 while in jail.
Official sentencing guidelines for Sidney Schwartz's crimes are 30 to 37 months. His lawyer, Randi Chavis, pleaded for a reduction because of Mr. Schwartz's age and history of a stroke and heart irregularities. The rules allow for reduced terms for illness but not age, the judge said.
''This defendant is a youthful 80 years,'' Judge Spatt said. ''He played golf up to the time these occurrences took place, and while in his 70's he knowingly cheated his friends and relatives of millions.''
The scheme took in $8 million, investigators said. The Schwartzes say the money is gone, but the victims say they suspect much of it is hidden.
The case drew attention because of the background of the Schwartzes and their victims.
Sidney Schwartz and his wife, Beatrice, had both served as president of Temple Emanu-el in Long Beach, L.I., near their home in Lido Beach. They now live in Boca Raton, Fla. Sidney and his son were partners in an accounting firm.
The father and son were popular members of the Old Westbury Golf and Country Club, where Sidney held high-level positions. At the club, they found and charmed many of their well-to-do victims, including one man who lost $2.4 million.
In court, Mr. Schwartz read a prepared statement in a halting but unemotional voice. ''I must confess that I have sinned,'' he said. ''I have been shamed and disgraced.''
He called his crimes reprehensible and said his health problems are part of his punishment. In lieu of jail, he volunteered to assist elderly people with their tax returns, teach illiterate people and work in a hospital.
One of the victims, Thomas Gould, called Mr. Schwartz's claims of ill health ''a lot of baloney'' and said, ''He's hurt a lot of people.''A number of AIDS researchers have taken initial steps to try to develop drugs, or even a vaccine, based on the discovery that a mutant gene can protect some people from infection with the AIDS virus.
Scientists from the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in New York City and from the Free University of Brussels reported on Thursday that the protection resulted from a mutant of a normal gene known as CKR-5 whose full function is not known. The normal gene controls production of a protein that is needed to allow the entry into cells of H.I.V.-1, the most common form of the AIDS virus.
People who inherit two copies of the mutant gene, one from each parent, are healthy but cannot make the protein. So if a sex partner transmits H.I.V. to them, the virus cannot dock with a molecule on the surface of the CD-4 immune cells. H.I.V.-1 remains harmless in those people, though the findings are not absolute.
The latest findings are derived from discoveries of two co-factors that the AIDS virus needs to invade human cells. Those findings, reported in June, have come on top of still other discoveries of a fundamental nature in AIDS in recent months involving substances in cells known as chemokines and cytokines. They have suddenly transformed the bleak outlook that had pervaded AIDS research for three years into a mood of excitement.
Yesterday, two of the Government's top officials responsible for AIDS research, Dr. William E. Paul and Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, joined in the chorus of enthusiasm.
Dr. Paul, who heads the Government's Office of AIDS Research, said he had initially thought the findings were examples of excellent research but had been skeptical that they would hold much promise for developing drugs or a vaccine. But ''that may have been too skeptical a view,'' Dr. Paul said in an interview. ''While speculation is easy, I am very excited and turning my views now to that this could be really important.''
He added that he would be surprised if scientists at drug companies and elsewhere were not already exploring the possibility of drug and vaccine development.
''Once you have something like this in science, the dam breaks, and the problem is not to entice people to do the experiments, but to keep out of their way,'' he said.
Dr. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said that although ''this is extraordinarily important work, it won't be as simple as this.'' The new findings provide a scientific basis to vigorously pursue new approaches to treatment and prevention but they ''are just opening the door to a very complex situation,'' he said.
Dr. Fauci said it was likely that additional mutant genes would be found as factors in resisting H.I.V. infection.
That prospect is based on preliminary studies by the Belgian team headed by Dr. Marc Parmentier that did not find the mutant gene in a small group of Africans. That result, combined with earlier studies of prostitutes in two African countries, Kenya and Gambia, who seemed to be resistant to H.I.V., suggests that a gene other than CKR-5 affords resistance to H.I.V. But many scientists said studies of larger populations were needed to determine which genes were at play throughout the world.
Laboratory workers at Dr. Fauci's institute in Bethesda, Md., held a meeting immediately after learning about the new findings earlier this week to think about how to design studies to look for substances known as peptides that might mimic the mutant gene's action in blocking the entry of H.I.V. into cells. ''That's not heavy duty technical work,'' Dr. Fauci said. He said he expected that substances would be found that work in test tubes. But he added, ''The problem will be does it work in patients.''
The researchers also began making plans to choose experts in peptide chemistry and other fields as collaborators.
Dr. Fauci said many scientists at leading AIDS research centers in this country and elsewhere had begun exploring the new avenues of research. Some would be applying the flexibility they have with existing Federal grants and others will apply for new grants or hook up with biotechnology companies.
''Nature is taking its course, and very quickly,'' Dr. Fauci said.
The new studies seem to ''nail down at a molecular level'' the fact that the AIDS viruses that are known as ''macrophage-tropic,'' and that seem to be the most important in transmitting the infection, need CKR-5 as the major co-factor to infect the cells, Dr. Fauci said. ''That lends much more credence to the potential therapeutic strategy of designing different kinds of peptides that can block the interaction between the macrophage-tropic strain and the CKR-5,'' Dr. Fauci said.
Another encouraging factor is that individuals with two copies of the mutant gene are healthy. Dr. Nathaniel R. Landau, who led the Aaron Diamond team, and several other scientists said the lack of any known harmful effect of the mutant gene or link to immune-system disorders suggested that safe drugs might be developed to block H.I.V.
Dr. Fauci said that humans need the CD-4 molecule on immune cells for proper immune function. Although scientists do not have a full understanding of the CKR-5 molecule's function, what is known suggests that it is not vital. So the apparent safety of CKR-5 may ''overcome a potential stumbling block,'' Dr. Fauci said.
While some potential drugs might be identified quickly, it will take about a year to start testing a promising one in humans because of the time needed to do safety testing and get approval from ethics committees and the Food and Drug Administration.
Dr. Fauci said he hoped that scientists working at primate centers ''would jump on'' the new findings to show that similar genes and co-factors are necessary for an AIDS-like disease in monkeys. Then, he said, ''you could do some important studies by challenging the animals with the virus.''Turkey's new Prime Minister, the leader of the country's growing Islamic party, heads off on his first foreign visit on Saturday to fundamentalist Iran, the Clinton Administration's least favored nation, and then proceeds on a kind of Muslim world tour: to Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia.
The Prime Minister, Necmettin Erbakan, installed last month when Turkey's Western-oriented parties split, wants better ties to Iraq and Syria, has spoken of an ''Islamic NATO'' and has praised Hamas, the Islamic fundamentalist Palestinian group that opposes Yasir Arafat and has sent suicide bombers into Israel.
The sudden rise of Mr. Erbakan and his pro-Islamic Refah, or Welfare, Party has set off alarms in Washington, which is officially professing calm about the instability at the heart of a vital NATO ally that bridges Europe and Central Asia, the Balkans and the Middle East.
Morton Abramowitz, a former American Ambassador to Turkey and now president of the Carnegie Endowment, asked, ''How do you deal with a NATO ally led by a man who is fundamentally anti-NATO, fundamentally anti-Semitic and fundamentally pro-Islamist, even when he's largely behaving himself?''
The rise of Mr. Erbakan presents serious policy concerns, especially in the Middle East and the Aegean, with the potential to undermine Washington's effort to isolate what it considers ''rogue nations'' that support terrorism, like Iran and Iraq, and to push Syria toward a comprehensive peace with Israel.
Greece and Turkey, which are both in NATO, almost went to war once this year over a tiny Aegean island, and a nationalist Mr. Erbakan might raise the stakes. NATO regards its air bases in Turkey as vital, and any indication that Mr. Erbakan would want to limit their operations, or that he is sharing NATO intelligence with other countries, let alone Iran, would roil a NATO alliance that already has a post-Soviet identity crisis.
The Americans are not the only ones worried. President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt went to Turkey two weeks ago to take the measure of Mr. Erbakan after the new leader met with a high-ranking member of the Muslim Brotherhood, a fundamentalist group that opposes the Egyptian Government.
But senior Administration officials argue that whoever his friends are, Mr. Erbakan's freedom of action will be restrained by his coalition partner, the conservative former Prime Minister, Tansu Ciller, and by the powerful Turkish military, which values its NATO ties and has intervened in politics before.
And while Mr. Erbakan's party finished first in parliamentary elections in December, it received only 21.4 percent of the vote. So at least in the short term, the officials say, Mr. Erbakan will compromise to earn his party more credibility, if only to prepare for future elections. In any event, they say, nationalism and national interests will trump Islam.
Just last week, the officials note, the Turkish Parliament voted to extend the operation that allows NATO aircraft based in Turkey to patrol northern Iraq, to protect Iraqi Kurds from President Saddam Hussein. The Welfare Party had originally opposed the extension, which Washington and the Turkish military had demanded.
In return, American officials said, Washington speeded up its approval of a United Nations mechanism to allow Iraq to sell some oil to buy food, medicine and other civilian needs. The sale will benefit Turkey, which has applied for an exemption from the boycott of Iraq that has cost Ankara an estimated $20 billion since the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990.
Still, American officials acknowledge considerable longer-term concern. The Welfare Party, which tripled its vote from 1987 to 1995 in traditionally secular Turkey, is feeding on popular discontent with the widely corrupt political elite.
With experience in local government, Welfare is the best-organized and most modern political party in Turkey, the officials say, while the other centrist and right-wing parties are in decline, representing powerful interests and individuals but with weak grass-roots support.
Mrs. Ciller, although a favorite in Washington for her Western manner and formerly staunch opposition to Islamic fundamentalism, is widely believed to have gone into coalition with Mr. Erbakan to halt corruption investigations Parliament initiated against her last spring. That is why their coalition is known in Turkey as ''the Government of deep secrets.''
Part of the problem, said Mr. Abramowitz and Alan Makovsky, a Turkey specialist and former State Department official now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, is that the United States knows a lot more about Mr. Erbakan, 70, than about his friends and the younger members of his party, who are more radical.
Although the Welfare Party is on a rising curve, ''I remain to be convinced that these guys are the inexorable wave of the future, and the U.S. Government shouldn't act as if they are,'' Mr. Makovsky said.
He and Mr. Abramowitz took part two weeks ago in a State Department seminar on the new Turkey. Ordered by Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, who attended, it was an effort to understand Turkey, and also to recover from what Mr. Makovsky called ''a stumbling start.''
After some internal debate, Under Secretary of State Peter Tarnoff went ahead with a scheduled visit to Turkey in early July, before Mr. Erbakan's Government was confirmed in Parliament and while some officials argued that the confirmation vote was not a certainty, because of defections in Mrs. Ciller's party.
The domestic effect of the visit, which included a meeting with Mr. Erbakan, was to give him more credibility and improve the chances of confirmation, the officials argued in opposing the visit. Other officials, however, argued that it was important for the United States to have an early meeting with Mr. Erbakan.
Nicholas Burns, the Department spokesman, said then: ''We knew they had the right number of votes. This is not the kind of relationship to play games. It's a NATO ally, we have interests, and we would want to have early and frequent contact with a new Prime Minister from a religious party, to be sure those interests are met. There's a great struggle over the future of Turkey, and Refah is part of it.''The interview with the vampire takes place in a sixth-floor walk-up in the East Village, among the dark shadows cast by blood-red drapes of satin brocade.
The vampire himself reclines on a plush bedspread of the same color and material, a figure of pale ivory against a rippling crimson tide. There are sepulchral notes in his laughter and undercurrents of menace in his smile, which reveals long, sharp canine teeth that curl over his lower lip like incipient fangs.
He is 20 years old, is known to all of his friends by his adopted name of Ethan Gilchrist and quickly clarifies that he does not consider himself the kind of vampire familiar from ancient legend and modern lore, the immortal creature who beds down in a coffin and sups at the jugulars of hapless human prey.
''But I'm definitely part vampire,'' he says, citing his unusual overbite, lifelong distaste for sunlight and occasional taste for blood. Sometimes, he says, when an obliging friend gets a nick or cut, he will savor a few drops from the wound. ''It's like liquid electricity.''
Is Mr. Gilchrist a prankster? A singular freak? He appears to be neither, but rather part of a small, loosely knit demimonde of vampire enthusiasts in New York City, an underground scene with its own music, nightclubs, wardrobe, periodicals and, in the case of some individuals, gustatory delectations.
The existence of this moonlit nether world, whose denizens number perhaps a few thousand nationwide, came into flickering, ambiguous view this week when it was mentioned in news accounts about the disappearance of Susan Walsh, a 36-year-old woman from Nutley, N.J., on July 16.
Ms. Walsh, a go-go dancer and freelance journalist, had befriended modern-day disciples of Dracula last year as she did research for Sylvia Plachy and James Ridgeway, the authors of ''Red Light,'' a book on the nation's carnal underbelly, and wrote an article of her own. It was never published.
The police have declined to discuss details of the investigation into Ms. Walsh's disappearance, but relatives and friends dismissed the notion that so-called vampires were to blame, saying the breed that Ms. Walsh encountered was hardly a sinister one.
A brief journey into their haunts and lairs draws back the curtains on a theatrical, eccentric and kinky milieu sired by Bram Stoker, nurtured by Anne Rice and inhabited in particular by people under 30 who have struck a countercultural pose with Victorian roots.
For many, vampirism is merely a kitschy game of dress-up, or an elegant style, not to be taken too seriously. For others, it is something deeper: a romantic fantasy, a sexual identity, even a religion.
To hunt these various vampires is to breach a society in which custom-made fangs can be bought for $40 (dental acrylic) or $300 (porcelain), bands have names like Nosferatu and Type O Negative, messages on answering machines include the words ''Feed well,'' and distinctions are made between those who are and are not ''out of the casket.''
The denizens of this world have a definite sense of humor, or at least a deft sense of wordplay.
In Manhattan, they even have their own cable access television show, which is broadcast Thursdays at 1 A.M. on Channel 34 and features conversations with self-proclaimed vampires or vampire wannabes.
''The scene has really taken off in the last few years,'' says Hal Gould, owner of the Bank, a club in the East Village that plays an offshoot of punk rock called Gothic rock, or Goth.
There is a strong connection between this music and people obsessed with vampire looks and lore, and hundreds of them dress in crushed velvet, pale makeup and assorted Victorian trinkets to flock to the Bank and other bars like Downtime, a Garment District spot that runs a promotion every Saturday called the Bat Cave.
Many patrons flash oversized canine teeth bought from a Brooklyn company, Sabretooth Inc., that has sold about 2,500 sets over the last five years and recently began marketing prescription contact lenses that give wearers red irises or feline eyes. The cost: around $250.
Starting this month or early next, these black-clad creatures of night will have a new place. The Limelight in Chelsea will hold monthly vampire balls of the kind it choreographed on July 30, which featured performances by such vampire-fixated artists as Jerico of the Angels. Jerico, a singer-songwriter, has been known to imbibe his own blood on stage and to simulate sex with a naked vampire-ette.
Although Jerico thinks of himself as a vampire, he and his particular soul mates define vampirism not as a predatory need for human blood but as a poetic metaphor for the way in which all human beings feed off each other in order to exist.
''It's a more spiritual approach,'' says Jerico, who lives in a basement apartment -- ''no sunlight'' -- in Astoria, Queens, and won't give his age. ''I'm ageless,'' he cackles.
He keeps a sarcophagus in his living room when he is not using it as a stage prop and confesses that he used to drink blood other than his own a decade ago, before the AIDS crisis and the distinct possibility of contracting the virus through such practices gave him pause.A propane gas company whose driver was killed in a fiery explosion here two years ago after his truck plowed into a guard rail on Interstate 287 was charged today with violating Federal safety regulations that limit the number of hours drivers can work without time off.
The company, Suburban Paraco Corporation, a subsidiary of the Paraco Gas Corporation of Purchase, N.Y., is accused of keeping false daily driver logs, which indicated that truckers were off duty when in fact they were driving.
Federal investigators said that Peter G. Conway, 23, the driver who was killed in the July 1994 explosion that injured 23 people, had been on duty for 35 1/2 hours without 8 consecutive hours off when he died, and that he falsified several time sheets.
Federal investigators said they found 93 falsified logs, 28 of them filed by Mr. Conway, from March 1992 to July 1994.
Marvin Smilon, a spokesman for the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said that although drivers filed the logs, the company was responsible for their accuracy. If company officials had matched refinery tickets -- stamped receipts that record the time drivers pick up propane gas -- with the time sheets, ''they could have seen that the time sheets were not accurate,'' he said. ''They are expected to do minimal checking.''
Suburban Paraco's chief executive, Joseph Armentano, who represented the company during the arraignment today, pleaded not guilty before Magistrate Mark D. Fox.
He refused to comment on the case, issuing a statement that said, ''It would be inappropriate, in our view, to comment on either the investigation or any pending charges.''
If convicted, the company faces up to five years of probation and a fine of $500,000 or twice the gross monetary loss resulting from the offense.
The judge assigned to the case, Jed S. Rakoff, can broadly interpret the gross monetary loss. For example, several people injured in the explosion have filed civil suits against the company, and ''any damages anyone collects up to the time of sentencing could be considered part of the gross pecuniary loss,'' Mr. Smilon said.
Safety regulations for propane tankers have long been a subject of controversy among highway safety experts and Federal officials. Critics contend that the regulations put too much faith in fuel companies to police themselves.To labor leaders in this old blue-collar port, a shot-and-beer stronghold, Sandy Nelson is an unlikely hero -- a lesbian, Socialist journalist. But to the top editors at The News Tribune, where Ms. Nelson works, she is a walking conflict of interest whose off-duty activities threaten the credibility of journalism.
For six years, Ms. Nelson, who is 40, was a beat reporter and feature writer at The News Tribune, the dominant daily paper in this city of about 200,000. In her nonworking hours, Ms. Nelson was a leader of an unsuccessful campaign to protect gay rights in Tacoma. And she belongs to a leftist group, the Freedom Socialist Party.
In 1990, the paper removed Ms. Nelson from all reporting duties, citing her role in a campaign for a gay-rights ordinance, which voters ultimately turned down. Though she never covered gay issues -- her primary beat was education -- the paper said Ms. Nelson's political work could provoke doubt among readers about The News Tribune's commitment to professional objectivity.
She was reassigned to the copy desk, where she remains as an editor, a job she considers drudgery and an affront to her career. She sued the paper, asking to be reinstated as a reporter. But a superior court judge here ruled against her last year, saying the newspaper had a right to insist on political restrictions to protects its credibility.
Now, on appeal before the Washington State Supreme Court, her case has attracted wide national interest from three disparate sources: gay rights, journalism and labor. And the case has become embroiled in larger issues of how much employers can control what their employees do after work. The American Civil Liberties Union has taken up Ms. Nelson's case because, it says, the newspaper's action against her poses a threat to free speech.
In a recent court brief on behalf of Ms. Nelson, lawyers for labor unions wrote: ''Between the hours of 9 and 5, the average person's life is not her own. Even one's rights as an American citizen largely disappear when one goes through the office door. This situation is tolerable because it is limited to working hours.''
Labor leaders say their main interest in Ms. Nelson's case is in fighting the effort by the newspaper to control what employees do when they are not at work.
''You have the right to go out after work and act for your own political interest,'' said Robby Stern, a lobbyist for the Washington Labor Council, which represents 400,000 union workers in this state.
But journalists, unlike aerospace mechanics or pipe fitters, are restricted from most political activity by the very nature of their work, say The News Tribune and its supporters around the country. They say reporters understand, as a condition of their job, that they will not become active in political parties or campaigns. It is a conundrum that journalists have long struggled with.
''This is not about neutering political activity,'' Cameron De Vore, a lawyer for The News Tribune, argued before the Washington Supreme Court earlier this summer. ''What is at stake is credibility.''
Mr. De Vore said that when reporters ''become news makers rather than news reporters, they have broken the compact'' between readers and the paper.
Beyond Ms. Nelson's case, newspapers have dismissed reporters for activities like publicly endorsing abortion rights, becoming an alternate delegate to the Democratic National Convention or marching against the Vietnam War and the Persian Gulf war.
Many journalists limit their political activity to voting. Some do not even go that far. Leonard Downie Jr., the executive editor of The Washington Post, has said he does not vote because of the potential for conflict.
Ms. Nelson, a 13-year-veteran of newspaper work, says such restrictions are posturing and somewhat phony.
''Let's be honest. Every journalist approaches the news with some natural human bias,'' she said. ''My job as a reporter, I thought, was to be fair, balanced, skeptical and thorough. I never lost my credibility. But in my off hours, am I supposed to give up all my political rights?''
She said the fact that her political work was in gay rights was also a factor in her reassignment, an assertion that the paper denies.
''Where do I draw the line?'' Ms. Nelson asked. ''I don't think you should be covering something in which you have a personal interest, or in which you stand to make money. But journalists need to be involved in their community.''
Among Ms. Nelson's supporters is Ben H. Bagdikian, a former dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley.
''In general, reporters ought not to be actors in the theater they cover,'' said Mr. Bagdikian, a former assistant managing editor at The Washington Post. ''What seems to me unfair in the Sandy Nelson case is that her activities did not interfere with her reporting.''
Ultimately, he said, a newspaper has the right not to publish an article, or edit the article to conform to its standards of objectivity.In one of the biggest criminal cases in municipal finance, a former partner at Lazard Freres & Company, was found guilty in Boston yesterday of defrauding his clients by failing to disclose a kickback contract between Lazard and Merrill Lynch & Company.
The former Lazard partner, Mark S. Ferber, had been hired by several prominent public agencies to provide them with independent advice on the best financing for their projects. But, unknown to these municipal clients, he steered a number of lucrative deals to Merrill Lynch, with Lazard and Merrill splitting fees that reached into the millions of dollars.
This conviction, in a case that many experts had said would be tough to win, is considered a resounding victory for the Government's efforts to rid the $1.3 trillion municipal bond business of corruption and cronyism. It was the culmination of a three-month trial that also laid bare the political pressures and influence-peddling often used to get local government officials to award lucrative financial contracts.
Mr. Ferber, 43, faces up to five years in prison for each of 58 guilty counts found by a Federal jury in Boston. Sentencing is scheduled for Nov. 4. With this conviction, Mr. Ferber will be the first high-profile Wall Street executive to face jail since Michael R. Milken and Ivan F. Boesky went to prison in the insider-trading cases of the 1980's. Unless he manages to overturn the conviction on appeal, Mr. Ferber is expected to spend at least several years in jail.
The case touched some of the biggest names in the business of raising money in the tax-exempt municipal market, which is used primarily by state and local governments to pay for public works projects. Once one of the most powerful bankers in municipal finance, Mr. Ferber was found to have violated Federal laws by failing to tell his clients about the secret fee-splitting deal. The clients that hired Mr. Ferber for his independent advice ranged from the Massachusetts Water Resources Agency and the State of Michigan to the United States Postal Service and the District of Columbia.
Merrill Lynch paid Lazard $2.6 million from 1990 to 1992 under the contract, with the two firms splitting fees on many deals arranged by Mr. Ferber.
''We are very, very, very pleased,'' said Brien T. O'Connor, the assistant United States attorney who prosecuted the case. ''The jury has said that people who hold positions of trust will not leverage them for private gain. This case has caused significant reform in the way that municipalities borrow.''
As the jury foreman read ''guilty'' 58 times, Mr. Ferber remained pale and showed no emotion, lawyers in the courtroom said. His lawyer, Thomas E. Dwyer Jr., would not comment on the verdict except to say that his client would appeal. During the trial, Mr. Ferber testified in his defense that he had disclosed all he was allowed to divulge under the contract with Merrill Lynch. Jurors declined to comment in detail, but John Dupont, the jury foreman, told Bloomberg News Service that he ''felt as though there was enough evidence.''
The case was considered particularly difficult for the Government to prove because it involved issues of disclosure and trust -- matters usually left for securities regulators to deal with in civil proceedings. But Federal prosecutors decided, instead, to bring the case in criminal court, using novel legal theories over the definition of fraud. Even though none of Mr. Ferber's municipal clients actually lost money, the Government argued that he nonetheless committed fraud by depriving them of a ''right to honest services.''
''This is an enormous verdict,'' said Joseph Mysak, editor of Grant's Municipal Bond Observer, a trade publication. ''We will see a great deal more scrutiny of public finance cases in the future than we have in the past. This was a perversion of the process and the jury got it. There were some very subtle issues, but they got it.''
The criminal case followed a settlement late last year under which Merrill Lynch and Lazard agreed to pay $24 million to the Government to settle civil charges brought by the United States Attorney for failing to disclose the kickback arrangement. That was the largest settlement ever in municipal finance. Mr. Ferber still faces possible civil charges by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which must now decide whether it wants to continue to pursue the case.
William R. McLucas, head of the S.E.C.'s enforcement division, said the jury verdict ''provides some significant vindication for the concerns that the S.E.C. has expressed over the past several years about behavior in this market.''
Merrill Lynch, one of the biggest managers of municipal bond deals on Wall Street, would not comment on the verdict.
Lazard, in a statement said: ''The Government made clear in its settlement with us that it had no evidence that any of our partners had knowledge of, participated in or approved of any misconduct by Mark Ferber. It is nonetheless a sad day when any former partner of the firm is convicted of a crime.''
For the last several years, the S.E.C. has been spearheading efforts to clean up municipal finance. These efforts, which have meet with much criticism, have resulted in bans on campaign contributions from municipal bankers to officeholders on the state and local level as well as efforts to force local officials to become more responsible for the millions in taxpayer dollars that they oversee.
In the last year, many of these efforts have resulted in successful settlements with Wall Street firms over Federal securities violations.
Some of the cases landed in court, with mixed results. Just as Mr. Ferber's trial started, the Government was handed a setback when a New Jersey jury acquitted Nicholas Rudi -- a one-time aide to former Gov. James J. Florio of New Jersey -- of charges that he had accepted kickbacks.
''The end of the Ferber case brings a huge sigh of relief to the industry,'' said Christopher Taylor, executive director of the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board, the municipal finance self-regulatory organization. ''It has been one of those clouds hanging over this industry. This is not normal behavior. And the industry felt it was being tarred with the same brush. If anyone ever felt there was some wiggle room on conflict-of-interest issues, this is a signal that there isn't.''To the Editor:
An Aug. 3 Op-Ed article and an Aug. 6 letter castigate the New York courts for contributing to delay in divorce proceedings.
In the case described in the Op-Ed article, neither the rotation of judges nor the court process should be targeted as delaying the writer's divorce. Rather, the case involves a complex legal issue decided by the trial judge using an expedited procedure and has been appealed by the losing litigant. The matter is under consideration by the Appellate Division.
The courts have given precedence to the timely resolution of matrimonial cases. Contested divorce matters can be rife with anger and bitterness, and we are sensitive to the need for speedy relief. It is for that reason that the courts in New York County and elsewhere have devoted special judges, staffs and courtrooms to handle contested divorces.
In addition, rules with specified time frames have been adopted that govern the processing of matrimonial matters -- a conference with the judge must be held within 30 days after the case has been assigned to a judge; discovery must be completed within six months; and, in noncomplex cases, a trial must be scheduled within six months from the date of the conference.
The judges assigned to matrimonial cases are selected based on their ability to manage the cases to meet the strict timetables set forth in the rules and their sensitivity to the emotional nature of the cases.
We have made real progress in reducing the number of older cases and are resolving matrimonial cases more quickly than before. We cannot stop searching for better ways to handle divorces. To that end, we are exploring the use of alternative dispute resolution for matrimonial cases as well as launching a pilot program using different case-processing models to identify the best techniques for the resolution of divorce cases.
JONATHAN LIPPMAN
Chief Administrative Judge Unified Court System New York, Aug. 6, 1996
The Trials of Getting a New York DivorceGov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas today refused to authorize a Medicaid payment for an abortion for a 15-year-old girl whose stepfather has been charged with incest, despite a Federal judge's order that such payments were required by Federal law.
Through a spokesman, Mr. Huckabee said his first obligation was to obey the Arkansas State Constitution, rather than Federal law. The State Constitution includes an amendment banning the use of public money for abortion except when a mother's life is endangered; the Federal statute requires that Medicaid pay for abortions that are performed on poor women in cases of rape or incest or a threat to the mother's life.
Aides to Mr. Huckabee, a Southern Baptist minister, emphasized that his refusal to authorize the payment of the $430 claim did not reflect his well-known opposition to abortion but was a carefully considered strategy to protect the state's position in a pending lawsuit in a state court. In that action, an anti-abortion advocate is seeking an order compelling Arkansas's withdrawal from the Medicaid program because of the state constitutional provision. A part of the state's position has been that the case is moot because no one in Arkansas has sought Medicaid reimbursement for an abortion before.
But Carolyn Izard, the supervisor of the clinic that performed the abortion on the young patient last week, called Mr. Huckabee's position ''nonsense.''
''All he has to do is obey the U.S. Constitution,'' Ms. Izard said. ''He has a simple decision: Does he want the state to participate in Medicaid or not?''
Tom Dalton, director of the Arkansas Human Services Department, the state's Medicaid agency, said privacy laws prevented state officials from identifying the young woman. But he described her as ''likely developmentally disabled.''
The patient's stepfather, who was also not identified, was charged with incest on Monday in state court.
Medicaid is a cooperative program for financing health care for the poor; the Federal Government contributes three dollars for each dollar a state appropriates. In the current fiscal year, Federal payments to Arkansas's $1.3 billion Medicaid program will approach $990 million. Mr. Huckabee's stance would, at least in theory, place in jeopardy the hundreds of millions of dollars Arkansas gets annually in Federal Medicaid assistance.
But so would the lawsuit in state court. The anti-abortion advocate filing the suit, Carol J. Hodges, has argued that state participation in Medicaid is voluntary and that because of the state constitutional amendment, Arkansas should withdraw from the program.
The constitutional provision, Amendment 68, was approved by voters in 1989. At the time, its ban on public money for abortions except when a mother's life was endangered was in harmony with Federal law.
But in 1993, Congress extended abortion benefits to poor women who were victims of rape or incest.
In a 1994 case challenging Amendment 68, a Federal District Court judge here, William R. Wilson Jr., found that the provision conflicted with the revised Hyde Amendment and was therefore unconstitutional. The Supreme Court in upheld that decision in March, but it noted that Amendment 68 was invalid only if the state continued to participate in Medicaid. The Court returned the case to Judge Wilson, who today found that under Federal law, the state had to provide Medicaid reimbursements for abortions in cases of rape and incest.
A spokesman for Mr. Huckabee, Jim Harris, said the Governor was seeking a waiver from the Health Care Financing Administration, which oversees Medicaid, to allow the Legislature to revise Amendment 68 to bring it into compliance with the Hyde Amendment and then submit it to voters in the 1998 election. Meanwhile, he said, Mr. Huckabee's order would stand.
Mr. Dalton, of the Arkansas human services agency, said on Friday that there was ''no guarantee'' that the legislature would draft such language nor that Arkansas voters would approve it. In the meantime, Mr. Dalton said, ''our legal counsel has advised us we don't have a strong defense'' against both the lawsuit in both state court and any action seeking Medicaid reimbursement for an eligible abortion.
Ms. Izard said she anticipated suing the state by Tuesday seeking Medicaid payment for the 15-year-old girl's abortion.In a ruling that goes to the basic philosophy of affirmative action, a Federal appeals court declared yesterday that a school district facing layoffs should not have used race as the sole reason to lay off a white teacher.
The Board of Education of Piscataway, N.J., cited its policy of seeking a diverse workplace in choosing in 1989 whether to lay off a black teacher or a white one who was equally experienced and qualified.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit found the district's policy to be unlawful because it was not put into place to remedy past discrimination and because it unnecessarily violated the rights of a nonminority employee.
The court, which sits in Philadelphia and has jurisdiction over New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and the Virgin Islands, is the highest tribunal yet to rule on the fundamental question raised by the case: Can racial preference be used solely to foster a workplace with a variety of people?
Lawyers for both sides, as well as Government officials and legal scholars who have followed affirmative action, agreed that the ruling would be closely studied by public and private employers throughout the United States, and that the issues it addressed would one day be taken up by the Supreme Court.
The issues have already bitterly divided officials of the Clinton Administration, which switched sides in the case and then bowed out.
Opposing lawyers in the Piscataway case agreed yesterday that the court's 8-to-4 ruling was potentially far more important than a ruling last March by the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans, that nullified the affirmative-action program at the University of Texas School of Law.
That case also involved what is loosely called ''reverse discrimination'' and is certain to be reviewed by the High Court. The Fifth Circuit court sided with four white students who contended they had been denied admission to the law school by an unlawful policy based solely on race.
In comparing the New Jersey and Texas cases, David Rubin, the attorney for the Piscataway Board of Education, said yesterday: ''This one is as far-reaching or more far-reaching. One is about who gets to go to school. This one is about who gets to go to work.''
The Piscataway case revolves around Title VII of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. Essentially, Title VII was enacted to end discrimination in the workplace on the basis of race, religion, sex or national origin, and to remedy the scarcity of minority workers that past discrimination had caused.
When appellate courts, including the High Court itself, have upheld race-based employment practices, they have often looked to the spirit and language of the 1964 act.
The problem the Third Circuit majority found with the Piscataway policy illustrates some of the paradoxes that have arisen around the debate over affirmative action and the litigation it has stirred.
Piscataway schools began an affirmative action policy in 1975 in response to a New Jersey Board of Education directive that local school boards do so. But by all accounts, the Piscataway policy was not enacted to remedy past discrimination. Statistics from the mid-1970's to the mid-1980's showed that the percentage of teachers who were black reflected the makeup of the community and that black employees of the district did not tend to have jobs of less importance than whites.
In 1989, the school board accepted a recommendation from the Superintendent of Schools to cut the ranks of business teachers by one. The decision on whom to lay off came down to Sharon Taxman and Debra Williams.
Mrs. Taxman and Mrs. Williams were found to be equally qualified and have equal seniority -- they started work on the same day -- and to be virtually alike in ability and enthusiasm. But Ms. Williams was black, and as the board president, Theodore H. Kruse, later put it in a deposition, ''I believe by retaining Mrs. Williams it was sending a very clear message that our staff should be culturally diverse.''
Mr. Kruse went on to say that he saw advantages for students to ''come into contact with people of different cultures, different backgrounds, so that they are more aware, more tolerant, more accepting, more understanding of people of all backgrounds.''
Mrs. Taxman, represented by Stephen Klausner, a lawyer from Somerville, N.J., filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. A Federal district court upheld the thrust of Ms. Taxman's complaint.
The appellate court's decision, written by Judge Carol L. Mansmann, said that she and the judges who agreed with her ''wholeheartedly endorse'' the basic principle of exposing students to people of different backgrounds. ''We do not reject in principle the diversity goal articulated by the board,'' the decision says. ''We recognize that the differences among us underlie the richness and strength of our nation.''
But those beliefs were not enough to justify what the board did to Mrs. Taxman, the court said.. It also criticized the board for not better defining what it meant by ''racial diversity'' and not being specific enough about how much diversity it wanted.
Chief Judge Dolores K. Sloviter led the four dissenters. She said the board ought to have had discretion to decide between the two teachers, the constraints of Title VII notwithstanding. The chief judge wondered sarcastically whether the board should have been expected to decide by means of a coin toss or lottery, ''a solution that could be expected of the state's gaming tables.''Boris N. Yeltsin was sworn in today as the first democratically elected President of an independent Russia during a brief, scaled-down inauguration ceremony that seemed focused more on conserving his strength than on flaunting his power.
Held inside the Kremlin Palace under a giant double-headed eagle, a czarist emblem revived as the symbol of Russia, the solemn event was also intended to suggest some of the lost grandeur of Imperial Russia.
But its tight choreography and limited news coverage also unconsciously evoked the Soviet era, when the Communist Party went to great lengths to cloak the health of its aging leaders. Russian television, which broadcast the event live, was tethered to distant positions and showed no close-ups of Mr. Yeltsin.
Mr. Yeltsin, 65, gave no inaugural address and spoke for less than a minute, reading the oath of office from a prompter.
The President, who was hospitalized twice last year for heart disease, has been working from a Government dacha since his re-election on July 3. He had not made a public appearance since June 26.
Some of Mr. Yeltsin's aides said he would benefit from a bypass operation, and one aide recently hinted that his coming vacation would be an opportune time for him to have it.
As Mr. Yeltsin, walking stiffly and speaking shakily, pledged before 3,000 dignitaries to uphold the Constitution, Russia's might was conspicuously under siege in the breakaway republic of Chechnya, where attacking rebel forces seized large sections of the capital.
After the ceremony, Mr. Yeltsin formally dissolved his Government and sent a letter to Parliament nominating Viktor S. Chernomyrdin to remain as Prime Minister. Parliament is to convene on Saturday to deliberate whether to approve Mr. Chernomyrdin's nomination.
The entire swearing-in ceremony, which included a fanfare of trumpets, a invocation by Aleksy II, the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, a 30-gun salute, and the ''Glory'' chorus from Glinka's opera, ''A Life for the Czar,'' lasted only 16 minutes, even less than the half-hour Mr. Yeltsin's aides had previously predicted.
Mr. Yeltsin placed his hand on a specially bound copy of the Constitution and spoke for less than 60 seconds. One of the two planned celebratory banquets was canceled at the last minute.
Mr. Yeltsin did speak for a few minutes at the luncheon banquet for 1,300 guests, also held in the Kremlin Palace. Standing at the front of the hall and reading from a prompter, Mr. Yeltsin said: ''Popular support gives me the right to to act firmly and decisively. It is progress that has distinguished Russia during the current decade, and these four years will finally determine the outlook of a new Russia.''
As his guests stood at their tables and saluted him with glasses raised, Mr. Yeltsin sipped from a flute of champagne and toasted them back.
Asked about the President's health, Sergei Medvedev, Mr. Yeltsin's press secretary, replied: ''You can see for yourselves. It's obvious he is very tired. He needs to restore himself. He needs a real, full rest.''
Mr. Yeltsin plans to take a long vacation after the inauguration.
Government figures, senior campaign aides, representatives of the intelligentsia and the business world, members of Parliament, members of the Constitutional Court, foreign ambassadors and the heads of state of the former republics of the Soviet Union made up the guest list.
Gennadi A. Zyuganov, the leader of the Communist faction in Parliament and the man Mr. Yeltsin defeated in the presidential runoff last month, was invited and attended. Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the last Soviet President, was not invited. He had presided, somewhat sourly, over Mr. Yeltsin's first inauguration in 1991, when the Russian republic was still part of the Soviet Union.
Many of the officials who attended the ceremony loyally played down Mr. Yeltsin's sickly appearance as they walked out.
''The ceremony was very solemn and modest, I mean modest in length,'' said Anatoly Minakov, the Mayor of Kaluga, a 14th-century city 90 miles southwest of Moscow that is now a machine-building center. ''The President's voice was shaky, but I'm certain it was due to the emotion of the moment.''
But Mr. Yeltsin's political opponents chose to think the worst. ''I came to hear the speech,,'' said Amangeldy Tuleyev, a Communist leader and a member of the upper house of Parliament from the coal mining region of Kuznetsk Basin. ''There was no speech. He's obviously very sick.''
''It was sad,'' Mr. Tuleyev said. ''I wish him good health as a person, but I am worried for the country.''The religious right political movement has considerable opportunity for future growth because many of its prime potential constituents, politically conservative evangelicals, are unfamiliar with the movement and unaware of some of its leaders, according to a poll commissioned by the American Jewish Committee.
For example, only 38 percent of the nation's conservative evangelicals say they have read or heard much about the religious right; fewer than half say support it. While 74 percent know enough about Pat Robertson, the founder of the Christian Coalition, one of the most prominent organizations in the movement, to give him a rating, only 18 percent know enough about Ralph Reed, the executive director of the coalition, to rate him.
The national poll, commissioned by the American Jewish Committee and conducted by the Gallup International Institute, screened a much larger group to identify 507 conservative evangelicals and 503 other Americans, representing the rest of society. All were interviewed by telephone between May 10 and June 3. The margin of sampling error for each group is plus or minus five percentage points.
Tom W. Smith, director of the General Social Survey at the University of Chicago, analyzed the poll for the American Jewish Committee, a private advocacy group.
''As conservative evangelicals learn more about the religious right, they are more favorable,'' Mr. Smith said. ''If the Christian Coalition and similar organizations can expand their familiarity among this group, they will gain more adherents.''
To be classified as a conservative evangelical, respondents first had to describe themselves as conservative on political or social issues. Then they also had to agree with three theological statements: that the Bible is the actual word of God, to be taken literally; that they have been born again and committed themselves to Jesus Christ; and that they have at some time encouraged others to accept Jesus Christ as their Savior.
These conservative evangelicals, express many attitudes consistent with the religious right political movement:
*89 percent say the main cause of the United States' problems is moral decay;
*89 percent favor a constitutional amendment to allow organized prayers in school;
*76 percent favor the active involvement of Christians in politics to protect their values.
The poll found that conservative evangelicals were much more negative than other Americans toward nontraditionalists or outsiders like homosexuals, feminists, atheists and Muslims.
But they expressed as much tolerance as other Americans in their attitudes toward ethnic minorities like blacks Jews, and Asians.
Robert S. Rifkind, president of the American Jewish Committee, said ''I rather like a poll that surprises me, and I found it enormously encouraging'' that so many conservative evangelicals expressed favorable attitudes to blacks and Jews.
The poll also provided a demographic portrait of conservative evangelicals, showing that they tend to be older, less educated, less well-off financially, more rural, more Southern and more Republican than other Americans.
Mr. Rifkind added, ''The poll helps us better understand one of the most remarkable phenomena not only in the U.S. but worldwide: the increasing mixture of fundamentalist religions and politics.''
But there may also be limits to the potential for growth by the religious right among conservative evangelicals. Some topics or issues divide this group, making substantial fractions of them less suitable for recruitment by the movement:
*While 44 percent of conservative evangelicals say that on most political issues there is one correct Christian point of view, another 44 percent disagree;
*While 38 percent say abortion should be illegal in all circumstances, 62 percent say it should be legal under at least some circumstances;
*While 38 percent consider themselves Republicans, 28 percent call themselves Democrats, and 26 percent independents;
*A considerable number of blacks hold evangelical religious views and are conservative on social issues but more liberal in politics.For several years, John Forrest has pitched in at the volunteers' telephone bank of United We Stand America, the nonprofit group that Ross Perot founded here three years ago. But Mr. Forrest quit late last year after discovering, he said, that the supposedly independent group was tapping its membership lists to drum up support for Mr. Perot's partisan political enterprise -- getting the Reform Party on the 1996 Presidential ballot nationally.
Mr. Perot founded United We Stand as a research and educational organization that would study domestic problems and find ways to press for economic and government reform in Washington. Above all, the organization was supposed to operate apart from a political system that Mr. Perot portrayed as corrupt.
In a speech in Augusta, Me., on July 20, for example, Mr. Perot said, ''Keep in mind, our highest priority is to restore trust and confidence in government.''
''Over the next few years,'' he added, ''in order to accomplish the difficult task we'll talk about today, we must first earn the trust and respect of the people.''
In its February news letter, the group describes itself this way: ''United We Stand America, Inc., was launched on Jan. 11, 1993. It is an educational, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization committed to involving citizens and their government.''
But interviews with former volunteers and a review of the organization's documents show that United We Stand has been closely aligned with the Reform Party, providing a wide range of assistance. From late last September through at least January, according to these interviews and documents, the nonprofit group's telephone lines, mail room supplies, volunteers and paid staff members regularly helped solicit support to get the Reform Party on the ballot in California and Maine.
Indeed, so intertwined is United We Stand with the Reform Party that, according to internal memorandums, volunteers at United We Stand were instructed to answer the telephone by saying, ''Information center,'' so that callers could be routed to either the party or the nonprofit group, whichever they wanted.
On Sunday, Mr. Perot and his supporters will gather in Long Beach, Calif., to begin a weeklong process to select the Reform Party's Presidential nominee. Mr. Perot is being challenged for the nomination by former Gov. Richard D. Lamm of Colorado; the winner will be announced on Aug. 18 in Valley Forge, Pa., after a tally of ballots cast by by mail and telephone and over the Internet.
It is not unusual for nonprofit groups to help politicians by, for example, sponsoring events to showcase them to members. But Federal laws limit what such groups can do for partisan causes if they want to maintain their tax-exempt status.
Last week the Federal Election Commission sued the Christian Coalition, contending that it illegally promoted Republican candidates in 1990, 1992 and 1996, pumping hundreds of thousands of dollars into their campaigns. The F.E.C. contends that by coordinating the distribution of voters' guides with political campaigns, the coalition made illegal in-kind contributions.
But to Mr. Forrest and other former volunteers for Mr. Perot, the issue is not one of legality alone, or an esoteric debate about the role of tax-exempt educational organizations in American politics. To them, the Reform Party's use of United We Stand's databases illustrates how Mr. Perot's effort to change the political system has capitalized on the same time-honored tactics he has decried.
Russell J. Verney, a top Perot aide, denied that the party has used United We Stand's current membership database, which includes tens of thousands of names, to solicit support. He declined to comment on whether the party had used the databases of former members.
Mr. Perot declined to be interviewed for this article.
There is also evidence that United We Stand has used another common political maneuver -- presenting self-serving polling data as proof of its popularity.
In 1995, before the Reform Party was formed, United We Stand took a poll that it said found that 77 percent of the group's members supported the formation of a third party. Mr. Verney, who has been on the road since late last September trying to get the Reform Party on the ballot in all 50 states, tells audiences at his speeches and says in interviews that the poll showed overwhelming support for creating a third party.
To obtain the results, forms were mailed to all members of United We Stand. The people who responded, said Sheldon Gawiser, president of the National Council on Public Polls, were ''a self-selected sample.''
He added: ''In a scientific poll, the pollster selects the sample and tries to get a demographically representative group to respond. You can't make any judgment about a whole group from a self-selected sample.''
But Mr. Gawiser said the poll's greatest flaw was its fund-raising appeal, presented at the bottom of the survey form.
Such an appeal skews the pool of respondents, he said, because those who are more likely to answer are also more likely to make a contribution. ''Democrats do it and Republicans do it,'' he added. ''It is all garbage, and it's basically a fund-raising technique.''
In addition, Mr. Gawiser said, by seeking the name and address of the respondent, the poll denied anonymity, making it less likely that some people would answer. Referring to the survey, Mr. Gawiser said, ''There is essentially no value in this activity for any kind of measurement that would be useful.''In only the second time the tobacco industry has been ordered to pay damages in a liability case, a Florida jury yesterday awarded $750,000 to a Jacksonville man who smoked for 44 years before he was stricken with lung cancer five years ago.
The six-member jury, in State Circuit Court in Jacksonville, found that the cigarettes the man had smoked were a defective product and that their maker had been negligent in not informing the public about their danger earlier.
Industry analysts noted that the award, against the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation, was small, and said it was likely to be overturned on appeal. Even so, the jury's decision could spark a new wave of suits and similar verdicts by other juries, they suggested.
''The good news for the industry is that there are ample arguments for appeal,'' said Roy D. Burry of Oppenheimer & Company. ''The bad news is that this is the second time this has happened.''
The plaintiff, Grady M. Carter, a 66-year-old retired air traffic controller and longtime smoker of Lucky Strikes, had sought $1.5 million in damages.
''I can't tell you what it means to Wall Street,'' Mr. Carter's lawyer, Norwood S. Wilner of Jacksonville, said in an interview. ''But it means that private citizens that are injured by products made by tobacco companies can seek redress in the courts across the country for violations of product liability laws and succeed, and that is important.
''We proved the cigarette industry is not above the law. This is a wake-up call.''
Thomas J. Fitzgerald, a spokesman for Brown & Williamson, which is based in Louisville, Ky., said: ''We are disappointed with the verdict in the Carter trial. We are convinced that it is the product of error that is subject to appeal with a very good possibility that the verdict will be reversed.''
Mr. Fitzgerald said the verdict would most likely be reversed because of what Brown & Williamson lawyers argued was inadmissible evidence. He said the judge, Brian Davis, had permitted the jurors to hear testimony from a witness who contended that the tobacco industry should have marketed a safer cigarette. Mr. Fitzgerald termed the testimony ''speculation.''
The nation's biggest cigarette maker, the Philip Morris Companies, also issued a statement, calling the verdict ''an aberration.''
The verdict, which was announced late in the afternoon, just before the stock markets closed, sent shares of Philip Morris and another big cigarette manufacturer, RJR Nabisco, tumbling. Shares of American Brands, which sold the Lucky Strikes brand to Brown & Williamson in a 1994 deal, also fell, as did those of B.A.T. Industries P.L.C., Brown & Williamson's British parent.
So far, in at least 19 tobacco liability suits, the industry has yet to pay a cent in damages, however. The only other monetary award against a tobacco company in a liability case was won in 1988 by the family of a New Jersey woman, Rose Cipollone, a longtime smoker. But that award, for $400,000, was overturned on appeal, and the lawsuit was dropped in 1992.
In a 1990 case, a Mississippi jury agreed that cigarettes had killed another longtime smoker, Nathan Horton. But the jury awarded no damages, finding that American Tobacco and Mr. Horton had been equally at fault.
Labels warning of the dangers of smoking went on cigarette packages in 1966, and those warnings were strengthened in 1970. As a result, Federal law shields cigarette companies from being held liable for any alleged failure after 1970 to warn smokers of tobacco's hazards.
But Mr. Carter had begun smoking much earlier, in 1947. During the trial, he testified that he had subsequently tried to quit several times but had continued to crave cigarettes and would always eventually light up. He smoked Lucky Strikes until 1972, then switched brands and did not free himself from his habit until 1991, when his doctors found that he had lung cancer. The upper lobe of one of his lungs was removed in surgery that year.
The jurors deliberated for nine and a half hours over two days. When their verdict was announced, Mr. Carter, who grew up in Georgia on a farm that grew tobacco, leaned back in his chair and squeezed his wife's hand.
Mr. Carter, whose cancer is now in remission, said later that he had no plans for the money. ''I'm retired, got a good pension, and I didn't do this for the money,'' he said. ''I did it because of the principle.''Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani yesterday lashed out at recent reports from fiscal monitors on the city's $33 billion budget, which warn that a series of what the monitors call shortsighted measures might push New York into its worst financial trouble since it almost went bankrupt in the 1970's.
The monitors focused on the Giuliani administration's estimate that the budget was balanced in a way that would lead to deficits of $2.7 billion in 1999 and $3.4 billion in 2000. They said those figures were evidence that Mr. Giuliani and the City Council had relied on questionable fiscal maneuvers essentially to shift their problems into the future.
Mr. Giuliani did not dispute the figures, which his own budget office generated. But he played down their importance, saying that he had made great strides in putting the city's finances in order and would continue to do so.
''We see a tremendous amount of confidence in New York City,'' he said on his weekly radio call-in program. ''And a lot of it has to do with the fact that we have -- in a very realistic way -- straightened out the budget and financial plan of the city.''
He also questioned the political motivations of some of the monitors, including the State Financial Control Board, the State and City Comptrollers and Wall Street bond-rating firms.
Mr. Giuliani's comments renewed a debate over the city's fiscal health that has flared repeatedly in recent months. The monitors noted that in the last 20 years, the city has never confronted a gap as large as the one projected for 2000 -- both in absolute dollars and as a percentage of city spending.
They said that in the new budget, Mr. Giuliani did not take on the issue that is at the heart of the city's ills: Expenses are increasing much faster than revenues. They said that by postponing efforts to correct that imbalance, often by using so-called one-shots to plug holes in the budget, the city would find it much harder to do so in the future.
The State Comptroller, H. Carl McCall, estimated that over the next four years, the city's expenses would rise 6 percent annually, while revenues would grow only 1.2 percent annually.
''The city's fiscal health is worse than it has been in years,'' Mr. McCall said in an interview. ''You are just building up to a disaster in the future.''
Mr. Giuliani countered that he had already cut billions of dollars from the budget since he came to office in 1994, reducing the city's work force by 22,000, to a little more than 200,000. But he emphasized that if he cut too much, he would deprive residents of important social services.
''We have made the reductions that can be done, at the same time without devastating services in the city,'' Mr. Giuliani said.
Mr. Giuliani's aides were asked on Thursday if the Mayor would be interviewed for an article on the fiscal monitors' evaluations of the budget, which the Council approved in June. Mr. Giuliani declined. But he used part of his radio program yesterday to criticize The New York Times before the article was published.
Mr. Giuliani said he was certain that the article would be unfair to his administration, asserting that it would focus too much on the views of Mr. McCall and the City Comptroller, Alan G. Hevesi. Both Comptrollers are Democrats with whom the Mayor, a Republican, has often clashed.
''Often, the slant in The New York Times is their way,'' Mr. Giuliani said, referring to the Comptrollers. ''People don't get the actual and complete picture of the progress that we have made in straightening out the budget of New York City.'' But other fiscal monitors have echoed the views of Mr. McCall and Mr. Hevesi. On his program, Mr. Giuliani did not mention the State Financial Control Board, which oversees the city's finances.
The control board has grown increasingly critical of the city's budget. At the board's meeting last month, its executive director, Cornelius F. Healy, joined the two Comptrollers in lambasting the new budget. Mr. Healy was appointed by Gov. George E. Pataki, a Republican.
Jeffrey L. Sommer, the board's first deputy director, said in an interview that the city had to find a way to cut spending. ''The size of these projected gaps are the highest that we have seen since the mid-1970's,'' said Jeffrey L. Sommer, the board's first deputy director, adding that the city had to balance its budget more prudently. ''And the concern is that they keep getting larger.''
The monitors are not predicting that the city will plunge into the kind of crisis that occurred in 1975, when it suddenly had to lay off tens of thousands of workers and implore the state for help.
Yet they said that by deferring cost-cutting, Mr. Giuliani and the Council had worsened future gaps. The recently adopted budget relies on $1.5 billion in one-shots -- non-recurring revenues that the city reaps from, for example, selling assets. The biggest one-shot in the new budget is an assumption that the city will settle its dispute with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey over rent that the authority pays for the two city airports. The administration projects that it will receive $339 million. It also has worked out a deal with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to get an infusion of $250 million.
To understand one-shots, imagine that city is a tenant who does not earn enough in salary to pay the monthly rent. The tenant sells a family heirloom to help pay the rent one month. The next month, the tenant must pay the full rent again, but the salary still falls short.
And if the rent rises faster than the tenant's salary, his financial situation gets worse. The only solution is to find a cheaper apartment or get a salary raise.With the only sign of progress the steady flow of wreckage raised from the ocean floor, Federal investigators looking for the cause of the destruction of Trans World Airlines Flight 800 said today that they expected no quick answers.
Signaling that the effort could be settling in for a sustained period, Robert T. Francis, the vice chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said that the 150 scuba and hard-hat divers exploring and retrieving the submerged debris would for the first time get some additional time off this weekend.
''There'll be a slight slowdown so these guys can catch their breath,'' Mr. Francis said. In some ways, the entire investigative effort appeared not so much to slow down today, but to shift from a sprinter's pace to that of a marathoner aware of the long miles to go.
For the first time in the 23 days since the airplane and its 230 occupants were lost, Mr. Francis announced that there would be no regular daily news briefing on Saturday.
And for the first time, the chief criminal investigator on hand, James K. Kallstrom, the assistant director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in charge of the New York office, made no formal statement at today's briefing. He did not even go through the daily ritual of reciting the toll-free number for tips.
Investigators are focusing their efforts in two major directions. Officials with the National Transportation Safety Board, working with officers from other agencies and the Boeing Company, are reassembling the wreckage in a hangar on Long Island, a process that could take weeks and may help reveal the cause of the crash.
Other investigators, meanwhile, are subjecting some pieces of the wreckage to sophisticated tests, in a search for bomb residue. The tests, conducted before the pieces are given to the reassembly team, have not produced results that the F.B.I. views as definitive.
''We're not purposely dragging this out,'' Mr. Kallstrom said, adding that the slow pace was simply a function of gathering evidence spread over a miles-wide swath 10 miles offshore.
The main goals still are to find the missing 34 victims and to raise as much of the jumbo jet as possible. The theory that a bomb brought down the plane will remain in play -- along with the possibility of mechanical failure or a missile attack -- until no new scraps of potential evidence were available, he said. ''If we have the whole plane up and there's still no explosion, I guess we have to look elsewhere,'' he said.
Echoing previous comments, Mr. Kallstrom said the F.B.I. would not rush to any conclusions about terrorism or criminal activity without a robust accumulation of evidence. He added that any haste could threaten future criminal cases, might interfere with subsequent civil suits, and could muddy a determination of who pays for the costs of the crash.
Offshore today, search and salvage vessels continued to scan and retrieve the wreckage that remained submerged, focusing on pieces thought to have originated from the forward cargo bays to the rear edge of the wings.
To bring fresh eyes and minds to the inquiry, a half-dozen engineers from the Seattle headquarters of the Boeing Company, the plane's manufacturer, flew to Long Island to pore over the wreckage for several hours on Thursday night.
One Boeing representative said that theories were valuable, but now that so much of the aircraft had been retrieved, it was important to shift from saying ''what if'' to saying ''what is'' -- what is the state of each piece, large and small, and what clues does it hold.
It is important not to discount any possibility yet, the Boeing representative said.For a party that promises politics not as usual, Ross Perot's Reform Party -- on the eve of its first national Presidential nominating convention -- seems to be deeply mired in, well, politics as usual.
As 2,000 of the Reform Party faithful headed to Long Beach, Calif., this weekend for the opening session of a two-part convention, there was still another vituperative yes-you-did, I-did-not exchange of statements by Mr. Perot and former Gov. Richard D. Lamm of Colorado, the two contenders for the party's nomination.
Mr. Lamm, campaigning in Florida yesterday, asserted, still again, that Mr. Perot was using the party's machinery to promote his own candidacy. And he added that his high hopes for a new party and a new politics had been depressed by ''this unpleasantness with Dallas.''
''It is necessary for the credibility of the party to have openness, debates and a process that is above suspicion,'' Mr. Lamm said. ''And we haven't had any of them.''
Mr. Perot, who spent much of yesterday and the previous day in his Dallas office giving radio interviews by phone to California stations, denied, still again, that he was mixing the day-to-day business of the party, which he founded and continues to finance, with the very personal business of seeking its nomination.
Mr. Perot insisted, through aides, that he could keep the two tasks separate and that he still welcomed a challenger. Russell J. Verney, Mr. Perot's top political consultant, said, ''We've spent a year building a field of dreams that invites other candidates to come in and participate.''
Mr. Perot is heavily favored to win the nomination when the balloting concludes at the second session of the convention, on Aug. 18, in Valley Forge. Pa. Considerably less certain, given Mr. Perot's high negative ratings in the polls, is whether he will run as strongly as he did in 1992, when he won 19 percent of the vote.
In yesterday's exchange, Mr. Lamm accused Mr. Perot of promoting his candidacy through ads and personal appearances that were ostensibly intended as promotions of the party and its convention. Pointing to one ad, mailed to 1.1 million members from party headquarters in Dallas, Mr. Lamm noted that it prominently displayed a picture of Mr. Perot -- but no Lamm picture.
''I guess the printer must have dropped mine by mistake,'' he said in an interview.
Mr. Lamm's campaign spokesman, Tom D'Amore Jr. was less politically elliptical.
''It's transparent what the real purpose of this mailing is,'' Mr. D'Amore said in an interview. ''It's outrageous that they would do it. They say one thing and do another. They've set up a party funded by one person, created for the promotion of one person, with absolutely no difference between his Presidential campaign and building the party.''
But Mr. Perot's spokeswoman, Sharon Holman, said the ads and interviews were meant only to ''tell people about the convention and encourage people to attend if they want to see history being made.''
Mr. Verney said Mr. Perot's picture was put on the ad, labeled ''A Message From Ross Perot,'' as an ''attention getter.''
In Sunday's convention session in Long Beach, where the usual political convention hoopla will be largely lacking by design, Mr. Perot and Mr. Lamm will each be allotted 50 minutes to speak. Beyond that, there will be little more other than brief attendance to routine party matters.
Mr. Lamm has been pressing Mr. Perot for a debate. But Mr. Perot has so far fended off the issue, insisting that he is too busy organizing the two convention sessions and getting the party on all 50 state ballots and that he did not even have time for his own campaign.
Another Lamm spokesman, Eric Anderson said, ''I think it goes without saying that if he had time to do these radio shows he had time to debate.'' Mr. Anderson said a debate could be conducted by satellite link.
A fairly large press contingent is expected to be in Long Beach, but only C-Span is planning live broadcasts of the entire Reform Party proceedings, which are expected to last several hours on Sunday.
Between the convention sessions, party members will cast nominating votes by mail, fax, phone and computer. Any party member may vote, not just those at the convention.
POLITICS: THIRD PARTYA former Long Island car dealer who admitted bilking the General Motors Corporation out of $422 million in one of the largest frauds in American corporate history was sentenced yesterday to five years in prison.
John M. McNamara, 56, had not spent a day in jail since he pleaded guilty in 1992 to swindling G.M. by borrowing billions of dollars from it for nonexistent vans. The delay in sentencing was the result of his agreement to help Federal prosecutors uncover political corruption on Long Island, but his testimony in several bribery cases failed to secure any convictions.
Nonetheless, Judge Edward R. Korman of Federal District Court in Brooklyn granted the Government's request for leniency, departing from sentencing guidelines that called for 9 to 11 years in prison.
Mr. McNamara's five-year sentence, which he will begin serving on Oct. 1, is to be followed by three years' supervised release. He was also ordered to repay General Motors more than $412 million in outstanding loans within three years of his release. General Motors has already recovered $13 million from the sale of cars that were on Mr. McNamara's lots and the sale of dealership properties. It claims Mr. McNamara actually took $425 million, $3 million more than he has admitted to.
In sentencing Mr. McNamara, the judge said, ''I always believe that, based on my own experience as a U.S. attorney, people who cooperate with the Government are vital to the success of law enforcement against those who have committed crimes.''
The agreement with prosecutors allowed Mr. McNamara to keep $1.8 million in assets and start a new company, even though he owes his creditors hundreds of millions of dollars. Once a ubiquitous presence in Port Jefferson, his hometown, where he was known for his extensive land holdings and his gifts to local charities, Mr. McNamara became reclusive after his guilty plea. But he continued to live in the area, in a rambling white house with an indoor pool.
In the prosecution's request for leniency, Loretta E. Lynch, an assistant United States attorney, wrote that Mr. McNamara's cooperation had been fruitful, providing ''substantial assistance in a number of important prosecutions within the Eastern District of New York.''
''He has provided important substantive information about the nature and the scope of public corruption on Long Island,'' the prosecutor wrote. ''The resulting trials, despite their verdicts, have increased public exposure to and knowledge of the inner workings of local government.''
But Robert Gottlieb, a criminal defense lawyer who ran unsuccessfully for district attorney in Suffolk County in 1989, said yesterday that the Government had had ''no choice but to make this deal with the devil.''
''What was somewhat surprising, even today,'' Mr. Gottlieb added, ''is the extent to which he has been able to profit by his activities, and that certainly hurt the Government. I don't think there's any question that they are embarrassed.''
''This is a case where the Government was willing to make an extraordinary deal with a con man in the hopes of obtaining convictions in political corruption cases and they obviously failed to do that.''
The leniency request was challenged by the General Motors Acceptance Corporation, the financial arm of the auto maker, which urged the judge to impose a ''substantial prison sentence.''
A lawyer for General Motors, Charles E. Brown, said yesterday that Mr. McNamara deserved at least the sentence he had received.
''Mr. McNamara is an admitted criminal who took advantage of individuals and associates through deceit and theft,'' Mr. Brown said. ''He abused the bond of personal trust he developed.''
A G.M.A.C. spokesman in Detroit, Terry Sullivan, said the auto maker had filed a civil lawsuit this week against Mr. McNamara that seeks up to $1.2 billion in restitution and damages.
In court testimony, Mr. McNamara admitted that over the course of eight years, he had obtained $6.2 billion in loans from G.M.A.C. for vans that did not exist. The fraud was discovered by G.M.A.C. auditors, who realized that his claims of shipping thousands of vehicles overseas per month were false.
During the bribery trials in which Mr. McNamara was the Government's star witness, defense lawyers forced him to explain in detail how he had lied, cheated and forged documents to deceive G.M.A.C.
Mr. McNamara used the money to keep up payments on his loans to G.M.A.C.; by borrowing increasing amounts, he kept one step ahead of payment-due dates. At the same time, he bought gold mines, other companies and land development projects, and traveled the globe in his own nine-seat jet. The scheme collapsed in the recession of the late 1980's. The pressure of keeping up payments, prosecutors said, forced him to bribe local officials into quickly approving his building projects without requiring costly changes.
Although Federal agents seized most of his holdings, the authorities allowed him to retain $1.8 million in real estate. He also disclosed in court this year that he had not been forced to give up $300,000 he had put in trust for his 16-year-old daughter or $138,000 he had made from various business ventures last year, including the sale of vans in Germany.
Mr. McNamara has also been permitted to travel throughout the New York metropolitan region and to take vacations in Florida.The President of Colombia, Ernesto Samper, urged the central bank yesterday to devalue the country's currency, the peso, to help make exports more attractive in the global market. The central bank has insisted that the country's exchange rate system, which is intended to keep the currency within a narrow range against the dollar, will not be changed. The bank has spent more than $300 million from its international reserves this year to defend the peso.
A Colombian devaluation might not hurt the economy as much as Mexico's currency devaluation of its currency in 1994, which led to an economic crisis throughout Latin America. Mexico had a soaring current-account deficit and was heavily dependent on short-term debt and foreign investment to finance it. Foreign investment in Colombia tends to be longer term, lessening the fears of capital flight.
(Bloomberg Business News)
INTERNATIONAL BRIEFSBAY APARTMENT COMMUNITIES INC., San Jose, Calif., a real estate investment trust, said it had bought two apartment communities: Martinique Gardens in Costa Mesa, Calif, for which it paid $7.5 million, and Channing Heights Apartments in San Rafael, which cost $24.8 million.
HEALTHCARE COMPARE CORP., Downers Grove, Ill., a provider of medical cost management services, will buy back up to 5 million shares, or about 15 percent of its outstanding common shares. The company previously repurchased a total of 2.5 million shares.
SPIEGEL INC., Downers Grove, Ill., said its wholly owned Eddie Bauer subsidiary, a leading retailer with more than 400 stores nationwide, planned to hire 225 sales and stock associates in September for the opening of a large store on Michigan Avenue in Chicago.When Bob Dole would meet with his advisers to mull over prospects for his running mate, every once in a while he would blurt out, ''What about The Quarterback?''
But for weeks, many of Mr. Dole's advisers said they did not think that their candidate would ever settle on The Quarterback -- Jack F. Kemp, formerly of the Buffalo Bills and the United States Congress -- because the two men had had such a contentious relationship for years.
The uncertainty was such that even tonight, for nearly two anxious hours, Mr. Dole's top aides feared that their candidate -- who is notorious for tearing up his scripts -- had changed his mind and given up on this unlikely alliance.
Dole-Kemp T-shirts had already popped up here on the eve of the Republican National Convention. Mr. Dole's emissaries had already been dispatched to promote Mr. Kemp's qualifications to reporters. And privately, Mr. Dole's top aides had let it be known that their candidate would seal the deal in a phone call to Mr. Kemp this evening.
Shortly after 11 P.M. Eastern time, Mr. Dole finally made the call, his aides said.
In the end, his aides attributed the delay not to indecision by Mr. Dole but to unexpected last-minute preparations. One was that Roderick DeArment, a lawyer on the search team, had to conduct one final background check on Mr. Kemp. Another delay was that Mr. Kemp still had to iron out with one or two Dole advisers the final details of what would his role would be as running mate.
As they waited for Mr. Dole to make the call tonight, aides who had said with confidence that Mr. Dole had made his decision were now hedging their bets. One said ''60-40.'' Another, more optimistic, put the odds at 75-25. One adviser even speculated that Mr. Dole was making one last pitch tonight to Colin L. Powell.
''People are pressing him to make the call,'' one Dole aide said in a panic.
Later, another senior aide said: ''No one understood why it was taking so long. People were saying, 'What's going on here?' ''
Even before tonight, there was great uncertainty that Mr. Dole would ever turn to Mr. Kemp.
''You have to remember there are a lot of people in the campaign who have privately wanted Kemp to be the Vice-Presidential candidate all along,'' said one person close to Mr. Dole who, like others interviewed, would only speak on the condition of anonymity until Mr. Dole formally announced his decision. ''They didn't have the courage to ask Dole to select him.''
Yet there was no unanimity among Mr. Dole's top aides that Mr. Kemp was the best choice. As another person familiar with the discussions put it, ''There were powerful arguments back and forth over whether Kemp should be considered.''
Even Scott Reed, Mr. Dole's campaign manager and a former chief of staff to Mr. Kemp, was described by several people as initially reluctant. Mr. Reed had been furious at Mr. Kemp for endorsing Steve Forbes in the primaries. ''Scott had to be persuaded it was the right choice,'' said one person close to Mr. Reed.
Mr. Kemp shot to the top of the list after two events this week: The unveiling of Mr. Dole's economic plan on Monday and, on Wednesday, the compromise on abortion forged between the Dole campaign and the committee here drafting the Republican Party platform.
People close to Mr. Dole said he was pleased with the public reaction to his economic proposal, which calls for the same sort of tax-cutting remedies that Mr. Kemp has espoused for years. They said Mr. Dole had concluded that Mr. Kemp, who is known for his supply-side economic mantra, could best champion the signature campaign proposal.
These people said the second turning point in Mr. Dole's decision came once the abortion compromise had apparently been resolved. That freed Mr. Dole from pressure to pick a candidate to soothe relations with social conservatives. (Mr. Kemp has consistently voted against abortion rights, but has never particularly been identified as an abortion opponent.)
The fall-back contender, said several of Mr. Dole's advisers, was Senator Connie Mack of Florida, who was considered more popular with opponents of abortion. One concern about Mr. Mack, the advisers said, was their fear that reporters would devote the coming weeks focusing on Mr. Mack as a fresh face on the national scene -- rather than the message of the campaign. They said that would not happen with Mr. Kemp since he has long been a national figure.
''We need a candidate whose first two weeks are about ideas,'' one aide said, ''and not about his own story.''
One person involved in the deliberations described how Mr. Kemp's fortunes improved this week: ''As Dole himself saw the way the economic message was being positively received, it became clear that Kemp deserved a second and strong look. And once the platform debate was resolved, it became apparent that we could now go to a big-tent candidate as opposed to a particularly Southern candidate to shore up the pro-life forces.''
Another person close to Mr. Dole said that while ''Kemp has always been the unnamed surprise,'' he ''did not become a viable option until about two or three days ago.''In choosing Jack F. Kemp as his running mate, Bob Dole emulated the two most successful Republican politicians since World War II, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan. Like them, he reached out to an element of the party with which he has often been at odds, the low-tax, pro-growth conservatives.
Eisenhower, an Eastern moderate who wrested the nomination from the conservatives' favorite, Robert A. Taft of Ohio, chose Richard M. Nixon, a Western conservative; Mr. Reagan, a Western conservative, chose George Bush, who was seen at the time as an Eastern moderate. Both sought to unify their party.
Mr. Dole, an establishment Republican in a party that has turned its back on his style of politics yet will nominate him for President, is trying to do the same thing.
But this time, there is an added twist: Mr. Dole has already been pushed farther from the center than is his wont by the strength of the Christian conservatives and their allies, who will dominate the convention opening on Monday in San Diego, and by the need to open some space between himself and President Clinton, who spends a lot of his time these days singing Republican siren songs.
Mr. Dole has chosen to reverse his field on economic policy, giving tax cuts priority over budget-balancing and making a 15-percent tax cut a centerpiece of his campaign. Some who have long supported this supply-side approach have been suspicious of the candidate's belated conversion; they will surely be much less so now. Mr. Kemp, a charter member of the supply-side club, gives Mr. Dole credibility on this issue, although it of course remains to be seen whether they will be able to convince the country of the wisdom of their position.
Mr. Clinton has already denounced Mr. Dole's ideas as a recipe for a ballooning deficit, and he has the support of many of the nation's economists.
Vice-Presidential choices, at least in the modern era, have seldom had a profound outcome on the results in November, and there is little reason to believe that Mr. Kemp will contribute much to cutting into Mr. Clinton's huge national lead. That is Mr. Dole's job. Nor will Mr. Kemp bring to the ticket any special regional strengths; born in California, a former Congressman from New York, Mr. Kemp has spent his whole career in Washington, no great advantage in these times.
From Mr. Kemp's viewpoint, though, Mr. Dole's nod could prove a turning point. Vice-Presidential nominees who give good accounts of themselves, even in losing causes, automatically move up in the sweepstakes the next time around. A strong showing by Mr. Kemp would make him a Presidential contender in 2000, which is no doubt why he and his friends so actively sought the No. 2 spot.
Mr. Nixon and Mr. Bush, when they had their own chances to choose running mates, chose relatively obscure figures in Spiro T. Agnew and Dan Quayle. Mr. Dole reportedly flirted with that notion, too, giving serious consideration to Senator Connie Mack of Florida, but turned away. The precedents were not encouraging, and Mr. Mack, as a Senate colleague said, ''is the kind of guy you have to introduce to everyone in the room, because nobody outside of Florida knows him much.''
Mr. Kemp could help Mr. Dole in several ways, all subtle, none decisive but all quite worthwhile.
Mr. Dole, at 73, has been widely described as too old for the Presidency. Mr. Kemp, a vigorous 61 with a background as a pro-football quarterback, could make the ticket look less dated.
From the start of his career, Mr. Dole, a plainspoken plainsman, has had trouble stirring the troops -- even committed, enthusiastic Republicans. Mr. Kemp is an accomplished speaker, much in demand for Lincoln Day dinners and other Republican fund-raising events, who can rouse the faithful. His verbal skills can become a liability, however, when he crosses the line into long-windedness and bombast.
Members of the Bush Cabinet, in which he served, often complained about that.
Finally, partly because of his age, Mr. Dole has long felt he needed someone who could step on short notice into the Oval Office. Not only that, he said in a talk last spring, he felt he needed someone whose qualifications to do so would be instantly apparent to voters, who might otherwise feel, because of Mr. Dole's age, that a vote for him was a leap in the dark. Mr. Kemp certainly has the credentials: A Presidential campaign of his own in 1988, service as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and years as a television spokesman for his wing of the party. Mr. Kemp will do little to mollify the moderates who are displeased by the party's position on abortion, though his opposition to abortion, while firm (and backed by the even firmer position of his wife, Joanne), has never been grating.
If he has always been an insurgent rather than an establishment conservative, he has always fought his corner without rancor. He and Mr. Dole have never been close and have often differed on major issues, but it is entirely in character for Mr. Kemp to join Mr. Dole at this point.
In one area at least Mr. Kemp will appeal to moderate Republicans and perhaps some Democrats as well. He is a strong supporter of civil rights, with many black friends, and he has opposed the recent movement in the party to deny rights and benefits to immigrants.
Once it became clear that former Senator Dole could not have Gen. Colin L. Powell as his running mate, he had trouble finding someone who fit his specifications. Had he not had trouble, it was doubtful he would have turned to Mr. Kemp. He had sought someone who was personally compatible, and the effusive, upbeat, sometimes almost monomaniacal Mr. Kemp, with his habit of belaboring a policy idea long after others have lost interest, could hardly be a worse stylistic fit with the laconic, mordant Mr. Dole, a skilled dealer in compromise.
In the end, though, that must have seemed less important as Mr. Dole went through his lists of governors and senators. He could not afford to reopen the abortion battle, which he had already lost, by choosing a supporter of abortion rights, and he wanted no surprises from a candidate he did not know well.
''He wanted someone who was safe,'' said a person whose name was on the list until the last, or at least the next-to-last, round of deliberations.
''Kemp worked his way in, late in the game, because too many of the others were gambles.Bob Dole settled tonight on Jack Kemp, the 61-year-old former Congressman from Buffalo and periodic political nemesis to Mr. Dole, to be his Vice Presidential running mate, aides to the former Kansas Senator said.
Nelson Warfield, the Dole campaign's press secretary, refused to confirm to reporters tonight that it was Mr. Kemp. All he would say was that Mr. Dole had called his top pick at 10:06 and that they spoke for 15 minutes.
''Bob Dole made the call and got the answer he was looking for,'' Mr. Warfield said. ''We've got a veep.''
Despite the widespread confirmation that Mr. Kemp was chosen, the campaign was determined not to spoil the element of surprise that Mr. Dole had wanted. But Mr. Warfield made some football analogies -- Mr. Kemp was a onetime quarterback for the Buffalo Bills -- and made references to a ''very upbeat, positive, energetic'' conversation, using words that are associated with Mr. Kemp.
At 10 P.M., Scott Reed, the campaign manager, began telephoning those who had been in the running but had not made the final cut. Mr. Warfield said there were 6 to 12 calls.
Mr. Dole planned to present Mr. Kemp on Saturday at a ceremony here in Mr. Dole's hometown, where bleachers were being erected in front of the Russell County courthouse.
Mr. Warfield said that despite rumors to the contrary, no communication had taken place today with Colin L. Powell, the retired Army general and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whom the campaign had held out hope of wooing even after he had closed the door.
For a brief period tonight there was consternation among some Dole aides after word spread that Mr. Dole was having second thoughts and was delaying his call to Mr. Kemp. Later, they said the delay of nearly two hours was a result of some incomplete arrangements regarding Mr. Kemp's campaign role.
Mr. Kemp, who this evening flew to Dallas, where he had a speaking engagement on Saturday morning, was later spotted boarding a private plane that was said to be bound for Great Bend, Kan.
Earlier in the day, he told reporters in Florida, ''Quarterbacks are always ready,'' when asked if he would be Mr. Dole's running mate.
While Mr. Kemp would seem a somewhat surprising pick given his endorsement earlier this year of Steve Forbes and his differences with Mr. Dole over economic priorities, the former Congressman fills out a lot of the weaknesses in Mr. Dole's own political resume.
The Dole team views Mr. Kemp as an energetic, highly competitive campaigner with an optimistic, even ebullient outlook and who, as a former Cabinet member and Buffalo Bills quarterback who served 18 years in the House, comes with some national standing. Another plus for the 73-year-old Mr. Dole was Mr. Kemp's relative youth and vigor, while he also carries some plausibility as a potential President.
The White House seized on Mr. Dole's interest in Mr. Kemp to portray the Republican candidate as having abandoned his reputation as a deficit hawk for the political payoff of promising deep tax cuts.
''He's gambling his whole campaign on the supply-side economic plan,'' said George Stephanopoulos, President Clinton's senior adviser. ''It's somebody at the roulette table who's way down. He's put half his stack of chips on black -- or, I would say, on red -- and now he's taking the second half and doubling up.''
Among other things, senior aides to Mr. Dole say, Mr. Kemp is expected to help the Republican ticket in California, where he grew up, and in large cities and urban areas because of the activist role he sought to play on behalf of inner city redevelopment as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Bush Administration in 1988.
At HUD, Mr. Kemp backed the idea of enterprise zones, which offered economic and tax incentives to businesses to invest in depressed inner city areas, and spoken out about the importance of racial justice.
Republicans praised Mr. Kemp for reaching out to minorities and others who have historically felt unwelcome in the party. Several said longstanding differences between Mr. Dole and Mr. Kemp over economic policy and other issues would not damage the ticket.
''The fact is that winning political marriages are usually marriages of convenience, not marriages of love,'' said Representative Robert S. Walker of Pennsylvania.
While Mr. Kemp is a longstanding opponent of abortion, the central tenet of his political agenda has been economic, and Dole aides said that Mr. Kemp embodies the elements of the tax-cutting economic plan that Mr. Dole will make the centerpiece of his campaign.
As a supply-side economist who believes that cutting taxes is the best way to stimulate economic growth, Mr. Kemp's position once was considered his greatest liability, but now that Mr. Dole has moved from budget-balancing to tax-cutting himself, Mr. Kemp has become an asset.NO ONE HAS YET CALLED IT such, but if 1996 is to be christened anyone's, it ought surely to be named the year of the teen-age girl. Consider the evidence: Alanis Morissette packs concert venues with thousands of ululating 13-year-olds who thrill to her hit ''Ironic'' the way their mothers swooned over ''Love Me Do.'' ''Reviving Ophelia,'' a therapist's account of her work with young women, is at the top of the paperback best seller list. ''My So-Called Life,'' a drama about a 15-year-old girl and her angst, plays in perpetual reruns on MTV. Time magazine recently named the psychologist Carol Gilligan, who first brought girls' faltering sense of self to public attention, one of the country's most influential people. And in the ultimate Zeitgeist test, a slew of films are being released this summer centering on the lives of adolescent (and preadolescent) girls.
Let me make this clear: I'm not talking about the traditional use of young women as plot devices -- like the virginal blank in ''Stealing Beauty'' upon whom other characters project their fantasies -- or as victims. Rather, I'm talking about films, for children and adults alike, in which girls are in charge of their own fates, active rather than reactive; films that are about girls' relationships to one another rather than to boys, that tackle the big themes of teen-age life, like anger, sexuality, alienation and displacement.
Before ''Clueless'' became a hit last year, earning nearly as much at the box office as its heroine spends in a week at the mall, conventional wisdom held that female protagonists were a bad bet. While girls will unquestioningly turn out to see an endless parade of boys on the big (or the small) screen, the thinking went, boys do not identify with a female hero and so refuse to watch one, a tendency many of them carry into manhood.
Movie reviewers are not immune to such assumptions. When ''Harriet the Spy'' was released, Peter Stack of The San Francisco Chronicle ghettoized it as ''a movie for pre-teen-aged girls,'' as if the struggles to cleave to one's artistic vision, cope with betrayal and confront one's fears are, merely because a girl is involved, of less universal interest than, say, blowing up a cable car.
Movies for the adult audience have fared little better. While you can't throw a rock in a video store without knocking over a male coming-of-age flick, until recently there have been few stand-out films about girls, and nearly all have been small or independent projects. ''The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love'' (1995) comes to mind as well as ''Heavenly Creatures,'' a 1994 movie from New Zealand about two friends who commit murder rather than separate. Before that, one must dig back to ''Heathers'' (1989) or Joyce Chopra's ''Smooth Talk'' (1986), an unnerving portrait of sexual awakening; or, ''Desert Bloom'' (1986), Diane Kurys's subtle ''Peppermint Soda'' (1977) or ''Carrie'' (1976).
That comparative dearth of images may be why ''Harriet the Spy'' (released last month) was greeted in some quarters more as a political triumph than as entertainment. It is thrilling to see an intrepid and fiercely committed girl on screen, heedless of fashion in her old jeans and sneakers, scaling buildings, taking risks, even making mistakes. Although decidedly less quirky than her literary counterpart, Michelle Trachtenberg's Harriet nonetheless stretches our vocabulary of visual images. Her story poses fundamental coming-of-age questions: How to stay true to yourself and keep your friends. How to be honest without hurting feelings. How to be singular but not isolated. How to find your inner voice.
These are especially critical issues for girls, whose self-confidence often drops below that of boys at adolescence and never catches up. During the 1992-93 school year, while observing two groups of 13-year-old girls, I saw many young women plunge into a tailspin of self-doubt. They began to loathe their bodies, to defer to boys, to avoid expressing dissenting opinions, to fear healthy risks. At the time, there were no screen teen-age heroines to bolster their egos, not even the bland, contrived characters of ''The Baby-Sitters Club'' or ''Now and Then.''
Although it's about a much younger child, the newly released ''Matilda'' offers up its own inspiring message, girl-style. Its heroine, a brilliant 6-year-old, is a fully realized person, not a cliche. She navigates an obstacle course of comically abusive adults by using telekinetic powers. Significantly, they are first summoned by that ultimate female taboo: anger.
Matilda's welcome, if sweetly sibilant, battle cry is ''No more Miss Nice Girl!'' One can only hope this catch phrase will become the ''As if!'' of 1996.
OTHER ELEMENTS OF THE movie, while entertaining, are painfully stereotypical. The ''good'' woman, for instance, is beautiful, passive and maternal, while evil is embodied by an unattractive, overweight, childless Olympic track star. Guess who, in this unfortunate postscript to the summer's celebration of female athletes, Matilda wants to grow up to be?
''Harriet the Spy'' and ''Matilda'' are both charming and poignant, but they are, after all, movies for children, and so their finales must be suitably upbeat. Matilda finds the family she has been yearning for; Harriet rejoins her friends to cavort in a school holiday pageant as the courses in a Christmas dinner, as natural together as turkey and cranberry sauce.
But is such optimism warranted? Not according to ''girl'' films for the adult market. Those films portray girlhood, and the transition away from it, as many grown-ups remember it: treacherous, painful and relentless, especially if a girl is different from her peers.
Like Harriet, Dawn (Wiener Dog) Wiener, the rabbity-faced 11-year-old subject of ''Welcome to the Dollhouse,'' is trapped in the purgatory of the preteen-age years, but her trials are not so tidily resolved. By the film's end, we know that there will be no Poppinslike deus et machina to swoop in to give her sage advice. Her single moment of rebellion -- smashing an unflattering home video -- may go unnoticed.
If somehow, in darkest New Jersey, Dawn could watch ''Harriet the Spy'' or ''Matilda,'' would she gain strength? Or faced with those heroines' easy successes, would Wiener Dog recall her brother's fatalistic response when asked if things get better in high school: ''Not really''?
Feminizing what the director Todd Solondz has admitted was, in part, his own experience in ''Dollhouse'' was a necessary choice. No male hero could ever be played as an unmitigated nerd. Even Wiener Dog knows that there is someone more vulnerable than she in the Darwinian muck of junior high, a weaker soul upon whom she, too, can prey: the boy who is called ''fag,'' who acts ''like a girl,'' but isn't. Just try getting audiences to identify with him.
Harriet and Matilda are adamantly and clearly presexual. Their bodies are neat and compact. Harriet's story begins in the final autumn glow of her girlhood, a time when a dated, black-and-white sex education movie called ''Girl to Woman'' is nearly blotted from the screen by shadow puppets. It is the golden moment when many girls are still outspoken and brimming with confidence.
But what happens when post-pubescent girls take Harriet's and Matilda's message of independence to heart?
According to ''Manny and Lo,'' (which opened last month), ''Foxfire'' (the movie opening later this month based on Joyce Carol Oates's novel) and ''Girls Town'' (which also opens later this month), such girls become outlaws. The ground for exploration in these films becomes not the stuff of day-to-day life but the wreckage that occurs when the boundaries of feminine behavior are crossed.
''Manny and Lo,'' which tells the story of two orphan sisters on the lam from their respective foster families in a rattletrap station wagon, has been compared to ''Thelma and Louise,'' but its deadpan absurdism owes a greater debt to Terrence Malick's ''Badlands'' (1973). The 11-year-old Manny and 16-year-old Lo travel beneath the radar of ordinary life, unnoticed and uncared for. Certain that the police are after them, they survive by stealing from grocery stores, siphoning gas and camping out in model tract homes.
Their age gap offers an ideal vision of the before-and-after aspects of girlhood. In one scene, for instance, Manny, the naif, clocks ants with a stopwatch while world-weary Lo has sex in the cab of a truck, snarling when her lover thanks her, ''I didn't do it for you.'' Lo is awkward and suspicious, her hair a tangle of peroxide and dark roots. When the same lover buys her a frilly shirt, she explodes at the insinuation that she should soften up. This is a girl with no time for sugar and spice.THE space that will house the new offices of the Equitable Life Assurance Society at 1290 Avenue of the Americas is a chaos of construction now, with workers installing plumbing and wiring and the walls a uniform gypsum-board gray.
But shortly, top executives of the company will get a preview of what their finished offices will look like, including the lighting and the colors of the walls and floors -- even the texture of the wood used in moldings. Instead of trying to visualize the final look from drawings, mockups and samples, they will watch a computerized animation of the finished project.
In a society that has become utterly dependent on computers and instant communications, technology is becoming as important in the process of office design as decisions on layout and amenities. Some aspects of technology, like the computer animation, are highly visible demonstration devices. But more of it is in the largely unseen infrastructure, with the emphasis on wiring and devices to provide for an ever greater flow, and on communications and power facilities to keep operations running through almost any foreseeable calamity.
''Technology drives business today,'' said Lou Switzer, whose Switzer Group is designing the 500,000-square-foot Equitable project. ''Twenty years ago computers were the future. Now you can't run a business without them. At our shop, we don't have drafting boards anymore.''
Mr. Switzer said the demonstration is chiefly a communications device for people whose business is something other than interior design. ''Sometimes when you are talking to executives, they have no idea of what you are trying to say,'' he said. ''This gives us a chance to show them what we mean.''
The animation gives a camera-eye view, as it moves down a hallway, through doors and into offices. The depiction can be slowed, stopped or viewed from any angle. Nor are walls and doors an obstacle; the camera passes ghostly through them into the next room.
''It's a sales tool,'' said David Mandl, an architect with Meltzer/Mandl Architects. ''Now you have a way of conveying a sense of space to people who do not think spatially. It's a better way of getting your point across.''
He said the renderings are effective, but require a lot of computing power, huge amounts of memory and lots of time. ''You have to do a series of views and put them together like a flip chart,'' he said. ''We did one relatively short one that consumed $17,000 in staff time.''
Mr. Switzer said the data base that underlies the animation permits quick and inexpensive changes to designs if senior executives decide they cannot live with a certain color or type of flooring or an office layout.
''This eliminates the messy work of changing drawings,'' he said. ''That means a real time savings and a cost savings as well. Doing it the old way would require three times as many people and a lot more space.'' Paper plans are very much in evidence at the working level, but changes can now be gotten to workers in ''hours rather than days,'' Mr. Switzer said.
SHARING electronic information also cuts down on the seemingly endless meetings needed for a big project like the Equitable move, which is consolidating the company's headquarters staff from five locations in the city.
''If I have to make a change in some space, I can read the documents Lou has created,'' said E. Martin Waisnor, the Equitable executive in charge of the transfer.
Since the floors of the building are being completely gutted, the project's managers have the opportunity to put in an infrastructure that can accommodate growth in information technology. ''Every work station is being pre-cabled with Category 5 cable, which can handle voice and data,'' Mr. Waisnor said.
Having a modern cable system is necessary to support the shared computer network of today, said Matthew Davis, a vice president of Tishman Technologies Corporation, an affiliate of the construction company.
''In the past, when people moved into a space, one guy would have an I.B.M. with its own cable and the next guy a DEC with its own cable,'' he said. If anybody moved, you had to drag new cable.''
Category 5 or universal cable looks like the telephone wires used for the last 50 years, but has been designed in such a way that it can reliably handle high speed data transmission, including video.
''Everybody uses a computer today, if only for internal messages and E-mail,'' Mr. Davis said. ''That's why we recommend a uniform cable system, so you know what you can do without additional expense.''
The system is intended to handle Equitable's needs for at least the next 15 years. ''Fiber is too expensive to use on the floors,'' Mr. Waisnor said. ''The Category 5 cable is our backbone. But we are using fiber between the floors. With a very dense data environment and short runs, it is cost effective.'' Equitable will eventually occupy the 11th through 22d floors of the building, which is at the southeast corner of 52d Street.
Although it is seldom mentioned directly, the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 clearly got the attention of facilities managers, particularly in data businesses like insurance. They watched as companies struggled to get their computers and data filed out of the building, which lost both electric power and telephones when a truck bomb went off in a basement parking garage.
One company even resorted to sneaking athletic young executives into the building so they could climb the stairs to the upper floors to retrieve the paper slips used to record trades during the day of the bombing that had not been entered into a computer.Out of Afghanistan The Inside Story of the Soviet Withdrawal. By Diego Cordovez and Selig S. Harrison. Illustrated. 450 pp. New York: Oxford University Press. $35.
The Search for Peace in Afghanistan From Buffer State to Failed State. By Barnett R. Rubin. 190 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press. $25.
The Fragmentation of Afghanistan State Formation and Collapse in the International System.
By Barnett R. Rubin. 370 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press. $37.50.
These books illustrate what deserves to be called the Buchanan strain in American foreign policy. Not Pat Buchanan, but Tom and Daisy, F. Scott Fitzgerald's careless couple who ''smashed up things and then retreated back into their money . . . and let other people clean up the mess they had made.'' For upward of four decades, the United States fought covertly or overtly against Communists and their clients around the globe, often arming anomalous partners in the name of freedom. When the cold war ended, America declared victory and pleaded new priorities, leaving the mess in Asia, Africa and Central America for others to deal with.
A famous proxy victory was won in Afghanistan, the rugged, remote and fractious country that the Soviet Union invaded in 1979 to rescue an imperiled Marxist ally. In February 1989 the last Russian left, thereby ending a catastrophic war that claimed a million lives and displaced a third of the population. Nevertheless, seven years after the Russian withdrawal, fighting continues in Afghanistan among a dozen factions using weapons supplied by former foreign patrons.
In Washington, meantime, passionate engagement has yielded to baffled fatalism. The ''freedom fighters'' who were once lauded by three Presidents and a near-unanimous Congress are now discovered to be infected by Ancient Hatreds, that vague, useful and unthreatening adversary that has supplanted the Evil Empire. Three recent books expose the inadequacy, to use the mildest term, of that shameless denial.
Diego Cordovez, an Ecuadorean, was the principal United Nations negotiator of the Geneva accords that brought about the Soviet withdrawal. His collaborator on ''Out of Afghanistan'' is Selig S. Harrison, a Washington-based specialist in Asian politics. The authors take the story forward in alternating chapters, with unavoidable repetitions and, in Mr. Cordovez's case, a bit too much tittle-tattle about diplomatic wining and dining. Yet their narrative is an invaluable complement to ''The Fragmentation of Afghanistan'' and its sequel, ''The Search for Peace in Afghanistan,'' by Barnett R. Rubin, an American scholar who worked in the field as a human rights monitor.
Mr. Rubin is excellent in sketching the peculiarities of Afghan history. Unlike India or the nearby Islamic emirates in Russian Turkestan, Afghanistan avoided colonial rule in the 19th century. Its unwelcoming mountains and passes were guarded by fierce tribal peoples whose rivalries ceased when meddling foreigners appeared. Victorian Britain twice invaded Afghanistan, and twice found it could not hold and rule Kabul. The pragmatic result was a modus vivendi in which Britain and czarist Russia agreed to treat Afghanistan as a nonaligned buffer state. This arrangement held under Stalin, who maintained correct relations with the Afghan king, even sparing him from a Moscow-inspired Communist Party. Not until 1965, when the Soviets moved aggressively toward the third world, was an Afghan party founded.
Mr. Rubin's thesis, which seems to me plausible, is that in preserving its independence during the imperial era, Afghanistan also preserved a traditionalist tribal society that might have otherwise been modified by a centralizing colonial government. But the coming of the cold war, combined with the emergence in 1947 of an independent India and Pakistan, undermined the old equilibrium. Everybody seemed to have claims and interests in Afghanistan. Moscow, Washington and other donors, notably Iran and gulf Arabs, financed roads, arms sales and schools, so that foreign aid soon accounted for 40 percent of the national budget. In 1973, Afghan Communists joined with left-wing officers to oust the king and found a republic. This was followed in five years by a Communist coup led by the fanatic Khalq faction, whose leader, Hafizullah Amin, duly engaged in mass arrests, purges and torture on a scale equaled only by the cruelest emirs in centuries past.
The result was widespread resistance and a disintegrating army. In Moscow, Kremlin hard-liners like Mikhail Suslov argued that the collapse of the Afghan revolution would imperil Communist regimes everywhere. On Dec. 24, 1979, the first Soviet airborne forces landed in Kabul. Three days later, the Soviets executed Amin, replacing him as party leader with Babrak Karmal, a Brezhnev favorite who returned from exile with the invaders. An operation so brazen, in a country so hostile and xenophobic, was doomed from the outset.
In Washington, Jimmy Carter found overwhelming support in Congress for covert aid to seven resistance groups based in Pakistan, their politics ranging from secular democratic to Islamic fundamentalist. But in order to preserve deniability, this covert aid was distributed by the military intelligence service of Pakistan, whose leadership had its own Afghan agenda. It thus developed that the single biggest beneficiary of American help was the group led by Gulbuddin Hikmatyar, a violent Islamic extremist of a type generically described as ''bearded engineers'': university trained, supremely intolerant and viscerally anti-American. On the evidence of these books, Mr. Hikmatyar was also a drug smuggler, counterfeiter, murderer and unscrupulous intriguer.
This was our man in Afghanistan because Pakistan wanted an Islamic fundamentalist regime in Kabul. As the United Nations negotiator, Mr. Cordovez found that Pakistan was the biggest obstacle to peace after Mikhail Gorbachev began signaling his wish for a Soviet pullout. Mr. Cordovez pressed vainly for the creation of a transition regime headed by the deposed Afghan monarch, Zahir Shah, then living in exile in Rome. The King was willing, and a poll taken by the respected Afghan writer and poet Sayd Majrooh showed that Afghan refugees in Pakistan overwhelmingly preferred Zahir Shah to any resistance leader. After he published this survey in February 1988, Majrooh was assassinated with American-supplied weapons at the orders, so Mr. Rubin and others generally believe, of Mr. Hikmatyar.
But the greater moral and political failure lay in Washington, not Islamabad. On the evidence of these volumes, Islamic fundamentalists were not taken seriously by the Reagan White House. Speaking to Mr. Harrison, Caspar W. Weinberger, Mr. Reagan's Secretary of Defense, admitted that ''we knew they were not very nice people,'' but ''we had this terrible problem of making choices.'' It is the immemorial voice of Tom and Daisy Buchanan.
Washington believed that once the Russians withdrew, everything would fall swiftly into place. Hence the opposition to any transition regime. And hence, worst of all, the American decision to move the goalposts at Geneva in 1988.
Before the peace conference, Washington had agreed to stop sending arms if the Russians went home. But at Geneva, sniffing a deal and Mr. Gorbachev's desperation, American negotiators switched from ''negative'' to ''positive symmetry,'' that is, letting all sides continue to arm their respective allies. Belatedly, by that time the Bush Administration had decreed that no weapons paid for with its funds would go to Mr. Hikmatyar. But it made no difference. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia continued to shower arms on the fundamentalists.
Viewing the melancholy wreckage, Mr. Rubin remarks that if the United States and its allies won the cold war, no ally paid more for this goal than the people of Afghanistan: ''The maneuvers of party leaders may inspire cynicism or repulsion, but millions of unknown people sacrificed their homes, their land, their cattle, their health, their families and their lives, with barely a hope of success or reward, at least in this world.'' If any member of Congress in the large mujahedeen cheerleading brigade has raised his or her voice in favor of generous economic assistance and a vigorous peacemaking diplomacy in behalf of the Afghan people, it has escaped notice.
Karl E. Meyer, an editorial writer for The New York Times, has commented on Afghanistan since the Soviet invasion in 1979.YONKERS and Westchester County, with help from Albany, are rolling out the welcome mat in a triple-play to lure the New York Yankees into the financially ailing Yonkers Raceway.
The Yankee owner, George Steinbrenner, whose stadium lease expires in 2002, is scouting the New York City area for a new home because he does not like the Bronx Bombers' neighborhood. The county is making a strong bid for consideration.
''Diamonds are a girl's best friend,'' as the saying goes, so local planners are waxing lyrical and offering the Yankees a diamond big enough to play on on the raceway grounds, if all goes well.
Yankee officials have reportedly visited the city, but the team's manager was maintaining a strict silence on all offers.
With 97 acres, adequate parking, ''an extraordinary road and transit network, the site is ideal,'' said Yonkers Mayor John D. Spencer. Also, he said, the environs are attractive; security is strong, and crime is down.
There are other reasons for the red-carpet treatment, mostly financial, for a city with a cash-flow problem: a prestigious tenant capable of drawing 60,000 fans a game would reverse the raceway's downward plunge and fatten the revenues it pays Yonkers, now at an all-time low.
But is that enough? It will not be a walk, considering the enticements offered in New York City and New Jersey: relocation packages worth hundreds of millions of dollars, with a retractable dome thrown in.
''It'll be difficult to match it with our revenue problems,'' Mayor Spencer said. He said city officials had met with Timothy J. Rooney, the track president, and Charles A. Gargano, chairman of the Empire State Development Corporation, ''to discuss this with Mr. Steinbrenner.''
Westchester County is considering a money package of its own -- a proposal by County Legislator Andrew Albanese, a Republican of Eastchester, which could ostensibly raise money for a diamond at the raceway. Late last month County Executive Andrew P. O'Rourke said he supported the proposal.
It is scheduled to be discussed at a meeting of the Budget and Appropriations Committee of the Board of Legislators in a few weeks. Mr. Albanese said: ''It would create a sports authority similar to New Jersey's to fund a stadium, but it needs approval from the state, Westchester, Yonkers and the New York Yankees franchise. The committee would study the feasibility of such funding.''
Mr. O'Rourke said: ''We've talked with the Yankee organization that visited the track and other locations in the county. Governor Pataki and I agree that the Yankees have a home here. The team can't go to New Jersey because we've got places here for them.'' He declined to identify the other sites.
Yonkers leaders are aware of raceway problems and see a mutual advantage should the city, county and state officials succeed in their quest. Last year, the city approved a $22,000 study outlining the many advantages the Yankees would have in Yonkers.
Attendance has been so dismal that raceway officials have booked flea markets, festivals, fairs and other ventures to compensate for sagging harness race income. A few years ago, the track owners demanded a review of the track's assessed valuation, which won them a $10 million certiorari award.
Similar costly refunds to other businesses have critically drained the city treasury, Mr. Spencer said, resulting in a more than 9 percent property tax increase. The track is one of the city's major employers and taxpayers.
''We know what the problems are, but we're interested in running a racetrack,'' Robert Galterio, the general manager, said. ''If someone wants to bring in the Yankees, it's O.K. with us.'' If the team comes to Yonkers, however, there could be serious traffic problems.
''They'll have to build a few garages, that's all,'' Mr. Galterio said. ''We've got 97 acres; all it takes is about 17 for a playing field. Parking here is adequate.'' The raceway, he said, pays Yonkers more than $4 million a year in taxes from admissions, food sales and an O.T.B. operation. The county receives a fraction of that revenue.
Mr. O'Rourke and Mr. Albanese have urged the Yankees to ''carefully review'' offers made by New York City, New Jersey and Westchester County. Mr. Steinbrenner has made no commitments to anybody, it is reported.
A multipurpose, $1 billion sports complex on the West Side of Manhattan near the Hudson River would not be easy to turn down, with Donald Trump reportedly lurking in the background.
New Jersey, which lured the New York football Giants, hopes to put the Yankees in a lush complex near the Giants.
Gov. George E. Pataki and Mr. O'Rourke, along with Mr. Albanese, said the Yonkers Raceway was the ''right place in the suburbs.'' They cited size, location and road network: the Bronx River Parkway, the Gov. Thomas E. Dewey Thruway, the Sprain Brook Parkway and multi-lane thoroughfares like Yonkers, Mclean and Central Park Avenues.SHE says she was only doing her job, but to many residents of this upscale waterfront community, Assessor Edye B. Kershner is somewhat of a local hero. With the tax rolls straining to support the city's government and residents shouldering most of the burden for making those ends meet, Ms. Kershner's recent decision to reverse the tax-exempt status of a retirement community has been met with cheers, at least in most quarters.
''The cost of good government has to be borne by somebody, and it shouldn't just be us,'' said Leslie N. Landes, a homeowner and one of Ms. Kershner's fans. ''We've reached a time when the idea of automatic tax-free status simply won't fly anymore. Why should the average taxpayer always have to pick up the tab?''
When the Osborn Retirement Community first opened early in the century on 150 rolling acres near Long Island Sound, its mission was to provide a home for indigent elderly women. Today, the institution is decidedly more upscale, and it has amenities rivaling those offered by first-class hotels.
While it still serves the elderly, many of the Osborn's wealthy clients pay a $500,000 entrance fee to live there -- which is why Ms. Kershner said she put her foot down in June. The Assessor claims the retirement community should be paying its fair share of tax dollars because its original mission to serve the needy has changed.
But directors of the Osborn have challenged the Assessor's decision, and the controversy that has ensued has attracted the sympathies of beleaguered tax assessors and taxpayers countywide. With more than one-fifth of Westchester's property value listed as tax-exempt, residents and taxpayer groups are growing increasingly irate, and assessors are often the object of that wrath.
In Peekskill, for example, where almost 49 percent of properties, including the county incinerator, are tax-exempt, Assessor Paul R. Wotzak, who said he finds himself sometimes on the defensive with homeowners, has recently taken to calling himself ''your friendly assessor.''
''Don't laugh,'' he said. ''Most people don't like us. We have to work hard to keep them happy.''
Using the percent of property listed as tax exempt as the criteria, the State Office of Real Property Services ranks Peekskill 11th highest in the state. Watervliet tops the list at 74 percent, and Albany comes in third at 73 percent. In Westchester -- which ranks 23 out of the state's 57 counties, not including New York City --
As a result of figures like that -- along with decreasing state and Federal aid to localities -- the squeeze is on the homeowner. Louis R. Perone, New Rochelle's Assessor, said that in response, the number of legal challenges from taxpayers to their assessments has risen sharply in his city.
''Deservedly so,'' he said, explaining that in New Rochelle almost 29 percent of the property is tax exempt. He said a bill passed by the State Legislature in July would enable the county to undertake a complete reassessment of all real property, and that might ease some of the pressures for taxpayers and assessors. Currently, out-of-date assessment rolls cause significant inequalities in the way some taxes are distributed among property owners.
But exempt properties continue to strain the tax rolls, and there is a growing sentiment among some citizen groups at least to require a partial payment from owners of many exempt properties.
''It's criminal,'' said John D. Williams 3d, the founder of the Westchester Taxfighter Association. ''The churches can afford to pay and the schools can pay, so what it boils down to is that the rest of us are picking up the tab.''
In Albany, James E. Culver, executive director of the 1,400-member New York State Assessors' Association, said complaints about tax-exempt properties are mounting statewide.
''The municipalities still pick up their garbage and put out their fires,'' he said. ''They get police protection and their streets are lit. Perhaps they shouldn't have to pay the full shot, but they should contribute something.''
State and local laws provide full tax exemptions to what Margaret I. Iacomini, executive director of the County Tax Commission, calls the ''wholly holies'' -- hospitals, churches and synagogues, schools, nonprofit institutions, public housing and governmental units, among others.
Additionally, low-income older residents and veterans are eligible for some tax breaks. And properties like the former General Motors site in North Tarrytown and the county incinerator in Peekskill, which are financed by industrial development agencies, do not pay full taxes -- as an incentive to attract business -- although they make payments in lieu of taxes.
Embassies of foreign countries and houses owned by ambassadors are also exempt from taxes. The State Office of Real Property Services lists tax exemptions for what it terms 68 embassies, 2 consulates and 5 missions of foreign governments in Westchester.
Mark B. Russell, the Yonkers Assessor, said that as municipalities come under increasing pressure to get more revenue, officials would be ''looking to see if all properties that are exempt are indeed entitled.''
He explained, ''Their uses may have metamorphasized over time.''
In Rye, Ms. Kershner decided that the Osborn no longer fit the criteria for a tax exemption, and she has assessed it at $40 million, which could bring in $1.1 million a year, including about $590,000 for public schools.THIS is a house surrounded by fear and anger. At first glance, there is little to distinguish it from any other upscale home in this bucolic neighborhood. But a closer look behind the new plasterboard, windows and other renovations at 6 Manor Lane reveals a charred entryway, blackened bricks and a flickering faded yellow tape, which reads, ''Fire lane -- do not cross.''
In November 1994, a nonprofit social services agency notified the town of Somers that the driftwood gray house on this quiet street had been chosen to be a home to 12 men recovering from mental illness and drug and alcohol abuse. A week later a fire gutted the house's interior. The Federal Bureau of Investigation was brought into the case by the Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development because discrimination was suspected. The F.B.I. ruled the fire arson. No arrests have been made, but authorities say that someone broke into the house -- which was empty at the time -- poured a kerosene-like accelerant near the back door and staircase and then lighted a match.
That fire transformed what had begun as a not-in-my-backyard story into a symbolic battleground. And while the embers were extinguished nearly two years ago, the heat of the battle is as intense today as it ever was.
Neighbors of the proposed group home are frightened, frustrated and furious in their opposition. The men who had planned to move into the house and hope still to do so are also scared and angry. The agency, which is sponsoring the home -- Rehabilitative Support Services -- is committed to the location. Renovations are continuing and should be completed by this fall. To back away now, the agency says, would be to cater to ''terrorism'' and would send a message that if legal means to fight a group home are exhausted, criminal action is an effective tactic.
At the same time, administrators at the agency say they have been warned by the F.B.I. that the closer the renovations are to completion, the higher the risk of another arson attack. The house is guarded overnight.
While it is rare that a neighborhood welcomes a group home, no proposal has seen the venom associated with the one here.
''This was unprecedented in the history of this county,'' said Steven J. Friedman, Commissioner of Community Mental Health. ''This is the first and only time a proposed residence here has been torched.''
When Rehabilitative Support Services, which is based in Albany, first proposed the group home, it notified the town that the large single-family home would be home to 12 adults, who were then living on the campus of the Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center in Wingdale, N.Y. That center was shut down in February 1994, as part of a larger state plan to save money from hospital-bed closings and reinvest funds in community mental health programs. The yearly cost of keeping a patient in a group home is about $25,000, compared with about $100,000 for hospitalization.
The men in the program suffered from a range of mental illnesses, including schizophrenia and manic depression, and also had diagnoses of drug or alcohol abuse. The program provides 24-hour on-site supervision, and residents are given counseling and medication. All residents are either working, attending school or in day treatment programs. Active participation in recovery programs to maintain sobriety is required.
John P., 47, whose last name is being withheld at the request of the agency, is one of the men who is scheduled to move into the home. The former Yonkers resident suffers from manic depression and formerly abused drugs. He attends a clinical day treatment program for his mental illness and a program for chemical dependency. At the same time, he is working for his General Educational Development Test through the Yorktown schools.
''I've had my problems, and I'm receiving help for them,'' John said. ''To be in this program, you need to accept that you need the help. I'm trying to change my life. For the people who may not understand, we want to tell them we are trying to do our best. This is our lives. We don't want to be a burden to people down there in Somers. We want to be an asset.''
But some Manor Lane residents say that people with John's problems are the kind they do not want living nearby. ''You read about dual diagnoses, and it scares you,'' said Michael Mazzola, an accountant who lives down the street from the proposed home. ''We're not against group homes. We're against this group home, and this population.''
Residents expressed fear that group home members would be violent, and also said that the value of their property had already declined since the group home was proposed. They said they did not believe studies provided by the state agency that people with mental illness are no more violent or likely to commit crimes than any other segment of society. Nor, many said, do they believe agency reports stating that property values around group homes remain stable.
''The people in this neighborhood are people who spent their lives eating tuna casseroles and working three jobs to get to Manor Lane,'' said Town Supervisor William C. Harding of Somers. ''So, obviously, you're going to get significant opposition based on the fact that someone is moving in these dual-diagnoses people next to their dream house.''
Richard Taylor, an electrician, whose property abuts the group home, said he put his entire life savings into his house, which he built himself. Since he found out about the proposed group home, he has tried to sell his house, but he says he can no longer get anything close to what he has invested in it because he felt obligated to tell potential buyers about the group home next door.
''I used to think, no matter what happens, we'll always have our equity in our home,'' Mr. Taylor said. ''Now I'm stuck. Now I can't sell it. They say everyone has a right to live where they want to live. Well, they took away our choice. Our pursuit of happiness ended one year and four months ago.''
While many deplored the arson, it seemed to change few minds about the desirability of the group home. Only two weeks after the fire, more than 100 people crowded into Town Hall to protest the proposal. After years of court battling, municipalities found that they have very few grounds upon which they can oppose the siting of a group home.
Under the Padavan Law of 1978, which was named for State Senator Frank J. Padavan, a Republican of Queens, when a site for a group home is chosen, the sponsoring agency must notify the municipality. The municipality then has three choices. It may approve the site, suggest alternatives or object on the ground that the neighborhood is already saturated with such homes. A decision must be made within 40 days or the site is automatically approved.
The town of Somers sought to block the 6 Manor Lane site by arguing that it would cause an overconcentration of similar homes in the town, thus substantially altering the nature and character of the town. After several delays, the New York State Commissioner of Mental Health ruled last January against the town. The town is appealing the decision, but even the Supervisor conceded that there is no legal barrier to prevent the opening of the home.
''The Padavan Law is crippling in the way that it's structured because it's so narrow,'' Mr. Harding said. ''I'm not as optimistic as I usually am when the town of Somers enters litigation, but we promised folks that we would do everything in our power to represent their interests, and that's what we're doing.''WHEN the Connecticut Tennis Center opened near the Yale Bowl in New Haven five years ago, many residents of the nearby Westville section expressed concern about noise before, during and after projected concerts in the 15,000-seat stadium.
The consensus in the quiet upscale neighborhood on the city's southern tip seemed to be that residents could tolerate a weeklong professional tennis tournament -- which tends to attract a more sedate crowd -- but not the booming beats and raucous crowds at a rock concert.
As it turns out, their fears so far have been unfounded. That is because the Connecticut Tennis Center has not had a concert since 1994. Indeed, in the opinion of some, the center is a white elephant that has benefited a tennis promoter but hardly anyone else.
Though it was projected as a multipurpose center when built (with state funds raised in a bond issue) at a cost of $21 million, the stadium essentially sits empty for 51 weeks of the year, an arena that this year will be used for only one event: the $1.5 million Pilot Pen International tennis tournament beginning tomorrow in the stadium and on some adjacent 22 hard courts at the Yale sports complex.
The underutilization along with the nagging questions as to whether New Haven and the state even benefit from that tournament are causes for concern among many. Tax revenues have been far less than anticipated -- mainly because of the absence of concerts -- as have revenues at restaurants and other businesses.
Indeed, the only major beneficiaries of the tennis center appear to have been the players (the winner receives $150,000), and the promoter, Jewell Productions Ltd. (with virtually exclusive rights to staging events at the center), which is owned by a nonprofit organization known as the Tennis Foundation of Connecticut and receives the bulk of ticket sale and concession revenues.
Far less of a beneficiary is Yale University, on whose property the stadium sits, although its tennis complex adjacent to the stadium has been expanded and upgraded at no cost to the university.
Staging a big-money tennis tournament in a publicly financed stadium in one of the nation's poorest cities seems incongruous to many. In a recent article in Economic Development Quarterly the authors say ''There is no evidence that construction of the tennis facility has attracted new business to New Haven'' and the stadium project may have ''generated more negative effects, politically and socially, than beneficial ones.''
For all of the second-guessing, however, there is no denying that the tournament itself has been a success. Crowds, attracted by the world's leading players, have been good. After sponsoring the tournament at four different sites since 1973, Volvo withdrew after last year's event, whereupon Pilot Pen of Trumbull agreed to back the tournament for at least five years. The tournament itself is owned by James E. Westhall, who has been associated with it since 1971.
The one-week tournament is a year-round job for Mr. Westhall and a fulltime staff of 20, which is augmented considerably as the event nears. A onetime radio reporter who has developed a good rapport with many leading players and their agents, Mr. Westhall runs the tournament from an office suite at Long Wharf.
Not surprisingly, Mr. Westhall is disappointed that more events, in particular concerts, have not been held at the stadium, since his company expected to derive considerable financial benefits from ancillary promotions when he agreed to move his tournament to New Haven. ''We thought that concerts would work,'' said Mr. Westhall who had projected that as many as 12 a year might be held. ''We did not foresee what happened to the north of us.''
That was a reference to the new 30,000-seat Meadows Musical Theater in Hartford that opened last year, along with the modernization of the Oakdale Theater in Wallingford, now open all year. Last year, his company, Jewell Productions, presented eight concerts in conjunction with the owners of the Oakdale Theater. ''We lost money,'' he said.
Far more successful were two exhibition women's tennis tournaments starring Martina Navratilova.
This year, the only events at the Connecticut Tennis Center have been a walk against hunger and a road race, both fund-raising affairs intended to attract participants more than spectators.
Largely because its revenues have been far less than anticipated, the Tennis Foundation of Connecticut has been granted rebates of state admission tax revenues for the last three years, a subsidy of more than $300,000, according to the authors of the Economic Development Quarterly article.
Still, most political and civic leaders express the conviction that the tennis tournament itself produces benefits for New Haven.
A tangible one has been a street festival in downtown New Haven. The festival, which features live music and a wide array of foods, has attracted thousands of people nightly during the tournament.
''The tournament has been a tremendous success,'' said New Haven Mayor John DeStefano Jr., who was the first executive director of the Tennis Foundation. ''It's helped contribute to the community in many intangible ways. Sure, we expected to have had more events. But I think the tournament has become one of our defining characteristics.''
Paul Johnson, the first president of the Tennis Foundation and still a board member, agreed. ''The tournament puts New Haven in the spotlight, at least for a while, and there's a real advantage as far as economic development is concerned,'' said Mr. Johnson, president and chief executive officer of the Gaylord Hospital in Wallingford. ''It's one of the most successful weeks of the year in New Haven for restaurants, merchants and many others.''
Mr. Johnson conceded that ''If we thought that the stadium would turn out to be for tennis only, we would have given substantial pause.''TWO years ago court rulings virtually stripped condominium associations in New Jersey of their ability to impose fines and late fees on owners who did not pay monthly common charges on time or comply with the rules governing their developments, causing discord in some and a bit of chaos in others.
But a bill signed into law by Gov. Christine Todd Whitman late last month has given back those enforcement tools to associations. She has thus restored their ability to better govern the housing communities, where residents own property in common and share expenses, say real estate lawyers and industry professionals.
The law, which affects only condominiums, not homeowner associations or co-op corporations, became effective upon its signing on July 26 and overrides two court rulings in 1994 that sapped condominium association powers. Cases already decided by the courts, however, are not affected.
There are 237,707 condominium apartments in New Jersey, according to figures from the state's Department of Community Affairs, which oversees housing issues.
''These high-density developments are no different than small municipalities, so they need specific rules to govern themselves,'' said State Senator Jack Sinagra, Republican of Edison, who was a main sponsor of the bill. Being unable to enforce those rules ''could have become a disaster,'' he said.
Typically, rules govern such issues as parking, pets, noise and changes to the exteriors of units. They also help chase down delinquent owners who put financial burdens on those who do pay, said Dennis R. Casale, a Princeton real estate lawyer and chairman of the legislative action committee of the state chapter of the Community Associations Institute (C.A.I.).
The West Trenton-based chapter, which lobbied for the bill, represents more than 600,000 members of condominium and homeowner associations and co-op corporation shareholders.
Unlike tenants, owners cannot be evicted for continued infractions, said Mr. Casale, adding that rules were needed to maintain the community and property values.
Thomas Giachetti, president of the state chapter and a Princeton lawyer, said that with the new law ''associations have the muscle to enforce the rules.''
Many associations agree, including the one at Lawrence Square Village I, a 420-unit condominium in Lawrence Township. Winona D. Nash, association president and a nine-year resident, called the last two years ''frustrating.''
She said that the community, where many units are rented out, faced several nagging problems, including noise and pet waste, the latter a potential health hazard.
''We could not respond, we could not take action, it was discouraging,'' said Mrs. Nash. ''We were reaching for any straw to combat the issues and incurring more legal fees, which increased the burden on the association.'' As a partial result of that she said the monthly common charges rose.
''Now,'' she added, ''we have some control of our lives here.''
Basically, the law amends the state's 1976 Condominium Act by clarifying methods of enforcing rules and collecting delinquent charges. The need for change grew out of two successful legal challenges to those methods in which the courts ruled that associations did not ''specifically have the statutory authority'' to use them.
The amendment expressly permits associations to impose reasonable fines and late fees and to exercise any powers not specifically prohibited in the 1976 state law, as long as their master deeds or bylaws also authorize them to do so. (The exception is that associations can no longer impose fines for moving automobile violations, unless the state's motor vehicle laws do not apply to the development's roads.)
The amendment also limits the size of fines, which cannot exceed $500 per violation or $5,000 for a continuing violation. And while fines and late fees can become liens against the apartment, an association may not record a lien solely for outstanding late fees.
MOREOVER, the law sets up guidelines, including one that a fine may not be imposed unless owners are given a written notice and told of the reason for the action. Owners must also be advised of their right to participate in alternative-dispute-resolution procedures instead of litigation. If that fails they may still sue.
These measures, said Michael Pesce, a board member of the state's C.A.I. chapter and president of the Community Services Group in Clifton, which manages some 75 associations, will bring balance to the process and make sure that owners are treated in a fair and equitable manner and that ''overzealous'' boards slow down.
For years associations assumed that the imposition of fines and late fees were statutory rights. The courts agreed until the Walker vs. Briarwood Condominium Association case in 1994.
In that case the Appellate Division of the State Superior Court held there was insufficient statutory authorization under the state's Condominium Act for associations to levy fines. It also said that for an association to have such powers they had to be in the association's by-laws as well as the state act.A SHY nocturnal amphibian not much longer than a dollar bill is costing the developer of a Riverhead shopping center millions of dollars in potential rent revenues because one of its breeding ponds is on the 85-acre property.
The Eastern tiger salamander, though fairly plentiful in some southern coastal states, is on New York State's endangered species list and as such is given state protection whenever development is proposed on or near its habitat.
At last count, 30 adults and about 110 babies of the species live on the Riverhead site at the juncture of Route 58 and Exit 73 of the Long Island Expressway. Tanger Factory Outlet Centers of Greensboro, N.C., is building a 450,000-square-foot outlet center on the property, extending an existing 287,000-square-foot center on an adjoining site that opened in 1994.
When the 737,000-square-foot complex is completed, probably by next year, it will be the largest outlet center in the world. Its almost 200 stores are expected to draw 10.5 million shoppers annually.
Those shoppers will share the site with the secretive salamanders, because the developers have set aside a 32.5-acre central portion of the property, which contains the pond, as a protected preserve.
The amphibians, which shoppers are unlikely to ever see, have brown bodies with yellow specks and grow from 8 to 10 inches in length. They live in subterranean tunnels, coming out one month a year to lay their eggs, but only at night.
Although the land was purchased with the knowledge that it contained tiger salamanders, ''we donated more to a preserve than we anticipated,'' said Steven B. Tanger, the Tanger company's president.
The 32.5 acres, worth $3.5 million to $4 million, would have allowed him to build an additional 325,000 square feet, he said, ''so you're talking about an awful lot of money in lost cash flow.''
The Riverhead property is one of about 100 surviving tiger salamander breeding sites on Long Island, the only area in New York State where tiger salamanders, which prefer a moderate climate, live.
State guidelines call for protecting 50 percent of the land within a 1,000-foot radius of a breeding pond unless a study of the sitee shows that the salamanders there do not range that far afield, said Ray Cowen, regional director of the state's Department of Environmental Conservation.
Such a study was conducted for Tanger by Dru Associates of Glen Cove, an environmental consulting firm.
As part of the study the salamanders were trapped when they came out of the ground to breed in the spring of 1995 and again this spring. Before they were released, tiny transmitters were planted under their skins so that their movements could be monitored, said Ronald W. Abrams, one of the Dru principals. The most recent count of adults and babies was completed this year, he said.
Dru calculated that 23 acres were sufficient to secure the site's salamander population, but environmental groups objected, saying that was not enough.
THE property not only contains salamanders but also has a coastal plains community of rare fauna and flora, two pairs of great horned owls and other assorted and important plants and wildlife, said Andrew E. Sabin, a precious-metals dealer and an amateur naturalist. He said his special hobby was wildlife preservation generally and saving the tiger salamander in particular.
Mr. Sabin works as a state-licensed volunteer identifying tiger salamander habitats on the South Fork. He estimated that only 500 adult tiger salamanders still existed east of the Shinnecock Canal.
The compromise worked out between Tanger and the Department of Environmental Conservation, under which the 32.5 acres are being preserved, ''is a good example of how you can have sustainable development and still preserve an endangered species,'' Mr. Sabin said.
''Tanger will make a nice profit and the salamander will exist there, hopefully forever,'' he added.
The preserve will be surrounded by a parking lot, but Tanger will secure it with a high fence to keep people out, and with a 12-inch-high, 18-inch-deep concrete curb to keep any wandering salamanders in.
The preserve will eventually be deeded to a not-yet-selected nonprofit environmental group for management and to guarantee that the land will never be developed even if state regulations concerning salamanders are changed. The preserve will be opened to school groups and to scientists for study.
State officials say that developers, and they included Tanger, usually cooperate with efforts to save endangered wildlife once they realize the importance of such projects and the potential benefits to them.EVEN a short description of Chelsea Piers sounds like the breathless spiel of a tour guide. The new sports and entertainment complex fills four reclaimed Hudson River piers (each as long as the Met Life Building is tall) and includes -- perhaps ''boasts'' is the verb here -- a 70-slip marina, 200-yard golf driving range, quarter-mile indoor track, 50-foot-high rock-climbing wall, two indoor skating rinks, two outdoor roller rinks, a field house, six sound stages, seven photo studios, three restaurants, five sports shops and a mile-long waterfront esplanade. Plus three cruise liners at anchor. And did we mention bowling lanes may be added?
Simply said, Chelsea Piers is bigger than most people imagined it could be.
Including, it turns out, the developers.
''Everything was exponentially different than what we had talked about,'' said Roland W. Betts, chairman of Chelsea Piers Management, which built and runs the 1.7 million-square-foot complex on property leased from New York State. ''Right from the first contract, we knew we had a problem.''
Budgeted at $25 million when it was announced in 1992 and $60 million when work began in 1994, the development wound up costing $75 million, said Tom A. Bernstein, president of Chelsea Piers. (Subtenants have also made $25 million worth of improvements, which is why the project is commonly given a $100 million price tag.)
Now Chelsea Piers hopes to refinance $55 million of short-term, high-interest debt with longer-term, lower-interest borrowing. To do that, the developers said they need a longer lease than 20 years on the piers. ''If we don't get a lease extension, we will not be able to get refinancing,'' David A. Tewksbury, executive vice president of Chelsea Piers, told a City Council hearing in late July.
It is almost axiomatic in real estate circles that the waterfront's allure is treacherously siren-like. The expense, complication and risk of shoreline development have dissuaded any number of builders from undertaking new construction. Yet to be seen is whether an ambitious renovation -- effectively subsidized by the state through generous lease terms but otherwise privately financed -- can succeed in the long run. And if it does succeed, will it augur further privatization and commercialization of the Hudson riverfront?
Chelsea Piers Management is negotiating a 29-year lease extension that would allow the developers to defer payment of two-thirds of the rent for the next three years. Charles A. Gargano, the state Commissioner of Economic Development and chairman of the Empire State Development Corporation, said he hoped the closing ''will happen quickly so they can move forward and refinance.''
Mr. Gargano said he and Gov. George E. Pataki were ''very pleased'' with Chelsea Piers Management. ''They did not come to the public side for any kind of assistance,'' he said. ''They did it all with private money. We see this as an ideal type of partnership. This is a project the community is interested in; not just the West Side, but the entire city.
''We're trying to insure that this is successful and will not have to be abandoned,'' Mr. Gargano said.
To look at Chelsea Piers today, abandonment seems a far-fetched possibility. But these piers have known many vicissitudes in their nine decades.
Completed in 1910 to serve trans-Atlantic ocean liners, the comb-like array of pier sheds was linked by a headhouse paralleling the riverfront. In 1963 the piers were renovated for use as a cargo terminal, but that period was short-lived. They were to have been demolished as part of the Westway project, which was canceled in 1985. A new conceptual plan drawn up by the West Side Waterfront Panel in 1990 showed the Chelsea Piers as a potential development site, with about 720,000 square feet of residential space and 110,000 square feet of commercial space.
While awaiting the day that such ambitious development would be feasible, the state Transportation Department set out in 1992 to find an interim tenant for the piers. The Circle Line, which already operated World Yachts from Pier 62, submitted a bid. So did Abraham Hirschfeld, a developer and one-time candidate for lieutenant governor.
AT first glance, the least likely bidder was Chelsea Piers L.P. While Mr. Tewksbury was a director of Cushman & Wakefield, Mr. Betts and Mr. Bernstein were strangers to the real estate scene. They were partners in Silver Screen Management, which raises money for movies, and part owners of the Texas Rangers baseball team. What brought the three entrepreneurs to Chelsea Piers in the first place was simply a search for a new home for Sky Rink, the ice-skating facility of which Mr. Betts and Mr. Tewksbury were board members, which was then at 450 West 33d Street.
The developers themselves credit their naivete as much they blame it. Had they understood the realities better, they might have concluded that Chelsea Piers was impossible.
Since they did not realize that, they went ahead and built it.
''Inadvertence and innocence got us down this road,'' said Mr. Bernstein. ''It's very capital-intensive. Not only the cost of building it out but the investment in starting all new businesses. These things do not make sense on a short-term basis.''
Mr. Betts recalls the chairman of the Board of Standards and Appeals remarking that the proposal involved the most comprehensive series of zoning changes in the history of the city. ''If we had known that beforehand, maybe we would have stuck to making movies,'' Mr. Betts said.
The lease ran 10 years, to 2004, with one 10-year extension. The base rent, $2.4 million, was subject to adjustment after two years based on the Consumer Price Index.
As construction began in 1994, the budget was $60 million. To finance it, $17 million was raised from a few friends and family members. Mr. Betts said he and Mr. Bernstein put up $11.7 million themselves.THESE are some of the pluses of joining a private golf club: immediate tee times; discreet and learned caddies; greens as smooth as a pool table; fellow golfers who know to replace divots and rake sand traps; postgame lamb chops and extensive wine lists.
The minuses go without saying. Clubs will not publicly disclose their fees, but the priciest cost at least $50,000 up front and $5,000 in yearly fees, plus required dining-room minimums, according to a spokeswoman at the United States Golf Association in Far Hills.
Still, New Jersey is filled with people who consider a private club a worthy and reasonable expense. Would-be members wait as long as 10 years to join. Half the state's 272 golf courses are private -- far more than in the nation as a whole, where three-quarters of the courses are public.
When asked, the private clubs' golfers and employees -- who won't give their names -- dwell on subtle aspects. It's the atmosphere and the privacy they prize.
''We're not looking for any publicity,'' said an employee at the Plainfield Country Club. ''We're a very modest club. We don't need to be in the limelight.'' Members, he said, are ''people of respect and belonging, who want to buy into a social life, who want the atmosphere, the being amongst friends.'' His voice is refined; that ''amongst'' slips seamlessly into his sentence.
While attire like cutoffs and T-shirts is permitted at public courses, dress codes and decorum are strictly enforced at private ones. Collared shirts must be tucked into pressed pants. Cursing at an errant swing will result in a written reprimand. A member with several reprimands may be suspended or expelled.
The private clubs have unspoken rankings. Most renowned is Pine Valley, near Clementon, Camden County. Pine Valley is so exclusive that some Hollywood stars and famous athletes are said to be unable to buy a membership. Buildings are plain -- they include bedrooms and bungalows for those who wish to spend the night -- and the atmosphere is famously unpretentious. An affable employee who won't give his name is apologetic about his reticence.
Pine Valley Golf Club, built in 1913, is in the minute town of Pine Valley, created expressly to serve the club. A writer who has played there as a guest says the roof ''could use some new shingles.'' Its bedrooms are small and share a common bathroom, like a dormitory. ''They're clean but smell slightly musty,'' the writer said. ''The light bulbs seem especially yellow.''
But the golf, he said, is glorious -- beautiful and bracing. For years it has been ranked first in Golf Digest's list of the country's 100 best private clubs. Pine Valley bars women from becoming members, though they are allowed to play at particular times as guests. At least one woman who has played there says she is grateful, not resentful, and sounds as protective of the club's privacy as any member.
''Guys are charged with keeping the course in immaculate condition,'' said the woman, Topsy Siderowf, an editor at Golf Digest. ''The caddies are the best in the world. It's a beautiful place in impeccable condition and everybody seems to be in a good mood.
''It was a privilege to play there. But I don't think you should write about it. I just don't think it belongs in a newspaper.''WHEN Trica Jean-Baptiste flew from Newark to New Orleans in April on business, she fended off hunger during her five-hour trip with a hot dog and bag of chips she bought at the Cincinnati airport before boarding her connecting flight. ''Otherwise I would have been famished,'' said Ms. Jean-Baptiste, the director of public relations for the Parker Meridien hotel in Manhattan, ''because food wasn't served on either one of the flights.''
Welcome to flying in 1996, a year marked not only by increasing passenger loads but by the incredible shrinking airline meal. And as food becomes harder to find on flights, hungry travelers may add its availability to their list of concerns when choosing an airline or route -- right up there with fares, safety and frequent-flier miles.
Some airline passengers have been on forced diets since 1992, when the industry lost a record $4.79 billion and began reducing food costs. But the cutbacks are becoming more noticeable.
United Airlines, for example, last year extended to 501 miles from 251 miles the length of a flight before passengers are offered a snack, and lengthened to 701 from 501 the miles required for a hot meal. Moreover, that policy is only for flights during meal hours. Otherwise, only a beverage is served on flights up to 899 miles (roughly the distance from New York to St. Louis) and only a snack, like a sandwich or fruit plate, for longer distances.
While the average airline trip is just under 1,000 miles, which would qualify passengers for a hot meal on most airlines, many flights connect at hub airports, breaking that 1,000-mile trip into two or more legs. Often, neither of those flights is long enough to qualify for a meal, so it is not uncommon for passengers to spend the better part of a day on a plane and in a terminal without being given much to eat. Passengers flying USAir from Boston to San Francisco, with stops in Philadelphia and Los Angeles, for example, will travel about 11 hours, through breakfast, lunch and dinner hours. But they will be served only lunch, on the second leg of the trip.
Whatever the airlines' revamped meal policies have done to shrink passengers' waistlines, they have had a perceptible impact on the carriers' bottom lines. Last year, the industry's food bill of $2.261 billion was $368 million less than in 1992, according to the Air Transport Association, and food costs fell to 3.4 percent of operating expenses last year, from 4 percent in 1992. Airlines spent roughly $4.45 on meals per passenger in 1995, down from about $5.60 in 1992. Not only have many carriers cut back on the frequency of meals, they have also saved money by serving chicken, pasta, sandwiches or salads, instead of former mainstays like steak or fish.
''A $368 million savings might not sound like a lot,'' said David Swierenga, the chief economist for the Air Transport Association, ''but after losing more than $13 billion through 1994, the industry was desperate to cut costs.'' Last year, industry net profits totaled $2.376 billion.
While many passengers are resigned to flights without food, particularly since the proliferation of no-frills carriers, some travelers are still disappointed that major carriers offer less than a full meal. On a recent flight from Atlanta to New York, Rick Bubenhoffer, director of marketing for Studio Plus hotels in Lexington, Ky., had to make do with a sandwich and chips. ''I can remember,'' he lamented, ''when an airplane meal was really a meal.''
Airlines, however, say that they hear relatively few complaints and that passengers are more concerned about lower fares or on-time performance. ''The big airlines all learned from Southwest, which never made any pretext of serving anything but peanuts or cookies,'' said Lee Howard, president of Airline Economics, a consulting company in Big Canoe, Ga. ''They've been forced to compete at an increasingly faster rate because of all the start-up airlines. But it sure has taken the fun out of flying.''
Some passengers have not taken the changes lightly. Greg Davidowitch, a flight attendant with United for eight years, said: ''It amazes me that passengers don't complain more to the airline, but they sure complain to us. I don't blame them. Where they used to have a choice of three hot entrees, now they're lucky to get a roll with a slice of ham or turkey.''
Crew members often eat what the passengers are served -- when there is time -- so they feel the cutbacks, too. At some airlines, the food issue is addressed in union contracts. At United, flight attendants who work at least nine hours are entitled to a meal. But crew members often bring their own food, Mr. Davidowitch said. ''With the airlines cutting back on the quality, quantity and frequency of meals aboard, we often do brown-bag it,'' he said.
In June, after passenger complaints about a lack of food on morning flights, Delta Air Lines increased the number that would offer breakfast. More generally, it switched to serving meals based on flight mileage (at least 725) instead of duration (at least three and a half hours). Delta said the change would qualify more flights for meal service.
While first- and business-class passengers are not immune from cutbacks, the hours and flight distances required for them to receive meals tend to be more flexible. On Trans World Airlines, first-class passengers qualify for a snack on flights as short as 400 miles, compared with a minimum 740 miles in economy class, and the passengers are often served a hot entree when a cold meal is served in economy.
On some flights, airlines have even abandoned the traditional style of meal service. At about two dozen airports, American Airlines gives its passengers bags containing a snack as they board the airplane. During breakfast flights, the bags typically contain cereal and fruit; at lunch, they contain a sandwich, chips and a brownie. For Northwest Airlines flights between Chicago and Minneapolis, passengers at either airport choose snacks or make sandwiches from a buffet table near the gate.
Carriers rarely stint on food on highly-competitive routes, no matter the distance. Thus Northwest and United serve meals on the 80-minute flight between Chicago and Minneapolis and American will begin serving meals on Sept 1. T.W.A. and USAir serve meals between St. Louis and Washington, although at 700 miles, the trip would not otherwise qualify for even a snack. And meal hours are usually ignored on flights between New York and Chicago, where competition for business travelers just about assures passengers a meal.
Some carriers are considering selling sandwiches and snacks aloft, as did the defunct People Express, but others dismiss the idea because passengers can readily buy food at restaurants and food carts throughout the terminal before they board. (The popularity of these businesses, in the view of Mr. Davidowitch, the flight attendant, is proof that passengers care more about in-flight food than carriers contend.)
And the airport fare isn't always just fast food. ''Our customers are always in a hurry, always having to catch the next plane, but they're eager to try something new,'' said Carlotta Flores, whose family-owned El Chorro restaurant has three locations at Tucson International Airport.
''It has helped us that the airlines have cut back on serving food,'' she said. ''And I have to smile when I think of our carne seca, tacos and tostados filling the planes with the aroma of garlic and hot sauce.''
SPENDING ITYOU say you want to create a new television show, movie or Web site, and you want it to telegraph youthful cool and edgy sex appeal.
Would you set it in ZIP code 90210? How about 10023, on Central Park West?
Of course not. The neighborhood for you, Mr. or Ms. With-It Producer, is the East Village, home of the casually hip and ''thrift store meets hot citrus'' fashions, where H.I.V.-positive musicians mix with transvestites and anarchist squatters.
That, at least, seems to be the thinking of a lot of packagers of popular culture, who have dipped into a resurgent East Village boho scene for energy and images with the potential for mass appeal.
To promote the new movie ''Joe's Apartment,'' which is about a single guy and his cockroach-infested pad in the East Village, MTV is running a contest offering a one-year lease on a real apartment in the neighborhood.
Comedy Central, the cable channel, is introducing a stand-up series later this month called ''Tompkins Square,'' a name the producers hope will lend street credibility to what they are billing as edgy, alternative humor.
And Charles Platkin, a creator of a popular soap opera called ''The East Village'' on the World Wide Web, is spinning off a record label, clothing line and, maybe, a television series.
''What we've tried to do is take the energy from the East Village and create a brand name from it,'' Mr. Platkin said. ''It's smart, moody and edgy. Gritty yet creative.''
Mr. Platkin's cybersoap chronicles the young and restless of Avenue A, including a struggling actress, a writer and a rock musician with a heroin habit. ''Around the world, people are more and more aware of the neighborhood,'' he said. ''We're talking to people about putting 'The East Village' into French and Mandarin Chinese.''
Scene makers have trekked to the East Village before, most recently a decade ago, when storefront art galleries with names like Gracie Mansion flourished and gentrification reached Avenue B, before retreating ignominiously in the citywide real estate collapse. After squatters and the homeless engaged in rock-throwing melees with the police in Tompkins Square Park in the early 1990's, the city closed the park for a major rehabilitation.
Now, the neighborhood is back on the map, a resurgence that Joel Rose and Catherine Texier, husband-and-wife novelists who have lived for years on East Seventh Street between Avenues B and C, can measure by the popularity that their 15-year-old daughter, Celine, enjoys with classmates at the United Nations International School uptown.
''Five or six years ago her friends didn't want to come down here, and she had to go everywhere to meet them,'' Mr. Rose said. ''Now, all of a sudden everybody wants to come downtown. She's got a hip address.'' The red double-decker buses of New York Apple Tours deposit French and Japanese visitors at First Avenue and St. Marks Place. A block west, the comic-book and studded-dog-collar shops have never seemed so crowded with young people.
The East Village's current cachet is in large part the result of two phenomena: the nationwide revival of punk rock, whose roots are in such local dives as CBGB, and the hit Broadway musical ''Rent,'' an update of Puccini's opera ''La Boheme'' that is set among the struggling artists and musicians of the neighborhood.
Early on, ''Rent'' the musical inspired Rent the Bloomingdale's boutique. ''I was sitting there crying and saying, 'This is too moving a thing -- I can't commercialize it,'' said Kal Ruttenstein, Bloomingdale's fashion director, who saw a performance before the show got to Broadway and conceived the boutique. ''Then I thought: 'The hell with it. This is what Jonathan Larson would have wanted.' '' Mr. Larson, who created ''Rent,'' died of an aortic aneurysm before opening night and had indeed dreamed of a big commercial success.
The ''Rent'' look a la Bloomingdale's featured vinyl pants, miniskirts and skimpy T-shirts in head-swimming holographic prints, all put together with nothing-matches abandon. After every item sold out three or four times, Mr. Ruttenstein said, the store recently closed the boutique to give the concept a rest, although it may reopen with new merchandise at Christmas.
Eddie (Legs) McNeil and Gillian McCain, the authors of ''Please Kill Me,'' a recently published oral history of East Village punk bands of the 70's, have found eager audiences at readings even in the American heartland. ''Three hundred kids showed up in Iowa City,'' Mr. McNeil said last week from the road, where he and Ms. McCain are touring in a purple convertible to promote the book. ''It was amazing.''
Why does the East Village have the potential to appeal to a broad audience in towns and cities that are spiritually light years from St. Marks Place? Perhaps for that very reason -- rebellious young people have always sought out ways to distinguish themselves from the mass culture around them. Sometimes, the smaller and more conforming one's hometown, the more one seeks news of a distant illicit bohemia.
Yet, in packaging the East Village ethos via television, the Internet and department stores, its impresarios risk undercutting its antiestablishment appeal. Comedy Central taped the seven episodes of the forthcoming ''Tompkins Square'' one night recently on an outdoor set built on the park's basketball courts. Flood lights bathed the brownstones on East 10th Street for a funky backdrop. A helicopter, flying overhead, captured crowd shots. When the series begins on Aug. 31, the expensive production will no doubt convey something of the neighborhood's hip cachet.
But some of the comics were wary. ''I live on St. Marks Place,'' Eddie Brill, one of the performers, told the audience. ''Pierced-earring land. But it's not cool anymore because they're doing it in malls.''Ever since they helped send Westway to a watery grave two decades ago, Greenwich Village residents have stood united and steadfast against even the thought of commercial development along their milelong stretch of waterfront.
Until now.
The hulking two-story building on Pier 40, currently used as a parking garage and truck terminal, has long been a major point of contention between the Hudson River Park Conservancy and local activists, who want to knock it down and devote the entire pier to a park. The conservancy, a subsidiary of the Empire State Development Corporation, is charged with planning the park, which will span 550 acres from Battery Park City to 59th Street.
The agency wants to develop a portion of the pier structure commercially and use the revenues to help maintain the new Hudson River park. Development suggestions have included relocating Chelsea's flower district businesses inside the shed.
Community Board 2 and an array of environmental and waterfront groups have always held a do-or-die position against the conservancy's plan. But last month, a coalition of Village sports teams broke ranks by calling for a compromise that would mix commercial and recreational uses on the 14-acre pier.
According to a plan announced by the Downtown United Soccer Club and the Greenwich Village Little League, the courtyard in the middle of the building on Pier 40 could provide local children with up to four temporary playing fields, while preserving space for the 2,000 cars that now park on the structure's upper levels, a use that generates $3 million for the state annually.
Since their ejection from Battery Park City's overcrowded playing fields in March, hundreds of baseball and soccer players have had to trek to fields as far away as Randall's Island. If approved by the conservancy, the plan could give the sports fans a home by next spring, its boosters say.
Opponents argue that any accommodation to a commercial component, no matter how temporary, will play into the hands of the conservancy, which needs community support for its plans. ''My suspicion,is that H.R.P.C. is using kids as a wedge to divide the Village, which will keep us from getting the park we desperately need,'' said Assemblywoman Deborah Glick. ''The conservancy just can't be trusted. They want to give us a pinky and develop the hand.''
Michael Mirisola, who grew up in the Village, remembers how the scarcity of recreation space led to shoving matches among children vying for the neighborhood's only baseball diamond at J.J. Walker Park. ''I've been fighting this fight for 30 years and I'm sick of it,'' he said. ''I want this generation to have a place to play before they grow up. Why can't people just open their hearts up and stop playing politics with our children?''
ANDREW JACOBS
Neighborhood Report: HUDSON WATERFRONTMOST of the year, Cathy Schneck lives a modest, landlocked life in Forest Hills, Queens. She shares a small co-op apartment with her husband. She takes pride in, and worries about, her daughter, Roseanne, a college student. She works as a school secretary for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn.
But come warm weather, Mrs. Schneck heads down to the Barren Island Marina at the southern tip of Brooklyn and to her beloved sailboat, the Cathy Rose. There she has all the comforts of home: a shower, a kitchen, a television set, good books. She has the sweet, rusty smell of the ocean and all the fresh fish and crabs she can catch. And she has friends, some very good friends, among the dozens of others who also spend their summers at the marina. For Mrs. Schneck it is very much like a neighborhood, a community of people who love the water, love their boats and love looking out for one another.
''This is my backyard,'' she said. ''This is my way of life.''
Mrs. Schneck is one of New York's boat people, one of thousands of city residents who take to the water every day that summer sun shines, and a few when it doesn't. While others head off to the Hamptons or the Catskills, these New Yorkers prefer to spend long days and nights navigating the local waterways.
There is a lively and thriving recreational boating community in New York, a city that is, after all, water-bound. New York City is two islands, the tip of a third and a peninsula, all surrounded by rivers, sounds, bays and, ultimately, the Atlantic Ocean.
''We have a fantastic coastline that so few people are aware of,'' said Ed Rudetsky, a retired college professor and boater in Brooklyn. ''It's a wonderful feeling when you're moving through the water.''
New York boaters don't just utilize their waterways; they revel in them, gushing about a run up the Hudson to West Point or a sunset sail around Manhattan the way other sailors might describe a cruise across the blue-green waters of the Caribbean. They see an escape to the sea as the perfect way to combat the pressures of life in the urban jungle.
New York City is dotted with more than 200 marinas, boat clubs, yacht clubs and other sites where urban dwellers can launch their boats.
''They represent a very large part of the economy,'' said John Boldt, a longtime promoter of New York City's waterways and a self-described boat bum. ''But it's not readily apparent because they're all scattered around. It's not like G.M.: all in one place.''
Mr. Boldt is the motivating force behind the newly opened Dyckman Street Pier and Marina on the Hudson River in the Inwood section of Manhattan. The modest, working-class boat yard has a concrete fishing pier that juts out into the river and a marina that is still under construction.
Barren Island typifies the largely blue-collar marinas scattered around New York's outer boroughs. At the end of Flatbush Avenue across the street from Floyd Bennett Field, the marina has no restaurant, no ship store and precious few other amenities. Its piers are weathered and slightly battered. The large umbrellas for the picnic tables went missing long ago.
But to the 250 or so boat owners who use the marina, Barren Island is not only as good as fancier marinas; it is better. It has deep water for larger boats, a lovely view and direct access to the Atlantic. Fishermen love the lively waters of Rockaway Inlet. People who own power water skis love the easy access to the Hudson River. Sailors bask in the wind patterns that allow them to sail from the marina directly into the ocean without ever cranking up their motors, and without passing beneath any bridges.
Raymond Santa Maria, who has moored his 25-foot powerboat at the marina for more than 15 years, said, ''It's beautiful to see the sea, to look out at the panoramic vision.''
His cousin Anthony Santa Maria said, ''It's a way of life for us, a second home.''
Hamed Ramirez, 25, said he has kept his power skis at the marina for about a year and found most people unfailingly polite. He likes to cruise up the Hudson River to Manhattan, a 40-minute ride, jumping the waves left by barges and big ships.
Mrs. Schneck and her husband, Harold, have had their boat at the marina for more years than they can remember. The boat, a 35-foot Island Packet, is a combination of leisure activity center, vacation home and major investment.
It is large enough to sleep seven with comfort, not including Mac, the Schnecks' large but friendly Rottweiler. There is a hand-held shower in the snug bathroom, or head, and a galley -- with refrigerator, oven and sink -- that Mrs. Schneck says is only slightly smaller than the one at home. The master bedroom rests under the stern and adjoins the bathroom. The main cabin area has a bar, a table, bookshelves, a television set and pelican knickknacks.
She is a bit defensive about the image of boat owners as rich people with too much discretionary income.
''People say boaters have fat bellies,'' she said. ''But we work hard for this. I live in a small co-op. I don't have a big house. I limited my family to one child so we could afford to put her through school.''
The boat serves not only as a vacation home, but also as an entertainment center for their daughter, Roseanne, 19, who sometimes takes her college friends to the boat for summer cookouts.THERE'S nothing like a chain saw for cutting through paper. But how will it do against toasters and coffee makers?
Albert J. Dunlap, the 59-year-old turnaround specialist who has won the sobriquet Chain Saw for his ruthless cost-cutting ways, vows that he can do for the tottering Sunbeam Corporation what he did for the narcoleptic Scott Paper Company. But he prefers a metaphor of renewal, not destruction, to describe his method. ''I'll hit it with a defibrillator,'' he said on a recent afternoon. ''That'll make it revive.''
Skeptics, however, question whether Sunbeam's pulse can be jump-started. They wonder whether Mr. Dunlap knows the small-appliance and houseware business the way he understood the paper business, where, when a young man, he toiled on the late shift. And they speculate that he is dressing up the company for a quick sale rather than trying to build Sunbeam's long-term value.
Some investors and analysts question whether Sunbeam employees, who know all too well the modus operandi of this celebrity downsizer, will rally around a leader who dismissed 11,200 Scott employees, or 20 percent of the work force, including 50 percent of all managers and 71 percent of the corporate staff.
Others ask whether Mr. Dunlap will be distracted from his legendary focus on corporate restructuring by the national tour of his ''how-to''-book-cum-autobiography, ''Mean Business: How I Save Bad Companies and Make Good Companies Great,'' to be published next month by Times Books/Random House.
Moreover, investors are asking whether his presence justified the astounding $521 million increase in Sunbeam's roughly $1 billion market capitalization on the day after Mr. Dunlap was named the company's chairman and chief executive. The 52 percent stock run-up was one of the biggest gains prompted by a chief-executive announcement for a single trading session in New York Stock Exchange history.
And now, with the stock at $19.50, up from $12.25 the day before Mr. Dunlap's appointment on July 18, some fund managers ask whether Sunbeam can even realize the 59 percent premium the market has already awarded the company for doing little more than hiring Mr. Dunlap, much less get its stock price even higher. Or would investors be wise to cash in their profits and not hold out for further miracles?
Wall Street is sending mixed signals in answer to that question. Some analysts who have been burned by Sunbeam over the last six quarters as its earnings fell repeatedly short of their estimates are giving Mr. Dunlap the benefit of the doubt. Susan Q. Gallagher, a securities analyst at the NatWest Securities Corporation, recommended that investors buy into Sunbeam in the mid-$18 range and continue to use ''any price weakness as an opportunity to aggressively purchase the stock.'' She is predicting a stock price of $23 to $26 a year from now.
Other analysts are more skeptical. Connie Maneaty of Bear, Stearns & Company, for example, said Mr. Dunlap ''has a pretty good chance of success if he has the right strategy,'' but added: ''We are waiting to hear what that strategy is going to be.'' More disturbing to Sunbeam's backers is that those on Wall Street who look for corporate weakness apparently think they have spotted some. The number of Sunbeam shares sold short by investors betting on a slide in the stock price, and not yet repurchased by them, doubled in July from June to 513,000, the most since August 1995.
''I usually bet against braggadocio,'' said a manager of a hedge fund who has shorted Sunbeam and who spoke on condition of anonymity. ''The stock price gives him credit for a lot of things that are going to happen in the future.''
The manager contended that the company's fundamentals were questionable, that sales of home appliances had been slowing and that many of Sunbeam's products sold with the inconsistency of faddish clothing. ''It's a $22 stock at best,'' he said, ''but only if everything works out for Dunlap.''
Mr. Dunlap sat restlessly in his office, which is nearly devoid of decoration, and listened to a summary of the criticism. He fixed his steely blue eyes on a visitor, then smiled.
''For years I thought this company's name was 'Troubled Sunbeam,' '' he said, ''because that's what it was called every place you'd read. My intention is to get 'Troubled' out of the Sunbeam name.''
To Mr. Dunlap, Sunbeam ''is a classic Dunlap-type company that has lost its way.'' But compared with his previous turnarounds, ''this one is so high-profile, and the stakes are much higher'' said the stocky, silver-haired Mr. Dunlap, who still looks every inch the West Point-trained former paratrooper who has dropped into eight companies to raise them from the dead. But this time, he said, his reputation for repairing companies has raised the stakes for him personally.
''People are banking on me. Literally. I mean, just about everyone I know has bought stock in the company,'' he said. ''I'll have to move to Siberia if I don't come through.''
If he does fail, it won't be for a lack of self-confidence. Mr. Dunlap described his stewardship of Scott as ''the most successful turnaround in the shortest time in the history of corporate America.'' In his forthcoming book, he boasts: ''I'm a superstar in my field, much like Michael Jordan in basketball and Bruce Springsteen in rock 'n' roll.''
Indeed, the incorrigible Mr. Dunlap even used the occasion of his first Sunbeam conference call with financial analysts last month to mention that they might want to buy his $18 book ''so you can get insights into how I run a company.''
The title of his book is a pun, and Mr. Dunlap surely does mean business at Sunbeam. Although Mr. Dunlap has spent only 15 working days at the company he already has jettisoned the company's chief operating and financial officers as well as its directors of consumer products and strategic planning, hired key managers, put the A-team of consultants from Coopers & Lybrand to work studying Sunbeam's nooks and crannies and persuaded the company's seven board members to accept a stock-only compensation package (a change he also introduced at Scott).
At the very least, analysts expect this burst of activity to help him get profits up quickly. After revising downward their consensus estimate for 1996 earnings to 33 cents a share from 60 cents, they foresee a big jump in 1997: 75 cents to $1.25.
Mr. Dunlap contends that in its business fundamentals, ''Sunbeam isn't significantly different than other companies I've turned around.''IT'S August in Europe, and the serious business of vacations has begun.
Consider Germany. This summer, as it does every year, the Government has imposed a plan by which the country's 16 states begin their six-week-or-so school vacations at different times. This year schools in a patch of northern states stretching from Hamburg to Berlin closed June 20, reopening at the end of July. On June 27 a cluster of states in what was formerly East Germany, around Saxony and Thuringia, started their school vacations, and on July 4 schools in the big state of North Rhine-Westphalia, whose 17 million people make it roughly comparable to the state of New York, set their hordes free. By last week, when children in Hamburg and Berlin were returning to class, little Bavarians in the Alpine south were bidding their teachers auf Wiedersehen.
Imagine Washington ordering New England states to stagger their school vacations so that Vermont schoolchildren quit in mid-June, while Rhode Island children tough it out till early August. Why do the Germans do it?
The Big Exodus
It's simple. In August, Europe shuts down. Not only do governments go into recess, as they do in Washington and American state capitals. Most Europeans get four to six weeks paid vacation and, unlike Americans, who might take a week or two here and there during the year, they take it all at once. In Germany, assembly lines at the big automobile plants fall mostly idle; the hallways of corporate headquarters go dark. In Italy hospitals slow down, and pregnant women try not to go into labor. Roman movie theaters and most restaurants close.
A huge exodus of Italians and French, Spaniards and Dutch begins, from cities and towns to the beaches and mountains.
Of course, not everyone goes very far. Tens of thousands of Italian and French families travel comparatively short distances from one part of the country to another. The Milanese brave the autostrada and bake for three or four weeks on the Italian Riviera. Romans drive the few miles to balmy Ostia and Fregene on the Mediterranean shore. Parisians set off for the windswept coasts of Normandy and Brittany.
The Italians and French so love their own land in August that only tiny numbers -- less than 10 percent of their populations -- travel outside their countries.
The Germans are different. Given the chilliness of of Germany's northern beaches, about 90 percent of Germans spend their summer holidays outside the country. So many of them flood Italy's Adriatic seacoast to roast under the sun each summer that those beaches have come to be known as the Teutonic Grill.
Germany's reunification in 1990 combined about 81 million people, or roughly one-third the American population, in an area slightly smaller than Montana. (West Germany, with 61 million people, was the size of Oregon.) Add to that Germany's 14 million Dutch neighbors, whose vacation habits resemble the Germans', and the problematic logistics of vacationing en masse emerge.
Staggered school vacations are not the only means to a better-organized summer. To assure bookings at favored resorts for the next season, many Germans and Dutch reserve at the end of this year's vacation for next year.
Traditions Eroding
But European vacation traditions may be about to change, with even an economic powerhouse like Germany now preaching austerity as it copes with record unemployment and a wilting currency.
''The Germans, unlike, for example, the Italians, have already begun spreading their vacations out over the year,'' said Ralf Corsten, chairman of T.U.I., the German travel agency, whose 25 percent stake in the $135 billion German vacation market makes it the world's largest.
Old habits are dying in France and Italy, too, if more slowly. In 1988, 56 percent of Italians responded in a survey that they preferred those long, lazy August vacations; this year the number was 38 percent.
Not everyone is celebrating the trend. Massimo Masini, the Mayor of Riccione, a tinselly beach town on the Teutonic Grill, who moonlights summers as a disk jockey, lamented recently the absence of the Germans and the weakness of the mark, which has lost 30 percent of its value this year.
''Thank God the Russians are arriving,'' Mr. Masini said. ''Their suits are lined with American dollars.''
The European Vacation
Correction: August 25, 1996, Sunday
A picture caption on Aug. 11 with an article about the tradition of August vacations in Europe misstated the location of the Italian resort of Diano Marino. It is on the Ligurian Sea, not the Adriatic.PRESIDENT ERNESTO SAMPER entered the third year of his presidency last week, trailed by the ghost of charges that drug money financed his election. The absolution from the Colombian Congress that he fought so hard for last June is doing little to clear his name, while a new indictment against drug traffickers in Miami is kindling talk of his possible extradition. Lacking support in familiar quarters, Mr. Samper is launching a desperate, at times embarrassing, drive for respectability abroad and post-presidential survival at home.
Far from clearing Mr. Samper's name, the official exoneration has deepened the crisis confronting him; it virtually ends any legal means of removing him. The Congress, itself compromised by suspected links between drug traffickers and many of its members, has left Colombians with the strange conclusion that the scandal wracking their country is baseless.
The exoneration has also given a fresh breath of surrealism to Mr. Samper's tenacious efforts to appear presidential, despite popularity ratings that have dropped by half since he took office. Unwelcome in the United States, where the State Department has stripped him of his visa, Mr. Samper has gone courting support elsewhere, often at extravagant prices.
Looking for Respect
Earlier this month, he was embraced by President Jacques Chirac of France, who proposed an international consortium to buy coca harvests and finance crop substitution programs in Colombia. Never mind that the proposal contradicted the vow that Horacio Serpa, the Interior Minister who was running the country in the President's absence, was making at the same time. Mr. Serpa told protesting farmers that the Government was adamant in its determination to burn and fumigate their coca crops.
The cost of French support? Confusion, embarrassment and perhaps millions of dollars. Accompanying Mr. Samper in Paris, the new Foreign Minister, Maria Emma Mejia, announced that Colombia had decided to purchase $200 million worth of French helicopters, though no final decision had been reached on bids solicited from 12 countries. Back home, the Defense Ministry complained that the French helicopters were far more expensive than either the American or Russian models, and that the decision was not up to the Foreign Minister.
In Spain, Mr. Samper's next stop, Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar was too busy to see him. Colombia's own Vice President, Humberto de la Calle, who also serves as ambassador to Madrid, carefully avoided being photographed greeting Mr. Samper at the airport.
Since his exoneration, Mr. Samper has issued a flurry of promises for reforms, including get-tough policies against drug traffickers and increased authority for the military, despite objections from human rights groups. But critics complain that the reforms are like reflections in funhouse mirrors, lacking force and coherence, and the result of a failure to acknowledge that drug kingpins influence much of what happens in Colombia. The problem with the reforms, said Otty Patino, head of the civic group, Inspector's Office for the Truth, is ''they don't deal with our biggest problem, which is corruption.''
Some of the reforms seem like frantic attempts to salvage Colombia's image as a country serious about cracking down on drug cartels. Others, proposed and then dropped, would have weakened the means to check rampant corruption. In Bogota, graffiti on a downtown wall suggested that Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela, a Cali drug lord implicated in the campaign financing scandal, should be President: ''Do away with the middleman,'' it said.
Such brazen inferences, along with the persistent allegations of the President's corruption, have caused him to become more doggedly insistent that if drug money entered his campaign, he was unaware of it. In a recent letter to The New York Times, he asserted that the convictions of his campaign treasurer, Santiago Medina, and the Liberal former Senator Maria Izquierdo, ''far from casting clouds on my presidency, clarify this situation in a very positive manner.'' He failed to mention that Mr. Medina and Mrs. Izquierdo were both convicted, in part, for ''illicit enrichment on behalf of a third party,'' and that, in the case of Mr. Medina, the conviction named Mr. Samper's presidential campaign specifically as that ''third party.''
The President was also described, though not named, in Operation Cornerstone, a broad indictment handed up in Miami, charging Gilberto and Miguel Rodriguez and some 72 associates with racketeering, drug trafficking and bribery of Colombian politicians. That indictment may well have raised Mr. Samper's fears of extradition to the United States, and hastened his measures to protect himself after he leaves office in 1998.
Even reforms that would stiffen penalties for drug trafficking and bribery lack the moral credibility the Samper administration is so eagerly seeking; they come too late to affect the Rodriguez brothers, his suspected backers, whose cases are in their final stages in Colombia. Others seem more like counter-reforms, designed to strengthen his hand. One would put the chief prosecutor, who brought charges against Mr. Samper early this year, under his control. Politically he is managing to stave off the rumored threat of a coup with increased funds and other concessions to the military, which has gained leverage in proportion to the crisis.
Self-Preservation
And last month, in a speech opening Congress, Mr. Samper raised the prospect of constitutional amendments that would have increased chances that Mr. Serpa, his most trusted adviser, could succeed him. The changes would have scheduled all elections on a single date, eliminating the second round of presidential voting and thus favoring the candidates hand-picked by the two major parties. Amid a chorus of rebukes, the President backed down, but his Liberal Party may still get them through Congress.
Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, Colombia's former ambassador to Italy and one of the authors of a best-selling sendup of the left, ''Manual of the Perfect Latin American Idiot,'' said the maneuvers for political reform took Colombians by surprise. ''Most people were thinking either that Samper would finish out his term in 1998 or that he would leave,'' Mr. Apuleyo said. ''The third option didn't occur to anybody: that the same people would try to hang on to power after 1998.''
The WorldYOUR chance of running into a low-income delegate among the Republicans gathering in San Diego this week is 50 to 1, only a bit higher than the chances that the next time Congress considers legislation affecting poor people, it will hear much from any of them. The Democratic National Convention will offer better odds of finding a delegate with a family income under $25,000: they'll be just 14 to 1.
It was only 10 days ago that the Senate completed action on welfare legislation whose critics said would push at least a million children into poverty. The corridors outside the chamber, usually an obstacle course of lobbyists, were deserted. Senators and Representatives, who were deluged by lobbyists and constituents two years ago when health care was the issue, heard little from the roughly 13 million people on the rolls for Aid to Families with Dependent Children.
More important, they heard little from them, or from poor Americans in general, at the polls in 1994. Nor do they have reason to fear them on Election Day 1996. For voting among lower-income Americans has been declining while voting among those with higher incomes has been rising.
And those trends affect political agendas for an age-old reason: Politicians get re-elected by looking after the voters who elected them the time before. So as long as turnout among poor people declines while participation among the higher income groups increases, government is unlikely to focus on issues -- or solutions -- that appeal to low-income people.
Curtis Gans, head of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, argues that in 1990, 13.8 percent of the voters came from families with incomes under $15,000. In 1992, they declined to 11.0 percent. And in 1994 they were just 7.7 percent.
Why? ''The basic cause is essentially that neither party is speaking to the interests of the lower-income brackets of Americans,'' he says. ''The Democratic Party has become, in its message, studiously geared to the middle class and the Republican Party has never made any pretense of speaking to lower-income people.''
It's not that the parties are altogether failing to discuss the plight of the poor. The Republican welfare bill, which President Clinton has said he will sign, is intended to encourage work and end dependency. And the Republican party platform pledges to help the poor with tax cuts and reduced regulations intended to spur economic growth.
But it's clear that the platform is aimed at middle and upper-middle class voters -- like those with $2,000 in extra cash to put in an Individual Retirement Account for a spouse without a paying job. With 2 percent of the delegates surveyed by The New York Times/CBS News Poll reporting family incomes of $25,000 or less, the average somewhere around $75,000 and 11 percent over $200,000, there is little in the economic section of the platform to bother the delegates themselves.
Even so, the Republicans say how they will help ''the poor.'' The Democratic platform that was recommended Monday in Pittsburgh avoids the word desperately. It appears in a list of Republican sins, what it calls ''their wrong-headed and mean-spirited efforts to punish the poor.'' The Democrats say good things about the Earned Income Tax Credit and raising the minimum wage, but they never whisper the word ''poor'' to identify the beneficiaries of those programs -- who at least have jobs.
That hesitancy, which was seen last year when some Democratic Senators were briefly reluctant to support such a bedrock party issue as raising the minimum wage, may contribute to the declining turnout -- which, in a vicious circle, may then contribute to more avoidance of those issues.
High Stakes
The Rev. Jesse Jackson attributed the recent decline to a lack of ''candidates who inspire hope.'' But he said that in about 50 House districts this fall, he planned to emphasize the importance of voting, and the hope of wresting Congress from the Republicans: ''The stakes are very high, and much higher than the Presidential campaign.''
Black leaders are not the only ones to worry about declining interest among poor voters. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York was eloquent last September, when the first version of the welfare bill was passed, asking the Senate: ''Why do we not see the endless parade of petitioners, the lobbyists, the pretend citizen groups, the real citizen groups? None are here.''
Last week, he said a major reason for the decline was an intellectual disdain many Democratic reformers of the 1970's held for ''the political views of working class, low-income voters, which were at odds with the patrician left.'' That disdain, he said, led them to curb the role of low-income voters in party politics.
The welfare bill actually may not be a particularly salient example of the effect of lower voting rates among blacks. Douglas J. Besharov, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute here, said that over 30 years, ''attitudes toward welfare have almost inexorably led to a bill like this.''
''If there had been a Democratic majority in the Congress, it would have been somewhat softer,'' he said. ''But there still would have been time limits and mandatory work. Maybe the poor don't vote. Maybe that made it worse. But you have this underlying tide.''
Another cautionary voice is that of Ruy A. Teixeira of the Economic Policy Institute. He said turnout differences had less to do with the political agenda than with hostility toward government among the rest of the electorate. ''The poor,'' he said, ''have always been at the mercy of the views and opinions of the middle-class voter.''
Representative John Conyers of Michigan, the longest-serving black in Congress, said he was dismayed at a turnout of only 17 percent in Detroit in last week's primary, about two-thirds of the normal level.
''I'll tell you what surprised me,'' he said. ''I have never heard any more complaints about the government's insensitivity to what people need in this country than there have been under the Gingrich leadership. Yet at the same time, instead of that translating into a remarkable turnout, an angry protest at the polls, it turns into a whimper.''
Poor LosersBarry Mark was piling gear into the cabin of his boat, the 40-foot Deena-R. He tossed bedding down a hatch, stowed food in the galley, checked the barometer and the fuel gauge and got set for an eight-day solo run in the Dixon Entrance to try to catch some salmon.
Mr. Mark trolled. He pulled six main lines and off each line six or eight leaders with ugly-looking hooks. At 55, he has been trolling for 29 years. Never, he said, has he seen a year as poor as this one. His take has been a quarter of last year's.
''I'm glad my house and boat are paid for, and that I've got a few dollars in the bank,'' he said. ''Only that will see me through.''
A few hundred yards away, along the mucky banks of Delkatla Harbor, sat scores of hulks of abandoned boats whose owners have decided to throw in the towel. Many have taken advantage of a federal offer to sell their salmon fishing licenses back to the Government as part of an $80 million plan to trim the salmon fleet.
The fishermen's woes stem in large measure from a federal ban on commercial fishing of the chinook salmon, a large fish that usually weighs 30 to 40 pounds and is the mainstay of coastal fishing communities. Mr. Mark was trolling for the smaller coho salmon, which averages six to seven pounds.
After years of overfishing, the chinook, known in Alaska, only 50 miles north, as the king salmon, have been returning in depleted numbers to spawning grounds in streams and rivers where they hatched years ago.
In 1994 the federal fisheries department began lowering catch limits. In addition to the total ban on chinook this year are tough geographical restrictions on where boats can fish for anything.
The decline of the salmon fishery has hit many towns on Canada's Pacific coast, but none harder than Masset, an isolated community of 1,600 on the Queen Charlotte Islands, a scimitar-shaped archipelago named for the wife of George III.
The three Wylie brothers -- Tom, Scott and Russell -- have taken up the Government's offer to sell back their licenses, ending a dynasty of salmon fishermen that goes back to 1938 when their grandfather came over from Scotland.
Their father, Robert, who is 70 and gave up his license seven years ago, looked out the window of his house above Masset Inlet. Bald eagles were catching the wind currents, and a black-footed albatross scavenged along the beach.
''Fishing always has its ups and downs,'' Mr. Wylie said, ''but in past years you felt there was always a future.''
Jack Rowbotham manages the Omega Packing Company, one of two fish processing plants in town. Omega used to employ 90 people full time. Now it has 22 employees, working only a few hours a day. About 60 percent are Haida Indians, descendants of the islands' first settlers.
''Last year was the worst year in my 14 years here,'' said Mr. Rowbotham, 68, who as a child came to the islands with his family from southeast Saskatchewan. ''Last year we probably had 250,000 pounds of fish landed. This year we'll be getting maybe 50,000.''
Despite such sharp declines, Mr. Rowbotham has tried to keep the business alive. Omega workers now spend most of their time cleaning, boxing and freezing Dungeness crabs, popular in restaurants along the North American west coast, and razor clams sold as crab bait.
In the absence of large quantities of salmon, Mr. Rowbotham says he is losing money and will have to make a decision later this year on whether Omega will be able to stay in business. ''It's going to be a hard one.''
But adversity has brought the community closer together, says Masset's Mayor, Terry Carty.
''We're all working hard on scenarios that involve transportation and tourism, such as bringing pocket cruise ships here, or getting more value added from our forest sector,'' he said. ''Honestly, I think if no more wrenches are thrown into the works, we'll be able to overcome all this.''The Italian Government said today that it had reopened an investigation -- shelved inexplicably more than three decades ago -- of two former Nazi officers who are suspected of killing civilian and military prisoners during mass deportations of Italians to German prison camps during World War II.
The Defense Minister, Beniamino Andreatta, announced that military prosecutors had resumed an investigation of Karl Titho, a former Nazi lieutenant, and his aide, Hans Haage, who are now thought to be living in Germany. The move suggested that the Government was seeking to deflect criticism of a military court's decision this month that another former Nazi officer, Erich Priebke, could not be punished for taking part in the massacre of 335 civilians in the Ardeatine Caves outside Rome in 1944.
The announcement came only one day after Italian officials ordered the arrest of another former Nazi, Karl Hass, also in connection with the Ardeatine Caves massacre.
When a military court absolved Mr. Priebke of the most serious charges in the 1944 killings, the decision met with protests from relatives of the victims and from Jewish and political leaders in Italy and abroad. Reacting to the outcry, Justice Minister Giovanni Maria Flick ordered Mr. Priebke rearrested, saying Italy had received a request for his extradition from Germany.
In a statement, Mr. Andreatta said that Mr. Haage, who is 90, and Mr. Titho, 85, were suspected of ''violence and homicide against civilians, and repeated violence against prisoners of war.''
The charges focus on their activities at a prison camp at Fossoli di Carpi, near the northern Italian city of Modena, from which thousands of Italians, including many Jews, were sent to their deaths at Auschwitz.
Specifically, the two men are accused of the execution on July 12, 1944, of 67 prisoners -- most of them Italian Army officers and partisans, but also captured American agents -- at Cibeno, a town near the camp. They were shot in reprisal for the killing of seven Germans by Italian partisans in Genoa.
Mr. Andreatta said he had ordered the case reopened on the basis of documents discovered in 1994, after military prosecutors began examining the charges against Mr. Priebke.
Mr. Hass, 84, is confined to a clinic outside Rome, where he is recovering from a fractured pelvis suffered in June during a failed escape attempt.
After Mr. Priebke's arrest two years ago in Argentina and his extradition to Italy, hundreds of files documenting Nazi atrocities were discovered in Italian military archives. The Government's enigmatic disclosure that in 1960 the files had been ''temporarily shelved'' by officials caused an outcry in Italy and led to a Government pledge to reopen the cases.
Little light has been thrown on the reasons for the documents' suppression in the 1960's, but Italian officials have often complained of pressure from West Germany in the years of the cold war not to pursue Nazi criminals overzealously, to spare Germany political embarrassment.
Now, however, the sudden flurry of anti-Nazi activity has exposed the Government to charges of again subjecting justice to politics.
Carlo Taormina, a lawyer for Mr. Priebke, accused Mr. Flick of ''violating principles'' by ordering Mr. Priebke's detention, which he said had occurred before the arrival of the German extradition request.
Renzo Gubert, a senator of a conservative splinter party called the Union of Christian Democrats suggested that Mr. Flick had acted for ''reasons of political opportunism.One day this spring, Canadian Navy sailors climbed a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean and put marble headstones over graves of American and Canadian soldiers who died here while fighting against the Bolsheviks in 1918. Down the hill, workmen are restoring the Beaux Arts terminal of the Trans-Siberian Railway. Nearby, work is to start on another turn-of-the-century tourist attraction -- a mansion that the Communists expropriated from the family of Yul Brynner, the actor.
As if awakening from a decades-old deep sleep, this Pacific port is slowly reassuming the character that once made it one of Russia's most cosmopolitan cities. A free port in Czarist days, Vladivostok virtually dropped off Westerners' maps after the Communists took control here in 1922.
In 1948, Stalin closed the American Consulate here and shut the entire city, where the Soviet fleet was based, to outsiders. When Vladivostok finally reopened in 1992, foreign euphoria easily matched local euphoria.
With a deep-water harbor and a rail link to Moscow, Vladivostok is a natural gateway to Russia's Far East, a region rich in mineral resources and timber. Already Vladivostok and its sister port, Nakhodka, handle a quarter of Russia's foreign trade.
But almost five years after the opening, Vladivostok's landscape, like much of Russia's, is littered with failed American enterprises. After $10 million in investments, a Giant supermarket complex stands like a 90,000-square-foot beached whale after the American backers pulled out in May.
American companies leaving this year include I.B.M., Deloitte & Touche, and an experienced guide to American investors, the Pacific Law Center.
''It's impossible to do business honestly in Russia because of the taxes,'' an American businessman said last week in the hushed privacy of Nostalgia, a restaurant with red velour walls hung with oil portraits of Czar Nicholas II.
In addition to taxes that eat up profits, bribes and bureaucracy have taken the bloom off the city's coming-out party.
''The fishing companies complain that the only way to get the quotas is to go to Moscow with suitcases full of money,'' said Deborah Turnbull, associate editor of Russian Far East Update, a based business monthly based in Seattle.
But for every step taken backward, this tough sailor's town seems to lurch forward two steps.
''There is so much potential here that the greatest Slavic control freak in the world can't keep his hands on it,'' said Vladimir Berzonsky Jr., an American lawyer of Russian origin who opened his law office here in October.
Indeed, despite setbacks, this city has not seen such a strong American presence since 1918, the year the Brooklyn dropped anchor here with the first doughboys of the American expeditionary forces.
A seven-story American Consulate has opened on Pushkin Street, where it enjoys a commanding view of the long-secret harbor. As trans-Pacific contacts mushroom, the consulate now stamps out visas at the rate of 10,000 a year.
In a city where local residents were taught only five years ago to denounce all foreigners to the K.G.B., there is now a biweekly English-language newspaper, Vladivostok News, and daily CNN programming on a local television channel. This fall, an American-style international school is to open here, the first since the 1920's.
Once a cold-war flash point where American spy planes were shot down while testing Soviet anti-aircraft defenses, military tensions are now at their lowest levels in memory.
In a sign of waning xenophobia, the first foreigner, Andrew M. Fox of Britain, was elected in April to the board of the private company that runs Vladivostok's port.
Western institutions are taking root again after a long absence. The Vladivostok Rotary Club now has so many members that it will spin off a new club next month. Swelling the membership are officers of Coca-Cola, which started bottling here in May.
Russian Orthodox churches have opened, although the cathedral was destroyed by Soviet troops in 1937. High on one of the roller-coaster hills, Roman Catholic Mass once again resonates within the red-brick walls of Most Holy Mother of God Church, a sanctuary that until three years ago was a state archive. Later this year, the army is to remove cannons and war exhibits from a military museum. This crumbling neo-Gothic building is to be restored to its original owner, the Lutheran Church.
But, on the business front, most foreign investors have looked Vladivostok's taxes and bureaucracy in the eye -- and have decided to wait.
''The problems we have here are the same to all of Russia,'' said Pavel Morozov, international director of Acfes, a Russian conglomerate based here. ''The rules are always changing. You sit down to play poker -- and then discover that you are playing baccarat.''THE story of Vera Coking's property fight with the casino people is developing a mythic life of its own.
Two weeks ago, a New York weekly mentioned that not only had Ms. Coking turned down millions for her rooming house (usually called ''dilapidated rooming house''), but that she had also rejected a free luxury hotel room, with free room service, for the rest of her days.
Not true. Neither is last week's rumor that Vera Coking had died. Died in that dilapidated rooming house, broke and alone, when she could have enjoyed her last years with riches and free room service.
It gets curiouser and curiouser: the other day, four women in Bermuda shorts, casino tourists from King of Prussia, Pa., stood in front of Ms. Coking's house taking pictures of one another. Asked why, one said, with an embarrassed giggle, ''Well, that's the house.'' As if it were the last one on earth.
Ms. Coking's is the only private house left on Columbia Place, the block between Pacific Avenue and the Boardwalk and better known these days as the alley between Caesar's and Trump Plaza. But it is not the only remaining building on the block that the state Casino Reinvestment Development Authority (Creeda) has been trying for three years to condemn. Creeda wants to seize Ms. Coking's property and two others, a family-owned bar-restaurant and a pawn shop, claiming eminent domain. Why? To hand it to Donald J. Trump to put up a few bushes and a limousine staging area for his newly expanded casino.
Ms. Coking is the famous holdout because she's the easy target. Her white two-story house stands empty and forlorn (especially now that it is surrounded on three sides by a Trump Plaza parking lot). The balustrade, undoubtedly a selling point once, looks like a set of bashed-in teeth. And the whole house needs paint. Many would say she should take whatever money is offered. So officials point to her, as Atlantic City's Mayor, James Whelan, has done, to show how a stubborn homeowner can use the courts to stymie progress.
And so when a Superior Court judge ruled last year that Creeda could not seize Ms. Coking's house and the other properties to allow a casino to expand, an Atlantic County State Senator, William Gormley, drafted a bill that would give Creeda the power to do just that. The bill has passed the Legislature and Gov. Christine Todd Whitman is expected to sign it any day.
James Kennedy, Creeda's executive director, said once the bill is signed he expects an appellate court to void the Superior Court ruling. Robert M. Pickus, a lawyer for Trump Plaza, sounded even more definite. Saying that the Governor had already signed the bill, he said, ''The condemnation of the properties will proceed.''
THIS news stuns Clare and Vincent Sabatini, who run Sabatini's Restaurant on the corner of Pacific Avenue and Columbia Place with three of their sons. The Sabatinis know too well that the Vera Coking saga has diverted attention from important issues. It obscures the fact that Creeda wants to give private property to a private developer. It makes Ms. Coking, who wants something like $2 million for her house and lot, sound greedy, a little crazy. When it is not crazy or even greedy in the free market to expect that property a rich developer is clamoring to have must be worth quite a lot, no matter what it looks like.
Not least, the Coking saga ignores Sabatini's Restaurant, in business for 30 years. The Sabatinis have been offered $700,000 for their life's labor. After capital gains taxes, paying for a required environmental cleanup of the property and settling their lawyer's fees, they would not be left with enough to open another restaurant.
Then there is Peter Banin, a Russian immigrant who bought the Golden Island pawn shop, next to Sabatini's, three years ago. Two months after he opened, he received notice that the property he bought for $500,000 would be condemned. He was offered $174,000 for his trouble.
Mr. Banin, weary after an 18-hour day at the store, sounded betrayed by his adopted country. ''Laws rewritten to overrule a court,'' he said, shaking his head. ''Not even in Russia would the government do something like this.''
Our TownsThe 19th-century neo-Gothic church of St. Bernard de la Chapelle is something of an anachronism in the heavily Muslim immigrant quarter known as La Goutte d'Or. The district is named for its main street, redolent with the spices and music of what used to be French North Africa.
But the colorful green robes hung out to dry on the church's entrance railing show that St. Bernard's has become the latest epicenter of one of the most incendiary political issues in Europe, the struggle between authorities determined to keep foreigners out in the face of high unemployment and immigrants equally determined to stay.
About 300 illegal immigrants, most of whom are African and many of whom have lived in France for years, have been occupying the church since June 28, and 10 men among them have now been on a hunger strike, taking in nothing but fluids, for 37 days. On Friday, they were too weak to talk. They lay on mattresses laid out in one of the church's side chapels.
''They'll stay on their hunger strike to the bitter end,'' said Doro Traore, a Mauritanian member of the group who, like the others, has been given official notice to leave French territory immediately though he has lived and worked here for eight years.
Jean-Louis Debre, the Interior Minister, is determined to apply the tough immigration laws put into place by his predecessor, Charles Pasqua, in 1994. After going over the cases individually, he gave permission to stay to only 48 of the protesters, mainly to the parents of children born on French soil before the new law and therefore automatically entitled to French citizenship.
''The others have to understand that the law will be applied,'' Mr. Debre told the daily Le Figaro on Thursday before going off on vacation. ''I am determined, too,'' he said, noting that he had authorized 22 charter planes to return unwanted immigrants to their countries of origin since taking office last year.
All told, Mr. Debre said, 7,352 people had been forcibly deported in the first six months of this year, compared with 5,868 in the same period last year. ''I will defend the application of the texts voted by national elected representatives, not the interpretation desired by a minority,'' he said.
With Jean-Marie Le Pen's far-right National Front party having won 15 percent of the vote in the last national elections on a platform of France for the French, Mr. Debre's Gaullists and the opposition Socialists alike are eager to appear tough on illegal immigrants.
Much of Mr. Le Pen's support comes from people fed up with crime and drug abuse in the vast suburban housing projects to which the authorities have consigned many of France's 1.6 million legal North African and Turkish Muslim immigrants. They believe him when he says that the 3 million unemployed French workers would find jobs if all the 3.6 million foreigners who are in France legally went back home.
There are relatively few black African immigrants, but they, too, are getting stiff-armed, as are supporters of the St. Bernard's group in the French human rights movement.
''With this hunger strike, we are approaching real tragedies,'' said Stephane Hessel, who had been chosen earlier by the immigrants to try to mediate with the Government.
In March, the protesters occupied another church, St. Ambroise near the Place de la Bastille, but were expelled by the police at the parish priest's request.
With 124 children among them, they moved to a gymnasium and then to a theater complex in the Bois de Vincennes that gave them shelter until mid-April. Then they moved to an abandoned warehouse belonging to the state railways, and on June 28, two days after the Government decided that only 48 of them could have legal immigration papers, they occupied St. Bernard's.
''We have a lot of support from the neighborhood,'' Mr. Traore said. ''The curate has promised us that he will never sign an expulsion order.''
A note from the parish council posted on the church wall said: ''The parish council of St. Bernard de la Chapelle takes note of the occupation of the church on June 28. Though it understands the demands of the African families, it deplores the absence of prior consultation. It considers that the threat of expulsions and the laws on immigration lead to this type of situation.''
''It asks the competent authorities to resume negotiations immediately,'' the note concludes. ''In this framework, it considers that the Church has a public role to play.''
The church is closed to most outsiders except at mass. On Friday, it looked like a big day-care center, with children playing on the stones of the spacious nave, dappled with the red and blue colors of the stained glass windows above.Ross Perot and his rival for the Reform Party Presidential nomination, former Gov. Richard D. Lamm of Colorado, will deliver their own nominating speeches here on Sunday at a no-frills convention that does not even have delegates, but that will nevertheless offer supporters three ways to be virtual delegates.
Supporters in the Long Beach region can see the proceedings live, sitting in the convention center.
Elsewhere supporters can watch the events on C-SPAN or attend so-called watch parties sponsored by supporters in restaurants or motels, said a spokeswoman for the Perot Reform Committee, Sharon Holman.
''It's very different,'' Ms. Holman said. ''There are no delegates. People are interested in a convention, not a show. The delegates will be sitting in their living rooms nationwide.''
The session here and the closing one next Sunday in Valley Forge, Pa., where the nominee will be announced, will be financed by Mr. Perot. Neither session will have the trappings or rituals of the Republican National Convention in San Diego, which opens on Monday, or the Democratic National Convention, which begins in Chicago on Aug. 26.
''We are not spending taxpayers' money,'' Ms. Holman said. ''No cities have kicked in money. This is something Mr. Perot is paying for.''
The precise format for the two-and-a-half-to-three-hour session was still being developed, she added. But the agenda includes a video history of the party, the candidates' addresses, an interview with a representative from the accounting firm of Ernst & Young on insuring the integrity of the voting and an explanation of how the 1.3 million supporters can vote using the mail, the telephone or the Internet.
Mr. Perot is expected to fly here on Sunday, give his speech and leave.
Based on the 18.9 percent of the popular vote that he won as a Presidential candidate in 1992, Mr. Perot is better known to party supporters and other Americans than Mr. Lamm, a maverick Democrat and a three-term governor.
In addition to being the front-runner, the Texas billionaire founded the party, has financed its efforts to be placed on ballots nationally and has had a major hand in setting up the nominating process.
On the eve of his speech as the underdog, Mr. Lamm said: ''I'm up for this. This is wonderful.''
But there has been tension between the two camps, which have sparred over conditions under which the Lamm campaign could have access to the list of 1.3 million people who enrolled in the party or signed petitions to place it on the ballot. And on Friday, Mr. Lamm criticized Mr. Perot for using advertisements, speeches and the party's organizational machinery to promote his own candidacy.
The Perot camp, represented by Russell Verney, has said the list could not be handed over because that would be a campaign contribution of more than $1,000.
At various times, Mr. Lamm's side has said the list is a public document, and offered to rent the list.
The campaign also found the process and results of the makeshift primary, a mail-in survey, unsettling. Of 979,882 surveys mailed, 43,057, or 4.89 percent, were filled out and returned.
Supporters in some states said they had not received surveys at all or not in time to participate.
Mr. Perot won the support of nearly 65 percent of the respondents, and Mr. Lamm had 28 percent, enough for each to clear a 10-percent threshold and vie for the nomination.
Under the selection procedures, party supporters will receive mail ballots with personal identification numbers, Ms. Holman said. Supporters will also be able to vote through an 800 number operated by MCI or over the Internet through Conxion, a web-site provider, she said. The toll-free number and the web site will open after the speeches, she added.
Mr. Lamm said he had doubts about whether Ernst & Young could supervise the balloting from A to Z, including ballot delivery, return and counting. He said the firm could supervise only the counting. With personal identification numbers for all forms of ballots, he said, supporters will not have the privacy Americans have in most elections.
Mr. Lamm said Mr. Perot would be able to match names and identification numbers if he wanted to. ''It isn't a process that inspires confidence,'' Mr. Lamm said. ''You can't correctly count a flawed process. It is necessary for the credibility of the party to have openness, debates and a process that is above suspicion. And we haven't had any of them.''North Carolina Helms Is Showing A Warmer Side
A touchy-feely Jesse Helms? Who would have thought it?
Certainly no one who saw the first television commercial of Senator Helms's re-election campaign, broadcast in April, would have called the Senator huggable.
In the style of Senator Helms, Republican of North Carolina, the commercial was a blunt-edged attack on the two Democrats who were competing to oppose him this fall. Its main points were that both supported ''racial preferences in hiring'' and ''extending health insurance to homosexual partners.''
It harkened back to Mr. Helms's last contest, in 1990, when he defeated a black Democrat, Harvey Gantt, in a bitter contest that was notable in part because of Mr. Helms's subtle emphasis on race. Mr. Gantt is back for a second try, having won the Democratic primary in April. And now, voters are seeing the softer side of Mr. Helms.
His latest television advertisement, on crime, opens with a manacled prisoner being unshackled as a narrator recalls how violent criminals used to be released from jail early. The prisoner is distinctly Caucasian. The commercial ends with a little girl ambling safely down a country road.
For years, Mr. Helms has been among the most adamant opponents of abortion in Congress, saying in 1990 that he ''will never sit idly by while people say it's just a choice.'' But last week, Mr. Helms told The Associated Press that he understood the position of abortion rights backers; they also dislike abortion, but ''it's the choice part that they're talking about.''
In 1990, Mr. Helms answered journalists' questions only by fax. In 1996, he is available for interviews ''as often as time permits,'' said his spokeswoman, Julie Wilkie. Ms. Wilkie says Mr. Helms's abortion statement is not a softening of his views. The Gantt camp says the new Mr. Helms ''is a lot like the old Jesse.''
Others wonder, noting that Mr. Helms has dumped his old red-meat campaign strategists, from the Congressional Club, and hired a Texas media adviser, Scott Howell, who is renowned for his heartstring-plucking commercials.
''The guy's been born again,'' said Ted Arrington, a political science professor at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte. ''This is an enormous change.''
But Professor Arrington adds that Mr. Helms comfortably leads Mr. Gantt in the latest polls. ''The real test of a candidate's intentions,'' he said, ''is what he does when he's slightly behind.''
Kentucky Riding to Hounds For a Republican
First there was Chicken George, the Democrat in a chicken suit who followed President George Bush in 1992 to spread the accusation that Mr. Bush was afraid to debate Bill Clinton. Then came Butt Man, the filter-tipped Democrat who trailed Bob Dole this summer after Mr. Dole questioned whether nicotine was addictive.
Now meet their linear descendant, a nattily attired fellow working for the re-election campaign of Senator Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican.
Hunt Man, as the McConnell campaign calls him, sports the red velvet coat, jodhpurs, black riding boots and black helmet of a patrician fox hunter. In the last week, he has begun to show up at campaign appearances by Mr. McConnell's Democratic challenger, Steve Beshear.
Mr. Beshear, a former Lieutenant Governor who is now a lawyer in Lexington, depicts Mr. McConnell as a Newt Gingrich-style Republican who is bent on slashing benefits to ordinary folk, and says his values more closely reflect the tenor of the state.
Mr. McConnell disagrees. As evidence, he notes that Mr. Beshear belonged to an exclusive fox-hunting club in Lexington's horse country even as he carried nearly $80,000 in unpaid debts to supporters from a failed 1987 campaign for governor.
To underscore that point, Hunt Man is pounding the Beshear campaign trail with a sign reading ''Fox Hunters for Beshear'' and yelling ''Tally ho!'' at inopportune moments.
Mr. McConnell's campaign manager, Kyle Simmons, said Hunt Man was doing an excellent job. ''I wouldn't be surprised if he shows up throughout the remaining days of the campaign,'' Mr. Simmons said.
Wyoming Democratic Chance In Senate Race?Despite reports that Chechen rebels have begun withdrawing from the region's capital, fighting raged again today as Russian troops, backed by airstrikes and helicopter fire, fought to recapture positions where soldiers and civilians have been trapped for days.
As the battle in southern Russia continued, the Communist-dominated Russian Parliament voted today to approve the reappointment of Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin by President Boris N. Yeltsin. And Mr. Chernomyrdin quickly took the political offensive in the deeply unpopular conflict, demanding that the top Russian prosecutor investigate why Russian troops were unable to avert a rebel incursion into a city they have controlled for more than a year.
The Kremlin also announced today that Mr. Yeltsin's national security adviser, Aleksandr I. Lebed, would take over as the presidential envoy to Chechnya. He replaces the hawkish Oleg I. Lobov, a former secretary of the national security council.
The rebels' audacious assault on the capital, Grozny, launched on Tuesday, was timed to embarrass Moscow during President Yeltsin's inauguration, which took place Friday. That mission was accomplished: As its second term opens, the Yeltsin Administration is blaming its own officers and appointed officials for the bungled management of the war in Chechnya even as it vows to root out the rebels.
The rebels stepped up the fighting this week to underscore the collapse of a truce negotiated by Mr. Yeltsin during his re-election campaign.
The appointment of Mr. Lebed, a former general who was an ardent critic of the Chechen war when he was a presidential candidate, did not mollify even the President's friends in Parliament.
The pro-Government party Our House is Russia issued a statement saying that Mr. Lebed had ''all but stepped aside and issued meaningless statements and promises to draw his own conclusions but made no real moves to avert escalated violence.''
Today's special session in Parliament began with a moment of silence for the hundreds who have died in the last five days of fighting. After his swearing-in ceremony on Friday, President Yeltsin declared today a day of national mourning, ordering flags at half-staff and postponing a gala inaugural concert.
The new Minister of Defense, Igor Rodionov, handpicked by Mr. Lebed, told members of Parliament today that Russian troops had regained the upper hand in the fighting.
''For three days the situation in Grozny has been very difficult, but we have have achieved a breakthrough,'' General Rodionov said. ''Now, as I stand before you, the combat, the initiative and the military situation are on the side of the federal troops and the Ministry of Interior.''
Sergei Slipchenko, press secretary of Moscow's state commission on settlement of the Chechen conflict, announced today that Russian troops had broken through the rebels' blockade and entered the center of Grozny and that rebels were fleeing. But earlier in the day, Interfax quoted an unidentified person in the Russian military command who said, ''it is premature to say that the resistance of the separatists has been broken,'' and noted that the rebels were ''preparing routes for a possible withdrawal.''
Russian journalists, trapped inside a government complex in Grozny, reported a slight lull in the fighting after steady bombing throughout the night.
''The rebels are slowly abandoning the city,'' Vladimir Trushkovsky, a Radio Russia correspondent, one of 30 reporters and civilians pinned down in the building, said today. Another Russian reporter said by telephone, ''We already believe this is the start of our rescue.''
But late today, the journalists vehemently denied a government assertion that they had been safely evacuated by Russian troops. ''We are exactly where we have been for four days,'' a Tass reporter told his news agency by phone this afternoon.
In a report on the fighting tonight, the Russian television network RTR showed a Russian armored column under heavy fire as it tried to make its way through a residential district of Grozny. One of RTR's correspondents trapped in the government complex, Abrek Baikov, said over the telephone: ''Don't believe those who are not here, particularly those who are trying to save the stars on their epaulettes. Reports that federal troops have unblocked the city center are a fantasy.''
Figures for the number of combatants and civilians killed and wounded in the intense fighting have been unreliable, with both sides making sharply contradictory assertions. Today, the Ministry of Interior announced that the number of Russian soldiers killed since Tuesday was 118, with 663 wounded.
An Interfax report stated that the rebels said today that since the assault began they had killed 1,000 Russian soldiers, downed 11 helicopters, including 2 today, and destroyed dozens of armored vehicles.
In Parliament, the approval of Mr. Chernomyrdin's appointment had been expected, and in a secret ballot he won by a comfortable margin of 314 votes to 85, with 3 abstentions. Nikolai Ryzhkov, leader of the Power of the People faction and a Communist Party ally, explained his vote in favor of Mr. Chernomyrdin by saying it would be too dangerous to change horses in midstream.
''He promised people he would improve the situation; now he has to do it,'' Mr. Ryzhkov said. ''If a new person was appointed today, he could say: 'I don't know anything. I've only been here for a few months.' ''
Nevertheless, in his hourlong address to Parliament, Mr. Chernomyrdin tried to allay opposition lawmakers' concerns about the course of economic reform.Call them spiritual beacons, historical anchors or simply architectural statements that help define this huge city's neighborhoods. The fact is that houses of worship stand proudly on countless corners, their importance most apparent when one disappears.
That was made painfully clear when the 133-year-old Brighton Heights Reformed Church on Staten Island, whose delicate white steeple could be seen from the Verrazano- Narrows Bridge, burned almost to the ground on June 28.
''Even now, people stand at the site and weep, people I don't even know,'' said the Rev. Robert Schwander, its pastor. ''For so many, that church represented hope, peace, security.''
Churches, synagogues, mosques and temples -- all are physical stamps of faith. But they are also buildings, and vulnerable to the prosaic perils of this world: termites, storm damage, vandals and, in the Staten Island case, restoration work gone awry. Paint strippers using a heat gun may have caused a spark in the steeple.
Religious groups are often poor in both money and technical expertise and almost always pledged to loftier spiritual goals than restoring stained glass. As the years roll by, the result is that churches are diminished in number and beauty.
That's the status quo being fought by the New York Landmarks Conservancy, a private group that works closely with the city to preserve its historical buildings.
The conservancy's Sacred Sites and Properties Fund concentrates on religious buildings, offering financial and technical resources to help preserve them. It had aided the Staten Island church twice in past repair projects, and is now helping find building professionals who will be sensitive to its architectural history in the new building. The church will be rebuilt as a smaller imitation.
Motivated by the Staten Island example, it is also rushing to prepare a pamphlet for national distribution to outline procedures for renovating old churches and synagogues, advice it has only given verbally in the past.
''The building's gone and this is something that did not need to happen,'' said Ken Lustbader, director of the program. ''It represents a loss of the continuity of history.''
The conservancy calls its Sacred Sites initiative the only grant program in the nation earmarked for the preservation of religious properties and says it has given $1.6 million in grants. Though its officials say the sum is very small compared with the need, they also say it helps address a general reluctance of religious institutions, most of which are struggling for cash, to submit to the stipulations of strict regulations of formal landmark designation -- which include exactly which materials must be used for repairs.
Because most clergy members, as well as deacons and trustees and other governing bodies, know little about keeping up historic properties, says Peg Breen, the conservancy's president, her group must function as a ''missionary in reverse,'' preaching a gospel emphasizing the importance of historic structures. ''It opens their eyes again to what they really have,'' she said. The next step is to present the endless cycle of maintenance and repair as less than odious. ''We spend a lot of time letting people know it's not as bad as they think it is,'' she said.
The highest grant is never more than $15,000, but the biggest impact is often not monetary. The program offers maintenance workshops to building supervisors, sends a technical assistance newsletter to 6,000 caretakers of religious buildings nationwide and helps arrange loans at below-market rates in New York State. Often the most important thing it does is give referrals to contractors expert in historical work. ''We provide a level of comfort,'' Mr. Lustbader said.
He is quick to point out that the conservancy did not recommend the contractor for the 1988 painting of the Staten Island church, from which the troubles leading to the fire are thought to have begun. For the initial paint removal, that contractor used a high-pressure water gun where old-fashioned scraping would have been more appropriate, Mr. Lustbader said. A result was that the paint never properly adhered to the wood, necessitating the recent attempt at removal with heat guns, which caused the fire.
In another story of backfiring repairs, Grace Church, on Broadway at 10th Street, applied a waterproof substance, Dekosit, to its stone building blocks years ago. Dekosit turned out to create nitric acid in sunlight, and has been damaging the stones it was meant to protect. Sacred Sites granted the church $3,500 last year to remove the Dekosit.
Each house of worship has its own story to tell. But all are variations on the Staten Island theme, a scramble to keep ahead of the ravages of time.
Baptist Temple in downtown Brooklyn at 360 Schermerhorn Street, which houses that borough's oldest Baptist congregation, is a current project of the conservancy. It has shrunk to just 150 members, but in the last few years has spent $60,000 on restoration, $40,000 of this for stained glass. Members themselves have painted, doing all the interior they could reach.
One of them, Keith Bigger, has worked for five years to restore the J.W. Steere & Company organ, which has 2,553 pipes counting the 500 that had been stolen and had to be replaced. When he began, only one keyboard played. Now all four play and the pedals work. His dedication is suggested by the fact he customarily sleeps in a cot next to the organ.
The conservancy's contribution was to pay for a survey that determined that the most pressing need was to fix the roof, gutters and other aspects of the drainage system. It also recommended three contractors. ''In many congregations, somebody knows somebody who knows the friend of a friend who may not know the subtleties of restoring a historic property,'' Mr. Lustbader said. ''That isn't good enough.''
The result of a refurbished Baptist Temple could be to turn around the membership slide. Arthur Nooregaard, church administrator, holds that it at least cannot hurt. ''If the doors of the church look tacky, people might come by and say I didn't know whether the church was open or not,'' he said.
In another Brooklyn neighborhood, the Reformed Church of South Bushwick at 855-67 Bushwick Avenue, with its white wood, slender steeple and green shutters, seems oddly transported from a Vermont village. But the area is so poor that 46 percent of the people are on public assistance, said the Rev. Kenneth Cumberbatch. But his congregation is determined to finance a new roof, in part to continue providing everything from the Cub Scouts to Alcoholics Anonymous a place to meet.It's easy to tell where the real money in Zambia is. Just look underfoot.
The carpet runners in the dingy halls of the Ministry of Finance are made of scuffed plastic. But in the lovely open-atrium headquarters of Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines, the runners are custom woven with the company logo: the roan antelope that back in 1902 was shot by a prospector who found its body lying atop a rich vein of green ore.
The national copper company produces 90 percent of Zambia's foreign exchange. It employs nearly 50,000 people. In a country where the average income is about $350 a year, it owns guest houses where visitors gaze across lakes into Zaire while dining off ivy-patterned china. Its hospital in Kitwe has the country's only CAT scanner. Its Mpelembe High School for miners' children has a pass rate on national exams of nearly 100 percent.
And it is all up for sale.
The company (universally referred to by its initials, Z.C.C.M.) is the crown jewel in Zambia's aggressive privatization program, which is converting 27 years of command-economy socialism under former President Kenneth D. Kaunda into what may be Africa's freest economy.
Since Frederick Chiluba came to power in 1991 in Zambia's first multiparty elections, he has moved to reverse Mr. Kaunda's policies and to Westernize the economy with a combination of help and arm-twisting from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the lead lenders for the $6.3 billion in external debt the country is carrying.
All exchange controls, tariff barriers and food subsidies have been dropped in the shock-treatment switch-over to rampant capitalism.
Virtually everything the state owned is for sale, from the national concrete industry to corner grocery stores to antique steam trains to leases on camps in the national parks. In the last two years, 140 enterprises have been sold, said Valentine Chitalu, chief executive of the Zambian Privatization Agency.
''We had to liberalize quickly,'' Mr. Chitalu said. ''For years, Zambia was 80 percent state-owned, and the worst-run country in Africa. There were no goods in the shops, and you could wait five hours for a bus. So the political outrage that could create a climate for privatization was there. Now it's just a matter of keeping our nerve.''
Mr. Chitalu, who is 34, commands enormous respect from the Western bankers and diplomats with whom he works. Last year, in a study of Zambia's work so far, the private research institute S.R.I. International, in Menlo Park, Calif., praised the privatization program, saying that if it kept up its momentum, it would be ''a model for the African continent.'' Its momentum has since increased.
Foreign buyers, particularly South African and British ones, are snapping up the economy. Tate & Lyle, the British food company, bought the national sugar industry for $63 million. ''Now it's their lowest-cost producer,'' Mr. Chitalu said.
Lonrho, another British conglomerate, bought the cotton industry. South African Breweries bought one of two national breweries; Shoprite of South Africa absorbed state stores into its grocery chain.
Last month, it was announced that the biggest prize, the copper company, would be offered for sale, probably in four packages: three mine-smelter combinations and a power company. Its lesser assets, from its private airline to cobalt-rich furnace slag, may be sold separately.
As in all its other sales, the Zambian Government has outside help. The privatization agency has five Wall Street investment bankers on staff, their salaries paid by the United States Agency for International Development. The copper deal is so big that the World Bank brought in the investment bank N. M. Rothschild & Sons and the London law firm Clifford Chance as consultants.
None of this is to say that the copper company is thriving. For 20 years, Mr. Kaunda's Government drained off the foreign exchange it earned, refusing to plow back enough to buy new machinery. Annual production fell from a peak of 700,000 tons in 1969 to fewer than 300,000 last year. And copper prices have been in a slump since the 1970's. The company lost about $40 million in the first quarter of this year.
Huge investments are needed. The Nchanga open-pit mine, the company's most productive, needs $150 million in new equipment, one expert estimated. Right now, the cash crunch is so bad that it cannot buy a simple gravel crusher to harden the pit's roads during the rainy season.
But, despite the problems, big mining companies like South Africa's Anglovaal and America's Phelps Dodge are showing interest. The company is setting up an office at each mine where geological, metallurgical and financial information will be concentrated for the stream of investors it hopes are coming.
And a tour 3,000 feet down into the Konkola mine shows the huge potential -- and huge potential costs -- that investors face. Konkola is the wettest mine in the world, shedding 50 tons of water for every ton of ore extracted. Where aquifers are being drained to make new shafts possible, miners and visitors wade through tunnels thigh-deep in water.
John Kalubai, who runs a cavernous underground pumping station, seems remarkably calm for a man who, in a power failure, has 20 minutes to restart his pumps or drown. ''It's worked pretty smoothly for 23 years,'' he said. ''But it's getting harder to afford spare parts.''
Once the underground lake is empty, miners can begin sinking much deeper shafts to get at a huge formation that is 3.8 percent copper -- three times as rich as many mines in the Americas -- and big enough to last 100 years. But the cost of the digging has been estimated at $600 million.As a teen-ager, Vic Damone was an usher there. In his autobiography, former Schools Chancellor Joseph A. Fernandez recalled sneaking into shows with his friends. Erstwhile bobby soxers remember squealing in ecstasy for the young Frank Sinatra, who rose to fame on its stage.
For New Yorkers of a certain age, the Paramount Theater, the Times Square entertainment palace at Broadway and West 43d Street, a fixture of the Great White Way in Damon Runyon-era New York, remains a repository of memories, even though it hasn't been there in more than 20 years.
Now it's coming back, or at least a piece of it. The 3,600-seat theater shut down in 1964, and its vast hall was converted to office space a few years later. What's coming back is the marquee, which disappeared during the conversion.
The city's Landmarks Preservation Commission recently approved a proposal by Newmark & Company, the owners of the Paramount Building, the 33-story ziggurat at 1501 Broadway that once housed the theater, to recreate the ornate, curvy, garishly lighted marquee that announced the presence of stars like Gary Cooper and Claudette Colbert on screen and musicians like Ella Fitzgerald and Harry James on stage.
In addition, said Jeffrey Gural, the president of Newmark, the four-sided clock near the top of the building will be set in motion again, and the globe on top of the clock will be lighted after years of darkness.
''When we're all done, the building will look again like it did in the 40's,'' Mr. Gural said.
The original marquee, which is the one being reconstructed, was erected with the building in the late 1920's. ''Then sometime in the mid- to late 50's, the original was replaced by a more modern-looking one, which was much larger,'' said Irwin Sheftel, a vice president of Spectacolor Communications, a Times Square signage manufacturer that did the historical research and will do the construction.
''The reason I guess that date,'' Mr. Sheftel said, ''is that I've seen a photograph of the new marquee in which there was a 30- to 40-foot Elvis cutout seen on top of it, and it was the skinny Elvis.''
The purpose of the restoration, as with many of the changes in Times Square, is commercial. Designed by Tobin/Parnes, a SoHo architecture firm, the marquee will not be placed over the current entrance to the building, but in its original location. That will be over an entrance to be created to an entertainment-restaurant-retail establishment planned by Robert Earl.
Mr. Earl is the president of Planet Hollywood International, whose sports-theme All Star Cafe opened to much hoopla on Times Square a year ago. A spokeswoman for Mr. Earl, Wendi Kopsick, said project details are not available.
Mr. Gural said that the restoration of the marquee, which will be paid for by Planet Hollywood and carry the logo of the new club, was conceived as a way to attract a tenant to the space, which includes a 40,000-square-foot basement. (One or more of the current retailers on the corner will be asked to vacate).
The New York Times now rents the basement to store newsprint for its presses next door. But those presses will be gone by the end of next year, when a Times printing plant is scheduled to open in College Point, Queens.
It would have been impossible to attract a big-time tenant without ample space on the building for signs, Mr. Gural said. Because 1501 Broadway is a designated landmark building, all exterior changes must be approved by the Landmarks Commission. The building was designed by the Chicago firm Rapp & Rapp, creators of opulent movie houses, and built in 1926 and 1927 for the headquarters of the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation, a forerunner of Paramount Pictures.
''A striking reminder of Times Square's boom in the 1920's, and of a founding force behind the motion picture industry, the Paramount Building stands as an important symbol of New York's architectural and cultural past,'' the commission wrote in its 1988 designation report. Paramount Pictures no longer has any connection with the building.
The proposal to recreate the marquee was approved by the commission on July 23.
''We think it's fabulous,'' said Deborah Sack, a commission spokeswoman.After years of Pentagon denials, a group of veterans of the Persian Gulf War are offering the most compelling evidence to date that American troops were exposed to Iraqi chemical weapons. The veterans say nerve gas and other chemical agents have begun to ravage their bodies.
The soldiers and former soldiers were members of the Army's 37th Engineer Battalion. And unlike thousands of other Americans who have complained that they suffer from the ailments collectively described as gulf war syndrome, the men of the 37th can pinpoint the time and place that they believe they were exposed to chemical weapons: 2:05 P.M. on March 4, 1991, when the battalion blew up 33 Iraqi bunkers in the southern Iraqi desert.
The Pentagon acknowledged this spring -- more than five years after the end of the war and more than four years after the United Nations made the first evidence public -- that one concrete bunker probably held shells containing sarin, a deadly nerve agent, and mustard gas, a blister agent that can burn flesh. The bunkers were destroyed to keep the Iraqis from re-arming immediately after the war.
Defense Department officials say their initial review of the medical records of the battalion offers no evidence of an unusual pattern of health problems among these soldiers. While it concedes that chemical weapons were probably at the arsenal, the Pentagon has said it still has no clinical evidence the soldiers were exposed.
But the veterans of the 37th tell a different story. Many say they are sick. In interviews with 37 of the nearly 150 battalion members who were reported in the vicinity of the arsenal at the time of the explosion, 27 said they had suffered serious health problems since the war.
Their ailments, they said, include mysterious infections and rashes, serious gastrointestinal problems, fierce headaches and constant fatigue. Many have been hospitalized for unexplained ailments; some have had surgery.
''We just want to know what's wrong with us,'' said Christian Tullius, a veteran of the 37th from Copperas Cove, Tex., who left the Army only last month.
''We were paratroopers -- elite troops, in great shape -- and now we're all sick as dogs,'' said Mr. Tullius, 28, who has been operated on nine times for intestinal ailments since the war and had much of the muscle wall around his stomach removed.
So far, medical experts have not been able to determine a cause for the reports of illness, and have disagreed over whether the syndrome in fact has a medical basis. More than 60,000 gulf war veterans have asked for special Government health screenings to determine if they suffer from ailments related to the war.
Pentagon Credibility Is Challenged
The accounts given by members of the 37th, however, have raised concerns about the credibility of the Defense Department, which until recently insisted that it had no evidence Americans might have been exposed to Iraqi chemical or biological weapons. There is also a possibility that tens of thousands of other soldiers downwind from the explosion were exposed as well.
An investigation of the incident at the Kamisiyah arsenal, including interviews with officials at the Pentagon and a review of classified Army reports on the explosion, has shown several things:
*The Pentagon paid little, if any, attention to early reports that chemical agents might have been released at Kamisiyah, even though the United Nations investigators made the information public in at least three reports to the Security Council in 1992. The United Nations said that copies of the report were also provided immediately to the United States Government, including several Federal libraries.
*Some veterans of the 37th Battalion dispute crucial elements of the Pentagon's initial account of what happened at Kamisiyah. The Pentagon has said that according to battlefield reports, soldiers conducted an extensive inspection of the site for chemical weapons before the blast, and that detectors found no chemical agents after the explosion. Some veterans said both assertions were incorrect. They said chemical-weapon alarms went off shortly after the blast, leading many soldiers to don rubberized chemical-warfare suits immediately.
*The battalion ran short of the chemical suits, and troops were encouraged not to unwrap new suits even when chemical-gas alarms went off. The alarms went off frequently during the war -- several times a week, with most dismissed as false alarms by commanders. Several soldiers said they often wore only gas masks when the alarms went off, leaving their skin exposed.
''We were just told to put our masks on and get inside the tent,'' said Dale Cook, a 28-year-old veteran from Fremont, Mich., who said he was suffering from kidney stones, a mysterious fungus that is causing his fingernails to drop off, rashes across much of the rest of his body and chronic fatigue that causes him to nod off at work.
Even as the Defense Department has suggested that exposure to low levels of chemical weapons does not carry long-term health risks, Pentagon officials acknowledge that in fact little is known about the long-term effects. One of the few studies ever done on the issue, a 1974 report in a Swedish research journal, said that low levels of chemical weapons could produce cancers and ''chronic illnesses'' of the central nervous system.
The former members of the battalion, which is based at Fort Bragg, N.C., were located through Army records and referrals by other veterans. While those interviewed are not a random sample, there still seems to be a remarkable amount of illness among a group of young men who, as paratroopers in the war, were required to be in peak physical condition.
Patrick T. Hopper of Ronkonkoma, L.I., who left the Army only a few months after the gulf war, said that he had suffered from continuous bouts of nausea since the war and that he had been rushed to a hospital emergency room last month after nearly passing out from vomiting. Often, he said, he is so tired that he sleeps until the middle of the day. ''I just associated all of this with getting older,'' said Mr. Hopper, who is 25.
James Stark, a 29-year-old battalion veteran who still serves in a National Guard unit near his home in Fort Scott, Kan., said he suffered from migraine headaches that last four to six hours and ''totally incapacitate me -- basically I tough it out until I get hit with waves of nausea and begin to vomit a lot, and then I'm forced to leave work.''With the Governors of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut at the Republican National Convention in San Diego, the metropolitan region for the next few days will be in the hands of acting governors who insist they will resist the temptation to commit mischief.
Gov. John G. Rowland of Connecticut and Gov. Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey seem likely to be able to relax at the convention, which begins tomorrow. Their states are in the hands of political allies, Lieut. Gov. M. Jodi Rell of Connecticut and Attorney General Peter G. Verniero of New Jersey.
But Gov. George E. Pataki of New York might want to phone home occasionally.
With the Lieutenant Governor, Betsy McCaughey Ross, who has been at odds with the Republican Party at various times, at the convention, and Joseph L. Bruno, the Republican who is the Senate majority leader, leaving the state on Tuesday, authority will shift to Sheldon Silver, the Democratic Assembly Speaker.
Mr. Silver said he planned to behave with dignity and realized he could not change the state's direction in a few days. He acknowledged, however, that changing Mr. Pataki's policies ''is a tempting idea.''
And he said wistfully that if he had a bit of time, he would change other things too: ''His commissioners. His staff.''
Mr. Pataki's spokesman, Michael F. McKeon, said, ''The bottom line is, we really don't think it's all that significant.'' Still, he did make a point of noting that Mr. Pataki would remain in touch.
Mr. Verniero, a Republican who was appointed Attorney General by Mrs. Whitman last month, insisted he did not have any secret fantasies of power. The Governor and he briefly discussed the fact that he would be Acting Governor because she, the President of the State Senate and the Assembly Speaker would all be in San Diego.
He said Mrs. Whitman did not leave him with any instructions. But that, he said, was not because she did not care about events back home. ''She cares very much,'' he said, ''but I think she knows I won't do anything off the wall.''
Mr. Verniero, who is supervising New Jersey's legal battle with New York over Ellis Island, said he would not even be tempted to stage an invasion of the island. ''We're going to win Ellis Island in court, so there'll be no reason to take any other action as Acting Governor.''
In Connecticut, Mrs. Rell also appeared unlikely to do anything precipitous. She is on friendly terms with Mr. Rowland and has shown no particular interest in embarrassing him. ''She'll keep a steady hand on the ship of state, you could quote me as saying that,'' said her spokeswoman, Lisa Moody.
Mrs. Rell has, however, appeared to relish the part of her job that allows her to take over the seat of power occasionally. When Mr. Rowland returned from a vacation last summer, people in the administration said, he found a sign at the Governor's mansion that looked just like the ones on the state's roads. ''Welcome to Connecticut, Jodi Rell, Acting Governor,'' it said.
With a nod to Alexander M. Haig Jr., the people in the administration said they were sure it was just a joke.The protracted investigation into the downing of Trans World Airlines Flight 800 has spawned an unusual ritual, one that has brought refreshing moments of humanity to the rigidly scientific hunt for clues. It is the daily news briefing held by a triumvirate of officialdom: the safety board executive, the F.B.I. agent, and the Navy admiral.
Virtually every day since the Boeing 747 exploded off the coast of eastern Long Island on July 17, killing all 230 people on board, these three men have marched into a hotel conference room to field questions from more than two dozen reporters. How many of the four engines have been found? Where are the salvage ships located? And, perhaps the most pressing question of all: Why?
In saying that they do not know why the commercial jet exploded in mid-air, the men have taken obvious care to frame their answers in the clinical detachment befitting an official investigation. Still, through weary expressions and occasional curt responses, they have conveyed the complexity and frustration of the task before them.
Yesterday marked the first time that a briefing had not been held in the 24 days since the crash, although one is scheduled for this afternoon. A spokeswoman for the investigators gave a simple explanation for the break: ''We want a day off.''
Nevertheless, the investigation continued, and divers retrieved two more bodies from the Atlantic, bringing to 198 the number of victims recovered.
A senior investigator said last night that the Grapple, a Navy salvage vessel, was being positioned over a southwestern section of the crash site, and that a remote-controlled robot would begin to assist Navy divers in recovering hundreds of pieces of debris presumed to be from the plane's underbelly, including the fuselage beneath the forward cargo hold, where some investigators believe a bomb might have been planted. Investigators, who have not determined whether the plane was destroyed by a bomb, a missile or mechanical malfunction, hope to have collected virtually all the debris in that area by Tuesday.
In addition, the investigator said, two of the jet's four engines had been recovered, and were being taken to a hangar in Calverton, L.I., to be examined by officials from the engines' maker, Pratt & Whitney.
News briefings by the National Transportation Safety Board are routine in the investigation of airplane disasters. The safety board gave daily updates, for example, after a Valujet DC-9 crashed in the Florida Everglades in May, killing 110 people. But while no two plane crashes are exactly alike, the unusual circumstances of an underwater search and the suspicion of sabotage have forced the routine to be redesigned and the number of briefings to be extended beyond that of any investigation in recent memory.
A safety board representative, Robert T. Francis, vice chairman, still serves as host. But he shares the podium with Rear Adm. Edward K. Kristensen of the United States Navy, who is overseeing the recovery efforts, and James K. Kallstrom, the F.B.I.'s New York supervisor.
Mr. Francis usually starts the briefings, at the Smithtown Sheraton, with a solemn recitation of the number of victims recovered -- a figure he says is unlikely to rise much. Mr. Kallstrom recites a toll-free number for those who might have helpful information, then thanks the Suffolk County Police Department, or some other agency, for its assistance. And Admiral Kristensen provides an update on wreckage recovery.
Then come the questions. By now, everyone in the room is conversant in the lexicon of this particular disaster. ''Debris field three,'' for example, is understood to mean the southwestern-most area in which airplane wreckage settled on the ocean floor.
Stepping up to and away from the microphones in almost choreographed precision, the three men willingly provide reporters with general information. But there clearly is a lot that they do not share. Mr. Kallstrom's way of refusing to talk about evidence -- ''I'm just not going to comment'' -- is a familiar refrain.
Still, hints of important areas of investigation can be gleaned by what the three men refuse to talk about, as well as the way they refuse. Last week, in response to a question, Mr. Francis said he could not talk about the plane's cargo bins, where some investigators speculate a bomb might have been hidden.
But a reporter persisted: Do you know how many were on the plane?
''What did I just say?'' Mr. Francis said. ''I think I said I'm not going to comment further on cargo containers.''
There is also the way that Mr. Kallstrom can tantalize. More than once he has said, ''I wish I could comment on that, but I just can't'' -- leaving reporters only more curious.
Generally, however, the briefings have been gracious, if not always informative. And, along the way, the personalities of the three have peeked through the structured decorum. Admiral Kristensen, for example, maintains a military bearing, addressing reporters either as ''sir,'' or ''ma'am.''
And last week, Mr. Francis used an affliction that he and Mr. Kallstrom share -- the heartbreak known to Boston Red Sox fans -- to explain their approach to the investigation. ''Both of us have a certain amount of tenacity and willingness to stick with things,'' he said.
Then, once again, the three men filed out the door, leaving a room still overflowing with questions about T.W.A. Flight 800.It was Jack F. Kemp's long and passionate advocacy of tax cutting as the best way to stimulate greater prosperity for both rich and poor that brought him to the Republican Presidential ticket alongside Bob Dole.
But Mr. Kemp's economic philosophy goes well beyond the tax-cutting proposals Mr. Dole unveiled on Monday, and it runs counter in many ways to the conservative Republican orthodoxy of the past few years.
Mr. Dole's plan, which he is counting on to reinvigorate his campaign, is based on the notion that it is possible to slash taxes by $548 billion over the next six years and still balance the budget by 2002. Mr. Kemp, while not opposed to fiscal austerity, has always argued that balancing the budget should not be the ''be-all and end-all'' of Republican economic policy.
While Mr. Dole's plan assumes deep cuts in spending across nearly all areas of the Federal Government except the Pentagon, Mr. Kemp maintains that it would be a mistake for Republicans to dismantle social welfare programs in the name of deficit reduction.
Mr. Dole has issued a somewhat vague pledge to overhaul the tax system, but Mr. Kemp has strong views about specific steps that should be taken, including the adoption of a single-rate flat tax, a proposal that Mr. Dole criticized when it was pushed by Steve Forbes, one of his challengers during the Republican primaries.
And while Mr. Dole has never been known for a love of detailed economic policy proposals, Mr. Kemp loves to hold forth at length on the arcane details of topics like the need to restore the nation to a gold standard.
''To Republicans, I humbly suggest that we make it possible for Democrats to give up their quest for redistribution of income and wealth by our acceptance of an appropriate role for government in financing those public goods and services necessary to secure a social safety net below which no American would be allowed to fall,'' Mr. Kemp wrote in an opinion article for The Wall Street Journal in June.
''The huge government bureaucracy we now confront was created over the last 60 years with good intentions, but with a redistributionist philosophy that led to counterproductive results,'' Mr. Kemp said. ''In the face of this reality, we Republicans make a serious mistake when we try to economize first on social programs. It allows us to be characterized as putting the 'cart' of fiscal austerity before the 'horse' of rapid economic growth.''
Among Republicans, Mr. Kemp has been one of the few who has tried to draw a clear line dividing taxes and other economic policies from the prosperity not just of the middle class and the wealthy, but of the urban poor as well.
One of his pet projects in recent months has been speaking out in favor of a proposal by Eleanor Holmes Norton, the nonvoting Congressional delegate for the District of Columbia, to drop the Federal income tax in Washington to a flat rate of 15 percent, from a current top rate of 39.6 percent, to attract affluent residents into the financially reeling district.
As Secretary of Housing and Urban Development during the Bush Administration, Mr. Kemp championed a proposal to allow residents of public housing to use rental vouchers to move to privately owned houses in other neighborhoods.
In some ways, Mr. Kemp is a classic advocate of free market policies. He favors free trade and supported such policies as the renewal of China's trading status with the United States and ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement.
But he also says government policy can play a role in some situations. He has long advocated enterprise zones, where tax breaks and other incentives are used to lure businesses to poor neighborhoods.
At the core of Mr. Kemp's philosophy is the idea that more economic growth would benefit those at the bottom of the economic ladder as much as those at the top. Only through the increased tax revenues that faster growth would bring can the deficit be ended, Mr. Kemp says.
''Taxes on capital, taxes on labor, inflation, bureaucratic regulation, minimum wage laws, are all -- to different degrees -- unnecessary slices of the wedge that stand between an individual's effort and reward for that effort,'' Mr. Kemp wrote in 1981.''
Even before Mr. Dole began considering him as a Vice-Presidential choice, Mr. Kemp was celebrating something of a victory in seeing tax cutting take center stage after several years in which his supply-side approach had taken a back seat to his party's deficit-reduction wing.
Mr. Kemp proved himself effective, if somewhat clumsy, at keeping his economic views on the Republican agenda over the last few months, when it seemed that Mr. Dole's victory in the primaries had ended any chance of the party's supply-side wing playing an influential role in the election. His clout was particularly evident at a Capitol Hill forum last month when he instigated a public endorsement of sweeping tax cuts by nearly all the Republican leadership of Congress, raising the pressure on Mr. Dole to go down the same path.
The forum had its roots in a meeting Mr. Kemp held earlier this summer with three of his best friends from the House: Speaker Newt Gingrich; Trent Lott of Mississippi, now the Senate majority leader, and Senator Connie Mack of Florida. At the meeting, Mr. Kemp, one participant said, attacked Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Lott for not doing more to pursue the supply-side agenda, and they . agreed to do something to invigorate the ''pro-growth'' debate. They settled on the public forum as the best way to start.
Some people in the Dole campaign were annoyed by Mr. Kemp's maneuver, but Mr. Kemp said: ''I was not there to upstage the Dole campaign. I was there to get Newt and Trent and Connie to elevate the issue again because balancing the budget is not the be-all and end-all of the American economy.''
POLITICS: THE ISSUESWhen completed, the Palisades Center mall here is expected to boast an ice-skating rink, a 2,100-seat amphitheater, a 21-screen cinema complex, a carousel, a ferris wheel, more than 15 restaurants and a 2,000-seat food court. Not to mention 225 stores, from Lord & Taylor and JCPenney to Nobody Beats the Wiz and Bed Bath and Beyond, which would make this a shopper's Eden second in size only to the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn.
Actually, the number of stores is contingent on the ability of the developer, Pyramid Companies of Syracuse, to win approval for an expansion -- the third since it embarked on the project more than a decade ago. The latest request would take the mall from 1.85 million square feet to 3.05 million square feet of retail space. Add the entertainment venues, and the mall, which is to open in the spring, leaps to a colossal 3.99 million square feet, only 200,000 square feet smaller than the Mall of America.
The notion of this $280 million mall the size of 32 football fields in their verdant backyards has struck fear in some Rockland County residents. They are worried not only about traffic, crime, pollution and the decimation of quaint downtowns, but are also extremely distrustful of Pyramid and its expansionist tendencies.
In 1985, Pyramid announced plans for an 875,000-square-foot mall on the site. Ever since, its quest for expansion has dismayed locals. ''They're not on the up and up,'' said Maria Whittingham, owner of Maria Luisa, a women's clothing boutique in neighboring Nyack. ''I don't think it's a very nice thing they're doing.''
Shirley Lasker, president of the Rockland County Civic Association, a newly formed organization that is fighting what it considers the mall's metastasis, agreed. ''I feel like they're coming in and raping the community,'' she said. ''We've been sold out by our local elected officials.''
But Thomas Valenti, a partner in Pyramid and the site manager of the Palisades project, defends the growth as a natural consequence of the market. ''We didn't know how much retail interest there would be,'' he said, adding that $182 million in retail sales ''leaves Rockland and flows into Westchester and Bergen counties each year. This will be an opportunity to capture retail sales right here.''
Industry watchers agree. ''It's highly unlikely that a project of that magnitude is going to get built unless there is a need for it and it can work,'' said Mark Schoifet, a spokesman for the International Council of Shopping Centers. ''You cannot get a project of that magnitude financed without utmost scrutiny, from intense site selection to market analysis to demographic studies and customer surveys.''
Mr. Valenti is sanguine about winning approval for the latest expansion. With good reason. Slowly but surely, Pyramid, which has erected 14 malls and 4 outdoor shopping centers in New York State, has gotten its way since it set its sight on this stretch of land, ideally situated two miles west of the Tappan Zee Bridge, next to the New York State Thruway, Routes 303 and 59 and less than a mile from the Palisades Parkway.
But the means by which Pyramid has achieved its goals elsewhere have been called into question, adding to distrust here. In Poughkeepsie, a state ethics panel charged that the company secretly funneled almost $800,000 to pro-mall Republican candidates for Town Council while it sought a zoning change that enabled it to build the Poughkeepsie Galleria mall.
When Pyramid embarked on the Palisades project, the site -- a jumble of warehouses, automobile body shops, used car lots, and two old landfills -- was zoned for light industry and offices. But in 1988, the Clarkstown Town Board approved a zone change that would allow retail shopping. In 1990, Pyramid's site plan for 875,000 square feet was approved, but the retail market nose-dived, so plans were put on hold. The next three years were spent in court. A civic group and the developers of the nearby Nanuet Mall instituted several lawsuits challenging the zone change, the site plan approval, sundry permits and the company's plans for the landfills, which contained incinerator ash and garbage.
After quashing the court challenges, Pyramid sought approval to expand the project to 1.2 million square feet. The Clarkstown Town Board approved the addition last year. And in April, Pyramid won approval to expand to 1.85 million square feet. If the Clarkstown Planning Board grants Pyramid's latest wish, the town and county may reap $39 million annually in property and sales taxes, about $15 million more than it would have without the expansion. And 6,000 construction jobs and 7,000 retail jobs may be created.
But even some officials who have supported past expansions are equivocal about being host to this colossus of consumerism.
''We're all happy about the 1.8 million-square-foot mall because of sales tax and property tax revenue,'' the Rockland County Executive, C. Scott Vanderhoef, said. ''But the expansion alone would exceed any existing mall in the county, and we're the smallest geographic county in the state, outside of the boroughs in New York City. I don't think they've taken an adequate look regionally at traffic, air pollution and the socioeconomic impact on other retailers.''
Lenny Sullivan, who has owned Herb Lack Hardware and Paints in downtown Nyack for 30 years, thinks the price of ''progress'' is too high. Rockland County will lose its soul, he argued. ''We have too many malls already,'' said Mr. Sullivan. ''We need to strengthen small communities.'' He added that he didn't think his shop would be hurt if Home Depot became a mall tenant, because of Nyack's heavy foot traffic.
Mr. Valenti said he doesn't understand the consternation caused by the latest request for expansion because, as he put it, the 1.2-million-square-foot addition ''does not expand the footprint.'' In other words, Pyramid is hoping to build up, not out, this time.
The developer wants to erect a four-story mall, which is unusual but not unheard of. ''If you can provide adequate vertical transportation, it should not be a problem,'' Mr. Valenti said.
As for traditional transportation -- the horizontal kind -- Pyramid is rebuilding the Exit 12 interchange on the Gov. Thomas E. Dewey Thruway and erecting multilane ramps and a bridge that will carry mall traffic directly to and from the Thruway. The company is also building a flyover ramp from Route 59 that will bring eastbound traffic directly into the mall, and widening both that route and Route 303. The total cost for road construction is $22.1 million, including a $6.1 million land purchase from the Thruway. The total cost to the taxpayer: zilch.
But critics are not impressed. Detractors contend that Pyramid is concerned only with entrances and exits from the mall. The draft environmental impact study Pyramid prepared ''only looks at traffic within a 2-mile radius, not a 12-mile radius,'' said Phillip C. Landrigan, the lawyer for the Rockland County Civic Association.
Crime is another concern. The Nanuet Mall, currently the largest in Rockland at 900,000 square feet, was the site of the 1981 Brinks armored car robbery, which left two police officers and a security guard dead. It was also the setting of a highly publicized carjacking in December 1994 in which an 18-year-old college student was shot to death.
Mr. Valenti said that Pyramid would take steps to avert crime. The Palisades Center will have its own police substation and a private security force of uniformed and plainclothes officers. Parking areas -- plans call for 12,000 parking spaces -- will be monitored with cameras and intercoms, he added.In a last-minute snag that spotlighted Republican efforts for tight control of the proceedings at their convention here, two Governors, Pete Wilson of California and William F. Weld of Massachusetts, have told convention organizers that they will not speak at the event rather then accede to conditions for their participation.
Aides to both men said today that they believed that convention organizers had set out to prevent them from speaking because they had been at the forefront of an unsuccessful effort to force the Republican Party to moderate the anti-abortion plank in its platform.
But convention organizers said they believed that Mr. Wilson and Mr. Weld were trying to shore up their credentials at home, and were showboating at the expense of party unity and Bob Dole's candidacy.
The dispute raises the possibility that the convention may open here Monday without a greeting from the Governor of the host state, Mr. Wilson, who is also a former mayor here. And it underscored the lengths to which the organizers have gone to control the agenda here, seeking to avoid the air of intolerance that permeated the Republicans' 1992 convention in Houston and to insure what the party chairman, Haley Barbour, called a ''fast-paced, multi-media-oriented approach conveying easy-to-understand messages.''
As the dispute unfolded today, Republican officials produced an array of internal Republican National Committee memorandums, dictating exactly what the candidates could say and even what they could wear. Mr. Barbour, in a note to Mr. Wilson explaining the party's intention, said:
''Accordingly, we look forward to working closely with you on the nature of your remarks in order to ensure each presentation enhances the objective of the convention. A commitment by you to this new approach, initial drafting responsibility, advance speech review, final editorial control, and rehearsals are simply a must if program participants are to contribute to a successful convention.''
Many Republicans blamed lax vetting of convention speakers' remarks for the tone of the 1992 convention, when phrases like Patrick J. Buchanan's declaration of a ''religious war'' slipped by convention organizers, whose only concern was whether Mr. Buchanan was unequivocally endorsing President George Bush, and out onto live television.
This year, the organizers are not stopping at only the content of speeches. Another document, titled ''Guidelines for Podium Speakers,'' included wardrobe suggestions: ''Dark, blue or black are always the better suit colors. Pale, blue, gray and tan do not show well. Checks or plaids are not recommended.'' It also said jewelry should be avoided.
Mr. Weld was informed that he had two segments -- one of 90 seconds and one of 60 seconds -- to introduce two videos that would be shown. One video featured remarks by Morry Taylor, the quirky tire manufacturer and one of the more unsuccessful Republican candidates for President this year.
Mr. Weld was also told exactly what he would say. He would discuss ''his leadership in bringing about economic renewal and success in Massachusetts,'' and that ''he shares Bob Dole's economic philosophy and believes that a Dole Presidency will be good for job creation.''
The problem was that Mr. Weld also wanted to talk about abortion rights, which he favors. A senior Republican organizer involved in the vetting of speakers said today that the party would have allowed him to speak about abortion. Aides to Bob Dole said they thought that Mr. Weld was just trying to highlight his abortion rights position to win advantage in his race against Senator John F. Kerry in Massachusetts.
Mr. Weld's campaign manager, Ginny Buckingham, denied the accusation of political motivation and insisted that he had been told that abortion was off limits.
''Had the convention managers said the governor could give the speech he wanted to give, he would have spoken,'' Ms. Buckingham said.
Mr. Wilson's situation was more complicated. Mr. Wilson said he had originally been invited to speak -- for five minutes -- in a prime-time slot on Monday. Then, shortly after his Op-Ed article appeared in The New York Times on Aug. 1 urging that his party adopt a moderate course on abortion, he was told that his role would be joining -- silently -- the Mayor of San Diego, Susan Golding, on stage in welcoming the convention delegates, on Monday morning.
Mr. Wilson's aides immediately rejected that offer. But they left little question that they saw the handling of the Governor as something of a snub, and distributed copies of correspondence from Republican officials.
''It seems a little strange,'' Mr. Wilson said. ''But frankly, it isn't going to stand in my way of enjoying a convention that I am proud to have in my hometown and in this state, which is crucial to electing a Republican ticket.''
Mr. Barbour said he had no knowledge of the letter that had been sent out under his name inviting him to speak Monday night. At a news conference, he asked a reporter to show him a copy of the letter, studied the document, and then pronounced himself vindicated.
''It says 'participate,' '' Mr. Barbour said. ''It doesn't say, 'speak at the podium.' I mean, I'm just telling you what it says here.''
POLITICS: THE CONVENTIONRepublicans today hailed Bob Dole's selection of Jack F. Kemp as his running mate, saying they hoped the former Buffalo Congressman would enliven their party's convention here next week and spur voters to take a second look at Mr. Dole.
While the two men have had a sometimes strained relationship for years, several Republicans applauded the choice of Mr. Kemp, an ebullient onetime professional football player, as a move that would help the ticket and show that Mr. Dole was willing to reach out to a longtime foe.
Republicans played down the fact that Mr. Kemp, though popular among many Republicans, has long been at odds with many in the party, including Mr. Dole, who disagree with his championing of supply-side economics and his refusal to endorse tough restrictions on immigration. And they argued that despite Mr. Kemp's tendency to talk too much sometimes, he would be a formidable competitor in a debate with Vice President Al Gore.
''Jack is life and buoyancy and optimism,'' said William J. Bennett, the conservative Republican author who was himself on Mr. Dole's Vice-Presidential list but told the Dole campaign on Saturday that he was not interested. ''People have been saying this campaign doesn't talk enough, doesn't have ideas, doesn't have vision, and here comes Kemp. He has all three.''
Ron Schmidt, a delegate from South Dakota attending party meetings here before the convention, said: ''Dole is a very stiff candidate, which is why Kemp is an asset to the campaign. He is a very warm and articulate person.''
Jude Wanniski, a political economist who is close to Mr. Kemp and has been publicly promoting the choice for months, was more blunt when he referred to Mr. Dole's inability thus far to catch up to President Clinton in the polls. ''Dole looked like a corpse,'' he said, ''and Jack is coming in as a rescuer.''
The Republicans who said they had reservations about Mr. Kemp did not cite his qualifications, but rather his reputation as not being a team player. In fact, even after it was a foregone conclusion earlier this year that Mr. Dole would win the nomination, Mr. Kemp refused entreaties to be a loyal Republican and instead endorsed his protege, the billionaire magazine publisher Steve Forbes. That episode led many Dole advisers to believe that Mr. Kemp would never get the nod.
Today, Mr. Forbes greeted the improbable alliance with delight, He emphasized that Mr. Kemp and Mr. Dole did not have to be ''bosom buddies'' to make a winning team.
Gov. Pete Wilson of California noted that Mr. Kemp disagreed with Mr. Dole on affirmative action and immigration control measures. ''Perhaps in the fullness of time,'' Mr. Wilson said, ''Mr. Kemp wil have to come to modify his views to reflect those of his running mate. Obviously it seems to me he has to do that or he can not in good conscience accept a spot on Mr. Dole's ticket.''
As the convention approached, a New York Times/CBS News Poll taken in late July and early August showed that 7 percent of the delegates preferred Mr. Kemp to be the running mate; the only candidates who fared better were Colin L. Powell, with 13 percent, and Gov. John M. Engler of Michigan, with 8 percent. In January 1995, when CBS News asked Republicans whom they wanted as the party's Presidential nominee, Mr. Kemp was the choice of 9 percent of those polled, while Mr. Dole was the winner, with 24 percent.
In another survey, a December 1994 Times Mirror poll conducted by Princeton Survey Associates, 43 percent of the voters polled nationally had very favorable or mostly favorable opinions of Mr. Kemp. Eighteen percent said their opinion was unfavorable; 9 percent said they had never heard of him, and 20 percent gave no answer.
Republican officials have been counting on the Vice-Presidential choice, combined with the convention next week, to give Mr. Dole a lift in the polls as the general election campaign gets under way in earnest.
Even before the choice was official, the White House and the Democratic Party were churning out news releases and compilations of Mr. Kemp's record that party leaders said demonstrated that he was out of touch with Americans, and with Mr. Dole.
In a press release today, the Clinton-Gore campaign said Mr. Kemp's selection illustrated how Mr. Dole had ''completed his transformation from deficit hawk to economic gambler willing to bet our economic future on a reckless supply side theory.''
''Bob Dole confirmed that women should not have the right to choose and anyone with an opposing view is not welcome in San Diego,'' it said.
Senator Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, general chairman of the Democratic Party said that Mr. Kemp had been ''the darling of the extreme right in this country for a number of years.''
Carole Shields, president of People for the American Way, a liberal group, said, ''Moderate and mainstream Republicans have got to wonder where to turn.''
But the description of Mr. Kemp as a hard-edged conservative may fall flat; Mr. Kemp has clashed at times with Republicans for his support for affirmative action and for rebuilding the cities and for not being more vocal in his opposition to abortion.
In fact, representatives of minority groups generally cheered Mr. Kemp's selection, declaring that he has been one of the few voices within the Republican Party who have shown interest in the plight of blacks and Hispanics, and one of the few to have been a counterweight to the opposition to immigration that is sweeping the party.
''Part of the ability that Kemp has is to talk to groups of audiences from the inner city and people much more associated with the Democratic Party,'' said Linda Chavez, a head of the United States Civil Rights Commission in the Reagan Administration.Shortly after Trans World Airlines Flight 800 crashed on July 17, the airline said that only about 40 employees had had direct contact with the airplane in the three hours that it had waited on the ground at Kennedy International Airport.
In the weeks since, law enforcement officials investigating the crash have found that dozens and perhaps hundreds of other people could have entered the baggage area, the tarmac around the plane or parts of the terminal through which bags checked for the flight were transported.
A senior law enforcement official said it was not even possible to estimate how many people could have come into contact with the plane or its baggage as it waited for takeoff. That fact, he said, will complicate the inquiry if investigators determine the plane was downed by a bomb.
Investigators have still not concluded what brought down Flight 800. But their inquiry has already found that security at Kennedy Airport is surprisingly porous -- even in the weeks since the crash.
The investigators remain publicly noncommittal about whether a bomb, missile or mechanical malfunction destroyed the Boeing 747. Privately, they lean toward the theory that a bomb exploded in the forward cargo hold, which contained passenger luggage.
Already, investigators are examining the path baggage follows from passengers' hands to the plane's cavernous hold, searching for openings that a saboteur might have exploited.
Under the airport's security rules, only a limited number of employees, holding appropriate passes, are allowed to walk into areas moving or storing baggage bound for international flights like T.W.A. 800. That system, which is enforced by a limited number of Port Authority guards, can be easily circumvented by people holding passes for other terminals, or by those with no passes at all, according to security experts, investigators and a former T.W.A. executive.
Baggage for international flights at the T.W.A. terminal is checked at curbside or at the airline's counter. It moves by conveyor belt through the building to a baggage room, where it is sorted and loaded onto wagons for transport to the waiting jetliner.
No one guards the conveyor belt, the baggage room or the wagons, which often sit on the tarmac unattended, according to the former T.W.A. executive. The former executive said protecting the baggage was chiefly the responsibility of airfield employees whose primary duty was to load the baggage canisters aboard the aircraft.
Mick Donahue, a former antiterrorism expert for the Central Intelligence Agency who now runs a private security company, said: ''The airlines typically assume that the secure area is secure, and that their employees can keep their eye on the baggage while they do their other jobs. Neither of those assumptions is necessarily true.''
Mr. Donahue said the baggage-handling arrangements at American airports posed ''glaring problems,'' adding, ''It's not realistic to expect people to be screening access or working security when their primary job is to load cargo or pave potholes in the parking lot.''
That vulnerability was graphically demonstrated less than a week after the crash when a local law enforcement official pinned on a plastic badge and took a remarkable stroll through Kennedy that he should never have been allowed to complete.
The official was testing claims that the airport's system for checking an employee's identification was easily breached. The badge, issued to a ticket taker at a small commuter airline, theoretically allowed access only to a low-security section of the terminal. But the official, who is not directly involved with the T.W.A. case, used it to roam the facility at will.
He wandered into the baggage area, where unattended luggage was stored before being stowed in the plane. He went downstairs onto the tarmac, where porters and caterers were tending to the aircraft. He even walked onto the plane itself, a Delta Airlines flight. No security guard or airport employee asked him who he was. No one questioned why a white male was wearing a badge with the photo of a black woman.
''It was incredible,'' said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. ''I suppose if I wanted to I could have sat down in the pilot's seat and drove away with the thing.''
The former T.W.A. executive said the system at Kennedy and other American airports contrasted with security at airports in Europe, which United States airlines have traditionally considered a high-risk area for terrorism. At those airports, the baggage is constantly under the supervision of armed guards from the time it leaves passengers' hands until it is loaded aboard aircraft.
''The bags are under the watchful eyes of security people from the time they are checked in,'' the former executive said. ''You will have security people who actually work in the baggage area.''
T.W.A. acknowledged that security was tighter at high-risk airports outside the United States.
''There is no doubt that there is a difference,'' said Mark Abels, a company spokesman. ''Generally, the security procedures in Europe are much tighter. There are a lot more armed guards roaming around, and a lot more stringent security, which is reflected in the amount of time it takes to load a plane and operate a flight.'' Mr. Abels declined to discuss specific questions about security at Kennedy.
''Whether the United States needs to go to more of a European level of security, perhaps by the Government or airport operators, is a policy question which I am sure is going to be considered in the next few months,'' Mr. Abels said.CHILDREN are often told not to read in dim light because they might strain their eyesight; now a retired chemical industry executive has taken out a patent based on the belief that reading in poor light can also cause some people's brains to confuse words and numbers.
Robin Mumford of Highlands, N.J., has developed a method of identifying people susceptible to such confusion, and then customizing powerful, high-intensity lights that he says will alleviate their difficulties.
The patented method is not equivalent to a diagnosis of a medical condition like dyslexia, nor have these high-intensity lights been tested by medical experts.
Mr. Mumford was simply testing the technical parameters of a vision-improvement system when, he said, he found that the lighting adjustments seemed to influence not just the clarity with which people could see words on paper, but the clarity and speed with which they could understand those words.
He said studies done at the National Institute for Mental Health indicated that some reading disorders like dyslexia might be caused by deficiencies in the brain's visual areas. But dyslexia, which can range from mild to severe, has many causes, and scientific studies and clinical research have yet to pinpoint a specific treatment.
People with reading disorders or ''other visual stress reacted very favorably'' to special lighting, Mr. Mumford said.
Under his patent, a person is first evaluated with a simple timed test.
''The test is a series of pairs of numbers,'' he said, ''and we ask people to compare them. It may be 135 and 135, or 1,427 and 4,127, and we ask people to tell us if the numbers in the pair are the same. An adult can generally do it in less than 45 seconds.''
Those who take more than a minute may be helped by his system, he indicated.
When lighting is changed for those who have been slow on the test, he said, test times drop. ''Some people are very influenced by glare, for example, or by spectral features such as whether a light is very blue,'' Mr. Mumford said.
His patent calls for a change to high-intensity discharge lights, the kind of very powerful bulbs used in street or stadium lights.
''These are the preferred lights to use, but they're not generally used inside because people have not realized their ergonomic advantages,'' Mr. Mumford said, adding that lamps must be customized for each person.
''We look for certain ratios of indirect light and set them up in such a way to make them shadow-free,'' he explained. Filters might also be attached. ''Then we have a choice of lamps determining the color you get and the brightness.''
The lights cannot be plugged into ordinary outlets at home, work or school.
Mr. Mumford received patent number 5,543,867.
Mixers for 'Cocktails' Used to Delay AIDS
People afflicted with H.I.V. and with full AIDS have been buoyed by recent reports that new drug combinations can stave off the disease for months or years. Each drug in these so-called ''cocktails'' is intended to battle a specific part of the chain reaction that takes place as the virus multiplies. So what is in these cocktails?
Emory University in Atlanta recently received a patent for an antiviral drug called 3TC that for a year has been used to attack the early stages of H.I.V. Like an older drug, AZT, Emory's invention tries to stop the virus from integrating into human cells. Other drugs in the cocktail, called protease inhibitors, go after the virus once it has passed that point.
''It's like hitting the virus at both ends,'' said Dennis Liotta, a chemist who is vice president for research at Emory. He invented 3TC, which takes its name from a chemical compound, along with Woo-Baeg Choi, now a research fellow at Merck. ''The fact that these cocktails hit two different targets is what is really important.''
Human genetic code is DNA-based. The genetic code of H.I.V. relies not on DNA, but on RNA, a ribonucleic acid building block. When H.I.V. infects the body, in the early stage an enzyme translates the virus's code from RNA into DNA. That allows H.I.V. to integrate into human cells. 3TC combats H.I.V. by preventing the enzyme from carrying out the translation.Concerted, high-level diplomatic pressure by the United States and the European Union, including the intervention of President Clinton, has prevented a breakdown of peace efforts in the Bosnian city of Mostar.
The lesson to be learned from the furor over recent elections in Mostar is that the major powers supervising next month's national voting in Bosnia must do more than monitor campaign and voting arrangements. They must be prepared to lean on the region's power brokers with aggressive diplomacy and the threat of economic punishments to insure that all parties comply with election results.
The voting in Mostar was Bosnia's first since the end of the war. The bitter wrangling it set off between two supposedly allied ethnic groups offers a grim preview of similar battles likely to break out after Bosnia's national elections.
Mostar, where Bosnians from different ethnic groups once lived in harmony, was brutally divided by the war. Croats and Muslims, allies against the Serbs, fought each other there in 1993 and 1994. Bosnian Croat artillery destroyed the city's famous 400-year-old stone bridge. Most Muslims living west of the river were uprooted and forced to move to the eastern side. Croats were relocated in the opposite direction. After the fighting, the European Union took over direct administration of Mostar, with the goal of reunifying it and turning over control to a newly elected city government this year.
The June 30 election, in which many Muslims and Croats crossed the river for the first time since the fighting to cast votes in their old neighborhoods, produced a council with 21 Muslim members and 16 Croats. But the dominant Bosnian Croat party refused to accept the results, contending that 26 absentee ballots had been unfairly counted.
Europe and Washington responded with a commendable sense of urgency. Carl Bildt, the international community's chief civilian representative in Bosnia, insisted that the Croats recognize the election results. The European Union threatened to pull out its administration unless the election controversy was resolved. President Clinton, in a White House meeting with Croatia's President, Franjo Tudjman, demanded that the Bosnian Croats end their boycott of the new Mostar council.
Even these strenuous diplomatic exertions produced only a modest compromise. The elected Bosnian Croat members will attend an opening session of the council and then the dispute over absentee ballots will be passed on to Bosnia's courts for adjudication. Meanwhile, the Croats have been promised that Mostar's new mayor will be a Croat.
Next month's elections are likely to produce similar ethnic divisions as Serbs, Muslims and Croats cast most of their votes for ethnic nationalist parties. The United States and other Western countries should see to it that the nationwide institutions specified in the Dayton peace agreement -- parliament, presidency and judiciary -- actually begin functioning. That is the best way to sustain whatever hope Bosnia still has of eventual reconciliation and reunification.Every day in and around Washington, post offices get letters containing a piece of electronic gadgetry the size of a greeting card, sent by the Postal Service to trace the flow of mail through its system. Each electronic card can be read from radio-frequency scanners in the ceilings of the mail rooms, even if the envelope containing the card is buried in a heap of letters and parcels.
''It's pretty exciting,'' Sandra Harding, a Postal Service spokeswoman, said of the technology's investigative potential. ''Otherwise, we could only see if letters were arriving late, but we couldn't see why.''
The scanning technology, known as radio-frequency identification -- or R.F.-ID tagging -- has applications well beyond the mailroom. It has been mandatory since 1992 in the railroad industry, for instance, for keeping tabs on individual rail cars as they make their way from one company's tracks to those of another.
And the technique is making its way into a wide range of industrial, commercial and consumer applications -- from inventory control and warehousing to automatic highway toll collection systems like the EZ Pass now widespread on the toll roads and bridges around New York City. Radio-readable ID ''tags'' are even being injected into dogs, cats and other pets.
And now, radio-ID technology is undergoing a transformation that has some industry executives looking ahead to the day when packs of cars driving down a toll road could be scanned en masse for electronic toll collection, rather than having to pass the scanner one by one, as with today's electronic collection systems. Then there is the industry's Holy Grail: tags inexpensive enough that an entire cart of groceries could be scanned in a single pass of an electronic wand.
Even in the technology's current form, the R.F.-ID market is expected to grow from roughly $227.3 million in annual sales to nearly $800 million by the year 2000, according to the Venture Development Corporation, a management consulting and market research company in Natick, Mass. The industry leaders include Savi, a division of Texas Instruments Inc.; Hughes Electronics, a subsidiary of the General Motors Corporation; the Amtech Corporation and ID Systems.
Promoters of the more advanced technology, which include a Canadian company called Samsys Inc. and a handful of others, predict that the R.F.-ID business could eventually become a partial replacement for the 20-year-old bar-code scanner technology now ubiquitous in shipping and retailing.
''For years there's been a need for another identification that exceeds the capabilities of the bar code,'' said Marc Regberg, vice president of Venture Development.
The advantage over bar code technology and other methods of package identification is that R.F.-ID does not require that the tag pass within the line of sight of an optical scanner.
In fact, depending on the specific features of the radio tag, the scanner reader can be a few feet away or several hundred. Any relevant identification, inventory or routing data can be contained in a microchip in the tag, or can be represented by code numbers corresponding to a computerized data base in the R.F.-ID tag reader.
Perhaps most significant, a new generation of R.F.-ID scanners can perform multiple readings -- as many as 50 tags a second, in some cases. A single scan could identify the contents of a huge cargo container, without its being opened.
Samsys, which has worldwide rights to market an R.F.-ID technology called Supertag that was developed within the South African National Laboratories, says it plans to sell radio tags at a cost that could put them in the ''disposable'' range -- $1 to $4 each. That compares with the $20 to $200 that tags typically cost now, depending on how much data they can hold and how far away they can be read.
Samsys said that tags costing less than $4 could be read in batches of up to 50 at a time, from up to 15 feet away, and could be used for such common applications as identifying airline baggage, streamlining passenger ticket check-in at airports and tracking the movement of employees in various business settings, as they enter and leave restricted areas.
''The affordability issue is going to make it much more pervasive more quickly,'' said Clifford Horowitz, the president and chief executive of Samsys, which is a unit of Spanex Capital Inc., a public company based in Toronto.
Samsys recently began shipping its first software- and hardware-development kits to companies that are developing customized products based on Supertag technology.
''There is not a single data collection environment where this particular technology could not be used,'' Mr. Horowitz said, though he conceded that tag prices would have to come down to fractions of a cent before the grocery-cart application would become feasible.
Mr. Horowitz said he had been talking to the Postal Service about more widespread uses for R.F.-ID technology, like tracking individual mailbags and containers, which would necessitate very inexpensive tags. (The tags the Postal Service is using in its Washington pilot program, produced by ID Systems, which is based in New York, cost $70 each.)
Despite Mr. Horowitz's enthusiasm, industry analysts are reluctant to estimate just how fast the market for such technology will grow. In part, it will depend on how quickly companies like Samsys can bring down the price, and how enthusiastically customers embrace the products.
For now, at least, the money to be made in R.F.-ID is with customers -- like the Defense Department -- for whom logistical needs transcend pennies-per-tag considerations.
The Pentagon learned the limitations of the bar code during the Persian Gulf war in 1991, when the military shipped more than 40,000 cargo containers, holding more than 10 million tons of equipment and supplies. Though virtually every item was labeled with a bar code, there was no quick way to know the contents of most containers without opening them and rummaging around, said Robert Reis, the founder, president and chief executive of Savi, the Texas Instruments unit.The maxim ''leave 'em wanting more'' apparently does not count for much in the magazine business. Indeed, after the last few weeks of seeing the faces of the actors Matthew McConaughey and Gwyneth Paltrow on what seems like just about every magazine cover in the country, readers could be forgiven for wanting to be left with considerably less.
Since the beginning of July, Mr. McConaughey -- featured in the new film ''A Time to Kill'' -- has appeared in all his 5-o'clock-shadowed hunkdom on the covers of Vanity Fair, Interview, Texas Monthly and Entertainment Weekly. He has also appeared on the inside pages of Newsweek, Premiere, Rolling Stone and People.
In the same period, the willowy Ms. Paltrow -- who plays the lead in ''Emma'' -- has been splashed across the covers of Vogue, US and New York magazines, and has been the subject of articles inside Newsweek and Time.
For the news weeklies, coming out with the same cover at the same time is par for the course; their lead articles are generally determined by the biggest breaking news. But for most other magazines, featuring the same topic simultaneously -- or worse, after the competition -- is considered anathema. They devote tremendous energy to getting something no one else has, or at least getting it first.
''One is constantly aware of the question, 'Are we the only ones who are doing it?' '' said Ingrid Sischy, editor in chief of Interview magazine. ''Ninety percent of the time someone appears on our cover, it's an exclusive because we have made sure that we will be the only place that he or she will appear that month.''
Sometimes, as in the cases of Mr. McConaughey and Ms. Paltrow, it does not work that way. The buzz is too overwhelming, the pickings otherwise slim. Editors are eager to anoint the next Brando on their pages. Publicists pick and choose those who will be granted interviews with their clients. And suddenly, magazines find themselves scrambling to showcase the celebrity of the moment, suggesting that they would rather follow the crowd than be left behind.
''Every once in a while it happens,'' said Graydon Carter, the editor in chief of Vanity Fair. ''The word spreads in the way that bad jokes from Wall Street spread around disasters. It goes over the oral pipeline.''
The pipeline generally originates in Los Angeles: Hollywood reporters see early screenings and the buzz about new movies and emerging stars begins to trickle eastward, to editors' offices in New York.
Even though Vanity Fair jumped on Mr. McConaughey early -- and had the acute pleasure of being the first to hit the newsstands with a cover of the actor -- the magazine almost missed out completely on him.
Interview magazine had been guaranteed an exclusive with Mr. McConaughey for its August cover. Then Vanity Fair wanted him for August, too. So Joel Schumacher, the director of ''A Time to Kill,'' called Ms. Sischy of Interview himself to ask if she would consider sharing Mr. McConaughey with Vanity Fair. And Ms. Sischy agreed.
''It ain't about hoarding,'' Ms. Sischy said. ''It's about doing it your way.''
In the end, rather than featuring Mr. McConaughey alone on the cover, as originally planned, Interview shot a new photo spread of the actor with Ashley Judd, who plays his wife in ''A Time to Kill'' and has been linked with him romantically in real life.
Entertainment Weekly also made adjustments in the wake of the media frenzy about the star, featuring Mr. McConaughey on the cover with his co-stars, Sandra Bullock and Samuel L. Jackson, rather than by himself.
''That was a definite response to the Vanity Fair cover,'' said Richard Sanders, the executive editor of Entertainment Weekly. ''But we also did individual shots, just in case we changed our minds.''
In general, however, Mr. Sanders said his magazine's main competitors were Rolling Stone, US and Premiere -- not Vanity Fair. ''Our policy is not to worry too much about Vanity Fair,'' he said.
Indeed, magazines do not consider every other magazine an equal threat. US, for example, did not mind that Vogue and New York also had covers on Ms. Paltrow. ''Both of those magazines are really not targeted to our readers,'' said Barbara O'Dair, the editor of US.
And New York magazine did not mind the situation, either. ''I thought that we could do a piece that would place her in context as sort of, 'New York Girl Made Good,' that was different from what either of those magazines would do,'' said Kurt Andersen, the editor in chief of New York.
Vanity Fair was not the first to write about Mr. McConaughey this summer.
Jeff Giles of Newsweek wrote his two-page profile three weeks before Mr. McConaughey's movie was released, sensing the deluge of coverage to come. ''The blizzard of stuff on him was completely insane,'' Mr. Giles said, ''and I can't tell you how good it felt to be off the stands for three weeks by the time it happened.
''Let's face it, this guy has 10 anecdotes, and you'd like to be the one to print them first.''On a set of Maya ruins at the outskirts of this capital, the Vice President of Guatemala last month swore in 21 Maya priests as members of a new Government-sponsored Council of Elders. Throwing flower petals and sugar into a crackling fire as they chanted and danced, the shamans in turn bestowed their official blessing on him.
Two weeks ago came the traditional festival marking the end of the Maya year. For the first time in memory, those ceremonies, which invoke Maya gods and for that reason have long been condemned by the Roman Catholic Church, were not only celebrated publicly, but also covered extensively by Guatemalan newspapers and television stations.
After five centuries of bitter repression, Guatemala's Maya majority is beginning to flex its muscles.
Taking advantage of the political opening that has accompanied the winding down of the country's 35-year civil war, Maya leaders are demanding a new relationship with a democratic Government that, for its part, promises to end racial discrimination here and sees the Mayas not as a subversive force but as a voting bloc to be courted.
As a result, new Maya political and cultural organizations are being formed almost daily, expressions of Maya religion and ethnic pride are on the rise and there has been an eruption of books, newspapers and radio programs in Mayan languages.
The country's leading newsmagazine, Cronica, published a cover story this month marveling at what it called ''the Maya Renaissance.''
''For the first time, Mayas are speaking for themselves about themselves,'' Demetrio Cojti, a social scientist who is one of the country's leading Maya intellectuals, explained. ''It is not that someone is speaking on our behalf, defending us, but that we ourselves are developing visions of our own identity and questioning everything, from a colonialist church to our relationship with the state.''
Richard Adams, an anthropologist from the United States who has worked here since 1950, said: ''It really is a renaissance and a major time of change. Everything is up for grabs.''
An estimated two-thirds of Guatemala's 10.5 million people are of Indian descent, the vast majority of them members of 21 linguistically distinct groups descended from the Mayas.
But since independence from Spain was achieved 175 years ago, the country has been dominated by an affluent Hispanicized minority, known as Ladinos, that has discriminated against indigenous Guatemalans and scorned their culture.
Conditions have been particularly difficult during the civil war, which is expected to end with the signing of a peace agreement before the end of the year.
In that conflict, ''the exclusionary project of the Spanish-descended elite merged with the internal security concerns of the military,'' one European diplomat here said, leading to a situation in which ''each supported the other, and counterinsurgency merged with racism.''
But early last year, the Government and the leftist guerrillas of the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity signed an ''Accord on the Identity and Rights of Indigenous Peoples.''
In that document, negotiated under United Nations auspices and due to go into effect when the final peace agreement is signed, the Government agreed to constitutional and other reforms so far-reaching that as one diplomat here put it, they will force Guatemalans ''to redesign their entire society'' if the changes are carried out by Congress.
The Government pledged to ''repeal all laws and decrees that may have discriminatory implications toward indigenous peoples'' and officially declare Guatemala a ''multi-ethnic, multi-cultural and multi-lingual nation.''
It also promised to ''recognize, respect and protect the distinct forms of spirituality practiced'' by Indian peoples, ''promote official status for indigenous languages'' and grant greater political and judicial authority to local indigenous communities.
For their part, Maya leaders feel confident in speaking out now because they no longer fear falling victim to the military massacres that wiped out hundreds of villages during the 1980's. President Alvaro Arzu, who took office in January, has largely defanged the Guatemalan armed forces through purges of the officer corps, recruitment restrictions and budget cuts, so that the military is more concerned at the moment with its own survival than repressing ''subversives.''
''We want to steer our own boat,'' Adolfo Ico Tujab, an elected leader of the Qeqchi people, said in an interview here. ''We do not want to be manipulated any more, and with the breaking of the iron fist, we finally have some space in which to promote the rights and interests of the Maya people.''
To turn the state's promises into a binding reality, the Guatemalan Fund for Indigenous Development, a Government agency set up to work with Maya groups, has begun consultations about new laws to guarantee Maya rights. The Council of Elders was organized to advise the agency on cultural and spiritual matters, and has been given authority to ordain priests and issue definitive interpretations of ancient Maya codices, which are being looked to for guidance on community matters.
''Our people have endured a bitter history of 500 years of marginalization,'' said Macario Zabala Can, a Maya priest who is president of the agency's national advisory council. ''But we have a prophecy that talks of the return of the Wise Men, and that is exactly what is happening now: we are entering a period of gestation.''THE airline industry can brag of precious few victories. Respectable profits are as rare as a full-course meal in coach class on a domestic flight. Endless marketing of innovations is also lost on most travelers, who see flying as something to be endured rather than enjoyed.
Even frequent-flier mileage has angered many consumers. When the popularity of the program built up a huge backlog of unused miles, many airlines imposed expiration dates, breaking a cardinal rule of marketing: Thou shalt not take anything away from the customer.
But airlines appear to have largely turned the mileage back to their advantage. Frequent-flier miles are no longer simply a liability, but have also become a source of revenue, even profits, as airlines increasingly sell miles to marketing partners like hotels and rental car agencies, who give them to customers.
And American Airlines, owned by the AMR Corporation, which invented frequent-flier miles 15 years ago, is pressing ahead the fastest with marketing and advertising efforts.
The airline, for example, recently created a separate marketing division specifically for its Aadvantage frequent-flier mileage program. Among its goals, Bruce Chemel, president of the new division, said, was to promote the notion of small businesses buying blocks of miles to offer as incentives to their customers. About 1,100 companies already offer miles with their own promotions, buying them from American for about 2 cents a mile. ''That's list price,'' Mr. Chemel said.
A roofer in Dallas, for instance, offers 5,000 miles with a new roof. Many car dealers are offering miles for test-driving a car, and thousands more for actually buying one.
The division plans to further mine American's huge data base of frequent fliers. For example, a Boston hotel facing a slow period might buy a mailing list from American of travelers who flew to Boston two or three times in the last six months.
Mr. Chemel said he also wanted to use the data base to refine the selection of promotions included in regular mailings to its millions of active members. If a member is not earning miles with a Citibank Aadvantage credit card, she would be sent an application for one. If she already has one, American would send her promotions for different products. And the number of those promotions is increasing, as American and other airlines find new ways for customers to both earn and redeem mileage without ever getting on a plane.
Frequent-flier mileage has become more than a matter of personal finance. For many people, it has become an emotional currency, almost an end in itself. That fact gave rise to some clever advertising and marketing ideas by American and its credit card partner, Citibank, which is owned by Citicorp.
Every year, for example, they hold a ''What I Did For Miles'' contest, asking Citibank Aadvantage card holders to send in stories about unusual things they paid for with their credit card. Each winner in five categories receives 100,000 miles. Thousands of people write in, bragging about charging college tuition or plastic surgery on their credit card.
A national ad campaign begun last year, developed by Kirshenbaum Bond & Partners of New York, tried to kid consumers that the driving force behind some of their purchases might be to add frequent-flier miles.
An ad showing a bouquet of flowers asks, ''Was he sorry? Or was it the miles?'' Other ads suggest a red sports car might have been bought more for the miles than because of a midlife crisis, and that an engagement ring might have been purchased for miles as well as to show commitment and love.
Prepare to see more. Nigel Carr, managing director of Kirshenbaum Bond, said the agency recently tested 60 new variations, and more were in the works. ''This is an inexhaustible campaign,'' he said. ''It will be a long time before it wears out.''
AdvertisingDeregulating the telephone industry may usher in lower prices and a wealth of new services, as Government officials and telephone executives promise. But for people who own telephone calling cards from AT&T, this new era is starting not with a bang, but a busy signal.
Over the last three months, thousands of cardholders from New York City to Oklahoma City have been unable to place local or toll calls using their AT&T calling cards. The reason: The AT&T Corporation has been dissolving agreements with the regional Bell operating companies and the GTE Corporation that provided for these companies to carry some of AT&T's calls over their local networks.
Now, if you place a call from Manhattan to Westchester County using an AT&T card, you are referred to a Nynex operator who informs you that ''AT&T no longer allows its cardholders to use the Nynex network.'' To complete the call, you must dial an 11-digit prefix, 1-800-CALL-ATT, which transfers the call from the Nynex Corporation's wires to AT&T's wires.
It is all part of the untrammeled competition introduced by the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Under the old rules, AT&T was not permitted to carry local or toll calls. So it agreed to transfer those calls to the Baby Bells and GTE. Now AT&T can compete for these calls -- if cardholders dial the magic 11-digit access code.
Such fine distinctions may not matter to the harried businessman who suddenly finds he can no longer call home from a distant airport. Industry executives admit that the chaos over calling cards illustrates the dark side of what was supposed to be a consumer-friendly law.
''This just makes life more confusing in a world that's confusing enough,'' Eric Rabe, a spokesman for the Bell Atlantic Corporation, said.
Even officials at the Federal Communications Commission, which has championed telephone competition, acknowledged the problem. ''There's going to be a lot of confusion over things like this,'' Mary Beth Richards, the deputy chief of the F.C.C.'s Common Carrier Bureau, said. ''But the benefits of competition outweigh the confusion.''
As in most telephone skirmishes, this battle pits the seven Baby Bells and GTE against their familiar nemesis, AT&T. Mr. Rabe and executives at other Baby Bells said that AT&T asked them to block local calls and short-haul long-distance, or toll, calls made by AT&T cardholders.
AT&T's rationale was logical: Why should it pay the Baby Bells for calls that it could legally carry itself? The trouble, according to the Bells, occurred when AT&T allowed its customers to believe that the Bells had blocked the calls.
In the days after AT&T's ''mutual card-honoring'' agreement with Nynex expired in April, AT&T even ran commercials implying that Nynex was blocking the calls of AT&T cardholders, according to Gary Scarano, the product director of Nynex's calling-card division.
That prompted Nynex to file a complaint with the F.C.C., in which it coined a new word to describe AT&T's action: jamming. Mr. Scarano said that ''jamming'' was a variation on ''slamming,'' the industry's slang for the illegal practice in which a long-distance carrier switches a customer's service without his knowledge or consent.
''Jamming means they block the call, then blame us, and then blur the line about who was carrying the call,'' Mr. Scarano said.
For its part, AT&T denied that it had misled customers. ''At no time were we trying to imply, or did we imply, that the Baby Bells made the decision,'' Kelly Statmore, a spokeswoman for AT&T, said.
Ms. Statmore said AT&T's advertising merely educated customers about the benefits of the access code -- namely, that the cardholder's call would travel exclusively on AT&T's reliable network. This reduces the danger of a call being routed to another long-distance carrier -- which could charge higher rates -- without the caller's knowledge.
Ms. Statmore said this situation often occurred when an AT&T cardholder made a call from a pay phone leased by another long-distance carrier.
AT&T, which has issued about 80 million corporate and consumer cards, has been introducing its new card policy in a wave across the United States. Starting with Nynex in April, it has dissolved agreements with Bell Atlantic, GTE, the Ameritech Corporation, and last Friday, with SBC Communications Inc. In November, AT&T plans to cancel its agreement with the BellSouth Corporation. And it expects to complete the process with the Pacific Telesis Group early next year.
Though AT&T's policy has provoked testy responses from the Baby Bells -- which are, after all, losing a stream of revenue -- the companies have responded with various marketing strategies.
Ameritech, which serves five states in the Great Lakes region, has told its customers that its card was easier to use than AT&T's. To place a local, toll, or long-distance call with Ameritech's card, one has only to dial ''0'' plus the number.
''It's not good customer service to make life harder for your customers,'' Thomas Hester, the general counsel of Ameritech, said.
Ameritech is not simply being altruistic. Under the new telecommunications law, the Baby Bells cannot carry long-distance calls until the long-distance carriers begin competing in the local market. So Ameritech and most of the Bells still must use AT&T or another carrier for long-distance calls by their cardholders.The Republican Party is taking great pains to present an image of diversity at its convention here, of ''real people living real lives in the real world,'' in the words of Haley Barbour, the party's chairman.
But away from the stage and the video screens, the nearly 2,000 delegates are overwhelmingly white, mostly male and middle-aged, and impressively wealthy. Almost one in five is a millionaire, according to a New York Times/CBS News Poll of the delegates.
The delegates are also more likely to call themselves ''very conservative'' than were delegates to the Republican convention eight years ago. They are more conservative than Republicans generally -- indeed, more conservative, their responses indicate, than their own candidate, Bob Dole.
The survey's profile of delegates points up the problem Mr. Dole has wrestled with all summer: How to sustain the enthusiasm of the party's core conservative activists, who are needed to staff phone banks and deliver leaflets, while still appealing to moderate Republicans, Democrats and independents to get enough votes to win in November.
Many of the delegates' views diverge sharply from those of Republican moderates, like Gen. Colin L. Powell, who will be showcased in prime speaking spots during the convention.
According to the poll, majorities of the delegates oppose affirmative action, the legislative ban on assault weapons and public education for the children of illegal immigrants. Most delegates say the Federal Government ''is doing too many things better left to businesses and individuals.'' But 56 percent favor a more active Federal role in one area, saying the Government ''should do more to promote traditional values.''
Over the years, polls have shown that convention delegates -- Democratic and Republican -- tend to be far more extreme in their ideology than average party members. Committed activists are more likely than moderates to master the arcane process by which delegates are picked.
The delegates here were selected in the spring and summer. In general, they either filtered up through a series of elections at the precinct, county and Congressional district levels, or they ran for the posts at state party conventions.
Despite their overwhelming support for their presumed nominee, Mr. Dole, only half the delegates say they believe that Mr. Dole will carry their particular states. At the 1988 Republican convention, 63 percent of the Republican delegates said that George Bush, then the Vice President, would carry their state against Michael S. Dukakis, who was leading substantially in national polls.
While 42 percent of this year's delegates cite Mr. Dole's ''character, ethics and credibility'' as his main strength, many also seem worried about his age, 73, and style as a candidate.
The delegates strongly support outlawing abortion, except in very limited cases. And 60 percent say they did not favor a ''tolerance plank'' in the platform that specifically mentioned abortion, a proposal that went down to defeat in meetings of the Republican platform committee last week.
Still, 38 percent of the delegates say they would support exceptions to an abortion ban in cases of rape and incest or to save the life of the mother, while another 27 percent say an exception should be permitted only ''to save the woman's life.''
In their platform, the Republicans have retained their call for a Human Life Amendment that would ban abortion in all cases. But 57 percent of the delegates polled say abortion is not the ''kind of issue'' that would merit changing the Constitution.
While 57 percent of the delegates support organized prayer in public schools, only 13 percent say it is the kind of issue that would be worth an amendment.
But 80 percent of the delegates say it would be worth amending the Constitution to require the Federal Government to balance its budget.
Most delegates say they view the religious right favorably and think that it has the right amount of influence on the party. Thirty-one percent say they are evangelical or born-again Christians.
At a time the Republican Party is trying to overcome a gender gap, only 36 percent of the delegates are women -- down from 43 percent in 1992. Ninety-one percent of the delegates are white.
Eighty-two percent of the delegates are married, compared with 59 percent of the general public. And 53 percent are 45 to 64 years old, about twice the proportion in the general public and the party as whole.
At a convention where one prominent Republican demonstration is a parade of yachts to support abortion rights, the delegates are also far wealthier than most Americans. Eighteen percent have net worths of more than a million dollars, while another 18 percent are worth $500,000 to a million dollars.
The poll was conducted by The New York Times and CBS News by telephone, mail and fax from July 16 to Aug. 8 with 1,310 of the 1,990 Republican delegates. The delegates were polled before Mr. Dole chose Jack Kemp as his running mate, and most of them were polled before Mr. Dole announced his tax-cut plan.This month, Sophia de Jesus will start training at the Mount Sinai Medical Center here for a low-paying job, but one that the hospital has reserved for welfare recipients like her. The 36-year-old single mother dreams of becoming a nurse one day.
''I'm looking ahead,'' said Ms. de Jesus, who has been on and off the welfare rolls for 19 years. ''I'm thinking: long-term, future.''
The pursuit of the ideal of self-sufficiency for the poor embodied in the welfare overhaul approved by Congress last month is already under way in states like Florida, one of the first to experiment with time limits on welfare benefits and to push recipients to get jobs. The state has already passed legislation to begin implementing permanent welfare changes, and it is well ahead of the July 1997 deadline imposed by Congress for states to submit their new welfare plans to the Federal Department of Health and Human Services.
But the transition from a system of guaranteed Federal cash assistance to one that leaves states with lump sums -- and decisions to make about whom to assist and how -- is fraught with anxiety and uncertainties even in well-prepared states like Florida. While Florida officials deal with the huge undertaking of transforming welfare offices into job placement centers, recruiting employers and appointing oversight boards, community agencies are holding public forums and emergency meetings to deal with the thousands of impoverished single mothers, legal immigrants and others who now face a cutoff of benefits or new requirements to find work.
A main concern for Florida is the roughly 129,000 legal immigrants who will become ineligible for food stamps and Supplemental Security Income. Agencies that deal with this population are rushing to qualify as many as possible for citizenship while bracing for the unknown.
''Certainly the elderly, those who cannot work, who have not passed citizenship exams, they're going to lose everything they have in the way of support,'' said Ariela Rodriguez, director of health and social services for the Little Havana Activities and Nutrition Center in Miami.
As the welfare overhaul kicks in, states are deciding whether they want to continue to finance some benefits. The Federal law, for example, allows but does not require states to cut off cash assistance, Medicaid and social services for legal immigrants who now receive these benefits. Don Winstead, welfare reform administrator for Florida's Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services, said the state had already chosen to continue the cash assistance.
But state law can be even stricter than the new Federal law. For instance, Congress set the lifetime limit for benefits at five years, but Florida set it at four in legislation passed in May.
Initially, states like Florida will have breathing room financially because their block grants are based on welfare rolls that have since shrunk. Florida is also looking at a healthy economy and job growth. But, warns State Representative Mary Brennan, one of the sponsors of Florida's overhaul, ''there are things beyond our control.''
''If Florida goes into a recession,'' she said, ''all bets on welfare reform are off.''
The new Federal law ends the guarantee of cash assistance under Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the major welfare program, and instead imposes time limits and work requirements on welfare benefits, allowing for the eventual cutoff of aid even if recipients have no jobs. Some groups, like legal immigrants, will become ineligible for most benefits and social services financed by the Federal Government, while others, like disabled children, must meet strict new standards to keep their grants.
In Florida, officials hope that at least a quarter of the 160,000 adults among the families receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children will be working within two years.
Florida is offering incentives to employers to hire and retain workers, like tax exemptions on equipment purchases. Officials with the state's Department of Labor and Employment Security say that more than 1,000 businesses have enrolled since July to hire participants in the new welfare program.
The labor department and the Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services are combining functions into ''one-stop'' centers where public assistance applicants and recipients can be screened to determine their skill and educational levels, and then be matched with jobs.
Two years ago Florida began pilot programs in two counties to test a two-year time limits on benefits, the first state to do so. Researchers who have studied those pilot programs say they are too new to yield many insights. There is no research yet on what happened to those who could not find or keep a job by the time they exhausted their benefits, for instance. Another unknown is whether those who find work will retain it for the long run and stay off welfare.
David Butler, assistant director of operations for the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, a nonprofit social policy research organization that studied the Florida programs under a state contract, said architects of work programs realized that some welfare recipients would not be able to work or to find jobs. He said it was up to states to decide who will be granted extensions or exemptions from requirements and who will be cut off. The challenge, he said, will be to do so in an equitable way if resources are also limited.
Ms. Brennan, noting that there is not enough money to meet the state's child-care needs, said she dreaded a worst-case scenario five years from now of increased homelessness and ''bands of kids roaming the streets.'' Valory Greenfield, a staff lawyer with Florida Legal Services, worries about mothers being forced to leave their children home alone to go to work and then risking losing them to the state for child neglect.
''Implementation is a lot different than putting the law on paper,'' she said. ''The devil is in the details.''
Child care concerns Ms. de Jesus, who was off welfare for two years before going back on it last fall. She has been told that her subsidized rent will go up, but as she begins full-time employment she does not know what will happen to the $378 in food stamps and the $309 in Aid to Families with Dependent Children that she receives each month.
More important, she has yet to find out if she can count on child care for her two daughters, ages 9 and 12, and her 14-year-old son while she works nights at the hospital.The conviction of India's best-known police officer last week for slapping a woman's backside at a party eight years ago, and his sentencing -- to three months in jail and a $20 fine -- have been hailed by women's groups as a landmark in the struggle for women's rights.
The trial, which ended last Tuesday, was front-page news across India because of the prominence of the defendant, K. P. S. Gill, who had retired at the end of last year as director general of the police in Punjab State. Mr. Gill, 61, earned renown, and controversy, for the harsh tactics he employed against a decade-long separatist insurgency, which was suppressed in 1993 after the loss of more than 10,000 lives.
The defeat of the Sikh separatists and the subsequent return to prosperity in Punjab, with a population of more than 20 million, earned Mr. Gill the sobriquet of ''super cop'' from India's popular press. But human-rights organizations here and abroad, as well as families of slain Sikh militants, have continued to demand action against Mr. Gill for his involvement in a well-chronicled campaign of police brutality that is said to have included the torture and summary killing of hundreds, and possibly thousands, of Sikh separatists and members of their families.
Because the Indian Government is considered unlikely to heed the demands for action against Mr. Gill for his actions during the insurgency, which posed one of the most serious threats to India's stability since independence nearly 50 years ago, his conviction under a section of the criminal code for ''outraging the modesty'' of the woman at the party has been welcomed by some in Punjab as a small measure of justice.
Others, including commentators in several of the country's major newspapers, have described the conviction, or at least the jail sentence, as poor reward to Mr. Gill for ridding India of a major separatist threat.
But the loudest resonance of the case has been among women's groups, which have long campaigned for action by the Government and the courts to combat the widespread abuses that are the lot of Indian women. According to those groups, few countries have a higher incidence of rape and sexual harassment than India, and a lower incidence of successful prosecutions. Dowry killings, in which brides are murdered for refusing demands from husbands and in-laws for money and gifts, are also common, and rarely punished.
The case against Mr. Gill was rooted in events at a party in 1988. According to evidence presented in court at Chandigarh, the Punjab capital, Mr. Gill approached Rupan Deol Bajaj, a senior official in the state government, and asked her to follow him to an adjoining room. When Mrs. Bajaj refused, the prosecution in the case said, Mr. Gill became angry and slapped Mrs. Bajaj on the backside. Mrs. Bajaj testified that the incident followed an earlier attempt by Mr. Gill to pull her chair closer to his, and that Mr. Gill, who has often spoken of his fondness for whisky, appeared to have had too much to drink.
Mr. Gill denied having touched Mrs. Bajaj, and said the friction between them at the party resulted from his having refused to intervene on behalf of Mrs. Bajaj and her husband, also a senior government official, in an unrelated police investigation. He has announced his intention to appeal the conviction, which carried with it the magistrate's stipulation that Mr. Gill be subjected to what is known in India as ''rigorous imprisonment,'' a harsh regimen generally reserved for serious criminals. Appeals in Indian courts often drag on for many years.
A feature of the case that has drawn widespread comment in India is the time that it took for the case to come to trial, and the prosecution's allegations of an attempted cover-up by senior officials who were said to have closed ranks around Mr. Gill. When Mrs. Bajaj and her husband pressed charges, lower courts dismissed them, determining there was no case to answer. But the couple pursued the matter to the Indian Supreme Court, which ordered the charges reinstated last year.
A further delay ensued when Mr. Gill, who is president of the Indian Hockey Federation, traveled to the United States last month, where he attended the Olympic Games in Atlanta and watched the Indian field hockey team in its unsuccessful bid to win a medal.
Mrs. Bajaj, 48, called the ruling a victory for Indian women.
''The judgment of a man who outraged the modesty of a woman sends the positive message that there is hope yet for women who dare to seek justice,'' she said. ''Thousands of young women who are every day faced with situations similar to mine, or worse, will now have the courage to come out and speak.''
But Mr. Gill's backers were insistent that an injustice had been done. Most commentaries in Indian newspapers took the view that even if Mr. Gill had slapped Mrs. Bajaj, the proper punishment would have been a fine or an official reprimand.When Sharon Kiss and her husband, Robert, were looking for a larger home three years ago, they scoured northern New Jersey's suburbs in search of a town with a fairly easy commute to Wall Street and good schools for their three young children.
They settled here in this small town in Morris County, where 96 percent of Chatham High School's graduates go on to college and the class size is usually 20 to 25 students.
''We bought a school district,'' said Mrs. Kiss, a former elementary school teacher. ''Kids only get one go around. And like most young families, we wanted to give our children the best education possible.''
Now, Mrs. Kiss and other parents here and in similar affluent New Jersey suburbs are worried that Gov. Christine Todd Whitman's new school financing plan threatens the very reason they were willing to pay a premium for their houses and high property taxes: a quality public education. Considered at risk are small classes, an abundance of extra-curricular programs and advanced placement courses in almost every subject.
Mrs. Whitman's plan to impose statewide curriculum standards and to overhaul how the state pays for public education was intended to end the two-decades-old court battle over the disparity between the state's richest and poorest school districts.
The debate, now being waged in the State Legislature, has shifted away from the needy school districts to the wealthy suburbs, where parents and educators, and their mostly Republican legislators, are concerned that Mrs. Whitman's plan could lower their schools' standards and put their prized public schools at risk.
''It is frightening,'' said Mrs. Kiss, 39, the mother of a 7-year-old girl, and two boys, ages 10 and 13. ''We want to maintain the standards that we already have, and that we already offer. We do not want to deny anyone else a solid education. You get one chance to make it work, and we are not willing to lower our standards. We are willing to bring everyone else's standards up.''
The New Jersey Supreme Court has ruled that the present system, which relies heavily on local property taxes to pay for public schools, does not provide what the state constitution requires: a ''thorough and efficient education'' to all of the state's children.
The court has ordered the Governor and the Legislature to adopt a plan by next month that would raise spending in the 30 poorest districts to the average spent by the 120 wealthiest districts.
Governor Whitman argues that pouring the estimated $450 million in state money to close the gap will not guarantee everyone a quality education. Instead, she is seeking to define a ''thorough and efficient education'' by imposing statewide curriculum standards.
The plan assumes that school districts would have to pay about $7,200 per student to meet the new standards. The Governor did promise to pump into the school districts now spending less than that an estimated $235 million of state money, about half of what lawyers for the poor districts say is necessary.
But many school districts now spend far more than $7,200, particularly in the northern suburbs. Almost half of the state's 594 school districts, under the Governor's plan, would have to ask voters to approve any spending beyond the $7,200, which the Whitman administration contends is unnecessary.
Local taxpayers now vote on their entire school budget every year. And in a state where property taxes are among the highest in the nation, some school budgets invariably fail. This year, voters in 32 percent of the state's school districts rejected their school budgets, forcing municipal governments, in most cases, to reduce school spending. And parents in those districts are particularly concerned that asking voters to approve what the Governor's plan deems unnecessary may end in chaos.
Lynne Strickland, director of the Garden State Coalition, which represents 117 mostly suburban districts working to change the Governor's plan, said, ''We are looking for stability so that we can continue to preserve our goals of excellence in education.'' At the same time, Ms. Strickland said, the group was pushing to raise educational standards in the poor districts.
The School District of the Chathams, which includes both Chatham Borough and Chatham Township, has a fairly solid record of winning support for its school budgets. And it shows: all of the school's 11th graders passed the reading portion of the High School Proficiency Test last year; 99.2 percent passed the writing segment, and 98.6 percent passed the math section.
Parents routinely set up phone banks in a local real estate office the day before elections on school financing to urge fellow parents to vote.
Yet parents and educators here worry about whether community support for the schools can continue under pressure from the high property tax bills and the Governor's saying that all that money is not necessary to meet the new ''world class'' educational standards.
This is what the Whitman plan means to Chatham, where homes range in price from $200,000 to $800,000. The district now spends about $9,400 for each of its 2,438 students. Under the Governor's plan, that means the school district is spending $5 million more a year than is constitutionally required. So next year, when the budget comes up for a vote, the school district will have to win special approval to continue spending that ''extra'' $5 million, which represents about 20 percent of the school district's total $26 million budget.
''You put that out to the public, to people who don't have children in public schools, and they are not going to understand what it means,'' said Carol R. Conger, Chatham's school superintendent. ''If we want new money, then clearly the public should vote on that. What we are asking for is to be grandfathered at our current spending level. If we have to cut, we can manage a $250,000 cut, but there is no way that we can cut $5 million.''
The Republican-controlled Legislature and the Whitman administration are looking to address the concerns of the more affluent districts. One legislative proposal would allow school districts to maintain their present spending levels. Another would allow school districts to ask voters to approve only a portion of of the amount above $7,200 level in the first year, and over a couple of years, phase in the remaining amount.On one of the most violent days of the 20-month war in the secessionist republic of Chechnya, Russian troops fought desperately but in vain today to regain control of the regional capital, Grozny.
Television showed a city in flames this evening as the bodies of dozens of young Russian soldiers lay where they fell in the muddy streets. Thousands of refugees -- many dragging their possessions in the sweltering heat -- fled the city on foot. President Boris N. Yeltsin convened a meeting of his top advisers in the Kremlin and then sent his national security adviser, Aleksandr I. Lebed, to the region for consultations.
''Radical measures must now be taken to settle this problem,'' said Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin after the meeting. The President ordered Mr. Chernomyrdin to find the cause of the ''gross miscalculations'' that led to the successful rebel offensive, which began last Tuesday.
''We will proclaim a state of emergency in Chechnya if that is what we need to do,'' Mr. Chernomyrdin said after the meeting, although it was unclear how that could affect the fighting there.
The war today appeared to reach an appalling new gravity for Moscow. Russian military officials, long known for presenting low estimates of their losses, said at least 200 soldiers had died and more than 800 had been wounded since the beginning of the offensive, timed to coincide with Mr. Yeltsin's inauguration last week.
By comparison, after the first eight months of the war, Russian leaders said they had lost no more than 1,000 servicemen. Nobody knows how many separatists and civilians have died in the fighting this week. By most estimates, at least 30,000 people, mainly civilians, have died since the war began.
The pace and character of the conflict -- after months of quasi-peace followed by fierce Russian bombing raids and rebel counterattacks -- have again attained the sustained viciousness with which it began.
After dozens of truces and many attempts at peace including a pledge by Mr. Yeltsin to end the fighting, the war still remains visibly impossible to resolve: the rebels are fighting for the independence of Chechnya, one of the many republics of the Russian federation. Russian leaders say that Chechnya can never be anything but a part of Russia. It is a battle that has been waged with different levels of intensity for more than 300 years, when Russia first rolled across the Caucasus and colonized the region.
''We have to finally determine who we are dealing with on the other side and what they want,'' said Emil Pain, Mr. Yeltsin's adviser for ethnic affairs. ''I am not talking about mercenaries. The majority of those who are fighting are fighting for Chechnya and if we don't find out why they are willing to side with the militants we will never be able to solve this problem.''
The fighting in Grozny today, where Russian tanks moved close to the center of the city only to be set upon by groups of rebels with anti-tank guns, was almost identical to the fighting there in January 1995, when Russians first attempted to take Grozny from the entrenched separatists.
Several Russian journalists who had been trapped with other civilians in a building in the midst of the battle for central Grozny were rescued by Russian forces tonight, and they said that although the federal soldiers were taking ''appalling losses,'' they seemed to be gaining the upper hand.
But the Chechen leadership said that the main field commander, Shamil Basayev, had remained with several thousand fighters in Grozny and that Russian forces did not control a single part of the city. As with almost every assertion issued by either side, there was no way to confirm that today. But according to witness accounts, most of the city remained in the hands of the Chechens, and in interviews with the Independent Television Network this evening, wounded Russian soldiers who had been evacuated from Grozny made it clear that the situation had been grave.
''They attacked us at night,'' said a private, who did not give his name but was in an army hospital in the central Russian city of Yekaterinburg. ''Nobody expected it. We just had no idea. They trapped us all at our posts or between buildings in groups of three or four. They would shoot from buildings and pick us off when we had no way to fight back. They had better weapons than we did and they were organized.''
By this afternoon the Russian forces appeared to have dispensed with their attempt to take the city by throwing as many soldiers in the line of fire as possible. Instead, as they did during late January 1995 when they finally forced the rebels from their control posts in the city, Russian soldiers were attacking in small groups today.
The situation throughout the countryside appeared to be as tense as in the capital. Rebel leaders said they had ambushed a large Russian convoy this morning and killed at least 150 soldiers. The Russian forces denied the assertion.
At a news conference in Moscow today, Doku Zavgayev, the leader of the Moscow-installed Chechen government, attempted to minimize the crisis.
''The pullout is underway,'' he said, referring to the troop withdrawal agreed to by Moscow in a treaty that it signed in May but has never honored. ''It will continue, and I will insist on it.'' Mr. Zavgayev has no real power in Moscow, and he is loathed above all others by the separatists.
It is also unclear what Mr. Lebed intends to do to try and bring peace to the embattled region. Before he was appointed as senior security chief for Mr. Yeltsin, he was long the most articulate and best-known critic of the Chechen war.
From the beginning of the conflict, he said it could not be won through military might and he many times noted how Russia seemed not to have learned the lessons of its 10-year war with Afghanistan, which ended in defeat.
If Mr. Lebed wishes to speak to the separatist leaders -- in the past he has said he wanted to -- he will probably get his chance.Signs have emerged of a severe split in one of the world's most brutal guerrilla groups, the Khmer Rouge, blamed by some researchers for the deaths of as many as two million Cambodians during their four-year rule in the late 1970's.
The turmoil burst into the open late last week with a flurry of vitriolic radio broadcasts by the guerrillas condemning some of their own leaders and a rush of statements by Cambodia's Government claiming that thousands of the rebel soldiers were about to defect.
The clandestine broadcasts made death threats against one of the founders of the movement, Ieng Sary, a schoolboy friend and brother-in-law of the Khmer Rouge leader, Pol Pot. And they branded as traitors two Khmer Rouge generals who were said to be ready to defect with as many as 3,000 men -- half the group's estimated force.
News reports from the Khmer Rouge stronghold in northwestern Cambodia said today that the two factions were squaring off for battle. Government officials in Phnom Penh, the capital, said the factions were preparing for mass defections.
Information about the Khmer Rouge, both from within and outside the movement, remains unreliable, with the rebels and the Government promoting their own propaganda. But the various recent statements contained enough overlapping information to suggest that a serious internal struggle was under way.
The apparent turmoil in the movement comes two months after still-unconfirmed reports of the death of Pol Pot, 68. He had been reported in recent months to be suffering from malaria and other ailments, but has not been seen by outsiders for more than a decade.
Analysts in Phnom Penh said the death or serious illness of Pol Pot, who called himself ''Brother Number One,'' could have touched off a power struggle and could help explain the attack on Mr. Ieng Sary, sometimes referred to as ''Brother Number Two.''
Nearly a decade ago, the Khmer Rouge radio announced that Pol Pot had stepped down as leader, but most outside analysts said they believed that this was a ploy to try to improve the group's image.
In Phnom Penh this weekend, Cambodia's Second Prime Minister, Hun Sen, said the Government had begun secret negotiations two months ago -- at the time of the reports of Pol Pot's death -- for the defection of the two commanders, Gen. Sok Pheap and Gen. Mit Chien.
Meeting with local reporters on Friday at his camp at Phnom Malai, just across the border from Thailand, General Sok Pheap reportedly denied that he was defecting from the Khmer Rouge. But he also reportedly said that his group wanted to discuss peace with the Government, and one of his officers was quoted as saying that the group wanted to break with ''hard-line'' leaders in the Khmer Rouge.
As he spoke, the rebel radio station, from elsewhere in the jungle, was branding him and General Mit Chien as traitors, along with Mr. Ieng Sary, who it said had embezzled $16 million in Khmer Rouge funds to buy a villa and a car.
''We are determined to destroy him,'' the radio said today of Mr. Ieng Sary, announcing that he had been sentenced to death and that he had fled Cambodia. His whereabouts could not be confirmed.
It was not clear who might seize leadership of the Khmer Rouge once Pol Pot and his tight-knit founding group leave power.
''There is no obvious person in the second echelon who could become No. 1,'' Steven Heder, an expert on the Khmer Rouge at the University of London, said at the time of the reports of Pol Pot's death.
The breakaway faction, which issued a statement pledging loyalty to Mr. Ieng Sary, is apparently opposed to the Khmer Rouge defense minister, Son Sen, and to his chief of staff, Ta Mok, a one-legged commander with a reputation for brutality.
From its inception in the 1950's, Cambodia's Communist movement has been run by a tight-knit and remarkably stable clique led by Pol Pot. He and Mr. Ieng Sary became friends as schoolboys in 1947, joined the Communist Party together in France a few years later and married two women who were sisters.
Mr. Ieng Sary, 71, was Foreign Minister during the years of Khmer Rouge rule from 1975 to 1979, when hundreds of thousands of Cambodians died from execution, forced labor or starvation. Recent research has led some scholars to double the death toll of one million usually cited for that period, while others now set the number at 1.5 million.
After the Khmer Rouge were driven from power by a Vietnamese invasion, Mr. Ieng Sary controlled the group's finances but appears to have dropped from an active leadership role in recent years.
''If they can't even let an old, sidetracked founder of the movement retire and grow some roses, they are at a state of division,'' said David Chandler, a Cambodia scholar at Monash University in Australia. ''They are losing a number of people with no replacements in sight, and this can't be healthy for them.''
Although they remain a tough fighting force, the Khmer Rouge have been reduced to something of a bandit group, operating from hideouts mainly in northwestern Cambodia. Though the Khmer Rouge have succeeded in repulsing repeated annual offensives by the Government, they appear no longer to have the capacity to launch a major offensive of their own.From Bill Ovecka, a salesman who had just finished 18 holes at the Bob-O-Link golf course, and Harold Ebert, a tree surgeon carrying a new shovel out the front door of Frye Servistar Hardware, to Norman Dick, polishing off his usual Sunday morning coffee and glazed at the Donut Kettle, and Dale Holwick Jr., an usher at the United Methodist church where President William McKinley used to worship, Republicans here had nothing but hopeful things to say about the choice of Jack Kemp as their Vice-Presidential candidate.
At times, they shouted, they were so worked up. On Saturday, as Representative Ralph Regula, the Republican Congressman from the area, marched through nearby Alliance in the annual Carnation City Festival parade, people yelled, ''Yo!'' ''Ralph!'' ''Kemp!'' and gave the thumbs-up sign.
But in their praise, the Republicans also revealed their fears about Bob Dole's candidacy for President. Mr. Ebert, like so many interviewed, was happy to have a younger man on the ticket. ''Dole's age may be agin him,'' he said. And Mr. Ovecka was excited about adding someone he called so ''Reaganesque.'' Mr. Dick was relieved to have a candidate he thought was impressive on television. ''CNN and all of those guys seem to like Kemp,'' he said. And Mr. Holwick said the selection of Mr. Kemp was a welcome break after the ''problems in the party,'' meaning abortion.
Furthermore, if the men getting their hair cut at Brunner's, a barbershop on South Market Street with a black clientele, are any indication, Mr. Kemp's supposed appeal in minority neighborhoods has not registered. ''Kemp? He won't get my vote,'' said Raphiel Carter, who works two jobs that pay little more than minimum wage to make ends meet. ''Republicans are the ones who create $4.95-an-hour factory jobs.''
Here in Stark County, a place that mirrors national voting trends, the selection of Mr. Kemp appears to be a good one for Republicans. They have plainly been energized by his choice. Virtually every one of the three dozen interviewed from both parties recognized his name, and no one had anything bad to say about him personally. There are even Democrats, like Chris James, a union leader and a Clinton supporter, with nice things to say. ''Jack Kemp's a good person and he gets across to more people,'' said Mr. James, vice president of a union local at Republic Engineered Steels.
While none of them said Mr. Kemp would prompt them to cross party lines, a few Republicans, like Claire-Marie Brown, a retired teacher who is leaning toward President Clinton, now say they will take a second look at the Republicans. ''I'm not terrified of Dole's age, but it is a factor,'' Ms. Brown said. ''Right now, I'd still go for Clinton, but I like that Kemp's not as stodgy as Dole, and I'm going to research him.''
The national commentators have made much of the past policy differences between the two top Republicans, but many here see it as a sign of strength that Mr. Dole would pick someone who disagrees with him on some matters. As Representative Regula said, ''If John Kennedy could pick Johnson, anything can work.''
Jim Leath, a computer salesman and a Republican, said that the choice of Mr. Kemp had given him faith that the 15 percent cut in Federal income taxes promised by Mr. Dole would actually happen. He admires Mr. Kemp for holding to ideas, like supply-side economics, when they grew unpopular. ''Kemp sticks with things,'' he said. ''Clinton talks about things, shallow things that satisfy for the moment.''
The Stark party leaders -- including Representative Regula; Charles Brown, the party chairman, and W. R. Timken Jr., chairman of the Timken bearing and steel company -- all said they were pleased that Mr. Kemp was the choice instead of the three men most often mentioned last week, Gov. John Engler of Michigan, Senator Connie Mack of Florida and former Gov. Carroll A. Campbell Jr. of South Carolina.
Mr. Ovecka agreed. ''Kemp's a national figure -- he's not like the Mayor of South Carolina or Governor or whatever,'' he said.
In the course of a 15-minute telephone interview from San Diego, Mr. Timken, a Dole delegate to the convention, referred to Mr. Kemp as ''Mr. Honesty,'' ''Mr. Integrity'' and ''Mr. Outreach.''
But whether Mr. Outreach will help Mr. Dole with two constituencies he desperately needs to attract -- women and minorities -- is not a sure thing. A poll of the county by The New York Times in the spring indicated that both groups were leaning strongly toward Mr. Clinton.
In interviews, Republican women like Judy Vaughn sounded less enthusiastic than their husbands about Mr. Dole and Mr. Kemp.
''I will vote for Mr. Dole,'' said Charles Vaughn, who owns a business.
''Dole? Yes, I guess,'' said Mrs. Vaughn, a stockbroker's assistant.
Beverly White, a county social service worker who worshiped this morning at the United Methodist Church of the Savior, had thought she would vote Republican this time, but now plans to vote for Mr. Clinton. ''Kemp? she said. ''I hardly know him beyond his name.''
Representative Regula pointed out that he and Mr. Kemp had served together on the Federal committee to promote Martin Luther King Day as a national holiday. And Mr. Regula had a major role in bringing in Representative J. C. Watts, a black Republican Congressman from Oklahoma, as the featured speaker for the Stark County party's annual McKinley dinner in May. But it was striking that of the 300 Republicans who attended that night, Representative Watts was the only black person.
At Brunner's barbershop this morning, Mr. Kemp inspired little interest among the black middle- and working-class men getting their haircuts. ''As a football player, he was O.K.,'' said the barber, Delbert Brunner Jr., ''but as a government official, no.''
Even Emmit Jones, a pipefitter for East Ohio Gas who was the most positive about Mr. Kemp among those in the barbershop -- saying he was willing to listen because of his concern about cutting welfare rolls, crime and taxes, all popular Republican positions -- said it would take a drastic change in the Republicans to get him to switch from Mr. Clinton.
Mr. Carter, who lost a union job at an auto plant when the company, the Dyneer Corporation, moved south, said that he was angry he had to hold down two jobs just to keep up, and that he, like most people, would vote his pocketbook this time. ''Republicans never did anything for a poor man,'' he said.Divers have recovered the last of four luggage containers that Trans World Airlines Flight 800 had been carrying in its forward cargo hold and have found that the large metal box, like the others retrieved earlier, showed no visible evidence of damage from a bomb, investigators announced this afternoon.
The finding threw serious doubt into a leading theory of investigators, that the Boeing 747 that crashed on July 17, killing 230 people, was brought down by a bomb secreted in passengers' luggage.
Divers brought up the fourth container on Saturday, and James K. Kallstrom, the senior F.B.I. officer on the case, said this afternoon that all four luggage containers ''are basically unremarkable, although the testing has not been completed.''
Nonetheless, investigators with both the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Transportation Safety Board all said today that they still believed it remained probable that a bomb caused the explosion and crash.
Tonight, a senior investigator said: ''I think it potentially closes out one area where the bomb might have been. But by no stretch of the imagination does it mean a bomb did not blow up the airplane. All it does is rule out those four containers as the place where a bomb was hidden.''
But for that theory to be so, the explosives would have had to have been hidden somewhere else.
One senior investigator said last night that an emerging theory is that a bomb was placed under a seat in the middle part of the cabin, possibly above the center fuel tank . Investigators have also said an explosive could have been stored in an overhead bin, or hidden in a food cart that was then loaded onto the plane.
At the former Grumman hangar in Calverton, L.I., investigators are reconstructing pieces of the plane from the rear of the forward cargo hold to the back of the wings, where there is clear evidence of fire damage on the metal.
In addition, investigators are eager to recover and test pieces of the underbelly of the plane's midsection, which they believe is located in the debris site closest to Kennedy Airport. The small pieces in that area are believed to be the first pieces blown from the airplane.
The focus on the inside of the plane's cabin has come as investigators have eliminated other possible locations for a bomb. They have already said they do not believe a bomb was in the cockpit area because when they pulled the cockpit out of the water a week ago, they found that the glass covers for most of the pilot's gauges were unbroken. At the same time, they discovered to their surprise that the glass ceiling light over the stairway to the jumbo jet's upper level was intact, making it unlikely that a bomb had exploded near there.
The forward cargo hold of a Boeing 747 -- large enough to hold a car parked sideways -- can carry as many as 16 luggage containers, seven or eight on either side. But this flight was only about half-full, and so the hold contained only four. They were situated in the front of the hold, and no other cargo was in the hold, investigators said.
The rear cargo hold is believed to have contained only cargo, not luggage. But because the plane's forward section split from the rest of the fuselage and fell into the ocean first, investigators said they strongly believed that an explosion occurred somewhere near the front of the plane, forward of the wings.
As early as the middle part of last week, several key investigators began having doubts that a bomb had been hidden in luggage in the cargo hold because of the condition of the other three aluminum baggage bins, which had been recovered early last week.
Two of the containers were badly damaged, and the third was relatively intact. But bomb experts looking at those containers did not find any residue or damage consistent with a bomb, investigators said.
Safety board investigators said they also remain interested in the center wing fuel tank, a large space between the wings. It was mostly empty when the plane took off, but aviation experts said it still held enough fuel to explode, if the fuel got warm enough to turn into a vapor and something ignited it.
The wreckage shows that the center-wing fuel tank had extensive fire damage, as would be expected no matter what caused the initial blast. But because divers have pulled up only a portion of the tank, they are not ready to draw conclusions.
Also today, Robert T. Francis, the safety board vice chairman who is in charge of the investigation, said two more bodies were recovered over the weekend, meaning that 198 of the 230 people on board have now been accounted for.
The baggage containers, used to speed up the loading and unloading of the jumbo jets, are rectangular metal boxes with side doors or roll-up canvas sides. Baggage handlers say most of them are made of aluminum. Luggage is stacked inside the containers, which are rolled into the cargo hold and then secured in place. A manifest listing the contents is then stuck to the side of each container.
Salvage workers have also recovered two engines and parts of a third. They believe the fourth is in the main debris area, under other parts, but they are reviewing sonar records from other areas to make sure they have not missed anything.
Little wreckage was recovered today as the Navy gave nearly all of its personnel some extra time off. Most of them have been working 12 hours a day for weeks. Divers on the Grasp, a Navy ship moored over the main wreckage field, skipped the noon-to-midnight shift today. But they were due to resume operations early on Monday.With a colorful spectacle of boats, afternoon fireworks and partisan politics, Bob Dole arrived today for his long-awaited convention with his new running mate, Jack Kemp, and a rousing pitch for his centerpiece plan to cut taxes.
As buoyant supporters chanted ''Dole-Kemp, Dole-Kemp'' at a rally in a sunny park jutting into the San Diego Bay, Mr. Dole immediately went on the attack against President Clinton in a speech that signaled a bruising fall campaign in which the Republicans will appeal to the anxiety of middle-class voters.
''If Bill Clinton opposed tax cuts, he obviously didn't mean it when he said the era of big Government was over,'' said Mr. Dole in a punchy dry run for his Presidential nomination acceptance speech on Thursday. ''I think what's happening, the era of Bill Clinton is about over. And that is going to happen sooner than you think.''
After a primary campaign that was notable for his stark appeals to conservatives, Mr. Dole, who told The San Diego Union-Tribune that he had not even read the party's starkly conservative platform $(Article, page B5$), also sought today to strike a more broadly appealing, confident tone. He repeatedly invoked Ronald Reagan, the last Republican who rode to the White House on a promise of tax cuts.
''It's time to lift up America,'' Mr. Dole said. ''Lift up America. Lift up our economy. Lift up our schools. Lift up our families. Lift up our values. And, most of all, lift up our expectations. And that's exactly what Jack Kemp and I are going to do.''
As the Republicans sought a harmonious pose, even Patrick J. Buchanan seemed to cooperate by halting his candidacy. At a rally tonight north of here in Escondido, Mr. Buchanan proclaimed a ''truce of San Diego.'' But in suggesting he would not torment Mr. Dole ''for the next 10 weeks,'' Mr. Buchanan stopped short of a formal endorsement and barely uttered Mr. Dole's name.
Rather than praise Mr. Dole, Mr. Buchanan devoted his speech to ridiculing Mr. Clinton.
And in his new subordinate role, Mr. Kemp also took aim Mr. Clinton, accusing the White House of ''kibitzing and criticism'' of Mr. Dole's blueprint to cut taxes and balance the budget. ''The President has said he is unalterably opposed,'' said the former Congressman. ''His advisers have said it can't be done. They don't know Bob Dole and they don't know Jack Kemp either.''
Saying that ''everything before has been a warm-up lap, a trial heat,'' Mr. Dole was seeking a fresh start for his campaign as thousands of Republicans poured into this clean and breezy city for the convention that opens on Monday and will nominate him to be President of the United States -- a moment for which Mr. Dole has longed for since his shattering loss in the 1988 primaries to George Bush.
Republicans are counting on their four-day, made-for-television extravaganza to help Mr. Dole close Mr. Clinton's months-long lead in the polls -- and to dress up the image of a party that many Americans blame for shutting down the Government last year.
Besides Mr. Buchanan rally, there were more political dealings up the coast, in Long Beach. In a gathering that could spell more trouble for the Republicans in the fall, the Reform Party, established by Ross Perot, opened its convention, with Mr. Perot and former Gov. Richard D. Lamm of Colorado vying for the nomination.
In his speech today, Mr. Dole did his best to pre-empt the competition. ''As of now, the President and his party are the party of the status quo,'' Mr. Dole said. ''We are the reform party.'' He added, ''We have all the ideas, and they have all the excuses.''
But in presenting the new ticket as oriented to the future, Mr. Dole turned to the past. From the opening line, when he asserted, ''We're going to win one for the Gipper,'' his speech was salted with references to carrying the banner of Ronald Reagan -- through a proposal that he claims would cut taxes and balance the budget at the same time.
''One man, Ronald Reagan, really did start it all,'' he said. ''And we're thinking of him today, and God bless Ronald Reagan today. Now it's up to us to finish the job, and win the Reagan revolution once and for all. And we're going to get it done. Make no mistake about it. And that's why we're going to cut taxes, tax rates across the board for every working person in this country.''
Mr. Dole was apparently attempting to goad Democrats into making the same mistake they made in 1994, when they sought to identify Republican Congressional candidates with Mr. Reagan's economic policies. The effort backfired because Democrats failed to appreciate Mr. Reagan's enduring popularity with American public.
Beyond the oratory, the symbols throughout Mr. Dole's showy entrance were unusual for his campaign -- and reminiscent of the well-polished campaigns of Mr. Reagan. It was no accident that several of Mr. Reagan's image-makers, including Michael K. Deaver, have important roles at the convention.
After flying here from Mr. Dole's hometown of Russell, Kan., where Mr. Dole announced on Saturday that he had selected Mr. Kemp as his running man, the two men and their wives, Elizabeth Hanford Dole and Joanne Kemp, arrived at the rally on a tour boat, waving from the deck, surrounded by sailboats, steam boats and a smattering of yachts. As the rally ended, a huge blue curtain behind the candidates dropped, revealing a depiction of the facade of the White House that rose from beneath the stage. It was not lost on some in the audience that the White House tilted to the left. All the while, the blue sky was crowded with sky divers and vintage airplanes.
The rally also marked the second major appearance of the new ticket. And in introducing Mr. Dole, Mr. Kemp sought to dispel speculation that he would be an uncooperative No. 2, given his independent streak and his years of tense relations with Mr. Dole.
Still, the loquacious Mr. Kemp also came close to upstaging the leading candidate on the ticket: he spoke for only three minutes less than Mr. Dole.
But Mr. Dole -- not his running mate -- was more aggressive today in attacking the President -- a role that the No. 2 on the ticket usually plays but which Mr. Dole had pledged not to put on Mr. Kemp.Declaring a temporary ''Truce of San Diego,'' Patrick J. Buchanan tonight ended his wilted Presidential campaign for 1996 with a speech that seemed to launch his campaign for the year 2000. Mr. Buchanan forswore a third-party candidacy but stopped well short of endorsing Bob Dole, the presumed Republican nominee.
In his speech to about 1,000 supporters gathered in Escondido, north of here, Mr. Buchanan mentioned Mr. Dole only once, in a somewhat poignant reprise of the campaign's might-have-beens. ''Had Lamar just run second in New Hampshire, instead of third,'' Mr. Buchanan said, referring to Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, ''we now know Senator Dole would have quit the race.''
In his speech Mr. Buchanan recapped his 18-month campaign, declared the triumph of his ideas in the party's platform and predicted the Republicans' eventual transformation to ''a Buchanan party.''
''America does not necessarily need a third party,'' said. ''What we need is a fighting second party.
While he called for party unity, Mr. Buchanan did not try to rally his supporters to Mr. Dole's banner.
Before Mr. Buchanan spoke, Oliver North addressed the cheering crowd, urging them not to desert the Republican Party.
When he mentioned the possibility of a new political party, the crowd came to its feet, interrupting him and chanting, ''Go, Pat, Go!''
In his speech Mr. Buchanan made no mention of Mr. Dole's choice of Jack Kemp as his running mate. While Mr. Kemp and Mr. Buchanan both oppose abortion rights, they disagree sharply on trade, immigration and other issues.
Mr. Buchanan, who won more than three million votes in the primaries, essentially suspended his campaign after losing to Mr. Dole here in California in late March. He had hoped to retain leverage in the party by staying in the race, but he made few appearances, and his influence waned.
Mr. Buchanan had hoped to speak in prime time during the Republican convention, but aides to Mr. Dole, the presumed nominee, locked him out. They feared that Mr. Buchanan might repeat his performance from the 1992 convention in Houston, when he declared: ''There is a religious war going on in this country.''
While he did not use those words in his Escondido speech, he included others certain to rattle the nerves of moderate delegates, not to mention viewers at home. He offered a fierce attack on abortion rights, on illegal immigration and on ''the New World Order'' that he said threatened American sovereignty.
Such sentiments may not be expressed so colorfully from the party's podium here, but they are reflected in its platform. Indeed, as he withdrew tonight, Mr. Buchanan intended to declare victory on issues important to him. "Our rivals may be the ones waving from the podium down there in San Diego, but, between you and me, it is our ideas that now reflect the grass roots of this party and our ideas that are now embedded within the Republican platform," he said.
Mr. Buchanan and his sister, Angela Bay Buchanan, helped resist efforts by Mr. Dole to insert a so-called "tolerance plank" into the Republican platform that specifically mentioned abortion. They also successfully pushed to amend the platform's endorsement of free trade to "free and fair trade," language favored by the party's protectionist wing.
In recent months Mr. Buchanan has seemed to shift his focus to the next Presidential elections, in the year 2000. And he has acknowledged that a third-party run by him this year might result in Mr. Dole's defeat.
That might damage Mr. Buchananan's hopes for future races. since the party's spoiler in one election would make an unlikely nominee in the next. ''Let us, at least for the next 10 weeks -- nobles and knights, and even peasants with pitchforks -- suspend our battles with one another, and join together in a common cause to defeat Bill Clinton and Prince Albert'' and ''dispossess them of all their holdings east of the Potomac River,'' he said.
POLITICS: PATRICK J. BUCHANANNINE years ago, the Kirtland's warbler, one of North America's rarest songbirds, appeared to be on the ropes. A survey of its nesting grounds in northeast Lower Michigan turned up only 167 singing males, which translates into a roughly similar number of breeding pairs.
''We didn't know what it would take to bring the species back,'' said Harold Mayfield, an ornithologist in Toledo, Ohio, who is an authority on the bird. ''I had my doubts about its survival.''
But the warbler has come back in spectacular fashion after a forest fire created thousands of acres of the bird's specialized habitat: Christmas tree-size stands of jack pines. Now there are so many Kirtland's warblers that adult birds looking for nesting places have leapfrogged Lake Michigan and are apparently breeding in the state's Upper Peninsula. A census this summer counted 678 singing males, the second-highest number ever, in Lower Michigan. The survey also turned up 14 male warblers in four northern counties in the Upper Peninsula. At least six of those birds had mates, and observers saw adult birds carrying food, a sure sign that nestlings were being fed.
The sightings raise the possibility of a significant expansion of the species' breeding range, which has historically been confined to a few counties in Lower Michigan where there are large expanses of jack pines.
''We've got state and national forest lands with the right kind of ground cover that can be managed to favor Kirtland's warblers,'' said Ray Perez, a biologist with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources in Newberry in the Upper Peninsula. He noted that warblers had been found both in jack pine plantations and on tracts burned a few years ago by wildfires.
Mr. Perez said scientists would try to net and band the young warblers before they migrated to their winter range in the Bahama Islands late this month.
Mr. Mayfield cautioned, however, that ''exploratory efforts by birds to colonize new nesting areas often fail.'' He added, ''I wouldn't be surprised if we can't find Kirtland's warblers in the Upper Peninsula three years from now.''
Kirtland's warbler is a handsome bluish-gray and yellow bird about six inches long. It has a ringing song that can be heard for some distance, which is a big help to the biologists and volunteers who count the birds. The species is named for Dr. Jared P. Kirtland, a 19th-century Ohio physician and naturalist. The first specimen was collected on his farm near Lake Erie in 1851. But the bird's breeding grounds in the sandy, fire-scarred plains near Michigan's Au Sable River, a world-famous trout stream, remained a secret until 1903, when the first nest was found in a tract of jack pines that had been burned a few years earlier.
The jack pine is a northern tree that reaches nearly to the Arctic, but Kirtland's warblers nest only in the southern portion of its range. Jack pine depends on fire to propagate; its cones open and spread their seeds only after they are exposed to intense heat. The warblers appear about six years after a fire in areas where new pine growth is especially dense and the trees are five to six and a half feet tall, with live branches that reach the ground, Mr. Mayfield wrote in 1992 in his monograph on the warbler for ''The Birds of North America'' (American Ornithologists' Union and the Academy of Natural Sciences).
The warbler nests are built on the ground and hidden by shin-high vegetation, but the birds will abandon a site after about 15 years, when the slow-growing trees are 10 to 15 feet high and their lower limbs begin to die. ''The females have very high real-estate standards,'' Mr. Mayfield said. ''If the trees are too tall for a Christmas tree, they're too big for the warblers.''
The extent of the Kirtland's warbler habitat and its population probably peaked in the 1880's and 1890's, Mr. Mayfield said. In 1871, he noted, an unchecked wildfire, fed by clear-cutting from logging operations that denuded most of Lower Michigan, burned one million acres in the heart of the bird's breeding range, converting the original white pine forest to jack pine. But by 1951, when conservationists took the first census, decades of fire suppression had reduced the amount of suitable habitat.
Moreover, brood parasitism by brown-headed cowbirds, which lay their eggs in the nests of other birds, had reduced the production of warbler fledglings to a critically low level. In one study, 70 percent of the warbler nests had been parasitized by cowbirds, and only two fledglings survived out of 29 nests.
Workers from the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, however, have killed more than 100,000 cowbirds from warbler breeding areas since a trapping program began in 1972, and parasitism has dropped, affecting 3 percent of the nests. State and Federal foresters, meanwhile, have used clear-cutting, seeding, replanting and burning to replicate the effects of wildfires and create Kirtland's warbler habitats.
But biologists say the biggest help for the warbler came from a fire in 1980 near Mack Lake in Huron National Forest; that created 15,000 acres of new jack pine habitat. In recent years, nearly half of the breeding warblers have been found in the Mack Lake burn. Those trees, however, have reached a size where the birds are beginning to abandon the area. That is why this year's census was down from the all-time high, reached in 1995, of 759 singing males in Lower Michigan.
Foresters are planting 4,300 acres of jack pines this year in a scramble to make up the difference. Mr. Mayfield compared the drop in the number of breeding birds to a ''bobble in the stock market.''AFTER six months on the job, Heidi Roizen, a former software developer who is now Apple Computer Inc.'s head of developer relations, says she has identified Apple's biggest problem.
''It's the perception of future risk, not the reality of what's happening now,'' Ms. Roizen said. ''People are worried about Apple. They are worried that the application they need either isn't available or won't be available. They wonder, 'How much can I depend on Apple to be there in the future when I need them?' ''
The reality is that the Mac is coming back. It never really went away, of course, but visitors to the annual summer Macworld conference in Boston last week were breathing a bit easier after viewing a broad array of new hardware and software products for the beleaguered personal computer system.
Apple has plenty of problems to work out before its customers can spend their dollars without wondering if they are investing in a dead-end technology. Those of a certain age may recall investing in Sony's technically superior Betamax video cassette format, which slowly withered away in the face of dominant VHS sales.
But there are several reasons to be more confident about the Mac's survival. First, this Macworld revealed, for the first time, a proliferation of so-called clone machines, computers based on the Macintosh operating system software but made by companies including Power Computing, Umax and Daystar.
Even more encouraging, Motorola Inc., International Business Machines and Apple were hinting that they would soon have computers on the market that will allow users to install the operating system of their choice. These ''Power PC reference platform'' (PPCP) machines could be available early next year.
I have never seen a normal human being compare the Mac OS, Windows and Unix systems side by side and come away saying, ''Gee, I really prefer the way Windows and Unix work.''
One of the most vexing problems, Ms. Roizen noted, is that customers may have a difficult time finding the new Macintosh products in the marketplace. Apple Computer's well-publicized financial and organizational problems in the last year have scared off many buyers and some software developers, but it has also scared off some retailers.
The retailers see Apple's market share dwindling -- to about 7 percent of all personal computers now sold domestically, down from more than 10 percent a year ago -- and reduce the space given to Macintosh products accordingly. They see rising numbers for Windows software sales and put up more Windows banners.
Most Macintosh users have experienced the Vanishing Mac phenomenon lately. My son and I visited our neighborhood computer superstore a few months ago, only to discover that the once-prominent Macintosh software section had been reduced to a pile of boxes on the floor in the farthest corner of the building, back by the cables and dongles and Dummy books.
To get to the back, we had to in effect hurdle over long rows of perfectly arrayed Windows programs, aisle after aisle of them, all under the colorful Jolly Roger Windows flag of the Microsoft Corporation.
Ms. Roizen of Apple acknowledged that the Macintosh's share of the retail shelf space has been slipping, and stopped short of saying there would be more Mac software titles in the stores by the coming holidays. But she also pointed out that there was far more Macintosh software in the store than meets the eye.
More software is being delivered on CD-ROM, she noted, and more CD-ROM packages contain hybrid disks that include the code for Macintosh computers as well as Windows machines.
The trouble is that retailers stock these hybrid CD's in the Windows sections. When the programs are sold, they are counted as Windows sales, even though they may have been purchased by Macintosh users. The result is what Ms. Roizen called a ''huge under-reporting'' of Macintosh software sales.
Apple has a difficult task ahead in persuading thousands of retailers to change the way they stock, display and report sales for the hybrid CD-ROM titles. The company plans to spend millions of dollars in the coming year to provide retailers with Macintosh banners and displays, in the hope that those piles of boxes on the floor will get better treatment.
Apple executives say they will also establish programs to help steer Macintosh users to the retail or catalogue outlets where Mac products are sold.
But Apple's best prospect in the long term is to encourage its Macintosh users to consider shopping electronically. At the Macworld convention, officials from the Netscape Communications Corporation gave enthusiastic praise to the Macintosh, which is not surprising, since Netscape is openly unfond of Microsoft. Netscape's point, however, was that its studies have shown Mac users to be twice as likely as Windows users to use the Internet. And there lies a potential advantage for Apple.
''In electronic commerce, shelf space is virtually unlimited,'' said Jonathan Fader, an Apple marketing executive.
Several new electronic software outlets have opened recently, allowing Mac users to shop for specific Mac products that can then be delivered the traditional way, through the mail, or the cyber way, through a modem and phone line. (Software only, of course; the technology needed to send a computer through the ether is still several years away.)
We will try to find some of the new Macintosh products on line, and will be back soon with the results.LAST week's release of clues that Mars may once have harbored primitive microbes has lent new energy and excitement to a call for close exploration not only of the red planet itself, but of Europa, a moon of Jupiter that some scientists had been independently and quietly examining as a possible home to alien life.
The common denominator of both worlds is water, a prerequisite for life, at least in this part of the universe.
Today, Mars is largely a red desert strewn with rocks and many indications that water flowed over its surface billions of years ago, cutting deep channels and filling large lakes. Mars offers no clear signs that liquid water now runs on its surface; its icy polar caps are composed primarily of carbon dioxide.
But Europa, a moon of Jupiter, is completely enveloped by water, either frozen or liquid, believed to be as deep as 60 miles in some places. In contrast, the Earth's seas reach down barely seven miles at most.
The rub for extraterrestrial life on Europa is that the moon's surface is an icy wasteland. But increasingly, scientists suspect that the Jovian satellite has a hot core and that the inner part of its waters makes up a gigantic dark sea that may seethe with alien life forms that have quietly evolved over billions of years.
So great is the biological allure of Europa that even before the announcement about Mars last week, scientists were making plans to hold a meeting to discuss the odds of life arising there and were lobbying for new exploratory missions to the Jovian moon.
Their excitement has redoubled with the news that a Martian meteorite that fell to Earth contains hints of ancient extraterrestrial life in its recesses.
''It's fantastic,'' Dr. John R. Delaney, an oceanographer at the University of Washington who is helping to plan the Europa conference, said of the new finding. ''With Mars, we're talking about fossil evidence. But where you have a live heat source and a liquid body, you have the potential for living organisms today.''
Dr. Joseph A. Burns, a senior planetary scientist at Cornell University who has led national panels that set goals for space exploration, said most experts agreed that after Mars, Europa was the most likely candidate in the solar system for nurturing extraterrestrial life or harboring its fossilized remains. It could be the most likely candidate when it comes to organisms living now.
Interest in exploration of the Jovian moon is rapidly growing, Dr. Burns said in an interview.
''Keep in mind that Europa is not that small,'' he said, noting that its radius is about half that of Mars. That makes it roughly the size of Earth's Moon.
For decades, if not centuries, speculation about the possibility of extraterrestrial life in the solar system focused on planetary surfaces and the idea that the preconditions for living organisms include not only water but also an atmosphere and sunlight, which were seen as providing essential energy and a refuge from the icy cold of space.
But a main discovery of the late 20th century is that rich ecosystems have flourished on Earth in complete darkness for billions of years, drawing energy from planetary heat rather than sunlight. Increasingly, the intriguing question is whether Earth is unique in this respect.
On Earth, the ecosystems that exist without sunlight are in the blackness of the deep sea. They were discovered in 1977 off the Galapagos Islands, along a volcanic rift that winds through the depths of the global sea like seams on a baseball. The otherworldly fauna include giant clams and fields of tube worms; the white casings where the worms live are up to 10 feet long.
It turned out that the dark ecosystems are powered by tiny microbes that thrive on chemicals released along the volcanic rift by Earth's inner heat. The microbes play a role analogous to that of plants in sunlit realms.
Genetic clues have suggested that such microbes are the ancestors of the earliest forms of life on Earth. The heat-loving microbes have been found to be widespread, thriving not only in hot springs on the ocean floor but also in active volcanic craters, deep oil reservoirs and deep, wet rock. They tend to flourish in areas of extreme heat and pressure, as in the subterranean world.
In 1992, Dr. Thomas Gold of Cornell University proposed that the microbes might be ubiquitous throughout the upper few miles of Earth's crust, inhabiting the fluid-filled pores, cracks and interstices of rocks while living off Earth's inner heat and chemicals. He calculated that the total mass of this hidden biosphere might rival or exceed that of all surface life.
''Such life may be widely disseminated in the universe,'' Dr. Gold added in his 1992 paper.
These kinds of ideas and terrestrial findings have put a new spin on the old question of extraterrestrial life.
For Mars, the emerging exploratory push fueled by the recent meteorite discovery aims to find evidence of tiny microbes that may flourish deep underground, in the wet and temperate parts of the planet's interior, or, if not such creatures, then fossil remains of them from a bygone era.To the Editor:
If Bob Dole, the Republican Presidential contender, truly wants Americans to believe that his character is built on the values of Russell, Kan., where he hasn't lived for 40 years, he should pledge to return there, after his term or after his defeat. And to make Russell the summer White House. But is he so desperate?
Government has sunk to its current level in large part because of the dominance of small-state politicians, whose lives and values are out of touch with an urbanized, post-industrial society and a rapidly changing, competitive world.
If this country is going to face up its problems, the ideas must come from the leaders of our big cities and big states. Why haven't we heard from them?
MARVIN L. KRASNANSKY
Sonoma, Calif., Aug. 11, 1996A PIECE of rock no bigger than a potato has awakened a somnolent American space program and inspired planetary scientists, spacecraft designers and the NASA leadership with what may become a new sense of mission. Tantalizing clues in the meteorite have emboldened them to think that if they are clever and persistent, they may yet find on Mars the first evidence of extraterrestrial life.
Although NASA officials refrained from money talk when they announced the discovery of these sensational clues last week, they did nothing to discourage sweeping discussions about expanding and accelerating current plans for Mars exploration. Scientists think the only way to get definitive proof of some microbial forms of Martian life -- in the distant past or, just possibly, at present -- would be to drill for subsurface rock samples and bring them back to Earth.
Already on the books are 10 low-cost, unmanned flights that are designed to orbit and land on the planet over the next 10 years, with the first two launchings scheduled for November and December. The Russians are ready to launch in November a long-delayed mission to place two scientific stations on Mars, each with instruments to probe at least six feet beneath the cold, arid surface.
If successful, these would be the first visits to the Martian surface since two American spacecraft, Viking 1 and 2, landed there in 1976 and failed to find any unambiguous signs of life. It is too late to modify this year's missions in light of the meteorite findings. But scientists expect the American and Russian explorations to set the stage for an eventual robotic mission that would bring back samples to Earth.
''Certainly by 2001,'' said Daniel S. Goldin, the NASA Administrator, ''we may want to consider some very bold missions where we bore down real deep, and we bring back samples. This is the process we're going to talk about. And this is where the excitement comes in.''
Dr. Donna Shirley, manager of the Mars exploration program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said in an interview that engineers and mission planners were waiting for instructions on how to proceed with future flights.
''Everybody is real excited,'' she said. ''One of our primary goals in the next decade has always been to search for evidence of past or present life on Mars.''
The future pace and priority of Mars exploration will be foremost on the agenda at a meeting on space policy to be convened by the White House in November. NASA officials will be armed with a report by the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences, completed this summer, saying that the current program for Mars exploration is severely underfinanced and especially hampered by insufficient support for the development of new technology for miniaturized scientific instruments. Any attempt to increase the budget for NASA significantly is, of course, likely to run into opposition.
Scientists, meanwhile, are stepping up their laboratory analysis of the meteorite, designated Allan Hills 84001, which almost certainly came from Mars and fell on Antarctica 13,000 years ago. The research team that reported ''evidence of primitive life on early Mars'' conceded that its findings were not definitive, though several members expressed confidence that in time they would be proved right. They must first meet the objections of many skeptics.
One of the leading skeptics, Dr. J. William Schopf, a paleobiologist at the University of California at Los Angeles, said the ''burden of proof'' was on those who claim that the organic compounds and fossil-like objects are biological in origin. Similar evidence that has been found in other meteorites and in Earth rocks has turned out to be produced by nonbiological processes.
Referring to the supposed microfossil objects in the meteorite, Dr. Schopf said, ''We've got to look inside these things, see if they have cell walls, see if they are compartmentalized, see if they are cellular, see if they are composed of organic material.''
The investigation will not be easy, but microfossils -- if that is what they are -- are tubular specks many times smaller than the diameter of a human hair. Looking inside the specks for traces of cell walls may be beyond the ability of the best electron microscopes.
Dr. David S. McKay, the geochemist at the Johnson Space Center in Houston who led the team reporting the discovery, described plans to use an ultrasensitive transmission electron microscope to examine thin slices of the meteorite, seeking to magnify these fossil-like objects. He said, ''We will be able to see inside and we will be able to see if there's a membrane -- perhaps.''
Likewise, planetary scientists from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and the University of Tennessee at Knoxville intend to conduct new tests, beginning this week, to see if they can detect the same evidence suggesting fossil life. They are dubious, though, because in previous studies, reported last month in the journal Nature, two scientists, Dr. Ralph Harvey of Case Western and Dr. Harry Y. McSween Jr. of Tennessee, found a striking absence of water-bearing minerals in the meteorite, which would seem to contradict the findings and interpretation by Dr. McKay's group.
They detected very little calcium carbonate, material that is sometimes found in meteorites and that is sometimes associated with life processes. Dr. McKay's team found this in abundance. But Dr. Harvey and Dr. McSween reported instead an abundance of magnesium and iron carbonates, which are not usually associated with organic production. They proposed that these carbonates formed not as a result of microbial life but as a result of a pulse of carbon dioxide at 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit, heated by an asteroid impact, that flushed through the ancient Martian crust.
Responding to this argument, Dr. Everett K. Gibson Jr. of the Johnson Space Center, another member of the discovery team, said the presence of certain oxygen isotopes, organic molecules and particular minerals indicated that the carbonates had formed at temperatures no higher than 180 degrees. If the identified organic molecules had been exposed to heat greater than 750 degrees, he said, they would have been degraded and would have fragmented.
''We see nice, clean spectra, which suggests there had been lower temperatures,'' Dr. Gibson contended.
Dr. Harvey, who led the Antarctic party of geologists that collected the rock in 1984, said the other 11 meteorites considered Martian were not likely to yield definitive answers because they were all much younger specimens. But he said he was comfortable with the analysis establishing that these meteorites are indeed pieces of Mars.
As for what it would take to confirm the report of Martian life, Dr. Harvey said in an interview: ''If the McKay group were to analyze the microfossils and come up with something indisputably produced by organisms -- chlorophyll or DNA or proteins -- I'd shake their hands and say that's life. That's going to be difficult, and I don't know if we have the technology.''
Dr. James W. Head, a planetary geologist at Brown University, said the new findings could do for Mars studies what the concept of plate tectonics had done for earth geophysics. ''It will make us ask questions we never thought of before,'' he said.SOME neuroscientists are experiencing what amounts to a natural high. For the first time, they have captured images of the brains of addicts in the throes of craving for a drug, revealing the neural basis for addiction.
The finding caps a decade or more of intensive brain research seeking the grail of substance abuse, the neurological circuitry that compels addicts to pursue the next fix. And the discovery confirms a number of emerging scientific hunches about the neurology of addiction.
For instance, no matter what the addictive substance is -- amphetamines, heroin, alcohol or nicotine -- all seem to activate a single circuit for pleasure deep in the most ancient part of the brain. This circuit, for the neurotransmitter dopamine, is the site of the high that addictive drugs bring.
And fine-grained studies of brain cells reveal that repeatedly dosing the brain with addictive drugs is akin to a chemical assault that alters the very structure of the neurons in the circuitry for pleasure. These changes starve brain cells of dopamine, triggering a craving for the addictive drugs that will once again swamp the brain with it.
A drumbeat of findings from dozens of scientific laboratories, several within the last few months and as yet not published, herald these conclusions, which ''offer an extraordinary insight into the brain basis of drug addiction,'' said Dr. Alan I. Leshner, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. He added, ''There have been a tremendous number of major advances in the last year.''
The identity of this brain circuit for addiction is a scientific flashback of sorts, if not a hallucinatory deja vu: the same brain area was the focus of intense study as long ago as the 1950's, when psychologists routinely implanted electrodes into rats' brains in the region they then called the brain's ''reward center.'' After the rats were trained to push a lever to stimulate this center, they would do nothing else, even forsaking food and water to dose themselves with dollops of rodent bliss -- an animal model of addiction. But the specific neural circuitry involved was, at the time, a scientific mystery.
Today that mystery seems to have been solved by using positron emission tomography scans of the brains of patients being treated for cocaine addiction. Reports from three different laboratories using PET scans show that when addicts feel a craving for a drug, there is a high level of activation in a strip of areas ranging from the amygdala and the anterior cingulate to the tip of both temporal lobes.
This mesolimbic dopamine system, as it is called, shows heightened metabolic activity ''when people are in a profound state of craving for cocaine, primed to seek it out and take it,'' said Dr. Annarose Childress, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania who did one of the PET studies. The work has been reported at scientific meetings but has not yet been published. The same system seems to be ordinarily in play to provide a sense of pleasure in whatever people find rewarding, like sex or chocolate or a job well done. Dopamine may also be part of a reward system in creatures as different from humans as bees, other researchers have shown.
In Dr. Childress's study, PET scans were done on patients under treatment for cocaine addiction while the patients were being exposed to cues that had made them crave cocaine in the past -- like seeing a videotape of people taking cocaine or handling crack pipes or other drug paraphernalia. Drug treatment programs routinely caution patients to avoid such Pavlovian cues, which addicts have learned to associate with the drug high itself, because the cues have long been known to trigger the craving for the drug.
The PET scans showed activation in the mesolimbic dopamine system as the addicts described feeling intense cravings for cocaine.
The mesolimbic dopamine system connects structures high in the brain, especially the orbitofrontal cortex, in the prefrontal area behind the forehead, with the amygdala in the brain's center, and with the nucleus accumbens, a structure that in animal research has proved to be a major site of activity in addiction, although in humans it is about the size of a squished pea, too small to register in PET images. The ultimate source of this dopamine system is the same brain region where psychologists stuck electrodes decades earlier to make rats endlessly stimulate themselves for pleasure, a location called the ventral tegmental area.
These brain areas have emerged in the last several years as hot spots in research on every addictive substance studied, and some that create dependency, if not strict addiction. Last month, for instance, Italian researchers reported in the journal Nature that the mesolimbic dopamine system was active in nicotine addiction, adding tobacco to a roster that includes heroin, morphine, cocaine, amphetamines, marijuana and alcohol.
In addiction studies with lab animals, a main site of activity is the outer layer of the nucleus accumbens. In humans, a nearby interconnected structure, the amygdala, ''is more important in craving,'' said Dr. George F. Koob, a neuroscientist at the Scripps Institute in San Diego. ''If people have a lesion in a section of the amygdala, they no longer link pleasure to its causes -- they wouldn't experience a favorite food as enjoyable,'' he said.
What ties years of brain research on addiction together in a ''final bow,'' Dr. Koob said, is the new finding by Dr. Childress and others that ''what lights up during craving is the temporal lobe, particularly the amygdala, where all these pathways converge.'' Dr. Koob reviewed earlier findings on the dopamine system in the May issue of the journal Neuron.
The various brain pathways he is referring to all have a particular kind of cell that has the D2 dopamine receptor, which is distinct from other dopamine receptors, like those involved in Parkinson's disease. PET images of cocaine patients taken over several weeks after they stop using the drug show a drop in those neuronal activity levels that is consistent with a lessened ability to receive dopamine. Although the degree of this reduction lessens over time, it is evident ''even a year and a half after withdrawal,'' said Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the Division of Nuclear Medicine at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. She has also done some of the other recent PET studies.
This pattern of reduced brain activity directly reflects the course of the craving. ''The highest risk of relapse for cocaine addicts is during the third and fourth week after they've stopped taking the drug,'' said Dr. Joseph C. Wu, a psychiatrist at the University of California at Irvine who has made PET images of cocaine addicts that verify the other reports. ''You see the lowest levels of activity in the mesolimbic dopamine system during that time.'' This work has also been reported at meetings but is still unpublished.
The brains of addicts are almost back to normal after a year without the drug, though not completely, he said. ''If you can stay abstinent for about a year,'' Dr. Wu said, ''you've weathered the periods of greatest vulnerability.'' Scientists are still debating whether the dopamine cells ever fully return to normal.
The gross patterns of brain activity detected in PET scans represent changes at the microscopic level that are so dramatic that they are akin to the kinds of changes that result from a brain injury, in the view of Dr. Eric J. Nestler, a neuroscientist at the Laboratory of Molecular Psychiatry at Yale University School of Medicine. In an anatomical study of dopamine cells in rats who had become addicted to morphine, Dr. Nestler's team found that the neurons with D2 dopamine receptors had become 25 percent smaller and had lost much of their ability to receive dollops of dopamine from nearby neurons. Their report will be published later this year in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The afflicted neurons also underwent a drastic change in their internal dynamics, altering the workings of the so-called second messengers, proteins like cyclic AMP. After a molecule like dopamine latches on to a receptor on the cell surface, the second messenger acts within the cell to coordinate its response, like the release of neurotransmitters to signal other neurons.
''When you take a drug like cocaine, it floods the neurons with levels of dopamine never seen in nature,'' Dr. Nestler said. ''The addictive drugs have an impact on the dopamine circuitry like a sledgehammer, storming through this pathway with an intensity that never occurs ordinarily. Taking drugs over and over perturbs these systems, and they try to adapt by making the dopamine less effective.''With a video-and-telephone call that turned into a breezy chat with a state governor, President Ernesto Zedillo today opened a new era of competition in long-distance telecommunications in Mexico.
Mr. Zedillo made the call to the northern city of Monterrey across the newly completed digital fiber optic network of Avantel S.A., a company formed by the alliance of the MCI Communications Corporation with Grupo Financiero Banamex-Accival, Mexico's largest banking group. It was the first long-distance call not carried by Telefonos de Mexico S.A., or Telmex, whose 48-year monopoly concession expired on Saturday.
To the relief of Avantel officials, the sound and video image of Benjamin Clariond, Governor of the state of Nuevo Leon, were so clear that he and Mr. Zedillo extended what was supposed to be a ceremonial hello into a wandering survey of events in the state -- including a discussion of the rainfall -- in front of more than 2,000 people at an Avantel service center on the outskirts of Mexico City.
''It seems like that little wire really does work,'' Mr. Zedillo said.
With the inauguration of the 3,356-mile Avantel network, an investment of nearly $900 million that links 33 of Mexico's largest cities, Mexico has managed to stay on schedule for the long-planned opening of long-distance competition.
For the next four months Avantel will offer services to pilot business customers only through its own network. But the next leap in competition comes on Jan. 1, 1997, when Avantel and other companies will begin to provide long-distance service to Mexican homes by interconnecting with Telmex's network.
A total of eight companies have applied to compete with Telmex. The biggest besides Avantel is a company formed by AT&T and Alfa S.A., under the name Alestra, which has pledged to invest $1 billion in five years to build up its own network.
In coming years both Avantel and Alestra hope to seize about 20 percent of the Mexican long-distance market, which is expected to be worth about $15 billion a year, including communications and equipment, by the end of the century.
President Zedillo's visit demonstrated that MCI and Avantel are maintaining a lead over AT&T in laying down a cable network and getting service up and running. This was the second Avantel event Mr. Zedillo had attended since September 1995. Officials from the President's office, anxious to dispel suggestions that he is engaging in favoritism, said he had not gone to inaugurate the facilities of other companies because none had finished construction work.
Mexico began to privatize and diversify its key state-owned industries under the administration of Mr. Zedillo's predecessor, Carlos Salinas de Gortari. The policy is one Mr. Zedillo has continued to pursue even though Mr. Salinas has fallen into disgrace among Mexicans, with his family tangled in corruption scandals, and he was forced to move into exile to Ireland.
As part of the legal requirements of the new competition, On Friday -- one day before the deadline -- Mexico established an autonomous Federal Telecommunications Commission. Avantel officials said they expected the new commission to help free the oversight of the industry from the political pressures it faced when monitoring was handled by the Communications Ministry.
Analysts predict Telmex will retain about 60 percent of the market. The giant company was privatized in 1990 by a group led by Mexico's Grupo Carso S.A. in partnership with SBC Communications and France Telecom. Since then, Telmex has invested about $10 billion, according to analysts, to improve its network and especially its customer service, which had a reputation for being slow and indifferent.
Telmex sought to pre-empt some competition in recent months by offering the first-ever discounts on some long-distance service to Mexican homes.
''Telmex is preparing for competition and they seem ready to face it,'' said Sari Mayer, Latin America telecommunications analyst at Salomon Brothers.
Although Telmex's potential competitors have grumbled behind the scenes that the company's preparations for interconnection have been reluctant, MCI officials acknowledged today that the former monopoly had cooperated on the basics.
Daniel E. Crawford, the MCI official who is head of Avantel's operations, said that Avantel would in practice be one of Telmex's biggest customers once Avantel's residential long-distance service starts next year.
In another area of privatization, Mexico announced today that a consortium including two California energy companies won the first private license to distribute natural gas. The consortium, which includes Enova International of San Diego, Pacific Enterprises International of Los Angeles and the Mexican company Proxima, will distribute natural gas in the border city of Mexicali.
INTERNATIONAL BUSINESSDeclaring that ''Yellowstone is more precious than gold,'' President Clinton came to a pristine corner of the country's oldest national park today to announce a halt to development of a nearby gold mine that environmentalists had warned would damage the park's waterways and wildlife.
With pine-covered Baronette Peak rising behind him, Mr. Clinton announced an agreement in principle with the Canadian owners of the New World Mine in which the Government will swap $65 million worth of Federal land in exchange for the company's dropping its claim to some $650 million worth of gold deposits upstream from the park's northeastern corner in Montana. The land to be swapped has not been specified.
''Yellowstone was entrusted into our care as a people, a whole people, more than 120 years ago now,'' Mr. Clinton told an audience that included the country singer John Denver and Senator John D. Rockefeller 4th of West Virginia, whose family gave the Federal Government much of the land that forms Grand Teton National Park just south of here. ''And today we are saying to the rest of the world, to the rest of the country and to future generations of America, we have been worthy of that trust and we are giving it on to our children and our children's children.''
The proposed mine has been controversial for years, and Mr. Clinton first expressed his concern about it on his vacation here last year, when he flew over the site by helicopter. In the months since, his Administration undertook intensive negotiations with the mine owners and environmental groups that have sued to block its development, producing the swap agreement announced today.
On the opening day of the Republican National Convention, Mr. Clinton used the announcement to trumpet one of his best-selling political themes: that the environment and public health and safety can be protected without unduly burdening business -- and that Democrats are the best ones to do the protecting.
As part of the agreement, Crown Butte Mines, a subsidiary of the Canadian mining conglomerate Noranda Inc., agreed to put $22.5 million in an escrow account to cover the costs of cleaning up the waste from mining activity that occurred before it took over the site. Mr. Clinton called that ''a very important part of this agreement'' and said the company ''deserves a lot of credit for it.''
Environmental groups, led by the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, an umbrella organization based in Bozeman, Mont., that has coordinated the fight against the mine, generally praised today's announcement. But they warned that many details remain to be worked out, including finding alternate land acceptable to Crown Butte and to environmentalists. If the company is not satisfied with the proposal, it can walk away from the agreement.
''This is just the beginning,'' said Robert Eakey, a spokesman for the coalition. ''There's still a lot of negotiating to be done.'' He said the group would closely monitor the proposed alternate land, saying, ''We are not going to transfer an environmental liability to another part of the country.''
But Ian D. Bayer, chairman of Crown Butte, said after the announcement that he believed the hardest part was over. He declined to discuss where the alternate land might be, or whether the Government might swap mineral reserves instead. ''In the end, the company wants assets that they can realize and liquidate to cover its losses,'' Mr. Bayer said.
Sounding a theme hammered home over and over again in recent months by his chief political strategist, Dick Morris, Mr. Clinton said the compromise on the mine epitomized both what Government could do, and what only citizens could do working together, to find common ground amid differences.
''We don't have to make a choice between the environment and the economy,'' Mr. Clinton said. ''We don't have to have every single challenge we face drag on forever and ever and ever, into court suit after court suit after court suit, being fodder for politicians that campaign from rhetoric that divides us instead of unites us. All of you have proved that America can be better than that.''
Mr. Clinton flew to the park by helicopter this morning from his vacation retreat in Jackson Hole, where he returned immediately after the announcement. Since he arrived on Friday with his wife, Hillary, and daughter, Chelsea, he had gone out only to church and for pizza and the late show of ''A Time to Kill'' at a movie house on Sunday night.
The President also looks unusually trim. Aides said he had told them he was down to 207 pounds -- 10 pounds below past confessed levels -- and aiming for 200. One secret of his success may be an unusually low-fat diet: On Sunday, he had a whole wheat vegetarian pizza with no cheese and extra artichoke hearts, a far cry from his fattier favorites.Turkey's new Prime Minister signed a $23-billion, 23-year agreement today to purchase natural gas from Iran, raising the awkward possibility of the United States' invoking sanctions against a NATO ally.
''We're disappointed that Turkey is pushing toward a broader and more active relationship with Iran,'' a White House official said today. ''Iran's use of terror to try to erode support for the Mideast peace process is well known and documented. And we find it perplexing that Turkey, which has itself been a victim of terror, has taken these steps.''
The deal could provoke a variety of American sanctions against the state-owned Turkish oil and gas company under the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act, which gives the President the power to penalize foreign companies that invest $40 million or more a year in the oil and natural-gas sectors of either country. President Clinton signed the measure last week, over the objections of European allies.
Contracts already in effect were exempted, but possible sanctions for the new deal could include denial of loans from the Export-Import Bank, denial of licenses for exports to the United States, a prohibition on loans or credits from American financial institutions and a ban on imports from the United States.
American officials were reluctant to say today whether the agreement, the text of which they have not seen, violates the new American law, for which operating regulations have not yet been written. They noted that pipelines needed to be built and that gas would not flow until at least 1999, and they suggested that given Iran's economic problems, those grand plans may prove overly optimistic.
Retaliation would create sharp new strains between Washington and a vital NATO ally that bridges Europe and Central Asia, the Balkans and the Middle East. Washington is already alarmed over the installation last month of Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan, head of the pro-Islamic Welfare Party, who has called for closer Turkish ties to Iran, Iraq and Syria, and a reorientation of Turkey away from the West.
''Turkey remains a very important NATO ally in an extremely tough neighborhood, and it's on that basis that we've continued to consult with the Turkish Government on this issue,'' the White House official said. ''Whether or not it is a violation of U.S. law, it is certainly bad policy.''
With Mr. Clinton on vacation in Wyoming and Secretary of State Warren Christopher traveling, Under Secretary of State Peter Tarnoff telephoned his Turkish counterpart today to express American concerns about the gas deal, officials said.
Turkish officials argued that the agreement did not break American law, because it is a trade agreement to purchase gas, not an investment in Iran, and each country will be responsible for its own infrastructure.
''The sanctions ban investments in Iran,'' a Turkish Cabinet minister, Abdullah Gul, said today in Teheran, where Mr. Erbakan signed the contract with the Iranian First Vice President, Hassan Habibi. ''We're not going to invest in Iran. This is only a trade agreement. The two countries will build their own sides of the gas pipeline.''
But the Iranian President, Hashemi Rafsanjani, hailed the agreement as a major triumph over American efforts to choke Iran's economy. And Mustafa Murathan, the director of the Turkish company, said Turkey might help cash-poor Iran build its part of the pipeline, from Tabriz to the border town of Teba, under a barter agreement.
Mr. Erbakan chose to go to Iran on his first official trip abroad as Prime Minister. He was met on Saturday with full state honors and told Turkish television in an interview, before leaving for Pakistan, ''Turkey will not permit any third country to interfere in the growing trend of cooperation between Turkey and Iran.''
Iraq and Libya are subject to United Nations sanctions, but the American effort to isolate Iran and Cuba has been sharply criticized by the European Union and other countries, like China, as an effort to apply ''secondary boycotts'' and bring foreign companies under American law. When Arab states tried to apply such secondary boycotts against American and other companies that did business with Israel, the United States objected, but now is applying the same principle to others, European diplomats argue.
Some nations, like Canada, have instructed their companies to ignore a separate law, the Helms-Burton Act, that punishes companies investing in formerly American-owned properties in Cuba.
In a public response, Glyn Davies, the State Department's deputy spokesman, said, ''Our general reaction is that we believe that this deal's conclusion sends the wrong message to Iran.'' But the details of the contract will have to be studied before the United States can decide if sanctions should be applied, he said.
Top Turkish officials have told Washington that ''this isn't an investment but a purchase of gas,'' Mr. Davies said, ''and we'll see.''
But he emphasized the strong relationship between the United States and Turkey and said, ''We certainly don't expect that this will cause a major rift in our relationship.''
Turkey plays a vital role in various American policies to broaden the ''circle of peace'' in the Middle East, to train and equip the Muslim-led Bosnian Army, to help the newly independent Muslim states of the Caucasus and Central Asia and to serve as a restraining buffer to Iran, Iraq and Syria.
Mr. Erbakan, while constrained by his coalition partner, the conservative former Prime Minister Tansu Ciller, could undermine those policies if he tries to reorient Turkey in a serious fashion, as opposed to making merely symbolic gestures to his Islamist constituency, American officials say. It could also lead to a coup by the Turkish military, an embarrassing step away from democracy in a NATO that is looking to expand.
New strains between Turkey and Greece, first over tiny islands in the Aegean and now over last weekend's rioting on Cyprus between Greek and Turkish Cypriots, could be worsened by the nationalist Mr. Erbakan and lead to a new cycle of reaction and overreaction in Athens, the officials say.The recent wave of consolidation in the energy utility industry continued yesterday as two utilities in Houston and two that serve New Jersey and the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay agreed to merge in deals worth a total of $3.37 billion.
Houston Industries, the nation's ninth-largest electric utility, said it would pay $2.4 billion for the Noram Energy Corporation, the nation's third-largest natural gas utility. The combined companies would have $6.7 billion in annual revenues.
The other deal, a stock swap between the Delmarva Power and Light Company and Atlantic Energy Inc., which the companies said was worth $968 million, was announced 11 years after the two first discussed the idea in 1985.
In the Houston deal, Noram shareholders will get $16 a share, half in cash and half in stock. In addition to the sale price, Houston Industries will also assume $1.4 billion of Noram debt and preferred stock.
The move typifies efforts by electric utilities to link up with natural gas utilities to defend their territory, analysts said.
''The old electric utilities and gas utilities will become energy-service providers,'' Edward Tirello, an analyst at NatWest Securities, said. ''The big game now is to control the customer's bill, because the way they will make money is not from the electricity or gas, but from ancillary services such as home security, deals with paging companies, appliance repair and 25 or 30 other things.''
William Tilles, an analyst for Smith Barney, said, ''This is more of the strategic repositioning of electric companies as full energy-service providers. Certain customers are indifferent to elements of electricity or molecules of natural gas, but are extremely sensitive to price, so many of the electric companies realize that they need that gas component to be able to sell it effectively.''
Also, gas companies are attractive because electric companies use large amounts of natural gas in their power plants.
Penelope Adelman, an analyst at Gruntal & Company, said that the purchase also furthered a trend of ''good companies bidding for good companies.'' The deal was first reported yesterday in The Wall Street Journal.
Houston Industries has 2.7 million customers in six states. Its Houston Lighting and Power Company unit provides electricity to Houston and other Gulf Coast cities in Texas.
Noram, known as Arkla until 1994, operates 8,600 miles of natural gas pipelines running from Texas up the Mississippi River to Minnesota.
Shares of Houston Industries, which was placed on credit watch by Standard & Poor's after the deal was announced, fell 75 cents, to $22.875. Noram shares rose $2.875, to $14.50.
The second deal merges two companies with similar, neighboring territories, but different electric rates.
Delmarva Power, based in Wilmington, Del., provides electric and natural gas energy to most of the Delaware-Maryland-Virginia peninsula, while Atlantic Energy of Pleasantville, N.J., provides electricity to southern New Jersey. But homeowners pay Delmarva about 7 cents a kilowatt-hour for power, while those in southern New Jersey pay more than a dime. Because of that, a new holding company will operate the companies separately.
Jerrold L. Jacobs, chief executive of Atlantic Energy, said that his company's rates were higher primarily because of the federally mandated purchases of expensive power from co-generation plants.
The two companies studied the possibility of a merger in 1985, but took no action. Mr. Jacobs, then a manager, headed the team from Atlantic Energy, while the Delmarva team was led by Howard E. Cosgrove, then chief financial officer and now chief executive.
Mr. Jacobs, who is 57, said he would retire in about 18 months, after the merger. Mr. Cosgrove, who is 53, would be chief executive of the new company.
Combining the companies is expected to save $500 million over 10 years; two-thirds of the savings would come from eliminating 400 jobs through attrition and buyouts.
The merger was structured to give current Atlantic Energy shareholders a play on expected growth in southern New Jersey. The 13 Atlantic City casinos now account for 7 percent of the company's volume, Mr. Jacobs said, and plans for six new casinos have been announced.
Under the deal, Delmarva shareholders will get one share in the new holding company for each Delmarva share. Atlantic Energy shareholders will get three-fourths of a common share in the holding company and one-eighth of a class A share, which will represent 30 percent of net profits that exceed $40 million annually for the New Jersey division. The deal will preserve Atlantic Energy's current $1.54 a share dividend for at least five years, Mr. Jacobs said.A Saudi financier who paid hundreds of millions of dollars to escape fraud charges in an international banking scandal has quietly reassumed control of his family's banking empire and enlisted Prof. Laurence H. Tribe of Harvard University Law School to rehabilitate his name in the United States.
But the new campaign by Sheik Khalid bin Mahfouz to portray himself as the innocent scapegoat of zealous American prosecutors in the 1991 collapse of BCCI Holdings S.A. drew a sharp rebuke from both the Manhattan District Attorney's office and the Federal Reserve Board. They accused him of glossing over the fact that a settlement he negotiated three years ago had included a $37 million fine.
B.C.C.I., or the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, based in Luxembourg, was closed by European and American regulators in July 1991 after they concluded that it had stolen billions of dollars from its depositors, forged financial statements and been involved in laundering drug money, tax evasion and the illegal ownership of several sizable American financial institutions, including First American Bankshares of Washington D.C.
The B.C.C.I. scandal resulted in New York State fraud charges against Clark M. Clifford, a former Defense Secretary and counsel to Presidents, who had served as chairman of First American and as counsel to B.C.C.I. and First American. Those charges have since been set aside because of Mr. Clifford's failing health. His law partner and protege, Robert A. Altman, who served as president of First American, was acquitted of bank fraud charges by a New York State jury in August 1993.
New York prosecutors and Federal Reserve lawyers also accused Sheik Khalid, who held a 30 percent stake in both B.C.C.I. and First American in the late 80's, of helping to disguise B.C.C.I.'s dire financial condition, and thus misleading and defrauding the bank's depositors, by surreptitiously selling his holdings.
Sheik Khalid, however, pleading chronic diabetes and the effects of a serious motor accident and a heart attack, steered clear of the American courts.
In 1993, he agreed to pay a $225 million settlement, of which $37 million was designated a fine. The sheik, who has maintained that he was unwittingly caught up in the B.C.C.I. scandal, had earlier stepped down from running National Commercial Bank, Saudi Arabia's largest private financial institution, with assets of $21 billion.
Now, after a four-year absence from banking, Sheik Khalid, whose family has long acted as banker to King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, returned late last month to National Commercial as general manager and chairman of its management committee. The Saudi central bank and Finance Ministry have each approved his return to National Commercial and his recent assumption of a 75 percent interest in the bank, according to his lawyers. (His wife controls the remaining 25 percent.) National Commercial was forced to close its London and New York branches in the aftermath of the B.C.C.I. scandal.
Professor Tribe is taking Sheik Khalid's case to the public. In interviews and in a 38-page paper he provided to The New York Times, Professor Tribe was scathing in his attacks on the Federal Reserve, District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau and B.C.C.I.'s liquidators. Motivated by ''ambition'' and showing ''a lack of ethical constraint,'' he said, the prosecutors had cynically conspired to tie up Sheik Khalid in lawsuits in order to extract the 1993 settlement.
''The scapegoating of Sheik Khalid by Morgenthau, the Fed and B.C.C.I.'s court-appointed liquidators represented nothing less than a carefully orchestrated and closely coordinated abuse of the legal processes of both the United States and the United Kingdom,'' Professor Tribe declared. ''State and Federal Government authorities in the U.S., desperate to appear to be doing something about B.C.C.I. after it came crashing down, acted in concert to hound -- there is no other accurate word for it -- the wealthiest and most cooperative witness they could find.''
The Harvard law professor, who acknowledges that he was paid substantial amounts to represent the sheik from 1993 to 1995, says he is now acting for his client pro bono.
An aide to Sheik Khalid said yesterday that the banker was considering seeking redress through the courts for what he sees as his mistreatment. He did not elaborate.
In answers to written questions, Sheik Khalid said he had ''not had the opportunity to be heard,'' in the courts or in the news media, ''on the true circumstances'' of his involvement in B.C.C.I. He also said he and his lawyers believed that as an Arab, he ''could not rely'' on getting a fair hearing before a New York jury.
Sheik Khalid said, however, that he had no regrets about cooperating with the American authorities. Maintaining that he was one of the principal victims of B.C.C.I.'s frauds, he argued that it was in his interest to help uncover those frauds. His advisers maintain that the Mahfouz family has lost more than $1 billion through B.C.C.I., including funds trapped in the defunct bank.
''What is regrettable,'' the sheik said, is that ''I became a convenient target because of my wealth and the District Attorney's need for a scapegoat. You have only to look and see what happened: There was no plea bargain by me; no fault was ever established or recognized, and no fine was levied. I reached a settlement purely as a business decision.''
District Attorney Morgenthau strongly rebutted Professor Tribe's critique and Sheik Khalid's assertions. ''This guy put a lot of money into B.C.C.I. and the related bank in the United States,'' he said in a recent telephone interview. ''And then he secretly got bought out, but continued as though he was a major investor.''
Contradicting the sheik's contention that no fine had been levied, Mr. Morgenthau stressed that $37 million of the $225 million the banker agreed to pay to settle the Federal Reserve and New York charges had been designated a fine.
More of that money could have been so designated, he said, but that would have reduced the remaining $188 million, which was put in a fund expected to compensate B.C.C.I.'s defrauded depositors.
Late yesterday, Professor Tribe countered that argument. ''It's simply not true,'' he said. ''There's nothing in the aqreement anywhere that uses the word 'fine.' It's simply a payment.'' He added that the agreement said that ''nothing in it shall be deemed to constitute an admission of wrongdoing.''
Mr. Morgenthau, responding to Sheik Khalid's assertion that he had been denied his day in court, recalled that the Saudi banker had said he was too ill to travel to the United States to appear.This is the place to be, although you would never know from looking at it.
Oliver Stone, the film director, has been here. Danielle Mitterrand, widow of the French President, has visited twice. So has a video crew from MTV.
They came to sit at the feet of the mysterious Subcommander Marcos, master strategist of the Zapatista guerrillas, and see the horse-riding Indian insurgents in black masks on their home turf.
The sweaty jungles of the southern state of Chiapas have become a fashionable venue on the international leftist travel circuit. Local residents even have a name for the bumpy jeep trip out to the Indian communities where the Zapatistas hold sway: it is called a Zapatour.
Visitors do not come for the comfort. A night in La Realidad, a Tojolobal Indian village, is a dose of the existence that the indigenous people of Chiapas have endured for centuries. The drinking water is alive with amoebas, and there is no sewage disposal. You get mosquitoes, fleas and snakes, four inches of mud to walk in and not nearly enough to eat.
Nevertheless, Regis Debray, the French intellectual who earned a place in the annals of revolution by interviewing Che Guevara in the 1960's, sought to replicate his accomplishment by spending two days with Marcos last year.
Most recently, the Zapatistas drew some two thousand supporters from all over the world to five Chiapas villages for a marathon weeklong convention that they called the Intercontinental Encounter for Humanity and Against Neo-Liberalism.
By the end many who took part were near heat stroke, and this village, where everyone converged for the finale, was a smelly quagmire. But most of them left happy.
The tourism has a logic for the Zapatistas. Although peace talks with the Government are under way and a cease-fire is in effect, rebel-controlled Indian communities remain hemmed in by the hostile Mexican Army. Marcos told reporters here on Aug. 3 that he thought the army would love to kill him if it got the chance, and Zapatista leaders say the presence of outsiders provides protection.
For the guerrillas' Indian followers, who live in the oppressive isolation of jungle canyons and are treated by most non-Indians with racist disdain, the visits are a chance to experience the admiration of supporters from faraway places -- and sometimes negotiate donations to help with their many needs.
The Government, at first irritated by Zapatourists, has come to accept them since they also enhance its image of tolerance. But enough travelers are questioned or turned back at official checkpoints to sustain a sense of danger in the journey.
The masked Subcommander Marcos, said by the Government to be a former university professor named Rafael Guillen, seems to appreciate the company.
Since he emerged after a decade in the jungle during the Zapatistas' brief armed uprising in January 1994, Marcos has demonstrated a voracious intelligence and a skill for the poetic turn of phrase. But lately he appears to be a little stir crazy.
$(The latest round of peace talks between the Government and the Zapatistas ended without agreement on Monday as negotiators bickered over proposals for democratic and judicial reform. A new round of talks was scheduled for Sept. 4.$)
''Marcos doesn't exist as a person,'' he joked with reporters here. ''If he did, he would probably be leaving on the next bus.''
Marcos never lets his guests down. During the international meeting, he held his audience spellbound reading one of his texts, a funny and lyrical dialogue about politics between himself and a wayfaring beetle he calls Don Durito, or Mr. Hardhead.
When travelers come from left-of-center groups in Europe and the United States, there is a risk of clash with the conservative culture of the Chiapas Indians. During one news conference here, a feminist foreign journalist asked a group of 10 Zapatista women fighters, dressed in woolen ski masks and pastel cotton house dresses, what they thought of the lesbian movement.
The fighters whispered among themselves. One offered an answer that made it clear they did not understand the term lesbian. When journalists helped them with a brief explanation, they whispered some more. ''That doesn't exist here,'' one Zapatista woman answered curtly.
Not everyone who wants to visit gets in. Marcos refused a request from Benetton, the Italian sportswear maker, to appear in one of the company's advertisements. The German filmmaker Werner Herzog, who was in Mexico scouting possibilities to shoot a movie, denied rumors that he was planning to meet Marcos.
''I'm not a tourist of the revolution,'' he said.The Republican convention yesterday approved a platform that the party's candidate for President says he never read and is not bound to follow. It was dispensed with quickly, in order to make way for a parade of prime-time speakers, most of whom represented exactly the kind of moderate Republicanism the platform was designed not to represent.
The only question for the rest of the nation is whether to take seriously a document the party leaders themselves seem determined to ignore.
The platform calls for at least five amendments to the Constitution, including one that would expand the 14th Amendment to cover fetuses, but retract it from applying to children born in this country to illegal aliens. It is hostile to any form of gun control. It opposes the right of homosexuals to serve in the armed forces even under the ''don't ask don't tell'' rule. In listing agencies that should be defunded or privatized in the name of smaller government, it names only the right-wing betes noires like the National Endowment for the Arts, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Legal Services.
Bob Dole's interest in the party platform seems to have extended no further than how it would play in the media. Although his supporters were completely beaten back in their attempt to insert a ''tolerance plank'' in the abortion section, Mr. Dole expressed his satisfaction because the controversy had lasted only a few days, and had faded from the headlines long before he arrived in San Diego.
The platform battle over abortion highlighted the differences between the Dole supporters' focus on appearances, and the zeal of the religious right and supporters of Pat Buchanan, who really were concerned about what it said. Mr. Dole was willing to leave in the platform's anti-abortion agenda, which would also restrict biomedical research and curb aid to international family planning. His tolerance plank said nothing more than that the Republican Party was willing to accept the votes of people it intended to deprive of the right to choice. But the opposition did not want to admit the possibility that any position other than theirs could have any moral legitimacy. They overwhelmed the Dole forces.
Before Mr. Dole even arrived in San Diego, he gave an interview making it clear that he regarded the platform as immaterial. The implicit message was that if Bob Dole does not care what the platform says, neither should the public.
But words have meaning. The platform represents the distilled thinking of the people who are most interested in controlling both the doctrine and the machinery of the Republican Party. Led by the Christian Coalition, the religious right has shown itself willing to undertake the kind of grass-roots efforts necessary to take over state party organizations and send delegates to the party conventions. The result of this effort in 1996 was clear in a Times study of the San Diego delegates. The people who will nominate Bob Dole Thursday are far more conservative than their party as a whole, let alone the nation.
Writing a platform may be a job sought only by those cut out of more glamorous party functions, like running for office or organizing a Presidential campaign. But the people who care about party platforms are exactly the same sort of people who turn out for other low-profile political activities, like nominating school board candidates, electing local party officials and turning out the vote in future Presidential primaries.Russia's new national security adviser, Aleksandr I. Lebed, returned appalled and angry today from secret talks with rebel commanders in Chechnya, but his rage was not directed at the enemy. At a news conference, Mr. Lebed, a former general and Afghan war hero, expressed horror at the condition of Russian troops and disgust over the conduct of bureaucrats leading the war effort.
''I suspect partisans in World War II were better clothed,'' he said of the Russian servicemen he saw at checkpoints and whom he described as ''hungry, lice-infested and underclothed.'' He said the soldiers stationed in Chechnya were kept there as ''cannon fodder'' and should be removed from combat ''for purely humanitarian considerations.''
In a fierce, startling indictment of the Government he has recently joined, Mr. Lebed derided Russian security officials as inept and corrupt, denounced the Moscow-installed Chechen government as liars, and praised the courage of the rebels.
Mr. Lebed said today that he thought a cease-fire could be arranged within the next 24 hours, and that such a truce was necessary to prevent further useless slaughter of Russian troops.
As he spoke, the Chechen capital thundered with the sound of aerial bombardment and thousands of civilians tried to flee for their lives from what has become a deadly stalemate. $(Page A6.$)
Mr. Lebed expressed no sympathy for either the Moscow-appointed Chechen leadership or his colleagues in Moscow, asserting that the state commission for settling the crisis in Chechnya, which is headed by Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin, had ''failed.''
He railed against the ''passivity'' and ''corruption'' of Government officials in charge of seeking a settlement of the crisis. He called the Moscow-appointed leader of the Chechen republic, Doku Zavgayev, a ''liar'' and ''self-aggrandizer.''
Mr. Lebed was appointed President Boris N. Yeltsin's envoy to Chechnya on Saturday, replacing the hawkish Oleg Lobov. Today, Mr. Lebed said he was not told of his new job ahead of time and suggested that the assignment was lobbed at him like a hand grenade.
''I did not have time to find out who prepared this decision and brought it to the President, but all this shows that someone wants me very much to break my neck over this assignment,'' he said. ''We shall see. I like tough assignments. They excite me.''
Mr. Lebed, who was an ardent critic of the war when he was running for President against Mr. Yeltsin, has alienated many of the President's men with his assertive manner and bold power grabs since he was put in charge of the President's national security operation.
Some of Mr. Yeltsin's aides have sniped at Mr. Lebed for hesitating to travel to Chechnya after he said shortly after the election that he would do so. His trip today was intended to find a way to get an immediate cease-fire in a six-day battle in Grozny that has killed hundreds of Russian troops.
It was also meant to silence his critics inside the Kremlin.
He lashed out at them today, talking about the lack of coordination, information-gathering or clear decison-making on Chechnya that preceded him.
He bitterly attacked Mr. Lobov's operation for ''passivity'' and demanded an ''in-house investigation'' into the whereabouts of Mr. Lobov's deputy, who he said was supposed to be permanently stationed in Chechnya.
''According to my information, he is currently in Cyprus, having his holiday,'' Mr. Lebed said scornfully. He said the rest of the staff ''ran away'' last week when the latest rebel offensive began.
The security adviser's comments were reminiscent of a tactic Mr. Yeltsin himself has used during the unpopular war -- summoning generals or Cabinet ministers before television cameras to blame them for mishandling a war that had become a humiliating political liability.
Mr. Lebed was also withering about the conduct of the government press services, comparing them unfavorably with the public relations finesse of Chechen rebels. He complained that Russian spokesmen ''switched off their phones, they have no communications, they have lost their tongues,'' and suggested that the press secretaries for the Ministries of Defense and Interior and the Federal Security Service be dismissed. ''Let them go fishing and grow raspberries at their dachas,'' he said.
Mr. Lebed's few conciliatory words were reserved for the Chechen rebels, saying, ''They are fine soldiers, and they should not be referred to by derogatory names.'' He said that in his meeting, the rebel commander, Aslan Maskhadov, had agreed with him that Russia could ''crush'' Chechnya if it wanted to.
''The question is, is it necessary?'' Mr. Lebed asked. ''Should hundreds and thousands of lives be sacrificed to achieve this Pyrrhic victory?''William R. Celester, the former Newark police director who has remained silent since he pleaded guilty last month to stealing almost $30,000 from a police account, has now given his version of his tenure, painting himself as a victim of circumstances.
Among other things, he said he was merely following a departmental tradition when he diverted the funds from the police account.
''That's the way the account was used,'' Mr. Celester said in an article published Sunday in The Boston Globe. ''There were never any guidelines on that account.''
Mr. Celester also told the newspaper that Mayor Sharpe James was aware that he had used money from the departmental account to buy dinner for Chinese dignitaries who were visiting Newark.
A spokesman for Mayor James declined to comment yesterday. But investigators have said there was no evidence that the Mayor was aware that Mr. Celester was stealing the money until after Federal agents began their review of Police Department funds. In fact, after investigators began examining the department's records, the city began to prepare its own audit of Mr. Celester's accounts. Mayor James has declined to release the audit of the funds.
According to current and former Newark police officials, the police director's account had traditionally been primarily used to pay for confidential informers in drug investigations. The officials have said that the money began to dry up soon after Mr. Celester assumed office as police director in 1991.
On July 25, Mr. Celester admitted in Federal court that he had taken $29,500 from the account and used it for vacations, airline tickets, gifts for girlfriends and other personal expenses. Under the plea bargain, Faith S. Hochberg, the United States Attorney for New Jersey, agreed to drop 34 of 37 counts of fraud and embezzlement.
Mr. Celester also admitted in court that he kept $27,000 improperly donated by police subordinates at a fund-raiser for his second anniversary as police director, and that he filed a false tax return that did not reflect income from the anniversary party or the director's account.
At the time, Mr. Celester's lawyer, Anthony Pope, said that Mr. Celester accepted responsibility for the crimes. ''Whatever he did wrong he admitted to,'' Mr. Pope said. Mr. Pope declined to comment yesterday about the article, saying that he needed to consult with his client. Mr. Celester could not be reached at home.
Mr. Celester's acceptance of responsibility could be significant in his sentencing. The former director, who faces a maximum of 13 years in prison, is due for a sentence reduction because of his admission of guilt. The United States Attorney's office declined to comment on whether Mr. Celester's statements in the article could affect the recommendation for a lighter sentence.
A Boston native, Mr. Celester was one of four children raised by a single mother in one of the city's toughest neighborhoods. He was a member of the Marseilles Dukes street gang and had the nickname Blast. A ninth-grade dropout, he was a divorced father by age 17 and had also served a six-month jail sentence for fighting.
After working for a time as a sandblaster, Mr. Celester joined the Boston Police Department with the help of a state senator who took an interest after Mr. Celester worked for one of his political campaigns. He attended night school for 10 years while rising steadily though the department's ranks. Eventually, Mr. Celester became a deputy police superintendent, leaving that post to assume command in Newark.Raising the competitive stakes to a rich new level in its World Wide Web browser war with the Netscape Communications Corporation, the Microsoft Corporation announced deals today providing for two of the Internet's most popular financial news and sports services to be bundled free into a new version of Microsoft's browsing software.
Even though Netscape's Web browser, Netscape Navigator, is used by more than 85 percent of computer users for viewing information on the World Wide Web, Microsoft is aiming to make its Internet Explorer software the market leader.
Today's deals and Microsoft's $7 billion in cash on hand, which generates more in interest than Netscape has in annual revenues, demonstrate just how formidable a competitor the world's largest software company can be.
Moreover, Microsoft's announcement today showed its ambitions to take Web-browser software beyond a navigational tool by building in a package of popular destinations.
The new software, Internet Explorer Version 3.0, which Microsoft planned to begin distributing free on the Internet at midnight tonight, will give users automatic and free access to the daily Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition, which normally costs as much as $49 a year, and to the popular ESPNet Sportszone, which usually charges for its services a la carte.
''In some sense this is a volume deal,'' said Brad Chase, the Microsoft vice president in charge of Internet browsers. ''We feel very excited about this giving us a better browser.''
The new services, along with several similar packages also announced late today, put added pressure on Netscape, which intends to introduce a new version of its Navigator browser next Monday.
''The operative word in the Microsoft Internet strategy is 'free,' '' said George Colony, president of Forrester Research Inc., a consulting firm in Cambridge, Mass. ''Microsoft is slashing and burning their way into this market.''
Web site publishers have from the beginning seen such deals as an added source of revenue, to complement advertising and circulation.
''The software producers are now to some degree acting like on-line services,'' said Tom Baker, the business director of The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition.
Under the Journal deal, Internet Explorer customers will get The Journal Interactive Edition free through the end of the year. The Journal site, which has more than 40,000 subscribers, only began this month to charge new subscribers.
Executives at Dow Jones & Company, which owns The Journal, would not disclose how much Microsoft was paying to offer the service.
Mr. Baker said the deal lasts five months but could be extended.
In addition to the deals with The Journal and ESPNet, part of the ESPN unit of the Walt Disney Company, Microsoft has made agreements with operators of five other Web sites that Explorer users will be able to use free: Hollywood Online, a source for movie information; Investors' Edge, which publishes recommendations from financial analysts; MTV Online; Riddler.com, an Internet game site, and Microwarehouse, a catalogue shopping site.
The deals are a new avenue of attack on Netscape, reminiscent, several analysts said, of the strategy Microsoft used more than a decade ago in its effort to dominate PC software operating systems. That strategy involved adding more and more features to its basic MS-DOS and, later, Windows software.
''This ushers in a new era of content competition,'' said David Smith, an analyst at the Gartner Group in Stamford, Conn. ''If you look at how Microsoft built their franchise in operating systems, it was by adding applications and locking people in. Now content is the application of the Internet.''
To date in the Web-browser war, Microsoft and Netscape have battled over technology features, with each racing to be first with better ways for viewing information. In recent months, however, word has begun to trickle through the Internet community that Microsoft has been trying to buy market share by purchasing the allegiance of Web site operators with software-development support and deals like those today.
Both Netscape and Microsoft basically give away the versions of their browsers used by individuals. Netscape draws much of its revenue from the so-called server versions of Navigator used on computers that play host to Web sites or give users access to the Web.
But so far, Microsoft has been giving away the server software, too, relying on its vast wealth to wage a war of attrition.
Netscape's response to today's developments was to make over its home page with point-by-point performance comparisons that Netscape said showed that Navigator remained faster than the Microsoft offering and required less disk space and processing power.Like an airline trying to lure bargain-conscious passengers off an overbooked flight, Cornell University Medical College has offered to waive tuition for first-year medical students who agree not to enroll until next year.
Cornell sent acceptances to 249 applicants, a number that in past years has yielded the 101 to 104 students it has room for. But this year, 119 said yes to Cornell, and officials began worrying about students fighting over microscopes, cadavers or laboratory tables to put them on.
So Gordon F. Fairclough Jr., the chairman of the admissions committee, sent the 119 students a letter offering a year tuition-free, worth $24,000, to the first 15 who defer their enrollment until September 1997.
Some students say Cornell admissions personnel told them the situation was so desperate that they could live in Cornell student housing until then, at about $500 a month for a one-bedroom apartment, as long as they did not enroll.
Cornell said five students have taken the deal, which Mr. Fairclough called an ''extraordinary opportunity'' in his letter. Orientation begins next week and classes the week after.
''This is a unique approach,'' said Richard R. Randlett of the Association of American Medical Colleges, which administers medical-school entrance tests. ''Overbooking is always a serious situation. It's not like undergraduate school, where you can book a few more people in the lounge area until you get beds ready.''
Cornell received 7,603 applications. As to how it missed by more than 15 percent on what admissions officials call the ''yield'' -- the number of students who decide to attend after being accepted at, presumably, other institutions as well -- Myrna Manners, a spokeswoman for the medical school, said a new curriculum and a new teaching center at Cornell may have given it the unwanted edge.
The curriculum calls for students to spend less time in formal classroom settings. It also emphasizes low faculty-student ratios, making it even more important for the school to hold down enrollment, particularly in the curriculum's introductory year.
''These problems occur from time to time as interest in particular professions waxes or wanes,'' said Janet Coffman, a researcher at the Center for Health Professions at the University of California at San Francisco. ''Applicants perceive one school as more prestigious.''
Cornell's problem follows a surge in medical-school applications and a sense among some health-industry experts that there are too many medical school openings nationwide, leading to too many doctors and to inefficiency in medical care later on. Last year, the Pew Health Professions Commission said medical schools and training programs should be closed to bring the number of places for medical students down about 20 percent.
This year, Mr. Randlett said, the nationwide applicant pool was up 1 percent from last year, with an estimated 47,000 applicants. Last year's total was 46,591. But he said that medical school acceptances would be down slightly this year, to 16,152 from 17,357.
Clearly, Cornell gambled on the number of acceptances it sent out. The Yale School of Medicine, whose first-year class is about the same size as Cornell's, issues only 125 to 130 acceptances, about half as many as Cornell. It was not clear why Cornell offered places to so many more prospective students.
''Without question, I can tell you, we never go 25 to 30 percent over the size of the class and the number of offers out,'' said M. Lynne Wootton, the director of admissions at the Yale medical school. ''Most of us have a great deal of heartfelt sympathy for our colleagues at Cornell. I imagine if it had just been a couple of overbooked people, they could have absorbed it, but the numbers here made that impossible. I think it will be a bitter lesson.''
Dr. Eugene B. Feigelson, dean of the College of Medicine at the State University of New York's Health Science Center in Brooklyn, said his admissions personnel accept approximately 30 percent more than the 185 they want to enroll.
''We know from experience that not everyone we accept is going to come to us,'' he said. If the number falls below 185, the school goes to a waiting list and issues one acceptance letter at a time.
In 1992, he said, ''we got caught'': 230 students accepted admissions offers. ''It was a logistical problem,'' he said. ''Overbooking in our case is not a felonious assault on the quality of the education. Maybe it's more along the lines of a little misdemeanor.'' He said the school made room for them all.
Some first-year students say Cornell should do the same thing instead of playing an academic version of ''Let's Make a Deal.''
''I have been given grants for this upcoming year, so my tuition is already lower,'' said one first-year student who decided against the tuition offer and who spoke on condition of anonymity. ''There's no saying I'd get those grants again if I waited.'' Also, the student said, ''If I put this off a year, I'll start working and making money a year later than planned. So instead of paying my debts in four years, I'll still be increasing them.''
The student said the tuition waiver ''sounded appealing at first,'' but closer study raised questions.
''If you take the offer, you actually lose money,'' the student said. ''Tuition goes up one or two grand a year. By the time the third and fourth years of school roll around four and five years from now, students would be paying almost $6,000 to $8,000 more in tuition.''Nearly four weeks after Trans World Airlines Flight 800 crashed off Long Island, half of the plane's tangled wreckage is spread out on the floor of a former Grumman hangar in Calverton, L.I., and investigators poring over it yesterday began focusing on the center of the airplane, where the wings meet.
Most of all, they are curious about what caused the plane's underbelly beneath the wings to fall first off the airplane. Much of that evidence remains on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, scattered about in fist-sized pieces.
As salvage workers continue pulling wreckage from the water, investigators examining it have eliminated from consideration several possible sites for the bomb that most of them believe brought the plane down. Over the weekend, they concluded that a bomb could not have been hidden in checked luggage in the forward cargo hold. Previously they said it could not have been in the cockpit.
Yesterday, investigators were theorizing that a bomb, if there was one, was probably somewhere in the middle of the expansive cabin, possibly hidden beneath a seat or inside a food cart.
They know that the initial blast severed the cockpit and first-class cabin from the rest of the Boeing 747, which plunged into the Atlantic shortly after leaving Kennedy International Airport for Paris on July 17, killing all 230 people on board. As a result, investigators are most interested in recovering pieces of the underbelly, near the juncture of the wings. Scuba divers and a deep-sea robot picked up just 15 pieces in 12 hours yesterday in the debris field closest along the flight path to Kennedy Airport, officials said yesterday.
At a news briefing yesterday, safety and criminal investigators confirmed that they are most interested in the center of the plane, specifically the center fuel tank which was housed between the wings. In recent days, the center fuel tank has become the focus of much interest among investigators who want to know if the jet fuel inside it -- only about 50 gallons was there -- somehow exploded. They are trying to determine whether the fuel tank explosion was triggered by a bomb, or if it exploded in the giant fireball some seconds later, after an initial explosion sliced off the front of the aircraft.
To investigators, the discovery on Saturday of the fourth and final baggage bin, which looked ''unremarkable,'' eliminated the forward cargo hold as a possible bomb site. But it did not diminish many investigators' theory that a bomb exploded on board, though several others said yesterday that a missile attack has not been ruled out.
''As we've been saying for three weeks, we go where the evidence takes us,'' Robert T. Francis, the vice chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said.
The autopsies of the bodies could also provide clues about where a bomb could have exploded on board. In an interview yesterday, Dr. Charles Wetli, the Suffolk County Medical Examiner, said small pieces of the plane were found in the bodies of some victims, usually in their legs and feet. ''There was an explosive force from below upward in some of the people,'' Dr. Wetli said. But he said they were not sitting in the same area. He added that the 31 missing passengers were not assigned to one particular area of the plane.
As it turns out, the seating chart may not tell investigators much. Flight 800 was an overnight route. When the flight is half full, as it was on July 17, passengers usually move from their assigned seats to other seats to stretch out and get more comfortable.
Investigators said large portions of the forward galley had been recovered, and they said that wreckage also looked ''unremarkable.''
Still, a senior investigator said, ''The bomb theory is as likely as it was yesterday or the day before,'' adding, ''I would like to see a lot more of the airplane.''
One reason is a test result for explosive residue from a part of the right wing, near where the wing and the fuselage are joined. Experts got the positive result using equipment in a makeshift lab at Calverton. But subsequent tests at the Federal Bureau of Investigation laboratory in Washington were inconclusive.
Nonetheless, investigators said the initial positive result indicated the presence of PETN, the chief component in the high-order plastic explosive known as detasheet or detcord. PETN can also be found in other explosive mixtures, such as those with Semtex.
As many as 10 other parts of the airliner tested by the technicians in the hangar in Calverton registered positive for explosives. However, it was unclear whether those positive readings also indicated the presence of PETN, and where exactly the readings came from. F.B.I. officials do not take these tests seriously unless they are confirmed by tests in Washington; so far none of them have been.
Detasheet is a plastic explosive that can be used to line suitcases. Detcord has been mixed with plastic cement to make bombs. It can be set off with a blasting cap and barometric timing device.
In 1982, a bomb exploded on a Pan Am flight en route to Honolulu. Two weeks later, another Pan Am flight, from Miami to Rio de Janeiro, was found to have a bomb on board. The bombs were determined to have been virtually identical, and their chief component was PETN. In the Rio bomb, the PETN was molded into 4-by-10-inch strips and sewn into the lining of a suitcase. The substance was undetectable by X-ray.
One senior investigator said the preliminary positive results have helped boost confidence in the bomb theory, even though they have not been confirmed by subsequent tests at the F.B.I. lab in Washington, or others at the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms laboratory in Rockville, Md.
Salvage crews late yesterday positively identified the fourth engine, in the main debris field furthest from the airport. The discovery appears to eliminate the possibility that the plane crashed because one engine came loose and hit a second, which happened in the crashes of two Boeing 747 cargo planes. That theory was never strong, however, because it would not account for the sudden loss of electric power on Flight 800.
The searchers said they could not raise the engine last night, and with bad weather moving in, they were not sure when they would recover it.New York City and State officials are scrambling to prepare for the largest public jobs program since the Depression -- in their effort to meet the requirements of the Federal welfare bill passed by Congress this summer. The program could create a statewide work force of welfare recipients as large as New York City's municipal payroll at a cost that may exceed $1 billion a year.
Under the plan, within two years as many as a quarter of the state's adult welfare recipients -- 100,000 people, mostly single mothers -- are to begin working for the city and other governments around the state in exchange for their welfare benefits. By 2002, that number may grow to nearly that of the city's current work force, 204,000 employees.
But city officials acknowledge that they have no idea where they will get the money to administer such a huge program, particularly in the case of mothers whose children need day care.
''There's always work to be done in the city of New York,'' said Richard Schwartz, a senior adviser to Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani who supervises welfare policy. ''But there's clearly a deficiency in the bill in covering the costs of workfare.''
The Mayor has said the bill deliberately shifts costs from Federal to local taxpayers, leaving cities and states without the money to take care of workers' children in a ''humane or a decent way.''
The welfare bill, which President Clinton said he would sign into law this month, ends the guarantee of cash assistance under Aid to Families With Dependent Children and imposes time limits and work requirements on welfare benefits. City and state officials said that rather than subsidize private employment or face the financial penalties written into the bill, they will find work for welfare recipients. The officials listed a variety of tasks, including cleaning parks and courthouses, answering telephones and doing clerical work in city agencies, and possibly supervising school lunchrooms.
There are provisions in the bill that could reduce the number of people required to work, particularly if the state is successful in reducing its welfare caseload. But even if only 100,000 people eventually go to work, the cost of day care and administering the workfare program would be $950 million a year, not including the benefits that workers receive, according to city and state estimates. Only a fraction of that amount will be covered by the Federal funds appropriated in the new welfare bill.
New York City already has the largest workfare program in the country, with 34,000 people now working in exchange for their welfare benefits. But most of those workers are part of the state's Home Relief program, which provides benefits primarily to childless adults. The new workers in the program required under the bill are almost entirely single parents, who will need child care that could cost the state and the city about $540 a month for each case. That's almost as much as their welfare benefits, which are now $577 a month for a family of three.
Although the total costs will loom large in tight city and state budgets, the cash benefits that would go to individuals in the year 2000 amount to less than they would make working the required 30 hours for the minimum wage.
The new workers -- who would be given no benefits other than Medicaid and within a few years would receive less than the newly approved minimum wage -- are also likely to raise significant labor issues for the city and its powerful municipal unions. Local union officials have thus far been compliant with the existing workfare program in the city, and helped negotiate a clause in the new Federal bill that prohibits the direct replacement of current employees by welfare recipients. But under the bill, cities are still free to fill all vacancies with welfare workers and could also reduce the size of the city work force, even if the welfare work force is growing.
Stanley Hill, executive director of District Council 37, the largest municipal union, representing 125,000 city workers, said he would not stand by and allow the bill to create a ''separate, second-class work force'' as large or larger than his own union. He said his union was exploring how to begin organizing the new welfare workers, possibly as members of the union, to prevent their exploitation.
Because the workers are participating in a welfare program and are not city employees, however, they do not appear to be covered by Federal labor law and could instantly lose their welfare benefits if they attempt a work slowdown or other collective action, according to Charles Loveless, legislative director of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the parent body of District Council 37.
Currently, workfare participants can lose their benefits for even small infractions of the rules, and dissatisfaction with the program has led to a tiny but growing effort to organize the workers now cleaning the parks and streets. The effort, led by the Urban Justice Institute, an advocacy organization, has enlisted about 100 workers in the last six weeks, drawing on their frustration over the menial nature of their jobs and the lack of meaningful training.
''We're not stupid people who never had a job,'' said Pat Wiley, a Brooklyn woman picking up trash recently in Prospect Park. ''I was never a bum. I don't want welfare.
''What am I learning? Learning to clean up? I learned that in my backyard when I was 4 years old. The whole thing just makes you more cynical.''
The new Federal minimum wage recently passed by Congress will be $5.15 an hour beginning in September 1997. Although workfare benefits are not meant to be wages, program participants -- based on the state's current welfare grant of $577 a month and an initial requirement of 20 hours of work a week -- will receive the equivalent of $6.66 an hour. But the work requirements go up gradually, and by 2000, when participants must work 30 hours a week, they will have slipped below the new minimum wage.
But in fact, Gov. George E. Pataki, with the Mayor's support, has proposed cutting it to $424 a month, and the reduced financing in the Federal bill has increased the likelihood that the grant will be cut.
Stephen DiBrienza, a Democrat, who is chairman of the City Council's General Welfare Committee, said the program has created ''a permanent underclass of people pushing brooms around the city'' without training them for permanent jobs. The coming wave of welfare workers will allow the city to make up for cuts in services while paying less than the minimum wage, he said.
But the Giuliani administration is quite pleased with the progress of the workfare program, and hopes it will be seen as a model for the kinds of programs that could eventually employ 2.3 million welfare recipients by 2002. Mr. Schwartz, the program's architect, said it has improved the city's cleanliness at a modest cost and has put more people to work than anyone had predicted when the program began in March 1995. Rather than provide specific job training, he said, the program teaches people the dignity of work, the responsibility of showing up every day, and the nature of working under supervision.
''We have an extra degree of confidence that we will be able to meet the Federal goals,'' Mr. Schwartz said, ''because we know exactly what it means to have a workfare program with tens of thousands of participants and how to assign them efficiently in a way that makes sense for public agencies, in a way that doesn't conflict with unions.''On April 3, 1989, the 103d day after a bomb destroyed Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, President George Bush met with families of the victims and pledged that the Government would take dramatic action to keep such a tragedy from happening again.
Later that day, Mr. Bush's Transportation Secretary, Samuel K. Skinner, announced sweeping proposals to defy terrorists and seal an airline security system filled with dangerous holes. Airports would be reshaped by ''the most effective security measures we can devise,'' he said, adding, ''We are not going to let cost get in the way of security.''
But seven years later, the nation's largest airports remain vulnerable. And amid suspicions that a bomb may have downed Trans World Airlines Flight 800 on July 17, President Clinton and top lawmakers are calling for new security measures in words that eerily echo those used before.
Time and again, through both Republican and Democratic administrations, what Mr. Skinner promised would not happen is exactly what has transpired. Bitter fights over the huge cost -- and who should pay to deal with such a vague threat -- have derailed the biggest proposals.
Top Federal officials complain that the airline industry, which typically has paid for its own security, has resisted many of their demands for improvement. The industry has hired William H. Webster, the former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency, as part of its extensive lobbying against important security measures.
The airlines, locked in cutthroat competition, have argued that some of the proposals were unrealistic and overzealous and would have crippled the travel system with costly and frustrating delays.
The Government's boldest plan -- to require the installation of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of new bomb-detection machines at Kennedy International Airport and other gateways -- foundered quickly amid questions about whether the technology worked well enough to justify deploying the equipment.
Interviews and a close examination of several issues show that the industry's lobby -- one of the most forceful in Washington -- has stymied other measures with help from allies in Congress. Asked to describe the airlines' attitude toward the changes he proposed, Mr. Skinner, who left office in 1991, responded last week with two words: ''highly resistant.''
For example, industry lobbyists brought in Mr. Webster to help persuade Congress to scuttle plans for extensive background checks on most airline employees -- an effort that Cathal L. Flynn, the Federal Aviation Administration's top security official, described as ''a wonderful piece of special pleading.''
But there are other tales as well behind the slow pace of change: of incessant waffling by lawmakers and the F.A.A., a regulator that has often seemed too cozy with the industry; of big promises and hasty judgments; of the inevitable lull that sets in once a crisis seems to have passed.
Now, as investigators comb the soggy wreckage of the T.W.A. flight that crashed shortly after leaving Kennedy Airport, the airlines are gearing up for another big lobbying battle, and some of the same fights are about to be replayed.
Federal officials say steps to thwart terrorists -- including a new drive to install bomb-detecting machines, which are now being used at a number of foreign airports -- could cost more than $1 billion a year. Several lawmakers have proposed adding a tax of a few dollars to the cost of each passenger ticket to help the airlines pay for the changes, and a commission headed by Vice President Al Gore also will make recommendations.
But the airlines argue that they should no longer bear the chief burden of securing such a vast system, which handles more than 1.5 million passengers a day. They say they have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on security -- much of it in years when the industry, now profitable, was strapped for money -- and they think the Government should pay any new costs from general Federal revenue.
Edward A. Merlis, the senior vice president for government affairs at the Air Transport Association, the industry's leading trade group, said recently that the airlines realize that the threat of terrorism is growing and that their planes represent ''a visible and dramatic target for terrorists.''
But he also told a Senate committee that there was a ''considerable difference between processing passengers and interdicting terrorists'' and that the latter goes ''beyond our abilities and responsibilities.''
The industry's main opponents in the past battles, the families of the Pan Am victims, say they will plead with political leaders to do more this time.
''Please don't insult us again by saying you'll do it if you're not going to,'' said Eleanor Hudson, whose 16-year-old daughter, Melina, was killed over Lockerbie. Ms. Hudson said that if it turned out that a bomb, and not mechanical failure, destroyed the T.W.A. flight, then the families of those 230 victims also ''will want to believe.''
''You don't want to be a skeptic,'' she said.
The Initiative After Lockerbie, A Burst of Activity
Indeed, when President Bush and Mr. Skinner announced their initiative, it looked as if there would be no room for skeptics.Republicans opened their 36th annual convention here today with a meticulously choreographed pageant of unity that evoked the glories of their party's past and sought to convince voters that they were sensitive enough to the nation's needs to be trusted not just with Congress but also with the White House.
To galvanize party loyalists, and promote Bob Dole's signature tax-cut plan, Republicans offered for the evening's emotional, prime-time highlight an optimistic and nostalgic video message from its ailing champion from the 1980's, former President Ronald Reagan. Then, looking to the future as it tries to unite, and to rally moderates who lost out on the pre-convention platform, the party turned to its most elusive and compelling figure, Gen. Colin L. Powell.
General Powell, who repeatedly stopped speaking to acknowledge an outpouring ovations, devoted only one sentence deep in his speech to directly address two simmering issues that set him apart from many party leaders: his support for abortion rights and affirmative action.
But mostly, General Powell, who captured the network cameras that had been turned off earlier when the party's rigidly conservative platform was discussed and adopted, offered a message of inclusion. It was aimed at voters who have been put off by what many feel have been the excesses of the Republican-controlled Congress.
''Let us never step back from compassion,'' he said. ''The message we must convey to the American people is that we fight for welfare reform, we fight for health-care reform and other reforms not just to save money, because we believe there are better ways to take care of Americans in need than the exhausted programs of the past.''
General Powell, whose commanding stature from the gulf war and status as the most prominent black Republican led many in his party to plead with him to run for President, paid tribute to Mr. Dole as a hero. ''I know this man,'' he said. ''In an era of too much salesmanship and too much smooth talking Bob Dole is a plain-spoken man. A man of strength, maturity and integrity. He is a man who can bring trust back to Government and bring Americans together again.''
Adding to the feeling of harmony, Patrick J. Buchanan, whose no-frills, self-styled populist campaign was an irritant to Mr. Dole throughout the primaries, strode through the hall tonight to the cheers of well-wishers.
On Sunday, Mr. Buchanan called for a ''truce of San Diego,'' with Mr. Dole, though he did not go as far as to actually endorse Mr. Dole. Today he finally capitulated, after getting a full run of headlines and televised sound bites for his insurgency and implied promise that he would be back as a candidate in the year 2000.
''The only realistic chance we have in 1996 to implement the agenda for which we campaigned for 18 months,'' he said in a written statement, ''is to keep Congress Republican, and replace Clinton-Gore with a Republican Administration.
''Therefore,'' he continued, ''I endorse the Republican ticket of Dole-Kemp, and will work for a national Republican victory in November.''
But the star of the evening was General Powell, who as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff worked intimately with President Clinton in his first year in office. His speech capped an evening designed to stir new enthusiasm about Mr. Dole, and his running mate, Jack Kemp. The program was also intended to sow grave doubts about the leadership of Mr. Clinton and persuade Americans that Mr. Clinton's lead in the polls is not insurmountable.
Speaker after speaker, in fast-paced addresses that were restricted to less than five minutes in many cases, came with tributes to the 73-year-old Mr. Dole as an American hero. They depicted their party as the party of economic growth and the protector of middle-class households in which incomes have stagnated -- themes that the Republicans plan to highlight in the fall.
Former President George Bush made an indirect but searing attack on the man who defeated him four years ago. ''It breaks my heart when the White House is demeaned, the Presidency itself diminished,'' he said. ''Bob Dole, as President, will treat the White House with respect, his staff will be beyond even the appearance of impropriety; and, in the process, he will increase respect for the United States of America around the world.''
Leaving no doubt he was drawing a critical comparison with Hillary Rodham Clinton, Mr. Bush, in introducing his wife, Barbara, called her ''a woman who unquestionably upheld the honor of the White House.''
The nearly 4,000 delegates and alternates, in festive spirits as they sported newly produced ''Dole/ Kemp'' placards. Though the joyous program played well on television, the long and narrow hall was comparatively quiet and muffled, even when Elizabeth Dole was introduced.
The most sentimental moments of the evening were when, nearly crying, Nancy Reagan spoke of her husband -- and brought tears to many in the audience. Referring to his suffering with Alzheimer's disease, Mrs. Reagan said, ''We've learned the terrible pain and loneliness.'' And she evoked one of her husband's most memorable phrases, saying, ''I can tell you with certainty he still sees the shining city on the hill.''
After Mrs. Reagan, former President Gerald R. Ford was on hand with Mr. Bush to recall past Republican triumphs.
Mr. Ford reminded the delegates that Mr. Dole was his running mate in 1976, and counseled them not to worry about Mr. Clinton's significant lead in the polls.
''Refresh your memories, recall when you read today's national polls,'' he said, ''Ford and Dole came from 30 points behind that August to win 49.9 percent of the actual ballots cast. We lost a cliffhanger. The only poll that counts this year is still three months away.''
The Republicans also sought to reach beyond partisan politics with appearances by ordinary Americans, and one not-so-ordinary man, Capt. Scott F. O'Grady, the Air Force F-16 pilot whose downing over Bosnia and dramatic rescue captivated the nation.This is a convention run by revisionists, determined to obscure if not rewrite recent history, to the electoral advantage of the Republican Party.
Bob Dole and his managers want to erase memories of the shrill animosity that marked their party's convention four years ago in Houston. They want to soften the confrontational record of the Republican-controlled 104th Congress, especially that of the House of Representatives. They want to consign this year's Republican platform to the dustbin of history quickly; indeed, they wanted to do so even before it was passed.
The platform may be more conservative than it was in 1992, the delegates may be more unyieldingly conservative than they were in 1992, but the television face of this convention will be more moderate, if the managers have their way. The real audience, the one that will decide who lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue after next Jan. 20, is not in the conventional hall but out there in videoland, and it is far more moderate than the delegates.
For the men and women who face the uphill task of defeating President Clinton, if not for the more outspoken conservatives among the delegates here, the first order of business is to make San Diego the non-Houston.
They are not shy about admitting it. For example, Nelson Warfield, Mr. Dole's press secretary, volunteered this during an interview today: ''There's a story to be written here, and the story is, this is not Houston.''
Houston, after all, was followed by the defeat of George Bush, who entered his hometown convention a favorite for re-election, yet lost. Mr. Dole and his circle have thought a lot about that and concluded, one of them said recently, that ''we may not have murdered our candidate right there, but we tied lead weights around his ankles and sent him out to take his licking.''
The people who ran things four years ago are out, and people who made Republican images in happier days are back -- people like Michael J. Deaver, the Michelangelo of the balloon drop, and the joint impresarios here, William I. Greener 3d and Paul J. Manafort, who both made their names in the 1980's, heyday of Ronald Reagan.
Mr. Reagan, ill with Alzheimer's disease, was of course not here, but Billy Graham, Jack Kemp and others appeared in a loving film about the Reagan era, when the Republicans seemed on the way to lasting majority-party status.
Then Nancy Reagan came on, cheered to the rafters. She brought many to tears as she spoke of the long goodbye his illness represented.
Charles Black, once Mr. Manafort's partner in the consulting business, observed this morning that no fewer than 128 people spoke at Houston, where some of the speakers were actually permitted to say what they thought.
''Four of those 128 people said things that were considered too controversial, too right-wing, and all of the coverage that came out of that convention concerned those four,'' Mr. Black told a group of reporters over breakfast. ''I don't consider that your fault. I consider it our fault, and we're trying to do better.''
So there will be no Patrick J. Buchanan this time, no Marilyn Quayle -- they were two of the speakers with a snarl last time -- and those who have been invited to speak have been told how long to talk, what subjects to address and how to treat them. Craig Fuller, the permissive 1992 manager who approved Mr. Buchanan's text, is a forlorn, forgotten man in 1996.
A thoroughly pro-Dole Senator, accustomed to having his way, grumbled over the weekend about ''brainwashing'' after his indoctrination session.
Gen. Colin L. Powell is popular enough, and the managers wanted him badly enough, that he could (and did) negotiate the terms of his appearance tonight, which produced the kind of boffo television politicians dream about. Few others could.
The result is that some officeholders with demonstrated appeal to the kinds of urban and suburban voters who hold the key to a Dole comeback, like Govs. Pete Wilson of California, William F. Weld of Massachusetts and George E. Pataki of New York, will not be making substantive speeches here.
Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York and Mayor Richard J. Riordan of Los Angeles, who were hailed as party heroes when they won three years ago, are not bothering to come to San Diego.
The big danger, of course, is that in making sure nobody disrupts the message of reassurance from San Diego, everything will seem so relentlessly scripted that it resembles a meeting of a party plenum in the old Soviet Union. Those didn't make for very lively television.
Better dull, say the Republicans, than divisive. And those who do speak will keep to their allotted 3, 5 or 10 minutes -- or else. Haley Barbour, the party chairman, gave them the word again on NBC's ''Today'' this morning, just a few hours before the first gavel fell. ''I'll be darned,'' he said, ''if on my watch, Colin Powell or Bob Dole or somebody is going to speak after prime time, like happened in Houston.''
As is his wont, Mr. Buchanan has a rather different slant on all of this. He wants to rewrite not the notion that Houston was typical of the Republican Party in its intolerance, but the notion that he did anything wrong there. At his rally last night in nearby Escondido, a kind of rump convention, he showed a video that included not only his 1992 speech with its famous proclamation of cultural war but also shots of television anchormen saying he had done his party a service.
After exorcising the ghosts of Houston, San Diego has other work to do. Polls show that the permanent chairman of this convention, Speaker Newt Gingrich, is one of the less popular political figures of recent history.AS Kim Harbroe reached into an incubator to touch an infant the same size she had been at birth -- 1 pound, 7 ounces, or 640 grams -- Dr. Saroj Saigal, the pediatrician who took care of her 16 years ago, snapped her picture.
''The nurses were sobbing,'' recalled Dr. Saigal, adding that she felt none too steady herself. But Ms. Harbroe, who has been blind since infancy as a result of her extreme prematurity, delightedly took the photograph home to show to her family.
Ms. Harbroe's visit to the place where she spent her first four months, the intensive care unit at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario, followed the completion of her part in an unusual study directed by Dr. Saigal and published today in The Journal of the American Medical Association.
The study, which included 150 teen-agers, all born very prematurely with birth weights of less than 2 pounds 3 ounces, or 1,000 grams, was the first ever to ask the children themselves, or their parents, to rate the quality of their lives. (In nine cases, where children were too impaired to participate, parents assigned the ratings.) Their responses surprised and heartened Dr. Saigal. Even though many of the teen-agers had disabilities, like cerebral palsy, blindness, deafness or learning problems, 71 percent gave themselves high ratings for quality of life. In that sense, they hardly differed from a comparison group of teen-agers born at full term, few of whom had disabilities, in which 73 percent judged their quality of life to be high.
''We feel this self-perception is really important,'' Dr. Saigal said. ''They've developed very good coping mechanisms, though we don't know how. A lot of credit must go to the children themselves, and their parents.''
Other neonatologists praised the study. Dr. Jon Tyson, who wrote an editorial accompanying the article, said in an interview: ''This is an extraordinarily well done study. To have followed a group of patients for this long and used methods so carefully developed and standardized to assess such a difficult issue is a remarkable accomplishment.'' Dr. Tyson is a neonatologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.
Dr. William Silverman, a retired pediatrician and former director of the premature-infant unit at the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York, said: ''Dr. Saigal is a pioneer in doing these extremely careful studies, and speaking to children and families themselves. I'm full of admiration.''
But Dr. Tyson and Dr. Silverman both cautioned that Dr. Saigal's findings might not apply to children born in the United States, and they urged that similar studies be conducted here. Dr. Saigal's medical center provides better care than many hospitals, Dr. Tyson said, and the patients in her study had a higher standard of living and more access to social services than inner-city residents in the United States, whose rates of premature birth are relatively high.
The doctors also emphasized, as did Dr. Saigal herself, that her study could not be used to justify aggressive, intensive-care-unit treatment for all premature babies with extremely low birth weight. Although technology has made it possible to save ever smaller and younger babies, the odds of severe disability, particularly brain damage, are higher when the birth weight is extremely low. Some neonatologists believe in making an all-out effort in every case, but others do not, preferring to consult with parents on painful decisions about withholding or withdrawing aggressive treatment.
''Where there is a higher chance of death and disability, in borderline cases at 23 and 24 weeks of pregnancy,'' Dr. Saigal said, ''we accept that parents should be making the decision, because they will be living with the consequences.''
She and her colleagues developed two methods for evaluating quality of life. In the first, the teen-agers, working with specially trained interviewers, used a ''feeling thermometer,'' on which zero represented death and 100 meant perfect health, to rate their own health and compare it with that of four hypothetical characters suffering from varying types and degrees of disability.
Next came a technique known as a standard gamble, in which the subjects were assigned various health states, including their own, and given a chance to change them. But each new choice carried certain probabilities. One, for instance, might offer a 90 percent chance of perfect health, but also a 10 percent chance of dying. Would they gamble, or stand pat? Their choices were assigned numerical values, and used to calculate a quality-of-life score.
Some parents who live with children born prematurely have reservations about Dr. Saigal's methods. Helen Harrison, author of a book about premature babies, and the mother of a 21-year-old son who has severe mental and physical disabilities resulting from prematurity, questioned whether children with disabilities or their parents could realistically rate the quality of their lives. ''It's a very threatening question, to rate your own quality of life or your child's,'' Ms. Harrison said, ''and the worse the situation, the more defensiveness and denial are going to come into play. You feel compelled to make highly positive but sometimes dubious statements. Maybe it's a wish to appear noble and brave and heroic, or to stick up for your child.''
A second parent, Andrea Williams, of Hamilton, whose 7-year-old son cannot walk, speak or sit up without help, feared that Dr. Saigal's study, with its strong emphasis on the positive, might give parents false hope about very small premature babies and lead them to make decisions about treatment that they would later regret. ''I don't think parents realize what they're consenting to,'' she said.
Another concern involves data that Dr. Saigal has published elsewhere but omitted from the current study. Although two-thirds of her subjects have I.Q.'s in the normal range, their mean I.Q. is 89, about 12 points lower than those in the comparison group. Half need special-education classes, and 40 percent have behavior problems that include frequent episodes of distractibility and disruptiveness.
Given those figures, Ms. Harrison wondered whether all the subjects were truly capable of understanding what they were being asked.
Dr. Saigal said she thought they were quite capable, and the I.Q. difference was not that important. Some are doing well academically, she said, including one who hopes to study medicine or dentistry. ''These are really bright children,'' she said, adding that she deliberately left the data on I.Q. and learning disabilities out of her current article. Study after study, she said, including many of her own, have documented the children's problems from the point of view of researchers. This time, she said, ''we wanted to let the children speak for themselves.''
Ms. Harbroe, who rides a tandem bicycle, is a downhill skier and hopes to pursue a career in music, appreciated that opportunity. She said, ''I think people are now going to realize that premature babies, when they grow up and are teen-agers, can be normal and healthy, and even though they might be blind can still manage on their own and be independent.''Nearly six years after reunification, the legacy of elite sports academies developed under Communist East Germany could still be felt on the German Olympic team. More than half of the 491 German Olympic athletes attended one of the 21 schools, according to information released by the German Olympic Committee.
Once exclusive and top-secret incubators for children hand-picked to become their country's ''ambassadors in sweat suits,'' the schools are now open to anyone interested in nearly two dozen Olympic disciplines.
Drawing heavily on graduates of the former East German schools, the German team ranked second in total medals at the Atlanta Games behind the United States.
But many prominent athletes and trainers from what sportswriters like to call the ''old East German machine'' believe today's boarding schools are neither demanding nor flexible enough to accommodate Olympic training.
''The quality of German sports is going to drop off radically beginning in 1997,'' said Andreas Wecker, 26, who won Germany's only gymnastics gold medal on the horizontal bar in Atlanta.
As an 11th grader at Heinrich Rau school in Berlin (today the Werner Seelenbinder School), Wecker competed on the East German squad that won a team silver medal in 1988. He also won one silver and two bronze medals in individual competition in Barcelona, Spain, in 1992.
''The new school system doesn't give young athletes the support they need to excel,'' Wecker said.
The actual sports instruction takes place outside of school as local sports clubs -- which are more powerful and influential than most clubs in the United States -- supervise morning and afternoon practices.
The schools' role is to work with clubs and coaches to structure class times compatible with training schedules, said Gerd Neumes, the head of the Werner Seelenbinder school, where Wecker still trains.
The East German regime maintained separate classes and academic calendars for every sport. Classes were suspended as athletes prepared for national age-group competitions and resumed in the down time after tournaments.
Today's students are still excused from school to compete, but they have to make up the work at the state school system's pace, not their own.
''When I was preparing for Seoul, they gave me private instruction for three years,'' said Wecker, who expressed doubt about the ability of young athletes to sustain both an academic and athletic career at the required tempo.
''My teachers designed the individual courses so that I could take the 10th and 11th grade in three years,'' he said.
Current students, such as the 15-year-old Jan Schaefer, the German age-group champion on the horizontal bar, are resigned to taking rigorous graduation exams during crucial years when they must leap from junior to men's competition.
''It's going to be very difficult,'' said Schaefer, who plans a career in banking. ''I know I need an education, but gymnastics is the main thing in my life.''
In the old days, Schaefer would have had to pass annual reviews in his sport if he wished to remain in the school. Today, he could drop out of competition entirely without losing his place in school.
''We had students finish high school at the age of 22 or 23 in those days,'' said Wulf Dalhofer, the sports director at the Seelenbinder school and a holdover from the earlier system. ''It didn't matter to us how long it took. Just so they finished.''
Educators are quick to point out that the reunified Germany offers fewer careers in sports than did East Germany, when parents were easily persuaded to send their children to elite sports schools.
''Now we just want to give students interested in sports the most support possible,'' said Neumes, whose school has 1,200 students. ''Our main responsibility is to give them an education.''
Under the East German sports system, children were tested for athletic ability at age 5 or 6. The most gifted were encouraged -- more strident critics say forced -- to attend one of the sports schools. Students could compete in any sport they wanted, as long as coaches saw their potential to be a competitors at the highest level.Two months after winning power in a general election, the new Prime Minister of Bangladesh has begun fulfilling a pledge to bring to justice the army officers who stormed her family's home, killing her father and 15 family members in a coup in 1975.
Three retired officers from the unit that staged the coup were arrested before dawn today in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh.
Sheik Hasina Wazed, who is now Prime Minister, and an older sister were the only members of the immediate family to survive when the gunmen burst into their house wielding automatic weapons and killing their father, Sheik Mujibur Rahman.
Sheik Mujib led Bangladesh's fight for independence from Pakistan, and became the new country's first leader in 1971.
After several hours of questioning, the three officers arrested were being held under a special powers act adopted by the military rulers who succeeded Sheik Mujib.
Last week, the Government asked five foreign governments to deny asylum to five other former officers suspected in the killings who were serving abroad as diplomats when Mrs. Wazed's party, the Awami League, won the election.
The Government dismissed them and recalled them on July 1.
Newspapers in Bangladesh have reported that at least three other former officers left Bangladesh in the days before the Prime Minister took office.
Today's arrests came two days before the 21st anniversary of the killings, which has been designated as a day of public commemoration by the new Government. The observance is being accompanied by a decree restoring to Sheik Mujib the title Bangabandhu, meaning ''Beloved of Bangladesh,'' which was stripped from him after his death.
But restoring Sheik Mujib's place in history will require changing the Constitution. Shortly after the killings, Parliament, at the instigation of the new military ruler, Gen. Ziaur Rahman, granted amnesty for all actions committed in the coup.
Prime Minister Wazed has said she will seek a new amendment to strike down the amnesty provision, but for this she will need a two-thirds majority in Parliament. That would require the support of the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party, headed by Khaleda Zia, the widow of General Zia, who was assassinated by rebellious army officers in 1981.
Such cooperation is considered unlikely, but in the meantime the special powers act gives the Government the authority to detain the arrested officers indefinitely. The Prime Minister has accompanied her effort to round up the coup leaders with a reshuffling of the army high command.THE Global Financial Information Corporation has sublet 80,000 square feet -- the 27th and 28th floors -- at 3 World Financial Center, the 51-story, 2.2-million-square-foot office building that is headquarters to American Express and Lehman Brothers.
Financial details of the 16-year sublet from Lehman Brothers were not disclosed, but real estate brokers estimate that the annual rent would be about $30 a square foot, giving the lease an aggregate value of about $40 million.
Global will be consolidating operations from five Manhattan sites. The company provides computer-based financial information, analyses and other services; it recently bought the Knight-Ridder Financial news service for $275 million.
Robert B. Emden of Grubb & Ellis New York, who with his colleagues Elliot Klein and Mark Preston represented Global, said the deal would bring together Global's offices at 330 and 380 Madison Avenues, 40 Rector Street, 77 Water Street and 32 Old Slip.
He said the Knight-Ridder operation, now at 75 Wall Street, would also move to 3 World Financial Center. Global expects to complete the move by early fall.
Mr. Klein said the new space provided in-place technology, extensive improvements and furnishings ''without the costs typically associated with building a new corporate headquarters, which Global originally considered doing.''
Mark S. Green, a managing director in charge of corporate real estate at Lehman Brothers, said that as part of a continuing cost-reduction program, the investment firm was using its space more efficiently, making the two floors available for sublet.
Mitchell Steir of Julien J. Studley Inc. represented Lehman Brothers.
J. Crew United
J. Crew, the clothing retailer, has leased 125,000 square feet at 770 Broadway, at East Ninth Street, for executive offices, design and catalogue production.
The space is on the 11th and 12th floors of the 15-story, 937,000-square-foot building.
J. Crew will be consolidating from three other Manhattan sites: 625 Avenue of the Americas, at 18th Street; 115 Fifth Avenue, at 19th Street, and 11 West 19th Street.
Details of the 15-year deal were not disclosed, but brokers said that asking rents for the two floors were $22 a square foot annually.
Julien J. Studley Inc. represented J. Crew; Helmsley-Spear Inc. represented the building.
Not Renovating
Sometimes technology requires renovation -- and sometimes it requires new space.
The Reuben H. Donnelley Corporation, a publisher and marketer of telephone Yellow Pages, has leased 61,634 square feet -- the seventh and part of the ninth floor -- at 220 East 42d Street, the former Daily News Building.
The seventh floor of the 37-story, one-million-square-foot building for many years housed the newsroom of The Daily News, which moved in May 1995 to 450 West 33d Street, at 10th Avenue.
Donnelley will be moving its midtown sales office to 42d Street from 711 Third Avenue, at 44th Street, where it has about 50,000 square feet. The lease, for 10 years and 9 months, was valued at about $15 million.
The reason for the move? Technology, said Robert A. B. Baraff of the Edward S. Gordon real estate company, who represented Donnelley with his colleague Andrew Peretz and with Jon C. Sarkisian of the Jackson-Cross Company of Philadelphia.In a celebrated spoof of scholarly writing a generation ago, the humorist Frank Sullivan quipped, ''Give a footnote an inch, and it'll take a foot.'' Academicians were not amused.
Scholarly citation, they had come to believe, was one of the building blocks of civilization.
Today, a growing number of scholars, particularly in the humanities have joined the Sullivan heresy, scorning footnotes and banishing almost all forms of citation from their work. Sometimes their motive is philosophical, though at other times it is crassly commercial.
''I don't use footnotes because I like to think my books are invitations to readers rather than indictments of other historians,'' said Daniel J. Boorstin, the historian and former Librarian of Congress.
Gordon A. Craig, a widely published emeritus professor of history at Stanford University, agrees.
''In my first days as an author, I had a tendancy to choke the page with footnotes,'' Professor Craig said. ''Now I've written several books with no footnotes at all. I figure I'm writing for the cultivated lay public, and they're not interested in footnotes.''
Domna Stanton, editor of Publications of the Modern Language Association, said that the new style of autobiographical essays, which ''lack almost all scholarly armature,'' was now so prevalent in academe that she was devoting much of the October issue of her periodical to consideration of the phenomenon.
But the anti-footnote crowd, even if rapidly multiplying, is not taking over without a fight. Academic journals are still a stronghold for scholars who use footnotes to demonstrate their accountability and their sources (or flaunt their erudition). Students are still being taught the technique for research papers, and a book by a Princeton historian, Anthony Grafton, published earlier this year in Germany, where the research university developed in the 1860's, argues that the footnote lends moral authority to scholarship and may be dispensed with only at the peril of the profession.
Inspired by an essay by Gertrude Himmelfarb in The New York Times Book Review in 1991, Professor Grafton book ''The Tragic Origins of the German Footnote'' will be published in the United States by Harvard University Press next year. And it seems sure to heat up the present dispute.
The decline of the footnote, say scholars, editors and university-press managers, has been hastened by changes in the book publishing industry.
About six or seven years ago, they say, the cost of subscriptions to academic journals zoomed up, with many costing more than $1,000 a year. As a result the acquisition budgets of libraries throughout the country and around the world were almost completely consumed by journal subscriptions, leaving very little for books by university presses.
At about the same time, the bookstore chains like Barnes & Noble and Borders began offering the public an unusually broad selection of titles on a wide variety of subjects. The inventories university presses could no longer sell to libraries began showing up -- and selling -- commercially.
John Kulka, the senior buyer for Barnes & Noble Superstores, said such books represented ''our biggest increase in sales.''
That development, said John Moore, director of the Columbia University Press, was a ''historic change.''
''There was a beckoning in the retail book market,'' Mr. Moore said. ''And we followed it.''
To compete more effectively in this new market, university press editors began packaging their books more attractively, and that meant catchier titles, snappier covers, more and better illustrations and fewer footnotes and bibliographies.
''A lot of our authors are aiming at the general reader,'' said Jennifer Snodgress, managing director of the Harvard University Press. ''And our marketing department tells us that footnotes scare off people.''
Colin Day, director of the University of Michigan Press, said editors were also taking part in the effort to streamline texts. While reading submissions, Mr. Day said, he and his fellow editors routinely ask themselves: ''How can we take what this scholar says and make it more powerful and of greater interest to more readers?''
That process often leads to snipping away all or most of the scholarly apparatus.
Professor Grafton said that nobody knew who wrote the first footnote, but that the practice took off in the late 17th century when French academicians used it as a weapon to challenge the work of Descartes.Steep price increases for food and vacation lodging helped drive up the Consumer Price Index three-tenths of 1 percent in July, lifting inflation for the last 12 months to 3 percent, Labor Department figures showed today.
The rise, which was somewhat more brisk than generally expected, unnerved the bond market, pushing interest rates higher, just a week before the Federal Reserve's next scheduled policy meeting. Stocks slumped, steadied, then eroded further to finish with a loss of 57.70 points in the Dow Jones industrial average.
At the retail counters last month, price-conscious shoppers increased their spending by a scant one-tenth of 1 percent, well short of what would have been needed to offset a June decline now figured at five-tenths of 1 percent. The June drop was more than twice as deep as the initial estimate.
Neither report, analysts said, fundamentally alters the economic outlook, but it is becoming increasingly clear that economic activity has slowed this summer, although perhaps less than some had come to believe.
And while it is still thought possible that the Federal Reserve could raise short-term interest rates next week, few were counseling or predicting this.
''The market was kind of spooked by the C.P.I.,'' said Kathleen M. Camilli, research director at Tucker Anthony. ''But there's no strong rationale for changing monetary policy.''
Specialists took comfort today in the likelihood that food prices would not keep rising so rapidly and in the near certainty that the inflation in hotel prices, perhaps augmented by difficulties in seasonal adjustment, would soon subside.
''The inflation environment remains very tranquil,'' said Lacy H. Hunt, chief economist at HSBC Markets in New York.
And shoppers have not been enthusiastic of late, even though they spent enough on groceries and other nondurables to generate a rise in that category of four-tenths of 1 percent in July, enough to offset a decline of that amount in purchases of cars and other durable goods.
Nondurables accounted for 59.4 percent of the $204.69 billion that shoppers spent at retail last month.
After allowing for the downward revision for June, the Commerce Department's sales report was ''extremely weak,'' said Susan M. Sterne, president of Economic Analysis Associates in Greenwich, Conn., which specializes in consumer trends. Much of the sales increase, moreover, such as that for groceries, reflected higher prices.
Unit sales -- obtained by applying a price deflator to the department's data: that is, the official figures adjusted for seasonal and holiday variations but not for inflation -- have declined every month so far this year except for February and May, Ms. Sterne said.
A sizable part of the rise of three-tenths of 1 percent in consumer prices, which followed a one-tenth of 1 percent increase in June, resulted from a jump in the cost of shelter, a sector that accounts for 28 percent of the index. This included a 2.3 percent rise in the cost of out-of-town lodging, reflecting increases at beach resorts on the East Coast and in Las Vegas, Nev. It appeared that any effect from the Olympic Games in Atlanta was indirect.
Food prices climbed five-tenths of 1 percent, the second consecutive hefty increase, as dairy products, fresh vegetables and processed fruits and vegetables all rose substantially, while prices for fresh fruit declined.
Transportation prices declined for a second month as gasoline dropped 2.7 percent, airline fares eased 1.3 percent and used cars were lower, albeit slightly, for the fourth consecutive month.
Mr. Hunt said he closely watched the price of used cars because he found this a useful predictor of sales of new cars, which have slumped so far this month.
Medical care, once one of the chief sources of upward pressure on the price index, rose three-tenths of 1 percent for the fifth consecutive month, the report also showed.
The so-called core index -- the 77 percent of the index that excludes the wide-swinging food and energy components -- also rose three-tenths of 1 percent in July. This was the fastest since March, but an analysis from Merrill Lynch noted that the 2.7 percent rise in the core index over the latest 12 months was still the most benign in 30 years.
As for last month's slight rise in retail sales, merchants selling building materials, hardware, garden supplies and mobile homes registered 1.6 percent less revenue, while auto dealers saw receipts fall six-tenths of 1 percent.
Those selling furniture and other household equipment posted a tiny decline that rounded to zero.There are more than 15,000 Avon ladies in Russia, and not one of them rings the doorbell.
Bowing both to security fears and old-time Soviet etiquette, Russian representatives of the world's largest direct-sales cosmetics company do not go door to door. They do not even make house calls to established customers. Instead, they sell lipsticks, wrinkle creams and facial toners in factories, airports, beauty parlors, laboratories and, sometimes, from a park bench.
''Russians are afraid to open their door to strangers,'' explained Mariya Gerasyova, 31, the company's national sales director. ''And even if they know you, they don't want you to see how their apartments look, the lack of repair, the dirt.''
But Russian women have swept aside almost every other cultural inhibition to embrace the latest capitalist profit notion sweeping the Russian economy -- direct-sales marketing. Avon Products Inc. of New York and its main rival, Mary Kay Cosmetics, a unit of the Mary Kay Corporation of Dallas, have invaded the Russian market the last two years and recruited an all-female army to sell tens of millions of dollars worth of beauty products each year.
And Russia -- with its swelling rolls of unemployed or underemployed professionals -- is a recruiter's dream. Thousands of women trained as engineers, physicists and teachers are grabbing an entrepreneurial opportunity that even five years ago was both illegal and socially taboo.
''The professional qualifications of these women are unbelievable,'' declared Susan Kropf, president for new and emerging markets at Avon, on her first visit to Russia last month. ''When the first Russian coordinator I met told me she was a surgeon, I fell out of my chair.'' Mrs. Gerasyova, similarly, is a trained linguist and a reserve lieutenant in the Russian Army.
As a result of their new-found wealth and independence, the lives of many of these newly minted entrepreneurs have undergone a more radical make-over than had taken place during the collapse of the Soviet Union five years ago. ''When I started, my husband was always furious,'' said Svetlana Morosova, 29, an area manager for Avon. She sat at a table in the Avon sales office in Moscow with a dozen other managers and sales coordinators. All of them were elegantly turned out in muted pastel business suits. And all of them nodded knowingly.
''He couldn't stand the fact that I was making more money then him, that I had changed, become more self-assured and independent,'' she said. Her husband, a policeman, earns less than $200 a month.
Two years ago, Mrs. Morosova, who has advanced degrees in mathematics and economics, was sitting at home with her twins, a boy and a girl who are now 4 years old, struggling to find part-time accounting work when a friend introduced her to Avon. She made her first sale to other young mothers at a children's playground.
She is now a manager, a job that pays close to $2,000 a month in a country where the average salary is $120. She drives a company car, a beige Russian-made Zhiguli. Her mother baby-sits for her children, and unlike many Russian marriages that have been torn apart by the wife's sudden financial success, hers has survived. Her husband ''has even learned to cook,'' she said to the laughter of her colleagues.
If many Russian women view the American cosmetics industry as an economic godsend, the industry is embracing Russia -- with a population of about 150 million hungry for Western-style goods -- as a marketing paradise.
For Avon, which is already active throughout Europe, Russia is one of several hot emerging markets, which also include China, South Africa and Latin America.
It started off gingerly in 1993, having been burned in an ill-fated bid to enter the Soviet market in the early 1980's, and at first it sold its products through stores. But last year, Avon began full-scale direct sales. It has already signed up 16,000 sales representatives in Moscow, St. Petersburg and the Siberian town of Perm and expects $30 million in revenue this year, up from $9 million in 1995. John Law, Avon's general manager in Moscow, says its long-term plan is to ''sell a lot of lipstick.'' Ms. Kropf, the marketing executive, calls the country ''Avon heaven.''
For Mary Kay, which has less experience in emerging markets, the former Soviet Union is the focus of its overseas growth. It began its operations here in September 1993 and now has 25,000 representatives in Russia and the other former Soviet republics. The company had sales of $25 million in the region last year and expects to triple that figure in 1996.
The American companies' penetration of Russia is all the more impressive given the country's 70 years of Communist indoctrination against private enterprise, which some people still refer to as ''speculation.'' ''For the older generation, selling is still viewed as shameful,'' Mrs. Gerasyova, Avon's national sales director, said. But another Soviet tradition played against that constraint: when shortages were acute, many women lined up for hours, bought in bulk and privately bartered cosmetics for meat, perfume for diapers. ''We took it easy at first, contacting friends and relatives, the way it was always done,'' Mrs. Gerasyova explained.
Avon, which had overall sales last year of $4.5 billion, and Mary Kay, which had revenue of $950 million in 1995, are following slightly different pricing and marketing approaches in Russia. Avon representatives buy Avon products on credit, then resell them to friends, acquaintances and co-workers at a recommended retail price, pocketing a difference that averages 20 percent. They do not have to pay any cash up front. Prices of Avon cosmetics are lower than many popular European brands found in Russian stores. A lipstick costs $5.16, a moisturizing cleanser, $5.79.
Mary Kay representatives, who call themselves ''skin care consultants,'' have to buy start-up demonstration product kits for $85. Their selling efforts focus on a free makeup and skin-care lesson, and they earn commissions of 20 to 40 percent on prices that range from $12 for a cleanser to $18.75 for a moisturizer.
A single purchase can take a big cut out of an average Russian woman's income, but many customers say they do not care. Natasha Matyonina, 28, a mother of one who earns less than $500 a month as a baby sitter, said she considers the Avon products she buys as necessities. ''I can go without a lot of things, but I can't imagine not having makeup,'' she said.
The entrepreneurs who sell Avon and Mary Kay products enjoy advantages that the owners of larger, more visible businesses lack. For one thing, their tiny, home-based ventures can easily escape the notice of tax collectors (though both companies say they instruct their representatives to register with the tax authorities). Better yet, they are unlikely to be detected by the mobsters and racketeers who demand protection money from cash businesses.
At Avon's sales center in Moscow, training new representatives can seem a little like a pink-tinted Parris Island, the Marine training base in South Carolina. The novices huddle in pained shyness, their shabby clothes, florid makeup and awkward body language clashing with the sleek corporate look of company veterans. Within weeks, though, they emerge radiating the trademark poise of professional Avon ladies. ''They come to us like mice, and we turn them into firebirds,'' Mrs. Gerasyova said brightly.In the latest indication of new strength in the personal computer market, the Dell Computer Corporation reported a 58 percent increase in earnings for its second fiscal quarter late yesterday, far exceeding Wall Street expectations,
Dell, whose earnings report sent its stock price up sharply in after-hours trading, attributed the strong profit to sales growth that exceeded the industry average, and to a steep decline in computer chip prices.
Analysts said that while Dell was taking market share from some of the industry's weakened players, like AST Research and Apple Computer, its growth was also an indicator that the much discussed slump in personal computer sales might be more perceived than real.
For computer makers that can survive in a highly competitive environment, a cycle appears to have begun in which users -- particularly corporate customers -- are replacing their PC's with more powerful models to take advantage of the Intel Corporation's Pentium Pro microprocessor and the Windows NT software of Microsoft.
Dell's surprisingly strong earnings report comes after recent positive results from Gateway 2000, which like Dell takes orders directly from customers and ships the machines without a retail middleman. And even in the retail portion of the PC market, the computer superstore chain CompUSA recently reported strong quarterly results indicating that the trend toward more powerful PC's was being driven by experienced buyers, not novices, said Seymour Merrin, an industry consultant in Mountain View, Calif.
''People are trying to buy performance at a price, not just the lowest price but the best buy on a specific configuration,'' Mr. Merrin said.
Dell reported its results after the close of the market. In the regular Nasdaq trading session, Dell shares had closed at $56.625, down 62.5 cents. But traders said the stock climbed $2.375 after hours.
For the quarter that ended on July 28, Dell had earnings of $103 million, or $1.05 a share, compared with $65 million, or 66 cents a share, in the comparable period a year ago. The consensus among Wall Street analysts, as compiled by First Call, had been for earnings of 86 cents a share.
Sales grew 40 percent, to $1.69 billion, from $1.21 billion in the second quarter of the 1996 fiscal year. Second-quarter 1997 earnings reflected a 10-cent charge in connection with the retirement of a portion of the company's senior debt.
Michael Dell, the chief executive, said in a telephone interview from corporate headquarters in Austin, Tex., that Dell's direct sales allowed the company to operate with much smaller inventories than PC makers that sell through retailers. Smaller inventories meant that Dell could much more rapidly take advantage of the nearly 50 percent drop in memory-chip prices in the first half of the year.
''Even though we've stayed very competitive, we saw huge reductions in our cost of materials,'' Mr. Dell said. ''Combined with that, we continued to grow very rapidly, particularly in servers, with 115 percent growth year over year, and 57 percent sequentially. We're not seeing this weakness in the market that's been talked about.''
Mr. Dell said the company had 35 percent sales growth in Europe over all, led by 60 percent growth in France and Germany, despite weak economies in those countries.
''In economic recession, the direct model is even stronger because companies are under pressure to cut costs but still need to buy PC's to boost productivity,'' he continued. ''The whole Dell mission is to replace the reseller and slowly but surely we are doing that.''
While the company's profit margin received an extraordinary boost from lower-priced chips, the sales growth reflected a healthy market, said Andrew Neff, an analyst with Bear, Stearns. ''I think unit demand is much stronger than people realize,'' Mr. Neff said.
Despite recent theories that computer sales would slow because more and more individual and corporate customers already had PC's -- the so-called installed base of customers -- Mr. Neff sees a seller's opportunity.
''The larger the installed base,'' he said, ''the larger the base that has to be replaced every year.''
COMPANY REPORTSFederal and state officials and a local abortion provider have agreed to rely on private money to pay for some abortions until their battle over Medicaid financing of abortions in Arkansas is resolved.
State officials said today that the dispute threatened almost a billion dollars in Federal health assistance to the elderly and poor.
Relying on a state constitutional provision banning public financing of abortions except when a woman's life is in danger, Gov. Mike Huckabee last week refused to authorize a $430 Medicaid claim for an abortion for a 15-year-old girl whose stepfather has been charged with incest. Federal law requires that Medicaid pay for abortions for poor women in cases of rape and incest, as well as when a woman's life is in danger.
The Governor, a Republican, said yesterday that private donations would finance abortions requested by Medicaid-eligible victims of rape or incest until 1998, when Arkansas voters would decide whether to amend the state constitution to bring it into harmony with Federal law.
Mr. Huckabee said the agreement averted ''one of the single worst catastrophes in the history of Arkansas.'' The Governor has said that if the state had paid for the abortion with Medicaid money, it risked losing a lawsuit in which an abortion opponent has argued that the state must withdraw from Medicaid to avoid violating the state constitution. About 75 percent, or $900 million, of Arkansas's $1.3 billion Medicaid budget for health care for the poor is Federally financed.
Bettina Brownstein, the lawyer for the provider in Little Rock that performed the abortion on the girl, said it would be ''premature to say the crisis is over'' until poor women are able to obtain abortions. But Ms. Brownstein agreed to hold off on a lawsuit seeking to have the state provide Medicaid money for abortions in cases of rape or incest.
Melissa Skolfield, a spokeswoman for the United States Department of Health and Human Services, the agency that oversees Medicaid, said: ''We've accepted Governor Huckabee's assurances that he will provide services as required by Medicaid. Should there be a complaint that he isn't, we'd obviously have to investigate.''
Arkansas voters amended the State Constitution in 1988 to bar public financing for abortions except when a woman's life was endangered. This made Arkanasas law consistent with the Federal Hyde Amendment, which imposed identical restrictions on the use of Federal money.
But in 1993 the Hyde Amendment was modified to permit Medicaid financing of abortions for poor women who were victims of rape or incest. In 1994, a Federal judge in Little Rock declared the state amendment unconstitutional. The United States Supreme Court later found that Arkansas had to follow Federal law if it wished to stay in the Medicaid program.
The conflict between Federal law and the Arkansas Constitution is at the core of the dispute over whether Arkansas would provide Medicaid money for the 15-year-old girl's abortion. The procedure was performed on the girl, whom state officials describe as ''developmentally disabled,'' on Aug. 1 at the Little Rock Family Planning Clinic, which then billed the Arkansas Medicaid program.
Mr. Huckabee, who is a Southern Baptist minister and a vocal opponent of abortion, ordered the Arkansas Human Services Department not to pay the claim. Mr. Huckabee said he feared that reimbursing the clinic would eliminate Arkansas's defense in the lawsuit filed in state court in July 1994 by an abortion opponent.
That suit demands that Arkansas withdraw from Medicaid, an optional Federal-state cooperative program, because its constitution is at odds with the Hyde Amendment. As part of their defense, Arkansas officials have argued that abortions for rape and incest victims have never been financed with Medicaid dollars.
Mr. Huckabee and lawyers for the State say the threat of having to withdraw from Medicaid posed by the state court lawsuit is real. They maintain that the United States Constitution's supremacy clause, which asserts the superiority of Federal law over state constitutions and statutes, does not apply to Federal programs like Medicaid, in which states voluntarily participate.
''This isn't the 1957 school crisis,'' Mr. Huckabee said in an interview, referring to the constitutional confrontation that arose when Gov. Orval Faubus of Arkansas defied a Federal court order and used National Guardsmen to prevent desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock.
''This is the 1973 55-mile-per-hour speed limit,'' Mr. Huckabee said, explaining: ''We were perfectly free not to lower our speed limit as Congress directed. But we were also free to lose every last dollar of Federal highway aid as a result.''
Ms. Brownstein said the supremacy clause does require Arkansas to yield to the Federal law.Stocks suffered sympathy pains yesterday after the bond market was bruised by unexpectedly strong retail sales and higher consumer prices. A broad decline resulted, leaving the major stock market barometers down about 1 percent for the day.
The Dow Jones industrial index declined more than 50 points after 2 P.M., setting off the month's first mandatory limit on computer-driven trading on the New York Stock Exchange. The Dow closed the day at 5,647.28, down 57.70 points, its largest decline since July 15.
The broader Standard & Poor's 500-stock index fared a bit better, tumbling 5.57 points to close at 660.20 for the day. The Nasdaq composite index also fell sharply but steadied a bit before the closing bell to end the day at 1,126.15, down 12.12 points. Declining issues led advancing ones, 1,506 to 852 on the Big Board, where daily trading volume was relatively light at 362.5 million shares, compared with a daily average this year of 410 million shares.
Behind the slide were two Government reports: that retail sales in July rose one-tenth of 1 percent after dropping a sharp half-percent in June -- a revision of an earlier estimated drop of two-tenths of 1 percent -- and that the Consumer Price Index rose an unexpectedly high three-tenths of 1 percent in July.
Of course, the inflation-sensitive bond market saw even worse damage, with the benchmark 30-year Treasury bond falling 1 8/32, to a price of 99 19/32, or $12.50 for each $1,000, which pushed its yield up to 6.78 percent, from 6.69 percent on Monday, the largest one-day gain in yield since July 5. Most market economists had expected slightly weaker retail sales and smaller consumer price gains, and the afternoon surprise gave bond traders a rocky day.
But there are no indications that those fears of inflation are justified, several economists said.
''The bond market has almost become a casino where instead of guessing on black or red, they guess on the weekly and monthly economic statistics,'' said Lawrence Chimerine, managing director and chief economist of the Economic Strategy Institute in Washington. ''But what impresses me most about inflation -- what I hear over and over from all the companies I talk to -- is that they still have little or no pricing flexibility. That's the clearest sign that there is little inflation pressure in the economy.''
Steven Einhorn, portfolio strategist for Goldman, Sachs & Company, agreed. ''The markets are jittery on a short-term basis, but that is not something that will be long-lasting,'' he said. ''This economy can deliver corporate profit growth of about 10 percent, and that is simply not consistent with poor equity markets.''
Indeed, corporate earnings played only a small role in yesterday's market swoon, apart from the semiconductor sector, which was slightly beaten down after Maxim Integrated, a maker of circuits for electronic devices, reported fourth-quarter earnings of 49 cents a share, less than the 50 cents analysts had expected. Its shares fell $2.50, to $29.875.
Otherwise, individual stocks and industries were burdened by their own private demons, ranging from worrisome litigation to resigning auditors to unenthusiastic analysts.
On the Big Board, Philip Morris led tobacco stocks lower as investors continued to worry about an adverse jury verdict on Friday in a Florida product-liability suit against Brown & Williamson.
Philip Morris, which closed at 105 1/2 a share on Thursday, closed yesterday at 90, down 3 5/8. RJR Nabisco Holdings, the Loews Corporation, which owns Lorillard, and UST Inc. all declined as well.
On Nasdaq, the Chantal Pharmaceutical Corporation saw its shares fall 13/16 to 2 11/16, after its independent accounting firm, Coopers & Lybrand, resigned. The departure will further delay the company's long-overdue financial statements, prolonging the pain for investors whose shares traded for more than 27 at the beginning of the year.
Casino companies were hit by strong selling pressure after two analysts issued cautionary reports.
Neil Barsky at Morgan Stanley & Company said that the industry's problem was companies building too much, too fast and in too many locations. The building boom ''will slow bottom-line growth for the foreseeable future,'' he wrote.
But Harold Vogel at Cowen & Company fretted that three casinos were not building fast enough. He cited construction delays at Circus Circus Enterprises, Harrah's Entertainment and Mirage Resorts in issuing ''neutral'' ratings on all casino stocks except the ITT Corporation, which he recommended.
Circus Circus shares fell 1 3/4, to 30 1/8; Harrah's slipped 7/8, to 21 1/4, and Mirage declined 1, to 22.
All told, yesterday's session looked like business as usual to Kent A. Logan, senior managing director of Montgomery Securities Inc. in San Francisco.
''The day-to-day volatility is unprecedented and has been for some time,'' he said. ''Lacking conviction, lacking a sense of direction, the market tends to overreact to individual pieces of news.''
Correction: August 15, 1996, ThursdayIf times are hard in municipal finance for the biggest and best-known firms on Wall Street, they are particularly tough for the nation's minority-owned municipal bond houses. Aided by Government set-aside programs, these minority firms prospered in the early 1990's in one of the few areas on Wall Street that was relatively open to blacks.
Yet as the municipal bond business has shrunk over all and affirmative action comes under attack, minority firms, which tend to be newer and undercapitalized, are finding that profits are scarce, deals are drying up and many are barely holding on.
''There are just too many players,'' said Tony Chapelle, publisher of Securities Pro, a New York newsletter. ''There is just no need for the dozens of black firms that are already in existence. The municipal business has undergone changes, and there's the need for a lot of these firms to consolidate or find new lines of business.''
It is not that minority firms are being singled out for cutbacks -- they still participate in about 20 percent of all new municipal bond issues, about the same as earlier in the 1990's. But, some of the biggest names are struggling.
WR Lazard, Laidlaw & Luther, hurt by the accidental drug overdose death of its founder in 1994, is suffering from a negative net worth and has recently laid off staff and slashed expenses. Its own auditor questions whether the firm can continue as a going concern.
Pryor, McClendon, Counts & Company, based in Philadelphia, lost $3.2 million in the last two years and slipped from 27th in underwritings among all municipal bond firms in 1993 to 64th today. Its net capital dwindled to $675,881 at the end of 1995 from $3.3 million at the end of 1993.
And MR Beal & Company, a New York firm, has seen its net capital shrink to $1.7 million last year from $4.7 million in 1993. Worse, the firm must pay off a $1 million note by next March, which could further eat into its capital.
It was not that long ago that many of these firms were in their heyday. In 1993, a rosy time for municipal finance in general, all kinds of Wall Street firms packed their offices with bankers as the volume of municipal bond underwriting hit all-time highs. But with volume now about half of those frothy days, even such established names as Lazard Freres & Company, CS First Boston and Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette Inc. have left the business.
Government agencies and municipalities across the nation made extra efforts in the early 1990's to set aside parts of lucrative municipal bond underwritings for minority firms. As a result, by 1993, dozens of minority firms had jumped in. They co-managed $103 billion of municipal securites and were in 1,188 deals, according to the Securities Data Company. But now there is a lot less business to go around. The volume dropped to $53.4 billion, or 825 deals, in 1995. This year, minority firms have participated in deals worth $34.3 billion.
Many minorities in municipal finance say that while things may be bad, they are not ready to call it quits. Bernard Beal, head of MR Beal, said his firm had suffered in recent years because it was excluded by Alan Hevesi, the New York City Comptroller, from all New York City deals -- a situation that has recently changed. The exclusion came about because Mr. Beal's firm was being investigated by the United States Attorney in Wisconsin as part of a Federal investigation into political links between minority bond firms and local officials. Once cleared, the firm was reinstated.
''My troubles begin and end with Alan Hevesi,'' Mr. Beal said. A spokeswoman for Mr. Hevesi, Leah G. Johnson, said that because of the Wisconsin investigation and ''other performance issues,'' Mr. Beal's firm had been dropped. But, Ms. Johnson added, once the inquiry into Mr. Beal's firm ended ''we wrote immediately and said 'please feel free to apply' in upcoming bond deals, which he did.'' He is in a current New York deal.
Mr. Beal was also recently named to join some of Wall Street's biggest investment banks in underwriting a $1.8 billion stock sale to privatize a Federal uranium ore processing operation. To add some diversity to the underwriting team, Mr. Beal's firm was placed on the deal along with such giants as Merrill Lynch & Compay and Morgan Stanley & Company ''Hopefully, we will be moving forward,'' Mr. Beal said.
And Malcolmn Pryor said of his firm, Pryor, McClendon, Counts: ''Life is not a bed of roses, but we will survive. We got into this business not because of affirmative action, but because we loved it.'' In his case, Mr. Pryor said that his firm would emphasize its money management business, which has suffered some rocky patches, to offset the downturn.
Ironically, as some municipal firms struggle, minority firms are making some significant inroads on the corporate side. Just yesterday, for instance, Blaylock & Partners, a New York-based minority firm, announced that it was being named lead underwriter for a $200 million Tennessee Valley Authority bond issue, the first time a minority firm has been named lead manager of a corporate issue.
Ronald E. Blaylock said that the corporate world might provide some corners of opportunity for municipal bankers. ''A lot of these firms have very talented people and they might begin to shift their skill set,'' Mr. Blaylock said. ''I don't exactly know what they are. But, if you can add value, people will listen.''
But a lot of minority firms have been unable to make the leap from Government set-aside programs to mainstream business, said Edward H. Seidle, president of Anvil Institutional Services, a minority brokerage firm, and a former Securities and Exchange Commission lawyer.
''I am astounded,'' Mr. Seidle said, ''that these firms were given an opportunity through set-aside programs to have a tremendous leg up. Yet they failed to develop any staying power or build any institutions that could survive an environment without any of these set-asides.''
Napolean Brandford 3d, vice chairman of Grigsby Brandford & Company, however, said that the problem faced by minority firms was not a decline in set-aside programs, but a decline in business.
''The conditions affecting the so-called minority firms are no different than those facing the majority firms,'' Mr. Brandford said. ''We've got a volatile market, tight spreads and a competition for client business that doesn't allow for loyalty.''
That's why Mr. Brandford, whose firm is now in 27th position among all municipal bond firms, compared with 29th in 1993, is hedging its bets by continuing its expansion into other product areas. It acquired a Houston brokerage firm that specializes in taxable fixed-income securities, carved out a niche in the financing of sports stadiums, and moved more into the trading and selling of Government agency securities as well as municipal bond reinvestment.An 18-year-old swimmer was granted a partial waiver of the National Collegiate Athletic Association's academic standards yesterday in a landmark case for student athletes with learning disabilities.
However, the parents of the swimmer Chad Ganden were not satisfied with the decision.
The ruling, the first waiver granted to an athlete with learning disabilities, will allow Ganden, who lives in Lisle, Ill., and was heavily recruited by college swimming coaches around the country, to receive an athletic scholarship from Michigan State University, the school where he signed a national letter of intent in the spring.
But what is upsetting to Ganden's parents is that while he will be required to practice, he will not be allowed to compete for the team.
''The whole program is absurd,'' said Warren Ganden, Chad's father. ''He is allowed to practice for five hours a day but is not allowed to compete. It doesn't make any sense. Practicing for five hours a day will not interfere with his studies but competing eight times a year will? They don't know sports and they don't know disabilities.''
Ganden was ruled ineligible by the N.C.A.A. this spring because he had taken special courses for learning disabled students throughout high school.
In determining whether to waive the freshman eligibility requirements, the N.C.A.A. considers a student's entire high school academic record, including standardized test scores.
Ganden's parents said that he met the grade-point average and standardized test requirements but that the calculations the N.C.A.A. made in determining the number of core courses required to make him eligible were incorrect.
Ganden had met the required number of core courses. But in his junior year, 3.5 core credits that he took in his freshman and sophomore years were deemed unacceptable by the N.C.A.A., leaving him below the required 13.
''The N.C.A.A. has made this process so difficult that it is impossible for even the most intelligent individuals to decipher,'' said Susan Ganden, his mother. ''It is not the high school's or the parent's responsibility to catch this type of situation.''
Warren Ganden was upset with the way the N.C.A.A. handled the entire issue.
''Chad had no voice in the decision,'' he said. ''They did not talk to him, his parents, his teachers or his attorneys. They gave him no right to due process.''
N.C.A.A. officials did not return phone calls seeking comment.
COLLEGESThe president of a Japanese electronics company has been kidnapped in Tijuana, and Mexican officials said today that the company had decided to negotiate with the abductors rather than call in the police. Executives of the company said it was preparing to pay a ransom.
The abduction of the 57-year-old executive, Mamoru Konno, president of the San Diego-based Sanyo Video Components, by armed men in Tijuana on Saturday evening set off alarms throughout the foreign business sector here. It has watched with growing apprehension as kidnappings have surged across Mexico in recent months.
Although 1,500 kidnappings were reported in the country last year, most were of Mexican executives and ranchers, and abductions of foreign executives have been ''a rare thing,'' said Christopher T. Marquet, managing director of Kroll Associates, the New York security firm. ''But we're getting many calls now from expatriate businessmen in Mexico because kidnapping is such a growing problem.''
Mr. Konno was accosted by two gunmen as he walked to his car in the parking lot of a baseball field in Tijuana after a game played by a Sanyo company team.
''Eyewitnesses, who are company employees, said that two men forced Mr. Konno into a vehicle with California license plates and drove away,'' said a statement issued by Sanyo.
Witnesses told Sanyo executives that the abductors hit Mr. Konno during the kidnapping, in an area of mesquite and vegetable fields on the outskirts of the border city.
''A Sanyo employee has since received two phone calls from Mr. Konno, who on behalf of the kidnappers requested $2 million in ransom to insure his safety and his release,'' the Sanyo statement said.
At a news conference today at Sanyo Electric's headquarters in Osaka, executives said that the company was preparing to pay the ransom the kidnappers have demanded.
''Paying money in these kinds of cases in Mexico appears to be a major factor in resolving the cases,'' said Takaharu Yamada, a spokesman for the company. Mr. Yamada refused to confirm that the ransom had been set at $2 million.
Sanyo Video Components, which has its corporate headquarters in San Diego, operates a television parts factory in Tijuana, and executives routinely shuttle between the Mexican plant and the offices north of the border. Mr. Konno had lived with his wife for about 18 months in Chula Vista, Calif., located between San Diego and the border.
''All the employees to this point have felt very safe,'' Alan Foster, vice president of Sanyo North America, said. ''We are now going to rethink that.''
There were conflicting reports about how Mexican authorities were reacting.
Bernardo Cisneros Medina, a spokesman for the State Judicial Police of Baja California, the force with jurisdiction over the case, said in a phone interview from Tijuana that neither Sanyo nor Mr. Konno's relatives have reported the abduction to the police. As a result, Mr. Cisneros said, Mexican police have not begun any investigation of the crime, at least officially.
But a senior Mexican official, speaking in Mexico City, said Mr. Cisneros's comments should be understood in the context of requests, lodged by diplomats at the Japanese Embassy in Mexico City with the Mexican Government, to handle the case with extreme discretion to protect the executive's life.
The Mexican television news program 24 Hours reported today that a State Judicial Police anti-kidnapping squad had arrived in Tijuana to take charge of the case.
One of Mexico's most high-profile kidnappings came in 1994, when relatives of Alfredo Harp Helu, chairman of one of the country's largest banking groups, paid an estimated $30 million ransom for his release. Various groups that monitor kidnapping trends in Mexico have reported a worsening crisis in the years since, partly because the near-collapse of the economy 20 months ago has left millions unemployed, including many former police officers.
Mexico's 1,500 abductions last year far surpassed the 1,000 reported in Brazil, a country nearly twice as large, and which has experienced its own kidnapping epidemic. In Latin America only Colombia reported more kidnappings last year than Mexico: more than 3,000.
The abductions in Mexico have appeared to be most common in the capital and in two states immediately to the south, Morelos and Guerrero, where wealthy families from the capital frequently vacation. Graco Ramirez, a federal congressman and director of a group that monitors violent crime, reported that over the last two years Morelos has suffered 184 kidnappings, nearly two per week.In another step to build a small broadcasting empire in the South and the Midwest, two executives of an Alabama television station and a Boston lawyer agreed yesterday to buy seven stations.
The three men, operating as a closely held corporation, Raycom Media Inc., said they would pay $485 million for seven stations owned by Aflac Inc., the parent of the American Family Life Assurance Company of Columbus, Ga.
The formation of Raycom came after the liberalization earlier this year of Federal broadcast regulations, which has led to the birth of several new companies and a wave of consolidations in the industry. Under the new rules, a company may own an unlimited number of broadcast stations with a reach equal to up to 35 percent of American households. Previously, owners had been limited to 12 stations with a reach of up to 25 percent of households.
Working with financing from an Alabama state pension fund, Raycom this spring agreed to pay more than $700 million for 15 television stations and 2 radio stations in the Southeast and the Midwest from Ellis Communications Inc. in Atlanta, said John E. Fiorini 3d, a Washington lawyer for Raycom. And early in the summer, the company agreed to buy eight stations in those regions from Federal Enterprises Inc. in suburban Detroit for more than $160 million, Mr. Fiorini said. Over all, Raycom has committed $1.35 billion to creating the new broadcast group.
The stations bought from Aflac, which specializes in supplemental health insurance, are: KFVS in Cape Girardeau, Mo.; WAFF in Huntsville, Ala.; KWWL in Waterloo, Iowa; WAFB in Baton Rouge, La.; WTOC in Savannah, Ga.; WITN in Washington, N.C., and WTVM in Columbus, Ga. Three of the stations are CBS affiliates, three are NBC affiliates and one is an ABC affiliate.
Kathleen V. Spencer, the director of corporate communications for Aflac, said the company had received a surprise offer for the stations 10 days ago. The stations are profitable, she said, and the company had not been seeking to sell them. But she said, ''They were not our primary focus, and I guess that favorable terms were being offered.''
Jeffrey Hopson, an insurance industry analyst at A. G. Edwards in St. Louis, said it appeared that the stations had sold at the high end of the market range. He estimated that the selling price was 15 times the annual operating cash flow of the television group. Typically, he said, broadcast companies sell for 10 to 15 times their operating cash flow.
''The price was right,'' he said.
Ms. Spencer said at least some of the proceeds from the sale would be used to repurchase Aflac stock.
Mr. Hopson estimated that the company's earnings would rise by 5 cents to 10 cents a share in 1997 as a result of the deal, to as high as $2.85 a share. The company's earnings per share were $2.33 in 1995 and were expected to rise to $2.40 this year.
The shares of Aflac rose 12.5 cents yesterday, to $34.125.
Mr. Fiorini said the three owners of Raycom were Ken Hawkins and William Zortman, the general manager and news director, respectively, of a Selma, Ala., television station, and Stephen Burr, a Boston lawyer specializing in mergers and acquisitions.IN the wake of last month's T.W.A. crash, Kroll Associates, a security consulting company based in New York, has begun publishing a monthly bulletin that reviews air travel safety issues worldwide.
The bulletin covers security-related incidents at specific airports and airlines as well as government warnings and alerts relating to air travel. The first issue discusses the Trans World Airlines crash, President Clinton's subsequent mandate for increased air travel safety and security measures, the hijacking of an Iberian flight; a bomb scare on a British Caledonian Airways flight, and a report on security measures at the Athens airport.
Sent by mail, fax or E-mail, the bulletin is $195 annually.
Getting the V.A.T. Back
Corporate VAT Management, a Seattle-based company that provides a value-added tax refund service to corporations whose employees travel in Europe, has developed software that enables corporations to process refunds themselves.
The Windows-based software generates completed application forms and all supporting documentation required by the countries issuing refunds. It also produces a management report that monitors the status of refund claims. Corporate VAT Management charges a $1,000 annual maintenance fee for the software; if it is purchased by December, it will waive an additional one-time installation fee of $250.
Corporate VAT Management estimates that United States companies pay more than $1.5 billion in European V.A.T. annually -- on hotel rooms, rental cars and other services -- but that they actually reclaim only a small percentage of these funds. For example, Corporte VAT Management said only $125 million was refuned last year.
In a related development, Germany, whose 15 percent V.A.T. rate is one of the highest in Europe, is considering ending V.A.T. refunds for United States business travelers. Its reclaim rules changed when the German Government revised its tax laws last year; the German Ministry of Finance has yet to make a formal decision on whether the changes will affect claims for refunds from American executives.
Another Hotel for Gotham
The Gotham Hospitality Group, which operates five reasonably priced boutique hotels in midtown and on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, has purchased its sixth property, behind Grand Central Station, at 141 East 44th Street.
In a building originally designed by Emery Roth, the Hotel Grand Central, as it will be known, will contain 162 rooms decorated with railroad-related art from the 1930's, including murals by the W.P.A. artist Winold Reiss that were commissioned in 1931 by the Cincinnati Union Terminal. The architect Rafael Vinoly, who is currently renovating Gotham's Roger Williams Hotel at 28 East 31st Street, at Madison Avenue, will also renovate the Hotel Grand Central.
Construction on the Hotel Grand Central will begin early next year; Gotham will offer a single or double rate of $79 a night until it is completed, when the rate will range from $140 to $160. Accommodations at all Gotham hotels include a full breakfast, dessert in the evening, film and compact-disk loans, classical music concerts and, in some cases, parking.
On the Web
Business Wire, which distributes press releases on Fortune 1000 and Nasdaq companies, has set up a personalized World Wide Web service on its Internet site (http://www.businesswire.com) that lets business travelers gain daily access to news on 31 different industries.
For a $14.95 monthly fee, individuals can retrieve industry-specific press releases and news articles divided into categories such as earnings, dividends, mergers and acquisitions, and management changes. Subscribers receive a personalized URL, or Web site address, where Business Wire sends them what is essentially a personalized newspaper; it is updated three times daily and archived for 30 days. Industries tracked include aerospace, apparel, automotive, banking, chemicals, computers, education, energy, real estate and telecommunications.
Business TravelThe growth in the number of Internet users appears to be coming from newcomers who are older, have less money, are less educated and spend less time on line than longtime users of the computer network, according to the most recent attempt to discern the size and habits of the Internet-user population in North America.
The new findings were disclosed yesterday by Nielsen Media Research and Commercenet, an Internet industry consortium, as part of a scheduled six-month follow-up on a demographic study commissioned by Commercenet last year.
Although the Nielsen report yesterday did not include many details or any hard numbers -- rather, Internet accessibility and use were reported in percentages -- Commercenet called the results encouraging.
For example, Nielsen concluded that 22 percent to 24 percent of all people ages 16 and older in the United States and Canada ''had access'' to the Internet as of March, compared with 17 percent in August 1995.
''This study has provided validation of the hyper-growth of the Internet,'' Asim Abdullah, executive director of Commercenet, said. ''Clearly, a huge market exists for electronic commerce.''
But the follow-up study also found that 20 percent of the people who said they had access to the Internet in the first survey said they no longer had access six months later. Of those who did visit the Internet, most did so through commercial on-line services like America Online, the study found. America Online promises to connect users with a minimum of technical difficulty, which attracts inexperienced computer users.
''It makes sense, because the usage of people who go on line through a commercial service tends to be more personal and more periodic,'' said Thomas E. Miller, vice president of the emerging technologies research group of Find/SVP, a market research firm in New York. ''AOL has succeeded in penetrating a downscale audience.''
''Longtime users, in contrast, appear to use the Internet more frequently and more steadily, and that represents a plus for anyone who is pinning their hopes and dreams on electronic commerce,'' he said.
N. MacDonnell Ulsch, senior vice president of O'Reilly Online Research of Cambridge, Mass., agreed that the broadening of the Internet population was encouraging.
''It shows the beginning of the democratization of the Internet,'' Mr. Ulsch said. ''It is a tool that provides greater access to a greater range of services to a greater range of users.''
The original random phone survey by Nielsen, conducted in August 1995, was widely seen as the most ambitious attempt to date to count the number of people using the Internet. The survey was commissioned by Commercenet, a Silicon Valley group whose member companies have an interest in the growth of electronic commerce.
The survey reached 4,200 households in the United States and Canada. Through the use of data weighting, a complex procedure whose goal is to reliably project the findings of the small sample audience onto the general population, Nielsen calculated that 37 million Americans and Canadians, ages 16 and older, had ''access to the Internet'' and that 24 million of them had used the Internet in the last three months.
The findings were immediately challenged by critics, including several of the academic researchers enlisted by Nielsen and Commercenet to help design the survey. Earlier this year Nielsen issued revised figures that it said reflected refinement of its analysis.
Donna L. Hoffman and Thomas P. Novak, professors at Vanderbilt's graduate school of management, contended that Nielsen appeared to have overestimated total Internet use, exaggerated the household income and educational levels of Internet users, and otherwise ''seriously inflated'' the findings.
For its follow-up report, Nielsen got in touch with 2,800 of the original 4,200 households again, six months after the initial survey.
Professor Hoffman said yesterday that without knowing the responses of the 1,400 households that were unaccounted for, it was impossible to draw any solid conclusions from the Nielsen report. But, she said, it appeared that Nielsen had taken the earlier criticism into account in preparing the follow-up data.
Nielsen itself seemed to acknowledge the earlier dispute. ''The Internet is a very difficult medium to measure,'' yesterday's report said.
Nielsen Media Research is a division of the Dun & Bradstreet Corporation. An executive summary of the report is available from Commercenet's site on the World Wide Web at the address: www.commerce.net.There is only one open road left into this city. It is a long series of bomb craters, really, mixed with dirt, mud and occasionally some asphalt. The road starts in the deep woods just southwest of town and runs straight toward the ravaged center.
The road has no name, but it does not need one, because everybody knows what it is there for. It is the last, harrowing route to safety each day for thousands of anguished refugees who have been driven from their homes here in the capital of Chechnya by war and death, and it is the best entry route for the secessionist rebels who now reign over most of the city.
Winding through twisted trees, past ruined houses and down the middle of one of Russia's largest -- but long unused -- oil refineries, the path has become a surreal Chechen version of the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
The right side is filled with pathetic, broken cars edging through the mud, piled high with boxes and always waving white flags ripped from sheets.
The left lane is for the separatists, often walking in groups of less than 10 or driving in flatbed trucks like those used by many refugees to flee the burning city.
Today, a walk from the nearest village, Alkhan-Yurt, into Grozny was a treacherous journey, with helicopter gunships hovering in the distance, Russian planes screeching across the steel-gray skies and a column of tanks to the west firing rounds at random. But the rebels moved along it, seemingly unfazed.
''They can't touch us here,'' said Imran Agimelzoya, 16, carrying a gun almost as large as he was and wearing a Chicago Bulls cap, as he made his way along the muddy path toward Chernorechye, the southwest part of Grozny. ''The Russians have tanks at every other entrance to the city, but they really can't stop us here.''
It is now clear that the Russians are losing badly in their second battle for Grozny in the last two years. What began as a rebel hit-and-run intended to humiliate President Boris N. Yeltsin for his failed promises of peace has turned into something like a conquest.
Chechen commanders here say they originally planned to teach Mr. Yeltsin a lesson by showing the vulnerability of a city that has been a Russian redoubt since early last year, and then withdraw after they made their point.
But now, they say, having captured Grozny and other Chechen cities so easily in the last week, they have no intention of pulling out, and plan to hold on until the Russians withdraw from the republic.
''This is our city,'' said Akhmed Zakayev, the national security adviser to the separatist government and one of its top commanders. ''Why should we leave it again?''
Although the two sides announced a cease-fire to begin on Wednesday -- the latest in a series of such announcements, none honored for long -- today the fighting continued in the center. Jets and helicopters unleashed their assault on the Chechen separatists who stormed the city a week ago and have taken effective control of it. Yet there are no Russian soldiers wandering the streets of the city; only the Chechen fighters dare to do that.
Under the overall command of Shamil Basayev, who led the infamous raid last year on the southern Russian city of Budyonnovsk, the separatists have split Grozny into five parts. And they appear to be running all five.
Mr. Zakayev agreed to speak to a reporter today in his temporary headquarters, a graceful former old-age home in the leafy Chernorechye section. For two days, Russian bombers have attacked the neighborhood, in part because they know Mr. Zakayev is there.
In the West, Mr. Zakayev, a former Chechen Culture Minister, is not well known. But for more than a year he led the fighting for the mountain village of Bamut, generally considered to be among the fiercest battles of the war.
Now he has 1,000 hungry and forelorn Russian troops surrounded in their barracks only 500 yards from his office. Mr. Zakayev said his orders from Aslan Maskhadov, the Chechen military chief of staff, were to keep the Russians pinned down but not to attack.
''When they come out and surrender, we will put them to use,'' Mr. Zakayev said. ''Until then we will keep them surrounded.'' One of his lieutenants, looking slightly uncomfortable, added, ''They are starving to death like flies.''
Mr. Zakayev's headquarters resembles a school for wayward boys. Scores of heavily armed teen-agers are constantly running in and out of the base. They play with grenades and rocket launchers as if they were baseballs and lacrosse sticks. But they always do exactly what they are told.
Mr. Zakayev said he had great ''military'' respect for Aleksandr I. Lebed, the Russian national security adviser who returned from a quick trip to the region on Monday full of praise for the rebels' tenacity and scorn for the way the Russian Government was waging the war.
''That is nice,'' Mr. Zakayev said. ''But we lost hope long ago in the Russian side. They have never fulfilled a single treaty or promise. So I was happy to hear that Lebed says we are brave and that his soldiers are badly treated. I am not sure, though, he can do anything to solve our problem.''A pickup truck hit a polo pony here last week.
The truck won that skirmish between the Old West and the faux West. But in the wider cultural collision here, the Old West is beating a retreat over Teton Pass to Idaho, or down the Salt River to a quiet town called Freedom.
Plank boardwalks and elk antler arches still define Jackson's main square. But the worn saddle stools at the Million Dollar Cowboy Bar seat tourists, not cowboys. Dotted around the square are a Gap, a Benetton and a Ralph Lauren Polo Shop.
''As far as the transition from a cow town to a tourist town -- it's basically done,'' said Scott Garland, a local lawyer who recently stepped down as head of a citizens' group, the Jackson Hole Alliance for Responsible Planning.
This week national attention focuses on Jackson as President Clinton and his family spend a weeklong vacation here. But for local residents, the real concern is the one million other tourists expected to flow this year through this town of 6,500 year-round residents.
Nestled at the foot of ''the American Alps,'' Jackson provides dramatic vistas of the Tetons' craggy granite peaks and is a gateway to Yellowstone, one of the nation's most cherished national parks. Traffic jams extend beyond Teton County's narrow secondary roads. On one particularly busy day last summer, nearly 4,000 tourists floated on rubber rafts through Jackson's section of the Snake River.
While Jackson's 19 gift shops, 21 clothing stores and 33 art galleries relentlessly peddle variations on the cowboy theme, the closest that most visitors come to a cowboy is the buckaroo on the Wyoming license plate of their rental car.
In the last six months, a quirky wax museum has been replaced by an Eddie Bauer store. And a community crossroads, Fred's Market, has been replaced by the imposing log and timber headquarters of a real estate company that recently brokered a $7.5 million house
''We woke up one day and found that we had more backhoes than tractors,'' Virginia Huidekoper, a longtime rancher, grumbled from her veranda, which affords sweeping views of the Gros Ventre Range.
Tourism brought $1 billion last year into Wyoming, part of a broader shift in the Rocky Mountain West away from the traditional industries of ranching, logging and mining.
In Jackson, mass tourism and second-home construction have prompted a rebellion by many residents over the last two years.
As cars sported bumper stickers reading ''Bring Back the Off-Season,'' voters abolished a motel bed tax that underwrote national advertising campaigns promoting Jackson. Then, Teton County radically reduced densities on new home construction, from one house per 3 acres to one house per 35 acres. Taking aim at trophy homes -- log and fieldstone cathedrals with elk antler chandeliers -- the county limited the size of new single-family homes to 8,500 square feet.
But with 97 percent of the county owned by the Federal Government, a leading real estate broker sees only escalating prices for Jackson's last ''exotic pieces.''
''We're starting to see the first scrapers in Jackson, people buying property for the land and knocking down the house,'' said Bland Hoke Jr., a partner with Jackson Hole Realty. Referring to houses built without committed buyers, he added, ''We're doing $5 million houses on spec.''
With the most expensive real estate north of Colorado, Jackson cannot escape the dreaded ''A-word'' -- Aspenization. Jackson's determined pursuit of cowboy chic is not enough to head off comparisons with the Colorado resort, often called ''glitter gulch'' for its high concentration of jewelers and movie stars.
''We've always had rich people here,'' said Mrs. Huidekoper, a full-time rancher and part-time social historian, ''but the Rockefellers came out here and lived in log cabins because they liked nature. This new crowd, they want steel sliding doors and a bathroom as big as my house attached to each bedroom.''
The target of her wrath was the palatial log houses of Jackson's West Bank. On the west side of the Snake River, these houses can be glimpsed up dirt roads often marked ''Private.''
The portion of Jacksons' houses occupied year round has dropped to about 50 percent today, from 83 percent in 1980. Affluent second-home owners include Harrison Ford, the actor; Dick Cheney, the former Defense Secretary; David Brinkley, the television newscaster, and James D. Wolfensohn, the president of the World Bank.
Like other ski resort towns in the region, Jackson is now building affordable housing in a belated effort to retain its middle class.
As teachers, police officers and carpenters move over the 8,400-foot Teton Pass to Idaho, the sour joke here is that one night the fire whistle will blow, and all the volunteer firemen will be sleeping out of state.Much of the financial support for terrorists who attack Americans, Israelis and others sympathetic to the West comes from wealthy individuals from Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf countries allied with the United States, former and current American officials say.
Over the last decade, the United States has focused its anti-terrorism efforts on state sponsors of terrorism, forbidding trade with countries like Libya and Iran. But officials said the emergence of sophisticated, privately financed networks of terrorists posed a new and even thornier set of diplomatic and legal challenges for Western governments.
American officials suspect that businessmen in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates helped finance the operations of Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, who has been charged with masterminding the World Trade Center bombing in February 1993 and a plot to blow up 11 American airliners.
And American intelligence agencies are closely examining the activities of Osama Bin Laden, the scion of a wealthy Saudi family stripped of his Saudi citizenship in 1994 who finances a host of hard-line groups from Egypt to Algeria.
Officials in several countries, including the United States, say Mr. Bin Laden's money, as well as money he has raised, paid for terrorist acts in Europe, Africa and the Middle East against Americans and other Westerners.
The State Department, in a detailed document made public this year, called Mr. Bin Laden ''one of the most significant financial sponsors of Islamic extremist activities in the world.'' It linked him to terrorist training camps in Afghanistan and the Sudan and said he supported a group that tried to bomb American servicemen in Yemen in 1992.
In the three years before he was charged in the World Trade Center case, Mr. Yousef lived in a Pakistan guest house paid for by Mr. Bin Laden, according to the document. And the Saudi militants who killed five Americans last November in Riyadh said in their confessions that they had been influenced by Mr. Bin Laden's thinking.
Mr. Bin Laden, in interviews with other reporters, has denied any involvement in terrorism, but he could not be reached for comment today. Khaled al-Fauwaz, a spokesman for the Advice and Reformation Committee in London with which Mr. Bin Laden is associated, said he was ''proud'' to be his friend, and described the charges of supporting terrorism as ''rubbish.''
''There is no evidence I know of to support such charges,'' Mr. Fauwaz said.
The State Department's latest annual report on global terrorism touches briefly on the role played by individual financiers. But Philip C. Wilcox Jr., the head of the State Department's counterterrorism office, which prepared the report, recently told Congress that Hamas and Islamic Holy War -- two Palestinian fundamentalist groups based in the Middle East -- receive significant support from individuals in the Persian Gulf as well as in the United States.
Some contributors, Mr. Wilcox added, believe that they are underwriting legitimate charitable organizations. Others, he said, give money to radical groups knowingly through secret channels.
The bombing in Riyadh last year that killed five Americans and truck bomb attack this year on an apartment complex in Dhahran that killed 19 Americans have prompted Saudi Arabia and the United States to intensify their scrutiny of private backing of terrorism.
But the issue is delicate for both countries. In Islam, the line between giving to religious, as opposed to political, causes is often blurred.
For Muslims, giving to Islamic causes is part of a believer's religious duty. So while some supporters of Islamic-financed terrorism do so knowingly, many whose religious charity winds up in violent hands are unaware of what is done with their money.
While Americans may see aid for anti-Communist Afghan Muslims or Bosnian Government soldiers as moral, as opposed to support for Islamic Holy War and Hamas, ''in Islamic terms, it's all defensive and hence moral,'' a Saudi businessman said.
A Saudi businessman tried last year in Jordan on charges of financially supporting terrorism made that defense, arguing that neither he nor the religious school he financed in the Philippines was involved in terrorism. He was acquitted.
Identifying and taking action against individuals who support terrorist groups is much more complicated than moving against rogue states, American officials said.
The United States can ban suspicious visitors relatively easily. But seizing an individual's assets, a key tool in the war against drug traffickers, requires legal proof that is usually unavailable to those trying to combat terrorism.
The biggest obstacle to legal action, according to counterterrorist experts in and outside the Government, is the reluctance of intelligence agencies to share their information with other countries or law enforcement officials.
Much of the information about financing terrorists is gathered through electronic eavesdropping or by covert operatives with ties to the groups. The data are among the Government's most closely guarded secrets, and intelligence agencies have historically balked at making it public or even providing it to prosecutors.If the 300 German prisoners of war interned here half a century ago could have attended a military ceremony held here last May, they would have stared as if looking at a desert mirage.
''This is a great day for the Luftwaffe, for Alamogordo, and for our two countries,'' Germany's Defense Minister, Volker Ruhe, proclaimed as honor guards marched German and American flags past a row of Tornado ground attack jets, each marked with the Iron Cross of Germany's Air Force. With that, the German Air Force Tactical Training Center opened for business at Holloman Air Force Base.
In the ebb and flow of great power relations, a small milestone is quietly being etched in this dry, baking-hot expanse of cactus and sagebrush in south-central New Mexico: the training center is the first military facility in the United States leased by a foreign government.
To locals, it is simply ''the German base.'' After investing $42 million in hangars and jet repair shops, Germany has moved here with 12 Tornado jets, 300 German Air Force men and 340 family members. Under a three-year expansion plan, the Germans want to invest another $125 million -- for maintenance hangars, a flight simulator, a jet engine shop, dormitories and fuel and munitions warehouses -- so they can increase their Tornado and Phantom F-4E training wing here to 50 planes and to increase the number of servicemen and dependents to 2,100.The German Government is paying the Pentagon about $22 million a year to use its corner of the base.
For the German military, New Mexico offers some of the best training conditions in the world: relentlessly sunny skies and plenty of desert for jet pilots to practice 500-mile-an-hour bombing runs 100 feet off the ground. Where Germans have trained in Germany and Britain, military pilots are now largely barred from flying below 1,000 feet, a restriction imposed after the Berlin Wall fell and residents' complaints increased.
Without Germany's rain, fog, snow or altitude restrictions, training in New Mexico allows the Luftwaffe to shave six months off a standard 2-year basic course for Tornado pilots. Now, another NATO power, which officials refuse to identify, is considering leasing space to train pilots here.
New Mexico is only slightly smaller than Germany. But, with only 1.7 million people, it has one-fiftieth Germany's population. Germany has a 40-year tradition of sending military pilots to United States bases for training. Currently, the nation buys about $200 million worth of American weapons a year.
As what is called ''supersonic overland airspace'' becomes an internationally marketable commodity, some Americans are feeling queasy.
''Until Wednesday, 1 May 1996, there was no foreign military base on our shores -- not since the British were ejected in 1814!'' James (Bo) Gritz, a retired Green Beret colonel and an informal leader of the far-right paramilitary movement, wrote recently in his newsletter, Center for Action. Echoing ultranationalist comments that ricocheted through right-wing talk shows and shortwave radio programs in May, he wrote: ''Hitler would be proud!''
With Internet headings like ''German troops (Hessians) on our soil,'' the far-right furor grew so strong that about 60 members of Congress called the Air Force in May to ask about the expansion plans.
On Monday night, at a public hearing here on the German expansion plan, Bill Hornback, a ponytailed United States Air Force retiree, grumbled, ''We go out and kick their tails two times -- and now they come here and call us 'hosts.' ''
Ranchers complained about joy-riding pilots buzzing their sheep and cattle. But a vigorous defense of the Germans came from Richard Zierlein, chairman of the Otero County Commission. In a time of defense cuts, he said, the German Air Force's 10-year lease helps guarantee Holloman's future. It also pumps an estimated $10 million a year into the economy of a county with only 58,000 people.
''We've got the Stealths here, but they can pick up and fly away anywhere anytime,'' Mr. Zierlein said of Holloman, which is the home base for the United States's only unit of radar-evading Stealth bombers and for American training jets. ''You can't do that with a German base.''
Germany's buildup here coincides with a radical reduction in the number of American soldiers in Europe. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States has cut the number of American military personnel in Europe to 100,000 from 300,000.
In Germany, the United States has closed four of its six air bases. By the end of the decade, if current plans are carried out, the United States will have roughly the same number of combat planes in Germany as Germany will have in New Mexico.
But Pentagon officials caution that while the numbers may converge, the missions radically diverge.
''We clearly have provided a line of defense to Germany that Germany is not providing by being in the United States,'' Kenneth Bacon, the Defense Department spokesman, said after attending the opening ceremony here with the Secretary of Defense, William J. Perry. ''In that way, it's not exactly reciprocal. They're not defending us by being in the United States.'' In addition, Germany contributes toward the cost of keeping American troops there.
The German presence here, American military officers say, underscores the idea that the modern relationship between the Western world's two most powerful economies is one of allies.
''It serves as a symbol to the German people that this is not a one-way street,'' said Brig. Gen. Bruce Carlson, base commander at Holloman. ''We have not been over there for 50 years running through their streets and woods as conquerors. We are allies.''
Pentagon officials note that the German ''tenants'' account for fewer than 5 percent of the daily sorties from Holloman. The American base commander said he was at the top of the chain of command at the base, adding, ''Flying operations are all under my control -- they fly by my rules.''Amonth before the Sept. 14 elections in Bosnia, the conventional wisdom among international officials and diplomats charged with overseeing the postwar settlement is that if the voting goes smoothly, a corner will have been turned and the chances of a durable peace vastly increased. If anything, the reverse is likelier to be the case.
Having returned from Bosnia last week, I am more convinced than ever that the elections will be followed by a speeding up of the partition already taking place on the ground -- and possibly, after the NATO Implementation Force leaves, by renewed war, probably between the Croats and Bosnian Government forces in central Bosnia and western Herzegovina.
The great accomplishment of the Dayton accord is that there is no longer a war. Its great flaw was the assumption that the warring sides had signed onto the terms voluntarily and were sincere about carrying them out.
When the NATO Implementation Force's first commander, Adm. Leighton Smith, left Sarajevo a few weeks ago, he insisted that the military provisions of the Dayton accords had been carried out successfully, but added that he was disappointed by the Bosnians' failure to take steps to further political reconciliation.
But the point, as Admiral Smith and his political masters in Washington surely know, is that none of the belligerents take seriously the weak unitary Bosnian state envisaged by the Dayton agreement. It is the nationalist Serb, Muslim and Croat parties that are likely to win overwhelmingly in their respective areas when the elections take place. And their lack of commitment to pluralism and comity is revealed by the absence on their lists of any candidates who are not members of the dominant group the party in question claims to represent.
We saw this triumph of ethnic politics in the last elections before the war started. During the fighting, the Bosnian Government side was made up of a coalition that included not only Muslim nationalists but democrats as well, Muslim and non-Muslim. The postwar period is witnessing once more the same self-destructive politics that ushered in the war in the first place.
Only this time it is being played out in a ruined Bosnia that is economically wholly dependent on aid from foreign donors and has been drained of a great proportion of its ablest citizens, by emigration, death, injury or mental disorder, a huge and underreported problem. Doctors in Sarajevo are panic-stricken by rising levels of alcoholism and psychotic disorders among veterans and others.
The superficial signs of recovery in Sarajevo -- the newly vibrant street life, the proliferation of cafes and the many new shops -- represent a false dawn, however much they may seduce visitors who remain in the capital for only a short time.
What has actually occurred since the Dayton pact is that the Muslim-led Bosnian Government has shown itself incapable of or uninterested in taking responsibility for its own citizens. Only sectors that are immediately profitable are flourishing. The results are catastrophic. Boutiques are full, but pharmacies are bare; hotels are being refurbished, but the University of Sarajevo is still in ruins. You can watch CNN in cafes, but most people's windows are still covered by the plastic provided during the war by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
Both critics and supporters of the Government say that Sarajevo's authorities are counting on international donors to take up the slack. That's what happened during the war. But such largess is unlikely to continue indefinitely. There will be more aid, and already there is some road reconstruction and other large projects.
But the Bosnians are counting on much more. When they describe the help they need, it is clear they have in mind a kind of Marshall Plan that would subsidize the rebuilding of Bosnia's industrial base and provide money and technical assistance for rebuilding the shattered educational and social welfare systems.
At least some aid is flowing into Bosnian Government-controlled areas. On the Serb side, things are worse. So long as Radovan Karadzic's party is in control, most donors are reluctant to commit to projects outside the Croat-Muslim Federation territory.
The situation in western Herzegovina is even more dire. Croat-controlled areas take their orders from Zagreb, not Sarajevo, and are largely run by mafias that made fortunes in the war.
In Mostar, the 11th-hour settlement between Croats and Muslims that allowed the European Union officials administering the city to save face is a fraud. Though the Muslim-dominated Party for Democratic Action won the municipal elections, a Croat extremist will likely occupy the Mayor's office. And the European Union negotiators also accepted the Croat side's entirely specious challenge to the election results. As a result, it is doubtful whether the town council will ever be convened.
Instead, most observers on the ground believe that, after the September general elections, the Croats will demand union with Croatia proper. The Serb nationalists in the so-called Republika Srpska would likewise want to join Yugoslavia. That would either seal the partition of Bosnia or provoke another war.
In the face of all this, Western officials continue to speak in the most sanguine terms, as if the only task were to insure that the vote goes forward without too many irregularities. In reality, there is no reason why the nationalist parties should sabotage this voting. It suits their interests. For once the elections are over, they believe, the world's interest will wane and the partition of Bosnia they have been working for all along can resume away from the view of meddling outsiders.
The only hope for preserving a Bosnia in which pluralism can thrive is precisely that kind of outside interference, particularly on the part of the United States, which imposed the Dayton agreements. Bosnia will not become democratic unless the international community makes it clear that any other outcome will invite the most severe sanctions. But election years -- ours, not Bosnia's -- are times when unpleasant problems tend to be swept under the rug, not moments when the political elite, in America or anywhere else, volunteers to take on new responsibilities. David Rieff is the author of ''Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West.''Volkswagen A.G. said yesterday that its profit more than doubled in the first half of the year because of higher sales and earnings from financial services. Volkswagen earned 282 million marks, or $192 million, in the first half of 1996 compared with 113 million marks a year earlier. Revenue for the first half rose to 50.5 billion marks, or $34.35 billion, from 44.5 billion marks a year ago.
The German auto maker also expects its full-year sales and earnings to be higher than last year, when it earned 336 million marks on sales of 88.1 billion marks.
(AP)
INTERNATIONAL BRIEFSRoyal Ahold N.V., the Dutch company that is one of the world's largest food retailers, said yesterday that it would pay at least $100 million to take a 49 percent stake in a supermarket venture with Central Group, Thailand's largest retailer. The venture will operate 30 supermarkets inside department stores throughout Thailand. The supermarkets will be renamed Tops, the same name as one of Ahold's five supermarket chains in the United States.
Thailand is the fourth Asian country in which Ahold will be active in the supermarket business. It is now in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia. The 30 Thai supermarkets have annual sales of about $500 million.
(Bloomberg Business News)
INTERNATIONAL BRIEFSWhen Colin L. Powell spoke about Republican diversity here on Monday night, at least a fifth of the faces the major broadcast networks focused on were black, though only 3 percent of the delegates are.
Two networks, NBC and ABC, broadcast a six-minute videotape about Ronald Reagan, whose image Bob Dole, the imminent Republican nominee, is trying to borrow. And all three devoted most of their hourlong broadcasts to scenes the Republicans had scripted.
Round 1 went to the Republicans in the prime-time bout between party planners trying to present a coiffed image and network producers willing to muss it, a quadrennial struggle that is more intense than ever this year.
Some network executives said convention planners had misled them about the content of the Reagan video, had not given them advance copies soon enough to allow them to screen it thoroughly for news value, had similarly delayed releasing the texts of speeches and had shifted the schedule forward at the last minute, throwing them even further off balance. Others said they had had plenty of time and information to do their jobs. All defended their coverage.
But today, during a lull between prime-time storms, at least one producer re-evaluated some decisions. Jeff Zucker, the executive producer of NBC's coverage, which drew the largest audience, paused and then sighed when asked whether he had made the right choice in showing the Reagan video.
''Let me say if I had to do it again, I would really give that a second thought,'' he said after a couple of false starts. ''I'm not as convinced, Monday morning quarterbacking myself, that it was as newsworthy as I thought it was going in.''
In dozens of split-second decisions during their coverage of the major parties' conventions, network producers must reconcile several competing needs: to resist becoming propagandists for the parties, to woo viewers with compelling images and to present a fair picture of the proceedings.
Jeff Gralnick, an ABC News vice president who is executive producer of convention coverage, said he had done the right thing in broadcasting the Reagan video. ''We thought it was going to be the emotional centerpiece,'' he said, ''if not of the night, then possibly of the entire convention.'' He said it had met his expectations.
Mr. Gralnick also pointed out that ABC News had provided context and commentary dealing with the convention on several news programs during the day.
But Lane Venardos, a CBS vice president, sounded equally comfortable with his decision to ignore the video almost completely. ''We decided on news value alone not to run it,'' he said. ''There was not one scintilla of new information.''
Mr. Venardos said convention planners had promised that the video would include ''new pictures of the former President, never-before-seen post-Alzheimer's-onset pictures.''
But Mr. Gralnick said he had received no such promises about the video's content. And Paul J. Manafort, Mr. Dole's convention manager, said, ''We never said, as recently as this week, that there would be new footage of Reagan.'' Mr. Manafort also denied that the networks had been promised advance copies.
In place of the video segment, Mr. Venardos substituted a live interview with Representative Susan Molinari, the keynote speaker, in which Dan Rather pressed her on whether the convention's images suited its reality.
''I'm a little confused,'' Mr. Rather said. ''Bob Dole says this is the party of inclusion. But Governor Weld, of Massachusetts, who's pro-choice, is not allowed to speak here.''
None of the networks showed the speech by former President Gerald R. Ford, but they disagreed on former President George Bush. While CBS and NBC carried Mr. Bush's speech, ABC skipped most of it, cutting to him only as he introduced his wife, Barbara, as ''a woman who unquestionably upheld the honor of the White House.''
Scores of media outlets, from print to radio to cable to computer services, are covering the convention. The Republicans are even televising it themselves, on two cable channels. The convention planners have arranged their schedule to meet the needs of the major broadcast networks, however, because those networks command the largest audiences.
But viewers seemed generally unimpressed with the convention, or with the coverage, or perhaps some were drawn to another medium. About 23 percent of the nation's television sets in use were tuned to the convention on Monday night, compared with 30 percent on the first night of the Republican convention in 1992, when the coverage lasted longer.
''We go through a great deal of effort -- the three of us do, and CNN does -- to put out programs that the American public in general does not want,'' said Mr. Gralnick, of ABC.
The broadcast networks each showed an hour of the convention on Monday, from 10 P.M. to 11 P.M., Eastern daylight time, a plan the Republicans had known about and scheduled for. CBS and ABC each carried about 35 minutes of the convention planners' program itself, while NBC devoted about 20 percent more time -- 42 minutes -- to it.
The networks certainly strayed far enough from the official convention script on occasion to make Republicans grind their teeth. For example, while Mr. Ford was speaking, Mr. Rather, on CBS, was describing the various cameras the networks had secreted around the hall, including what he called ''the Bobcam.''Sometimes it is very hard for the rest of the world to understand why the United States is so down on itself. One of the clearest examples of this malaise is the fretting over its supposedly weak productivity growth.
Whatever the merits of Bob Dole's supply-side economic plan, he has succeeded in making productivity a central issue in the Presidential campaign. But much of the debate on the economy is really beside the point, because the key assumption -- that productivity growth is low -- is false. Compared with their counterparts in the rest of the world, American workers perform at least as well.
Increasing productivity -- measured by dividing a country's economic output by the number of workers -- is rightfully seen as the surest road to prosperity and higher wages. Some economists and public officials say it is an outright calamity that average American productivity growth -- the annual increase in productivity -- has declined from 2.7 percent in the 1960's to about 1 percent since the beginning of the 1980's. These figures are supposedly making Americans feel as if they are running in place.
The doomsayers point to the performance of America's major competitors. Much has been made of the fact that Germany's productivity increased by 3.6 percent in 1994 and 2.2 percent in 1993, while Japan had an annual productivity growth rate of 2.3 percent between 1979 and 1994. (It is rarely mentioned that annual productivity growth in both Europe and Japan has slipped to about 1.5 percent over the last 18 months.)
Why, then, are the Japanese and Europeans more than a little envious of the United States? To begin with, one needs to be careful not to confuse productivity growth with the overall level of productivity. Productivity growth only tells us about progress made from one year to the next. It says nothing about the starting level.
On this critical issue, American companies and workers are far more productive than those of either Japan or Germany, according to a solid body of economic and management studies. A June report by the McKinsey Global Institute, the Washington research arm of the McKinsey consulting company, found that Japanese workers were only 53 percent as productive as Americans while Germans, whose wages are on average much higher than Americans', were 90 percent as productive.
So the United States is not falling behind. Given that American workers operate at a much more productive level than those in Germany and Japan, even increases of ''only'' 1 percent mean that America is performing just as well as other economies with 1.5 percent productivity growth -- about what Japan and Western Europe are experiencing now.
While the United States may no longer be pulling away from its competitors, it is certainly maintaining its lead. After all, once a country is so far out on top, it is extremely difficult for it to increase productivity by leaps and bounds. Not even America can expect to squeeze blood from a stone.
The remarkable thing is that the United States has maintained its productivity with an unemployment rate of about 5 percent -- as compared with Western Europe's jobless rate of about 11 percent. Because productivity is the output of an economy divided by the number of workers, the fewer workers used to produce that output, the more ''productive'' the economy.
What if the United States had 11 percent unemployment? If with the simple stroke of an economist's pen we removed 6 percent of American workers from the equation, United States productivity growth would be approximately 1.5 percent, about the current rate for Western Europe.
European employers have been very accommodating in keeping wages high, but it means they can afford to hire fewer -- and therefore more productive -- workers. One out of every nine European workers is out of a job. If the United States were to increase wages to rates similar to Europe's, about 7.7 million more Americans would have to be unemployed, to keep labor costs under control. Who is willing to pay that steep a price to raise worker productivity?
These numbers should bring home a clear message to Americans: the United States has made the overall level of employment the top priority without really sacrificing much in terms of productivity.
Ultimately, it is much harder for a society to deal with a large number of people out of work and without prospects than to have lots of people feeling that they should earn more. To be sure, tight wages are an unpleasant reminder of growing competition around the globe.
But Americans would do well to realize that Europe and Japan can only wish that they had America's problems.
Norbert Walter is the chief economist of the Deutsche Bank Group.One day it was the front cargo hold, an obvious place to conceal a bomb. Another day it was the cockpit, where an explosive device might have been hidden in a cooler. Then there was the possibility that an engine came unhinged, touching off a catastrophic mechanical failure.
One by one these theories have been raised, and one by one they have fallen as investigators continue to pull pieces of Trans World Airlines Flight 800 from the waters off eastern Long Island. Along the way, the public has shared the investigators' roller coaster ride of a difficult inquiry in which the evidence -- tons of wreckage -- is strewn over miles of ocean. The gathering of evidence has been slow; at times, it has seemed chaotic.
But investigators say they are following a deliberate course that has made significant progress. Although the evidence recovered from the Atlantic Ocean has not explained what caused the plane to break apart, the incremental discoveries, taken together, have gone a long way toward explaining what did not happen.
Yesterday, in fact, investigators said they had concluded that the center fuel tank on the plane burned as many as 24 seconds after the initial blast, a finding that deals a serious blow to the already remote chance that a mechanical accident caused the crash. $(Page B5.$)
Robert T. Francis, vice chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, declined yesterday to discuss the center fuel tank in detail, but he acknowledged the investigation's seemingly circuitous path. ''Things lead you along a track and then all of a sudden something pops up,'' he said. ''It stops you on that track and you end up going up another one.''
If the investigation's rhythm seems slow to outsiders, it follows a beat familiar to veterans of crime scenes and airline accidents. Theorizing, they say, is elemental in virtually all investigations.
''You set 'em up and you knock 'em down,'' said Rudy Kapustin, a former investigator-in-charge for the safety board. ''That's what you have to do.''
Investigators initially proposed three possible causes for why a Boeing 747, the largest and one of the safest commercial aircraft, split apart in midair on July 17, killing all 230 aboard: a bomb, a missile or mechanical failure. The last of these options, investigators say, seems less likely in light of yesterday's evidence. But if sabotage knocked Flight 800 out of the sky, it would mark the first terrorist takedown of a jumbo jet near American soil.
Indeed, most investigators believe that sabotage, in the form of a bomb, caused the crash. Preventing a complete and public embrace of the theory, however, has been the lack of conclusive forensic evidence.
Magnifying the absence of any conclusion are the daily news briefings held by the officials supervising the investigation. The sessions, covered intensively by the media, have allowed the public to witness an investigation-in-progress, one that has not followed the simple, narrative flow of a ''Murder, She Wrote'' episode.
Nevertheless, there have been answers.
For example, one theory that investigators took seriously almost immediately held that a bomb might have been concealed in luggage packed into the large, aluminum baggage bins stored in the front cargo hold of a 747. That possibility would have answered several questions, including why the front third of the plane fell off in flight. A bomb smuggled on board this way would have had a better chance of avoiding detection. What's more, terrorists had used the technique before.
Earlier this week, however, investigators announced that they had recovered the last of the four baggage bins. Each of the bins, they said, was ''basically unremarkable.'' One investigator said, ''All it does is rule out those four containers as the place where a bomb was hidden.''
One of the first coups of the salvage effort, the recovery last month of the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder -- the so-called black boxes -- provided another clue. Because the recorders had captured nothing more than a split-second noise, followed by silence, investigators have been able to rule out pilot error, and to deduce that the pilots received no advance warning of the catastrophic event.
Then there was the speculation about the cooler. Moments before Flight 800 left Kennedy International Airport for Paris, a sealed cooler containing corneas from an eye bank was stowed in the cockpit. Because the cooler had not been opened and inspected, one senior investigator theorized that if a bomb exploded in the cockpit, it was most likely concealed in the cooler.
But a tentative line was drawn through this theory -- as well as any other theory involving an explosion in the cockpit -- when searchers resurrected a ball of metal and wires that had once been the cockpit. The glass covers on many of the pilot's gauges had not shattered, making the possibility of a bomb in the cockpit much less likely.
And then, the discovery this week of the last of the jumbo jet's four engines seemed to weaken two other theories: that an engine had become unhinged and slammed into another engine, or that a heat-seeking missile, which would probably have zeroed in on an engine, had downed the plane. The engine, like the others, appeared badly damaged, but was generally intact.
So goes the tedious process. And as some theories fall victim to the ever-emerging evidence, other theories surface, are tinkered with and tested. ''It's essentially a process of elimination,'' said Mr. Kapustin, who as a chief investigator for the safety board handled several high-profile cases, including an Air Florida crash in Washington, D.C., that killed 78 people in 1982.
Mr. Kapustin likened the process to putting together an adult's jigsaw puzzle, only with a twist.
''You take one of those puzzles, one with thousands of pieces, and you throw it on the floor,'' he said. ''You take those pieces, you stomp on them, bend them, rip them apart. And then you say, 'Here. Now put it back together.' ''Over the objections of civil rights advocates, the first single-sex public school in New York City in a decade will open its doors to 50 seventh-grade girls when the school year begins in September, a Board of Education official said yesterday.
When plans for the school, known as the Young Women's Leadership School, were disclosed last month, questions were immediately raised about whether it would violate Federal and city discrimination laws by excluding boys.
While still bracing for a possible lawsuit, school planners, including officials in the East Harlem school district where it is located, have taken several steps in recent weeks to assure the school's legality. Those steps, which include allowing boys to apply if they choose, have largely satisfied Schools Chancellor Rudy Crew, who does not intend to block its opening, said Dr. Judith Rizzo, the Deputy Chancellor for Instruction.
''I want to see this system be flexible enough to accommodate a whole variety of options,'' said Dr. Rizzo, herself a graduate of an all-girls Catholic school. ''It behooves us to explore this.''
The school, conceived by Andrew Tisch, the chairman of the Loews Corporation, and his wife, Ann Rubenstein Tisch, is inspired by a simple premise: studies have shown that girls, particularly in poor neighborhoods like East Harlem, perform better when boys are not in the classroom.
But critics of the school, including the New York Civil Liberties Union and the New York Civil Rights Coalition, say that the changes planners have made in an attempt to make the school pass legal scrutiny are largely cosmetic. They say they still hope to prevent the school from opening, through the courts or by appeal to Federal and state education officials.
''If they are not going to do any affirmative outreach to boys,'' said Norman Siegel, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, ''then that is not acceptable.''
While officials in Community School District 4 say they have decided to permit boys to apply to the school and be interviewed for admission, they concede that they have not actively recruited boys and that none have come forward. The incoming fall class, they add, is now virtually full. And even if a boy did apply, school officials said, they are not sure whether they would accept him, considering that the interview process is geared toward finding girls interested in learning to be leaders.
Then there is the question of whether the school, which will occupy the top three floors of a commercial building on East 106th Street near Park Avenue, is technically a freestanding school. To the Board of Education, it will be designated a program that is part of nearby Junior High School 13, which is co-ed.
Under the 27-year-old law desegregating the city's schools, community school districts may start new programs without the consent of the Board of Education or the Chancellor, Dr. Rizzo said. Under that provision, districts have opened dozens of alternative academies in recent years by calling them programs.
The legal distinction is important, because it allows the school to open without any action by the Chancellor, Dr. Rizzo said.
But a district official, who insisted on anonymity, said that the designation was largely one of semantics. Girls who attend the Young Women's Leadership School, the official said, will have no reason to enter the junior high school building that they theoretically attend.
To Michael Meyers, the executive director of the Civil Rights Coalition, calling the girls school a program is a form of subterfuge that allows the Chancellor ''not to intervene'' and ''not to enforce the law.''
While the school is expected to open on Sept. 4, its future remains very much unresolved. The district board passed a resolution on May 15 calling for the school to expand to grades 9 through 12 in the coming years, making it a junior high school and high school.
But only the Board of Education has the authority to open a high school, and Dr. Rizzo said that the Chancellor's office would carefully study the legal ramifications -- and the school's performance this year -- before allowing it to expand.
The Board of Education is to have a preliminary discussion of the matter with lawyers from the city and planners of the school in an executive session on Aug. 21.
Meanwhile, plans for the school are moving ahead. The leased space, which once housed an arts high school, is ready for the students to move in. A director and three teachers have been hired.
And last week, as Mrs. Tisch looked on, many of the girls assembled at the school to be measured for their uniforms -- navy blazers, pleated skirts and white blouses -- which are optional, but designed to give the school the air of the private academies it aspires to emulate.
''I don't feel any apprehension that anything would threaten the opening of school,'' said Leonides Cortez, a clerical supervisor at a medical clinic, who gladly paid the $120 cost of her daughter Leslie Ann's uniform. ''My daughter is getting bored with summer right now and wishes the school would open sooner.''When Speaker Newt Gingrich made his first appearance before the Republican National Convention tonight, the first words out of his mouth were about beach volleyball. This new Olympic sport, Mr. Gingrich said, ''is an example of what freedom is all about.''
From there he segued into the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whom he called 'the greatest Georgian of this century.''
Most of the rest of his speech was about compassion and charity. He talked about how he had worked here last weekend with Habitat for Humanity, the charity that builds houses for the poor.
He made no mention of revolution or the Contract With America. He did not talk about dismantling a corrupt government or describe his political opponents, as he often does, as traitorous and grotesque. He did not even mention Congress.
No, this is the new Newt Gingrich, and the image of Congress the Republicans are trying to present here this week is strikingly different from the one Mr. Gingrich led to power.
That was the Congress where ''compromise'' was a swear word and lawmakers were so rigid that they allowed the Government to shut down twice last winter.
But now they are trying to adopt a mien of moderation and accomplishment. The theme of the convention Wednesday night will be ''The Common-Sense Republican Congress.''
No one is taking credit for coining this phrase, which has become ubiquitous in San Diego the last two weeks. But its intent is clear. Democrats have succeeded in characterizing the Republican-led Congress as extreme. The notion of ''common sense'' is meant as an antidote to such accusations.
Haley Barbour, the party chairman, who may well have coined the phrase, explained its origin in the same sort of way politicians brush aside their errors, by saying, ''Mistakes were made.''
''As Congress broke for the conventions,'' Mr. Barbour divulged this morning, ''this phrase began to be heard.''
''We're tickled to debate whether the balanced budget and tax cuts and welfare are extreme,'' he went on. ''We think they're common sense.''
Whatever the coinage, Republicans acknowledge that the party is suffering from the way the public views Congress.
''We obviously made our share of mistakes last year in terms of how we went about moving our agenda,'' said Representative John A. Boehner, the fourth-ranking Republican in the House leadership and a convention delegate from Ohio.
''I don't think our substance has changed,'' he said, ''but the way we talk about it certainly has.''
This new image-building came none too soon, said Gov. Marc Racicot of Montana, a featured speaker on welfare at the convention tonight.
''If they'd done this from the beginning, they'd be in much better shape,'' Mr. Racicot said in an interview today. ''There's no image that's worse than for people to think you're a bunch of bomb-throwers.''
As recently as June, The New York Times/CBS News poll found that the public disapproved of the way Congress was handling its job by 71 percent to 19 percent. Early this month, after a spasm of bill-passing, the public's view of Congress improved somewhat. But people still disapproved of what Congress was doing by 52 percent to 32 percent.
The truth is that the 104th Congress has been quite productive. It adopted important legislation overhauling the laws governing farm subsidies, the telecommunications industry and securities litigation. And just before the recess for the party conventions, bills were passed raising the minimum wage, giving tax breaks to small business, making health insurance available to workers when they change jobs and, most important, scrapping much of the nation's 60-year-old welfare system.
But except for the welfare measure, this legislation was not part of the Contract With America, the platform on which Republican House candidates ran two years ago. The Contract, in fact, has not been mentioned here this week, presumably because it raises the ghost of the old, hard-line Republican-led Congress of a year ago that the convention managers would like to leave buried, at least until after the election. When people were asked in the most recent poll how they planned to vote, 46 percent said they would vote for a Democrat for the House of Representatives, while 39 percent said they would vote for a Republican.
Such polls say nothing about individual races. But the Democratic lead on this question is slightly greater than the one Republicans enjoyed just before the elections in 1994, when they won control of Congress.Jack Kemp, the party's pick for Vice President and longtime Buffalo celebrity -- he represented the city both as a Congressman and a quarterback for the Bills -- was the scheduled speaker this morning at a meeting of New York's convention delegation.
But not long after everyone had packed into the ballroom of the Hotel Del Coronado, it was announced that a ''surprise speaker'' would also attend. It turned out to be the other half of the ticket, Bob Dole.
New York, with its 33 electoral votes, has always been a priority for both parties. But that both men would make the New York stop such a priority underscores the freshening hopes of party officials that Mr. Kemp's presence on the ticket might finally give Republicans a chance in a state that more often goes Democratic in national elections.
''We're coming to New York right away,'' Mr. Kemp promised.
The delegates and others who gathered inside the hotel's Crown Room, with its wooden, crown-shaped chandeliers, responded like football fans on opening day, as Mr. Kemp referred to his glory days with the Bills.
''I retired in 1970, but my friends from Buffalo think that I quit playing in 1965,'' Mr. Kemp quipped.
Even Mr. Dole, who was introduced to the crowd by Senator Alfonse M. D'Amato of New York, made an effort to lay a claim to the state.
''Remember, I attended Brooklyn College,'' Mr. Dole said, referring to a brief time he spent at the institution before World War II. ''You've got Brooklyn and Buffalo here. Not bad. A New York ticket.''
Personal ties notwithstanding, New York will once again present a challenge for the national Republican ticket. Over recent months, public opinion surveys of likely voters in New York have given President Clinton a substantial lead.
Recent history offers little solace for the Republicans. In 1992, George Bush got 34 percent of the votes in the state, compared with Bill Clinton's 50 percent. Four years earlier, Michael Dukakis, the Democratic nominee, also took New York, even as Mr. Bush was rolling to a big victory elsewhere.
In an effort to win support in New York, Mr. Kemp is expected to rely on the help of political allies in the state's minority communities, the result in part of the active role he played over the years on behalf of inner-city redevelopment.
This morning, he talked about black New York natives who are now Republicans, like Gen. Colin L. Powell and Van Woods, a former Black Panther and operator of Sylvia's, a well-known family-run soul food restaurant in Harlem.
In a speech punctuated by cheers, Mr. Kemp drew the most sustained applause when he recalled General Powell's speech to the convention on Monday night and asked, ''Weren't you proud to see an African-American stand up and say how proud he was to be a Republican?''
Mr. Kemp, who made his mark in the minority community when he was head of the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the Bush Administration, displayed his own diverse talents when he responded, in Spanish, to a heckler who had challenged him, in Spanish.
''We are going to carry this message of inclusion, opportunity and progress to every single corner of this country,'' he said.
Mr. Dole chose to focus on his plan to cut taxes, the highlight of his recently released economic agenda, and one that he and his supporters have been going to great lengths to explain.
Clearly buoyed by the response that his tax plan and selection of Mr. Kemp as a running has received, Mr. Dole was as playful as he was serious. ''I don't know what you had for breakfast,'' Mr. Dole said, as he tried to quiet the cheering crowd, ''but Al must have overeaten.''
But he went on to make Mr. D'Amato, who heads the powerful National Republican Senatorial Committee, two promises.
''We're going to give you more seats in the Senate,'' Mr. Dole said. And ''one of our first stops will be in New York.''
THE REPUBLICANS: THE DELEGATESIntersolv, Rockville, Md., to Mullen Advertising, Wenham, Mass., to handle advertising for the software company, which had been handled by various agencies on a project basis. Billings were estimated at $5 million.
Emirates Airlines, New York, to Spring, O'Brien & Co., New York, to handle advertising in North America for the international airline of the United Arab Emirates, which had been handled by Keating Communications, New York. Billings were estimated at $1 million.
THE MEDIA BUSINESS: ADVERTISING -- ADDENDAAfter a rousing reception by cheering Republican delegates, Gen. Colin L. Powell tried to stake out independent ground today, while Bob Dole's senior campaign aides plotted ways to pull General Powell deeper into their camp.
In a round of television talk shows he taped here after his speech to the Republican National Convention, the retired Army general and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said he had no second thoughts about turning down Mr. Dole's offer to run on his ticket. And he made clear that he had no intention of spending too much time this fall campaigning on Mr. Dole's behalf.
But senior advisers were trying this evening to persuade Mr. Dole to offer General Powell a position as Secretary of State as part of an effort to expand the campaign's base. One aide said Mr. Dole's advisers, concerned about the candidate's shortcomings as a campaigner and pleased with the reception accorded the selection of Jack Kemp as his running mate, said there was talk about making similar offers to other well-known Republicans.
Among the possibilities, a Dole aide said, was asking Jeane Kirkpatrick, the former United States delegate to the United Nations, to consider accepting in advance the post of Defense Secretary. Such a move, a Dole aide said, might also help the candidate's position with women.
These discussions were said to be in the earliest of stages, and have not been approved by Mr. Dole.
''That would be news to Bob Dole,'' his spokesman, Nelson Warfield, said, responding to a report on CBS News that Mr. Dole had offered General Powell a Cabinet post.
And campaign aides also said there were unexplored legal problems involved in trying to name Cabinet secretaries in advance.
But the fact that Mr. Dole's aides acknowledged discussing this subject was the latest indication of the campaign's strong interest in General Powell's campaigning abilities.
General Powell, who returned to Washington this morning, made clear in one interview that he would consider an offer in a Dole administration. ''If there is a Dole administration, which I expect there will be, I would consider anything that the President asked me to do,'' he said.
But in the television interviews he discussed at length points of disagreement with Mr. Dole and Republicans gathered here.
General Powell on Monday made a point of noting his support of abortion rights and affirmative action, both of which run contrary to the party platform. And he repeated his position on both issues with even more passion in interviews on three morning television talk shows that were broadcast today.
Powell aides said the general said he had told Mr. Dole's campaign that he would agree to make only a limited number of appearances on Mr. Dole's behalf.
THE REPUBLICANS: THE PLAYERSLATEX RESOURCES INC., Tulsa, Okla., agreed to acquire control of Alliance Resources P.L.C. of London in a $26 million stock swap. Latex would have a 72 percent interest in the combined company.
MEDLOGIC GLOBAL CORP., Colorado Springs, a privately held medical adhesives maker, said it had received a major investment from the Travelers Insurance Co., a unit of the Travelers Group, in exchange for a stake in the company. Further details were not disclosed.Republicans melded homespun family images with hardball politics at their national convention tonight, as a line-up of speakers exploited what party leaders believe are President Clinton's two biggest vulnerabilities: his character and the economic anxieties of the middle class.
In putting Representative Susan Molinari of Staten Island before the television cameras as the keynote speaker, Republicans made a play for female voters who have turned away from the party. A day earlier, the party sought to broaden its appeal to moderates, swing voters and perhaps even minorities by advancing a message of inclusion from Gen. Colin L. Powell.
As the cameras panned to her husband, Representative Bill Paxon of Buffalo, who balanced their 3-month-old daughter, Susan Ruby, on his knee, Ms. Molinari referred to herself as ''a mom.'' Mr. Paxon sat beside Elizabeth Dole and Jack Kemp, Bob Dole's running mate, as his wife sought to put a softer, more youthful and maternal face on the Republican Party four years after Senator Phil Gramm of Texas delivered a hard-edged keynote address.
But from the beginning of her tersely written speech, Ms. Molinari, who is 38, made it clear that she would hardly be tame in making the case that Mr. Dole would make a better President than Mr. Clinton. ''This speech is a lot like a Bill Clinton promise,'' she said. ''It won't last long, and it'll sound like a Republican.''
The most prominent time slots featured not only Ms. Molinari, but also two other women who favor abortion rights: Gov. Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey and Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas.
Waving a copy of Mr. Clinton's 1992 campaign manifesto, ''Putting People First,'' Mrs. Hutchison leveled the most scathing attack, depicting Mr. Clinton as a radical liberal who never keeps his word: ''It's time to wake up America to President Clinton and his high-taxing, free-spending, promise-breaking, Social-Security-taxing, health-care-socializing, drug-coddling, power-grabbing, business-busting, lawsuit-loving, U.N.-following, F.B.I.-abusing, I.R.S.-increasing, $200-hair-cutting, gas-taxing, over-regulating, bureaucracy-trusting, class-baiting, privacy-violating, values-crushing, truth-dodging, Medicare-forsaking, property-rights-taking, job-destroying friends.
''And,'' she added for effect, ''that's just in the White House. Well, I ask you, isn't four years of President Clinton long enough?''
''Yes,'' the delegates shouted back with exuberance.
Mrs. Hutchison's caustic riposte was reminiscent of the lively speech that another Texan, then Gov. Ann Richards, delivered against George Bush at the 1988 Democratic convention.
But Mrs. Hutchison drew an even more overwhelming ovation when she ridiculed Hillary Rodham Clinton's book, ''It Takes a Village.'' ''In the real world,'' she said, ''we don't want a village to raise a child -- we want a family.''
The program opened with a handful of Governors recalling their own experiences cutting taxes and balancing their budgets as evidence that Mr. Dole's economic remedies would work for the nation.
After the nearly 2,000 delegates and alternates hissed at a black-and-white images of Mr. Clinton that flashed on two giant screens, Gov. John Rowland of Connecticut lashed out at Mr. Clinton for raising taxes. ''Mr. Clinton, we do feel the pain,'' he said, ''because you're causing it.''
Except for an outburst from two anti-abortion protesters at the start of Ms. Molinari's speech, the crowd was remarkably sedate. But delegates rocked briefly when Patty Cabrera, a singer who mixes her Latin musical heritage with Christian pop lyrics, took the stage. One delegate, swaying to the music, brandished a sign, ''Rock on Dole.''
While Mrs. Dole and Mr. Kemp arrived in the hall in time for Ms. Molinari's speech, the nominee-in-waiting sat in his hotel suite in front of a television with Senator Alfonse D'Amato and other supporters.
It was for the largest television audience of the evening that the Republicans saved their punch-the-President theme, in which politicians and ordinary Americans -- including a woman in Pennsylvania who was raped and the owner of a gas station in New Jersey -- painted Mr. Clinton as a villain who had failed the country on issues including welfare and education.
Still, the evening was designed to showcase Ms. Molinari, who reviewed a list of promises that she said Mr. Clinton had shattered, like his pledge for a tax cut for the middle class to reforming the health-care system and balancing the budget. Her address was spiced with about as many references to Mr. Clinton as to either Mr. Dole or Mr. Kemp, who are to receive their party's Presidential and Vice-Presidential nominations later in the week.
''Americans know that Bill Clinton's promises have the lifespan of a Big Mac on Air Force One,'' Ms. Molinari said. ''While that may be funny, what's not funny is what he is doing to the promise of America.''
Beyond the attacks, her speech was intended to show that working women and their families would fare far better with a Dole administration. ''At the end of the day while I'm rocking Susan Ruby to sleep, I look down and wonder what life will be like,'' said Ms. Molinari, whose husband, Mr. Paxon, is the conservative chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee. ''I want the best for her. I want a country free from danger. A nation and a world where she is free to believe in greatness and achieve her fullest potential.
''But,'' she added, ''she will never know that life if we continue down the rudderless path we have been on for four long years.''
As Ms. Molinari recalled how her great-grandfather opened a barbershop in Queens, and how her father, Guy V. Molinari ended up as a member of Congress, Mr. Molinari looked on with pride. By the end of the speech, Mr. Molinari, who is now Staten Island Borough President, was holding his granddaughter and feeding her from a bottle.Prosecutors in the terrorism trial of Ramzi Ahmed Yousef yesterday introduced what they said were bomb-making instructions found in his possession and a draft of a letter threatening to poison the air and drinking water in the Philippines.
The instructions, written in Arabic and translated into English by a Government language expert, support the Government's contention that Mr. Yousef and his co-defendants, Abdul Hakim Murad and Wali Khan Amin Shah, hatched an elaborate plot in the Philippines to place bombs on American jets in Asia.
The threat, also in Arabic, was found scribbled on a piece of cardboard in the hotel room occupied by Mr. Yousef in Islamabad, Pakistan, when he was captured by Pakistani and American agents on Feb. 7, 1995.
He was quickly extradited to the United States to face charges that he masterminded the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. Since May, he has been on trial on separate bombing conspiracy charges.
The translations were offered in court by Salim Daniel, an Iraqi-born teacher of Arabic at the Government's Defense Language Institute.
Mr. Murad was extradited in April 1995.
The letter threatened ''the harshest of measures'' against the Philippines, including assassinating its President and hitting ''numerous aerial targets.'' It said that ''we also have the ability to make and use chemical and poison gas,'' which it said would be used ''against vital institutions and residential populations and drinking water sources.''
No evidence has been presented at the trial that the threat was sent to the Philippine authorities.
Mr. Yousef's legal adviser, Roy R. Kulcsar, objected to the English translation, contending that its value as evidence was outweighed by its potential to prejudice the jury.
Judge Kevin Thomas Duffy allowed it to be introduced but told the jury that it did not involve Mr. Shah, who was not in custody at the time.
Other documents offered yesterday included a notebook with chemical formulas and diagrams and instructions for assembling bombs.
''We fit the detonator and if we want to adjust anything, we pull the battery out, then we set the time,'' one excerpt said. In converting a digital watch into a timer, another advised, ''we remove the plastic so it does not melt during welding.''IF politics make strange bedfellows, then commerce makes some pretty strange ones, too. A good example is the recent alliance between QVC, the cable shopping channel, and several major museums.
The benefits of the alliance, the participants say, are twofold. For the eight museums -- which include the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston -- it is another way to sell merchandise and to make up for lost government support.
For QVC Inc., the deal helps its effort to move upscale and shed a reputation as a hawker of cubic zirconia and other cheap wares.
The most impressive of the two-hour museum programs, which have been carried by QVC since March, was the show last month from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where a blockbuster exhibit of work by Paul Cezanne, the 19th-century French Impressionist, is on display.
The program featured live interviews with the artist's great-grandson, Philippe, a tour of the exhibit, and 90 minutes of promoting -- from the museum's galleries -- everything from reproductions of Cezanne's best-known works, to a watch adorned with apples from one of his still lifes, to a CD featuring classical music that he enjoyed.
Starting in September, QVC will carry monthly art and shopping tours of the Smithsonian, which is celebrating its 150th anniversary this year; the Metropolitan; the Winterthur Museum of American decorative arts in Winterthur, Del., and Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia, which will be visited during the Christmas season.
''The perception is we're not a mainstream retailer, but the truth is we're mainstream and even more upstream than other retailers,'' Fred Siegel, QVC's senior vice president of marketing, said.
Noting that QVC had $1.6 billion in net sales -- the sales after returns -- last year, Mr. Siegel said that QVC's problem was the lack of distinction made between shopping networks.
''People believe televised shopping is all the same thing,'' he said. ''But the Home Shopping Network and QVC are two different animals. The merchandise selection is different and the pricing strategy is different.'' The museum tours, he explained, ''help us say to people 'we're not who you think we are, that we have products for people like you.' ''
That is, if those people are watching. According to the National Cable Television Association, QVC, which is based in West Chester, Pa., and was taken private by Tele-Communications Inc. and the Comcast Corporation two years ago, is the 18th- largest cable network in the United States, with a reach of 56.1 million homes. The Home Shopping Network, which is based in St. Petersburg, Fla. and headed by QVC's former chief, Barry Diller, is the 20th- largest cable network, reaching 49.2 million homes.
The museum tours are the latest installment in a continuing effort by QVC to differentiate itself from its main rival; other initiatives have included a $10 million advertising campaign last year, and live shows, begun in 1995, that highlight local products and services offered in a number of different states.
Neither Mr. Siegel nor officials from museums that have worked with QVC would say how much revenue the museum tours have generated. But all expressed satisfaction with the concept.
Sandra Horrocks, vice president of marketing and public relations for the Philadelphia Museum of Art, called the program in July a ''wonderful experience,'' and said that 6 of the 16 products featured on the show sold out that evening, including the exhibition's catalogue.
Ms. Horrocks said the museum expected it would sell $4 million worth of Cezanne merchandise, about $1 million more than originally predicted, though she could not specify what percentage of these sales might be attributed to QVC.
Both John Stanley, deputy director for operations for Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, and Harold Holzer, vice president of communications for the Metropolitan, said they regarded their collaboration with the cable channel as an experiment. ''Like any other business, we have to move with the times and find new ways to get our name out to the world, like QVC and the Internet,'' Mr. Stanley said.
Adelle Kirk, manager of consumer marketing for Kurt Salmon Associates, a retailing consulting firm, called the QVC museum tours a ''brilliant idea, since people have become very tired of shopping.''
''To make retailing fun, retailers need to do things that are entertainment-based,'' she said. ''If they create an outing for consumers, once they get them there, they can sell them merchandise. People aren't going to watch someone on TV trying to sell 27 products in one hour; they want to be entertained.''
According to Bill Lane, QVC's vice president of new business development, the channel plans to offer museum tours again next year, perhaps adding visits to zoos, botanical gardens or historic homes; it is also eager to offer similar programming from museums overseas, he said.
Regardless of its intentions, QVC must still convince skeptics in the art world who do not agree that their interests and images match those of QVC. Even one museum official who had worked with QVC and termed the experience a positive one, warned: ''TV marketing of products has a bit of hucksterism to it. If you embrace it wholeheartedly, you could hurt your brand.''
THE MEDIA BUSINESS: ADVERTISINGHollywood has never been too sure how to treat politicians and journalists, portraying them as either heroic or contemptible, either utterly decent and selfless or recklessly ambitious and back stabbing. But now two movie projects -- a big-budget adaptation of the best-selling novel ''Primary Colors'' and a drama about Janet Cooke, the disgraced Washington Post reporter -- are seeking to redefine the worlds of politicians and journalists as more ambiguous and morally complex.
Mike Nichols, who is directing ''Primary Colors,'' said it was precisely the ambiguities of the central character, a flawed Presidential candidate with apparent similarities to Bill Clinton, that led to his decision to turn the book into a film. (Universal gave Mr. Nichols one of the most lucrative deals ever for a director, earning him millions of dollars.)
As to the controversy that erupted when the political writer Joe Klein acknowledged that he was the ''Anonymous'' who wrote the novel and that he had lied about it, Mr. Nichols said he doubted it would have any negative impact on the project. Tom Hanks and Emma Thompson have tentatively agreed to star in the movie, which is being adapted by Elaine May, Mr. Nichols's former partner, who also collaborated with him on the highly successful comedy ''The Birdcage.''
''Primary Colors,'' Mr. Nichols said in a telephone interview, has ''an excellent plot.'' He continued, ''It's about honor, and probably a redefinition of honor in a strange new time in which peoples' private lives and various personal acts are held accountable in a new way.'' (In ''Primary Colors,'' the fictional President chases after women and has a secret illegitimate child.) ''In some ways,'' he said, ''the thesis of the book is you can't find anybody absolutely irreproachable and so you hope to find people who are doing things for the right reason, flaws and all.''.
An even more ambiguous drama is the real-life one involving Ms. Cooke, whose 1981 Pulitzer Prize-winning article for The Washington Post about an 8-year-old heroin addict proved to be a hoax. The Post returned the prize. This summer, Hollywood studios fell all over themselves after a 12,000-word article about Ms. Cooke appeared in the June issue of GQ Magazine. It was written by Mike Sager, a former Washington Post colleague of Ms. Cooke's and a former boyfriend.
Tri-Star Pictures, a division of Sony, committed what may be as much as $1.6 million to make a film based on Mr. Sager's article, which dealt with Ms. Cooke's humiliation after the hoax as well as her marriage and exile to Paris for a decade, her divorce and her troubled recent years eking out a living as a sales clerk in a department store in Kalamazoo, Mich.
The article asserted that Ms. Cooke had been driven by disparate factors: a troubled childhood in Toledo, Ohio, that led her to lie early on to avoid an iron-fisted, tyrannical father; her hunger to succeed, as a young frightened black woman in the predominately white Washington Post; internal politics and competition at the newspaper, especially among black reporters and editors, and her desire both to please and break away from an editor who, she said she felt, abused and intimidated her. The editor has left the newspaper.
''I don't know if I feel guilty as much as ashamed and very sorry for what happened,'' Ms. Cooke said in a telephone interview from Kalamazoo. ''I'd be the first in line to wish I had never done it.''
Although Ms. Cooke said editors had applied intense pressure on her to produce the article once she told them of rumors of the 8-year-old heroin addict, she says she takes full responsibility.
''I have to stress no one forced me to write it,'' said Ms. Cooke, who was 26 when she won the Pulitzer and is now 42. ''Certainly, there was pressure, which is different from saying, 'These guys forced me to invent something.' ''
Ms. Cooke said she had agreed to discuss her past because she trusted Mr. Sager, with whom she had talked and corresponded over the years, and because she wanted to start a new chapter in her life. ''It was time to say what I had to say about the whole affair and move forward in my life,'' she said. ''People said I would not be able to do that until I talked about it. Perhaps I should have done it a long time ago.''
In the deal shaped by an agent, Philip Raskind, of the Endeavor Agency, Tri-Star bought a 30,000-word draft of Mr. Sager's article -- which was trimmed to 12,000 words by GQ -- for $750,000. If the movie is made, the article will fetch $850,000 more. Mr. Sager receives about 45 percent of the sale, while Ms. Cooke earns about 55 percent. Ms. Cooke is also to serve as a consultant to the film.
Journalists have often been treated as heroic by Hollywood in such classics as ''The Front Page'' and ''Woman of the Year,'' but there was also Billy Wilder's corrosive portrait of a reporter in ''Ace in the Hole,'' with Kirk Douglas. Meanwhile, some of the best political films treat politicians in the worst way, among them ''All the King's Men,'' ''Advise and Consent'' and ''A Face in the Crowd.''
Ms. Cooke and Mr. Sager selected Tri-Star over several other studios largely because of the involvement of James L. Brooks, who directed ''Broadcast News,'' which was about television journalists, as well as ''Terms of Endearment.'' Mr. Brooks is producing the film along with Doug Wick, whose films include ''Working Girl'' and ''Wolf.''
What the producers as well as Mr. Sager say they envision is, partly, a drama that deals with Mr. Sager's infatuation with Ms. Cooke and their love affair set against the backdrop of the newspaper in the late 1970's and early 80's, still galvanized by its prize-winning coverage of Watergate.
''James Brooks said I was Stingo of 'Sophie's Choice,' '' Mr. Sager said, referring to the narrator in the William Styron novel. He said he hoped the film would capture the post-Watergate era among journalists in Washington. ''We were a bunch of young kids hanging out together,'' he said. ''We did things. It was the era of sex, drugs and rock-and-roll. Along with the story of Janet we want to do a story about journalists.''
Although no one defends Ms. Cooke's decision to sit down and write a fake article, Mr. Sager and Mr. Wick said, essentially, that forgiveness was finally owed to her.
''The basic issue of what she did was terrible, that's a given, but I do find it curious about the level of bitterness toward her even after all these years,'' Mr. Wick said. ''It's surprisingly unforgiving of a woman who did something so stupid and self-destructive, given the standards of the world all around us.''
Mr. Sager said in a telephone interview: ''Janet became a piece of history, but she really was a piece of psychology. People do strange and weird and messed-up things because they have a lot of problems. Somehow Janet's problems intersected with the course of journalistic history. Janet, I'm convinced, had no idea, no clue. She was a little girl lost. I don't want to be a bleeding heart, but that's the way it was.''
Ms. Cooke said what was ''wonderful'' about her sudden good fortune was that the money from Hollywood would help her ''take a huge monkey off my back,'' meaning paying off bills and not worrying about her rent and food costs. Her aim, she said, is to return one day to Paris and live there. In the meantime, she added, she wants to start writing magazine articles about social conditions in the United States.An ''October surprise,'' in political parlance, is the making of big news to affect a November election. Because such manipulation of events by government officials is unfair, the opposing party seeks to impugn the surprise's motive.
At least two events are in the pipeline, one that could damage and the other boost the Clintons. Both pose an ethical dilemma: Should the normal course of action be changed to avoid affecting an election -- or is that avoidance itself an intrusion into the course of law or diplomacy?
The first is the Washington grand jury's coming decision to indict or not indict Hillary Clinton and White House officials for obstructing justice by hiding subpoenaed documents and lying.
Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr knows he could affect this election by seeking that indictment this summer. He is surely aware of Justice Department guidelines discouraging pre-election indictment. However, if he deliberately slows down a criminal case lest it hurt a political candidate, he would subvert the democratic process -- and invite huge resentment if evidence is presented of White House wrongdoing too late for a national decision.
What's right? It's best to proceed as if there were no election. Neither speed up nor delay the process of law. After thousands of hours of grand jury testimony, some counts against some targets have ripened or dead-ended; the prosecutor should ask the Washington jurors investigating abuses of power to make a charge, to issue a public ''information'' or to close up shop. (The Whitewater grand jury in Little Rock, wading through complicated corruption, may take much longer.)
In the same way, though in an order of magnitude affecting human life, the ''October surprise'' dilemma faces Clinton Administration officials gathering intelligence on the source of two attacks in Saudi Arabia that killed 24 Americans.
If statements made by Defense Secretary William Perry on National Public Radio two weeks ago are accurate, the Saudis are ''close to completing their investigation'' and he anticipates their finding an ''international connection.'' Asked if that connection was Iran, Perry answered: ''possibly. . . . We know that Iran is very active in international terrorism, some of it directed against the United States . . . so, yes, they are the leading candidate. . . .''
Asked by the reporter Martha Raddatz if the U.S. would retaliate if the Saudi report pointed to Iran as the state sponsoring the terrorist act against us, Perry promised, ''If we have compelling evidence of international sponsorship of that bombing, we will take strong action. . . .''
Soon afterward, White House national security officials secretly tipped the Dole campaign to the likelihood of a punitive strike against Iran if that evidence became ''compelling.'' Since then, we have heard unconfirmed reports from Saudi oppositionists of confessions wrung from six suspects. Our officials hope these will not be beheaded as quickly as the last bunch, before our F.B.I. has a chance to see them.
Assume, for argument's sake, that the Saudi report and our intelligence point clearly to Teheran as the central source of the blasts that killed Americans. If sponsored by a state, those acts of terror become acts of war. How should the U.S. respond?
At a seminar here at the Republican Convention of former Secretaries of State (Kissinger, Haig, Shultz, Eagleburger), state-sponsored terror was raised only hypothetically -- not about this specific case -- and the panel agreed the U.S. response must be fierce. Senator John McCain, at the subsequent lunch, used the term ''disproportionate.''
That means to me that Bill Clinton should not be asking himself ''Will a military strike seem politically motivated to make me look macho?'' or ''Will more economic sanctions be enough?'' but should call Dole, and make the case to him -- as well as to Congressional leaders -- about ''compelling'' evidence.
If our retaliation against Iranian oil facilities is severe enough to make Teheran cease its terror war, he'll get that bipartisan support. And though the rallying-round would help the Clinton campaign, no Republican could properly complain about an ''October surprise.'' Neither the criminal law nor the law of nations need be suspended for an election.
EssayBill Mulcahy, a retired city firefighter, was enjoying the warmth of a recent sunny morning in his backyard in Queens. His father-in-law sat at a table under an umbrella and his niece lazily dangled her toes in a shallow, plastic pool. This, Mr. Mulcahy said, is the good life.
Then a jet suddenly appeared in the sky, shattering Mr. Mulcahy's quiet retirement. The plane passed over Jamaica Bay and soared above the Mulcahys' two-story house in Rockaway Beach, the roar of its engines smothering conversation.
''That was from Runway 31-L,'' Mr. Mulcahy yelled, his arms akimbo, his eyes resentful and glued to the plane as it flew toward the Atlantic Ocean. ''It had to make almost a 180-degree turn over Jamaica Bay to go over us.''
Most people living near Kennedy and La Guardia Airports might shrug off the din after a while. But in a city filled with neighborhood agitators and block revolutionaries, Mr. Mulcahy, 51, belongs to a particular Queens subculture: those who hate the airports but refuse to move. They memorize the designation of each runway and publish newsletters against the airports, with a feistiness that puts them on a first-name basis in Borough Hall, at the Federal Aviation Administration offices in Washington and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey atop the World Trade Center.
Three years ago, Mr. Mulcahy co-founded Sane Aviation For Everyone. Flanked by a former Roman Catholic priest from Rego Park and a septuagenarian podiatrist from Howard Beach, he has waged a relentless, sometimes colorful, campaign against airplane noise in news releases and marches, on public access television and the Internet.
The group is part of an increasingly sophisticated network of noise protesters who fax and E-mail one another studies and bills relating to their cause. From Queens to Seattle to Sydney, Australia, they share strategies on how to lobby politicians and battle their common enemies -- airports, airlines and government aviation officials.
''You become so involved because every rock you turn over, you find something nastier,'' said Jack Saporito, the director of the Alliance of Residents Concerning O'Hare International Airport in Chicago. ''This has become a full-time job. I used to have a small marketing company, and it's gone straight to pot.'' And so Mr. Saporito, 49, now works four hours a night as a janitor to ''keep himself above water.''
He and the others view themselves as crusaders against a neglected form of pollution: noise. They say they fight on behalf of apathetic neighbors. They want fewer nighttime landings and takeoffs or higher-altitude routes over their roofs or different paths altogether. Their critics see them, at best, as gadflies and, at worst, as conspiracy-mongers whose identities are dependent on the airports they hate.
Noise protesters are rallying these days against Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, which plans to add a third runway, and the new Denver International Airport, which opened last year. But the New York area, where a third of the airplane-noise-affected people in the nation live, seems the epicenter of the debate.
Relief comes for only a few and then for only two weeks near the end of the summer, when the United States Open prompts the routing of flights around the National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows. But moving flight patterns out of one neighborhood only puts them in another.
The Port Authority estimated in 1994 that 211,000 people, or more than 10 percent of Queens residents, were ''noise impacted,'' living close enough to the borough's two major airports that the average ground noise level from planes was above 65 decibels.
A jet taking off usually registers more than 100 decibels, using the standard measurement for the relative loudness of a sound. Some residents live so near to La Guardia that the average ground noise level around their homes (between 30 and 40 decibels during quiet moments) reaches more than 75 decibels, the equivalent of a car alarm. But the majority of those affected by jet noise at the two New York airports endure between 65 and 70 decibels -- enough for many schools to have qualified for funds to soundproof their walls and windows.
Houses near the airports stand a stone's throw from runways. Jets land and take off, as if a few feet above rooftops, rattling walls and windows, temporarily blotting out the sun, stopping people in mid- . . . . La Guardia disturbs more people, but the summer raises the noise to its peak at Kennedy. International travel increases. Jets need more power when the weather is hot. Residents' windows are open.
The situation begs the question: why do these people stay?
Why should they move, asks Allan Greene, the podiatrist who helped start the Sane Aviation group and has lived in a two-story house in Howard Beach since 1964. ''There are old houses here built before the airport was ever here.''
Mr. Greene, who dedicates three hours a day to airplane noise, said he suddenly became deaf in his left ear in 1989. ''The doctors claimed it was viral,'' he said. ''They don't know. I tried to get them to say it was aircraft noise, but they wouldn't commit themselves.''
If Mr. Greene describes himself as Sane Aviation for Everyone's whip, Frans C. Verhagen is its spiritual leader. After serving as a missionary priest in Ghana, the Dutch-born Mr. Verhagen became interested in ecology at Columbia University in the 1970's. He said he eventually ''evolved out'' of the priesthood, then married and taught environmentalism at the New York Institute of Technology and junior high schools.
Unlike the others, Mr. Verhagen, 60, lives in Rego Park, midway between the two airports. ''Our organization is about far more than working toward noise mitigation,'' he said. ''Noise policies represent only the tip of the ecological iceberg of neglect by the industrial technological paradigm of a mechanistic world view.''
The group had trouble focusing early on. When four of its members met with Representative Nita M. Lowey a year ago, she listened to them for 15 minutes. Then, she asked what they wanted her to do.
''We didn't have an answer,'' Mr. Greene recalled. ''It took us by surprise. We thought she would come up with an answer.''CONVERSE INC., North Reading, Mass., said Michael C. Bell, its president, had resigned to pursue other business interests. His duties will be assumed by Glenn N. Rupp, the chairman and chief executive.
LOUIS DREYFUS NATURAL GAS CORP., Oklahoma City, a unit of S.A. Louis Dreyfus & Cie. of France, promoted Simon B. Rich Jr., chief executive and president, to chairman. Mark E. Monroe, chief operating officer, was named to succeed Mr. Rich.
Executive ChangesMorgan Stanley Group Inc. agreed yesterday to pay $20 million to settle a lawsuit brought against it by West Virginia over a failed investment strategy that ultimately cost the state $280 million and forced it to raise taxes.
The settlement will allow the two sides to avoid a costly trial that had been expected later this year. And it comes after more than five years of legal maneuvers: a lower court had ordered Morgan Stanley to pay $56 million in 1992, but the State Supreme Court last year reversed that decision and had ordered a new jury trial.
Both sides praised the settlement, which was arranged by a private mediator in Washington. For Morgan Stanley, it will end an episode that began in 1987, when it, along with a number of other Wall Street firms, sold the state millions in highly risky securities in a state investment fund that later plummeted in value.
And, for the state, the settlement provides immediate cash rather than the uncertainty of gaining money through a jury decision, which could also be appealed by Morgan Stanley, adding even more years to this litigation.
''For practical reasons, we don't believe it makes sense to return to the original court to litigate the case all over again,'' Morgan Stanley said in a statement. ''The events in question occurred 10 years ago and it is simply time to close the case and put it fully behind us. We believe this is a fair and practical resolution.''
Morgan Stanley had been barred from doing business with the state because of this settlement, and it is expected that the settlement will enable the firm to resume selling securities and providing other financial services to the state.
Rudolph L. DiTrapano, a lawyer for the state, said the settlement was fair.
''Morgan Stanley had fought this case vigorously,'' he said. ''This was a case that could have gone on forever. And it could have been three or four years before we would have realized any money. This is fair.''
This case had attracted much attention among securities lawyers because it raised many of the issues that are still unresolved in a $2 billion lawsuit brought by Orange County, Calif., against Merrill Lynch & Company. While the numbers in the Orange County case are bigger, it touches on the same question of the liability of Wall Street firms for losses that occurred when they sold complex securities to local public officials.
''We do not see this as having an impact on our case,'' Paul Critchlow, a spokesman for Merrill Lynch, said yesterday. ''We have no comment on the Morgan Stanley decision to settle. And we remain fully confident of our legal position.''
In the West Virginia case, other Wall Street firms have already settled with the state. Salomon Brothers has paid $15 million; Goldman, Sachs & Company has paid $8 million, and County NatWest has paid $2 million. Smaller settlements were also made with Merrill Lynch and Citicorp's Citibank. Litigation brought against Chase Manhattan is still pending.
Morgan Stanley, however, stood apart from the other defendants, not only for refraining from settling, but also because it was one of the biggest suppliers of risky securities to the state. The West Virginia Consolidated Investment Fund was one of Morgan Stanley's biggest accounts. Indeed, the firm's trades with the state came to more than $20 billion in one three-month period in 1987.
But when interest rates suddenly rose in 1987 and the value of the state's holdings sank, Morgan Stanley continued to sell risky securities to the state to cover its losses and also lent the state millions more to continue its trades.
Dale Wainwright, a securities law expert at Haynes & Boone in Houston, said the settlement made sense. ''Both sides had reason to take a hard look and be concerned about this case,'' he said. ''There were substantial losses and the potential for a sizable verdict facing Morgan Stanley and, on the state side, they had placed a very substantial investment portfolio in the hands of persons who may not have been extensively trained.''Genta Inc., a biotechnology company, warned today that it would have to cease operations if it could not raise additional funds.
Genta also said that as of June 30, it did not meet the net tangible asset criteria required for listing on the Nasdaq market, and that its stock might be delisted.
The announcement sent Genta's already depressed shares plummeting to close at 75 cents, down 56.25 cents, or 43 percent, in Nasdaq trading. The stock traded at a 52-week high of $3.50 nearly a year ago.
Analysts said that there was still value in Genta's technology, but that the company might need a partner to go forward. As of June 30, the company had cash and cash equivalents of $2.3 million.
Genta is one of a handful of companies that were formed in the late 1980's to pursue a drug technology called antisense. Antisense drugs work by blocking the production of disease-causing proteins by means of a strand of synthetic DNA that is the mirror image of the so-called sense strand, or messenger RNA, that instructs a cell to produce the protein. Despite the simplicity of the concept, antisense drugs have proven difficult to produce. In recognition of that difficulty, both Genta and Gilead Sciences Inc., another early antisense company, moved to license drugs with more near-term potential, but while Gilead's first such drug recently received approval from the Food and Drug Administration, Genta will not be ready to apply for a review until next year.
Thomas Adams, Genta's chairman and chief executive, said in a telephone interview that the company had raised $6 million in March with the understanding that it would run out in September, so that the current situation was not a surprise. He said the company was investigating both potential corporate partnerships and the restructuring of its preferred stock into common, and he believes it can raise more money in time.
''We have investors who are ready to commit funds to the company,'' Mr. Adams said.
He said the company could file three new drug applications with the F.D.A. next year, for reformulated versions of existing blood pressure, anti-inflammation and Parkinson's disease drugs, while its antisense drug for cancer therapy will enter the second of three phases of clinical trials, also next year.
''Genta will survive,'' said Viren Mehta, an analyst with Mehta & Isaly. ''They have some patents, and the cancer gene they have selected is a good target and they control that,'' he said. ''If for no other reason than they have created an infrastructure worth some $60 million, Genta will have some value in the right hands.''WHILE economists are not lining up to congratulate Bob Dole on his plan to cut taxes even as he proposes a constitutional amendment to balance the budget, many do admire his skill in snaking a path between the deficit hawks in the Republican Party and the what-me-worry supply-siders.
But whether or not Mr. Dole is ever in a position to try to implement his plan, there is still a price to pay. For in suggesting that the American economy can painlessly grow its way out of its fiscal problems, Mr. Dole is postponing the day Americans face up to the gap between what they expect from Government and what they are willing to pay for it. ''He's setting the debate about what to do with Social Security and Medicare back five years,'' argued Paul Krugman, an economist at Stanford University.
Veterans of the Washington budget wars will recognize Mr. Dole's subtle technique in fashioning a hypothetical budget that honors all the graven images. There's a 15 percent income-tax cut and a break on Social Security earnings for the middle class, a $500-a-child tax credit and retirement accounts for homemakers to please the family lobby, capital-gains reductions for the rich and education incentives to cheer the proponents of investment in ''human capital.''
To cover the cost of the $548 billion in tax breaks and reduce the deficit to zero over six years, he asserts that $147 billion will come back as a growth dividend. That's almost double what Joel Slemrod, an economist at the University of Michigan Business School thinks is likely. But unlike Reagan-era claims that tax cuts would pay for themselves, it does at least pass the laugh test.
Then there's the invocation of the time-honored tradition that David Stockman, Ronald Reagan's budget director, called ''the magic asterisk.'' Spending is supposed to be reduced by $393 billion by implementing the Republican budget plan that was vetoed by President Clinton and that cost Congressional Republicans much of their political popularity. Another $217 billion in cuts are proposed, but the details are nearly as hazy as Mr. Stockman's phantom cuts.
Among the least plausible: $90 billion in ''administrative costs'' that, by default, would have to come out of all the agencies that have already been slimmed down. Then, among other proposals, there's another $32 billion from the Energy Department, which is more than the total now budgeted for its nondefense activities, and $15 billion from the Commerce Department, which might well require the gutting of the National Weather Service.
All this may be forgivable by the doubly debased standards of campaign and budget politics. What Mr. Krugman does not forgive, though, is the implication that six years is as far as one has to look. For even if Mr. Dole managed to balance the budget in 2002 after cutting taxes, the country would soon be drowning in red ink again.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, the projected annual deficit rises by $118 billion from 2002 to 2006. Thereafter, things really begin to cook. For even if the budget were balanced in 2002 and discretionary spending was frozen in real terms, if nothing was done to alter current benefit policies, the deficit would rise from about 1 percent of total national output in 2006 to 6 percent in 2020 and to 17 percent in 2050.
The explanation is simple. Revenues from Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes currently exceed outlays, but this surplus will begin to fall in little more than a decade. Unless expenditures are checked or taxes are increased sharply, they will push the budget deeply into the red by the second decade of the next century. And the effect will be magnified by the need to service the ballooning national debt: interest payments, now 3 percent of G.D.P., are projected under that scenario to reach 14 percent in 2050.
Mr. Dole's opponents are equally guilty of ignoring the long-term budget arithmetic. After all, Democrats made political hay of the Congressional Republicans' tentative steps toward containing the relentless rise in Medicare costs.
But the Republican candidate raises the ante by proposing big tax cuts and by taking Medicare, Social Security and military spending ''off the table.'' More important, by setting 3.5 percent economic growth as a target, he suggests that the hard budgetary decisions will never have to be made. For if the economy were to grow that fast over the next 50 years, rather than the roughly 2 percent projected by the C.B.O., Washington would be swimming in revenue.
Robert Reischauer, the former director of the C.B.O., noted wryly that the irony here was that anti-tax Republicans might actually promote the growth of government by playing budget politics as usual. The longer Washington waits to decide how to pay for projected deficits, he argues, the more likely they will be financed with tax increases. After all, the less warning the baby boomers have, the harder it will be to ask them to cover their retirement costs from their own savings.
Economic SceneKristin M. Anson, a 31-year-old radiology technician, and her husband, Bill, a 35-year-old truck driver, really want to buy a new full-size, option-laden Dodge pickup for upward of $25,000. But after carefully reviewing their pinched budget, they have decided instead to keep the 1989 Mercury Cougar they bought in 1992 for $9,900.
What irks them is that Mrs. Anson's older brother, who is a 45-year-old power plant foreman, has been able to afford a succession of new cars and trucks. ''It's aggravating that I work just as hard, if not harder, but the rewards do not come as easily as they do for people born 10 years earlier,'' Mrs. Anson said, balancing her 19-month-old daughter, Samantha, on her right hip at the county fair in this blue-collar town, some 40 miles south of Detroit.
Mrs. Anson is not the only one annoyed by the harsher financial realities faced by the 35-and-under generation. Increasingly, domestic and foreign auto makers worry that Americans born in the 1960's and early 1970's are proving a much less prosperous market than the graying baby boomers of the 1950's.
In response, the car companies are rethinking vehicle design and marketing strategies, aiming to match less expensive cars and small trucks with buyers who cannot keep up financially with their older brothers and sisters.
As Honda Motor tries to hold prices level for redesigned vehicles like the Civic coupe, it has hired authors of books about young people's finances to help it decide what features to omit. Ford Motor actually lowered prices on some versions of its Escort when it restyled the small car this spring. And General Motors and Ford both plan to go after the youth market by designing compact sport utility vehicles that could sell for under $15,000 with off-the-shelf engineering.
Indeed, the need to hold down costs for younger buyers -- who now account for a bit more than a quarter of new-car sales, a slowly eroding share -- is one reason that Detroit's Big Three are reluctant to grant significant pay and benefit increases in talks with the United Automobile Workers this fall.
Advertising campaigns are also being tweaked. After concluding that more and more buyers of Jeep Wranglers were turning to parents and grandparents for the money, Chrysler softened its rough-and-tumble cowboy theme this spring, said Thomas R. Krehbiel, a managing partner at Chrysler's advertising firm, Bozell Worldwide, a unit of Bozell, Jacobs, Kenyon & Eckhardt Inc.
Now, Chrysler's television commercials show 20-year-olds sitting around campfires in serene wilderness, with Wranglers parked nearby. A new radio spot features a young woman driving a Wrangler with a dozing mother-in-law in the back. Wrangler prices start at $13,995, making it one of the few vehicles cheap enough to sell extremely well to young buyers.
At such prices, though, the vehicles being marketed to younger drivers cost far more than the classic first cars of the past. In 1951, for example, a Volkswagen Beetle listed for $1,280 -- or $7,626 in today's dollars.
''The whole industry, domestic and nondomestic, shares a concern with respect to affordability,'' said Harry J. Pearce, G.M.'s vice chairman. ''You can't allow the pricing of our products to move beyond the market.''
Car makers are far from alone in trying to cope with the profound economic changes set in motion by the aging of the baby-boom generation. That group's huge numbers left a dearth of well-paying jobs for those who followed, including the last of the boomers, who were born in the early 1960's. The impact is being felt from the fashion business to the home-building industry.
And the concerns may only grow as the younger generation grows older. When baby boomers begin retiring over the next couple of decades, experts predict that the next generation will be unable to fill the boomers' shoes. For car makers, that would mean fewer sales of the more expensive -- and profitable -- vehicles that mark middle age.
Demographics can cut both ways, of course. Some economists have found evidence that the youngest Americans now entering the work force -- those born when the birth rate bottomed out in the mid-1970's -- may be doing better financially because they are in relatively short supply. Detroit's marketers are already studying the buying preferences of this group -- for instance, interviewing students on spring break in Daytona Beach, Fla.
For now, though, the car makers have their hands full trying to satisfy those born in the 60's and early 70's, a demanding constituency that may have little to spend but does not want anything that looks cheap or cuts corners on reliability and safety.
So far, Detroit's record has been spotty, with high fixed costs for engineering and factory work making it hard to offer cars under $10,000 and sport utility vehicles under $15,000. Starting prices on Dodge and Plymouth Neons, which are marketed as first new cars, are jumping $500, to $10,895, for the coming model year. And some of the least expensive cars, like Ford's diminutive three-door Aspire, which sells for $9,530, are having trouble attracting buyers, who are put off by the lack of space and style, among other things.
Because of the dollar's long slide, foreign car makers, too, have had a hard time producing inexpensive vehicles that meet the quality demands of young buyers. For example, Toyota Motor has just introduced a compact sport vehicle, the RAV4, which is aimed at young buyers but sells for $15,368 to $18,518 before options.
The hand-wringing over affordability and young buyers represents a sharp U-turn for car makers after years of catering to people born in the 1950's, the nation's largest generation and one of the most prosperous. It was this group that fueled the market for small pickup trucks in the early 80's and then, as it began producing its own mini-boom of babies, created the mini-van market almost overnight. Now, these drivers are buying extraordinary numbers of large sport utility vehicles like the Jeep Grand Cherokee and the GMC Suburban. More than half of all industry profits come from mini-vans and sport utility vehicles.
But ask auto executives about the generation born in the 1960's and they grow grim.
A few statistics from Census Bureau data and other sources demonstrate the scale of the problem. When the children of the 1940's were aged 25 to 34 in 1974, they needed to work an average of only 21.7 weeks to afford a typical car -- just a week longer than the average then for Americans of all ages. When the children of the 50's were the same ages in 1984, they needed to work 31.9 weeks, or three weeks longer than the national average.
But when the children of the 60's were the same ages in 1994, they needed 36.2 weeks, or nearly five weeks longer than the average.New York State's ambitious proposal to move almost all of its 3.5 million Medicaid recipients into managed care plans took a major step forward yesterday as the Federal Government announced the terms under which it would approve the plan. State officials immediately called the conditions generally acceptable, predicting that the plan would be in place by the end of the year.
The plan would require that all Medicaid recipients who are not in nursing homes get their health care through health maintenance organizations, in the hope of providing improved health care for the poor as well as curtailing costs in a program whose price has recently ballooned to $24 billion annually. About half that is borne by the state.
In a 50-page document, Federal officials set forth conditions that they would like the state to meet before granting final approval to the changes, The conditions included slowing the pace at which poor people were moved into managed care and making sure that plans were prepared to enroll patients with serious illnesses like AIDS.
Dr. Barbara DeBuono, the State Health Commissioner, who has been publicly impatient with the pace of Federal Government's review of her plan, said she was elated to have Washington's response in hand. ''We're pleased to have received the document since we have been committing our heart and soul to this program for 16 months,'' she said. ''There were not any great surprises and I'm confident that we can bring this to successful closure quickly.''
While yesterday's document does not represent even a conditional approval of the state's plans, its enthusiastic reception suggests state and Federal officials will find common ground.
Dr. DeBuono said that negotiations between the Federal Government and the state on the final terms for the Medicaid managed care program would begin next week and that she expected an agreement within four to six weeks, which would allow the state to begin enrolling patients by the start of next year.
Federal officials refused to discuss the details of their letter to New York State, saying it was merely a jumping-off point for negotiations. But they confirmed that they had sent Dr. DeBuono their terms and conditions for granting the state's request. New York State applied to the Health Care Financing Administration, which administers the Medicaid program, 16 months ago for permission to create its mandatory managed care program. The Pataki administration is counting on the plan both to help balance the budget and to become a centerpiece for its health care policy for the poor.
The plan would create by far the largest managed care system for Medicaid patients in the country and would be the first to require that large numbers of patients with serious medical problems -- including AIDS and chronic mental illness -- get their care through H.M.O.'s.
Even a number of health care advocates, who are generally leery about the notion of forcing poor people into managed care, expressed optimism that the negotiations would produce a satisfactory health system for the poor.
''There is good reason to be optimistic that the Clinton Administration and the Pataki administration can get together on this to make sure that poor people get the care they need and taxpayers get a good deal for their money,'' said Michael Kink, legislative counsel for Housing Works, a service and advocacy group for people with H.I.V. and AIDS.
Thirteen states have received approval to force Medicaid recipients into managed care, but the results have been mixed. In some states, Medicaid H.M.O.'s have been accused of unscrupulous business practices and shoddy health care.
New York's program would be more than twice as large as any currently running. The two largest plans at the moment, in Illinois and Ohio, have about 1.5 million participants each.
The document compiled by the Health Care Financing Administration raises numerous concerns about the proposal New York State submitted last year and proposes ways to address them.
Although Federal officials declined to describe the specifics of the document they sent to Dr. DeBuono, state officials and advocates who had seen drafts of it said that Federal officials felt that the state was planning to push patients into managed care too quickly. They said that the Health Care Financing Administration proposed slowing the timetable -- perhaps even bringing in one county at a time -- and instituting far more extensive checks on H.M.O.'s than the state had proposed to make sure that they had enough doctors to take care of the influx of patients.
The document proposes an even slower timetable for enrolling people with chronic conditions such as H.I.V. or AIDS into newly created ''special needs plans'' designed for such patients.
And it seeks to restrict how H.M.O.'s may market themselves to poor people. Last year, the State Health Department suspended enrollment in a number of the city's Medicaid managed care plans in part because they discovered that salesman were going door to door, intimidating poor people into joining.
Dr. DeBuono said that most of the concerns raised by the document about the state's original proposal had already been dealt with.
In the last 16 months, the Health Department has become far more vigorous in regulating the activities of health maintenance organizations that serve Medicaid patients, and the Pataki administration has proposed an H.M.O. consumer protection bill that restricts the activities of all plans.
But she said that New York officials still had to resolve some significant differences with their Federal counterparts over the next few weeks, particularly regarding the pace at which the plan could be phased in and how to organize the specialized plans for people with chronic conditions.
She said that the state and the Federal Government also had some serious disagreements about the plan's finances.Fidelity Investments cut its holdings of the Chrysler Corporation's shares by more than a third last month, perhaps contributing to a large selloff in Chrysler shares.
According to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission earlier this week by Fidelity's parent, the FMR Corporation, Fidelity mutual funds owned a cumulative 57.21 million shares of Chrysler stock at the end of July, equal to 7.8 percent of the company's total shares.
At the end of March, Fidelity owned 91.84 million Chrysler shares, or 12.2 percent of the total, adjusted for a 2-for-1 stock split paid last month. Some of Fidelity's stake might have been sold in the second quarter, but Fidelity's total holdings fell below 10 percent of Chrysler's total shares only in July, according to the most recent S.E.C. filings.
Chrysler's stock price tumbled in July, to as low as $26.25 on July 16, down from a 52-week high of $35 in mid-June. The shares fell 12.5 cents, to $28.125 yesterday.
The Fidelity Magellan fund's holdings of Chrysler also fell in July, according to the filing, to less than 5 percent of Chrysler's total shares, although it is not clear by how much.
Robert E. Stansky took over management of the Magellan fund on June 3, and although Chrysler remained among the fund's top 10 holdings at the end of that month, analysts have speculated that Mr. Stansky would begin selling shares of the auto companies and other cyclical stocks.
Those holdings were favorites of Jeffrey N. Vinik, who resigned as manager of the Magellan fund at the end of May. At the end of March, when the Magellan fund last reported its portfolio holdings in detail, the Magellan fund owned 38.4 million Chrysler shares (adjusted for the 2-for-1 split).
Despite the selling, Fidelity is apparently still Chrysler's largest institutional shareholder. The largest single shareholder is Kirk Kerkorian's Tracinda Corporation, which owns 103.8 million shares, about 13.7 percent of the total, according to Tracinda's most recent S.E.C. filing.
Fidelity mutual funds also cut their holdings in the shares of several other cyclical companies, including Deere & Company, the tractor maker. Fidelity held 24.29 million shares of Deere at the end of July, or 9.3 percent of the company's total shares. At the end of March, Fidelity funds owned 33.1 million Deere shares, or 12.6 percent. But the Magellan fund apparently was not among the funds selling Deere shares; the fund held 18.5 million Deere shares, or 7.1 percent of the company's total, at the end of July, about equal to its holdings in March.
Fidelity funds were active buyers of America Online Inc. shares last month, as shares of the computer network company were at their lowest level in a year. Fidelity funds owned 10.1 million shares at the end of July, or 11.1 percent of the total, up from 5.3 million shares, or 6.1 percent, at the end of March.Get 'em while they're cold. Investors who are longing for the hot new-issue market of last summer, when initial public offerings like Netscape Communications shot up during their first day of trading, should learn to enjoy the cooler weather. The decidedly tepid temperature of the current market offers buyers greater opportunity to snatch up stock in solid companies at reasonable prices.
The change in climate comes after Wall Street spent the last several months plying investors with countless Internet or technology outfits -- many of which were long on promise and short on actual experience, but were met enthusiastically by those eager to take part in a raging I.P.O. market. The average initial offering in May gained a blistering 25 percent in its first day of trading, according to the Securities Data Company.
But the subsequent chill in small-company stocks is forcing underwriters to serve up more enticing fare. Investors are turning up their noses at companies with short histories as too risky and instead considering more mature types.
''The companies that are more established and have revenues and earnings and a level of predictability are still of interest to the market,'' said Paul Grangaard, director of corporate finance at Piper Jaffray, the Minneapolis investment firm.
All of which is good news for portfolio managers who aren't looking to make a quick buck flipping I.P.O.'s and for individual investors who never get the opportunity. While the average initial offering gained only 8 percent in July, buying select I.P.O.'s is proving profitable, according to John Fitzgibbon, editor of the IPO Aftermarket publication. Of the 90 stocks that went public in the six weeks ending on Aug. 9, 70 are trading above their initial offering price. The I.P.O.'s have gained an average of 10.2 percent, compared with a 4 percent decline in the Nasdaq composite index in the same period.
''The aftermarket for I.P.O.'s is grinding right along and outperforming anything in sight,'' Mr. Fitzgibbon said.
The new environment favors companies with much less sizzle, to be sure. Consider the American Pad and Paper Company of Dallas. The company, which claims to have invented the legal pad in 1888, makes and markets nothing more exciting than envelopes and writing pads, but is profitable, before a one-time charge. When American Pad and Paper went public on July 2, its shares were priced at $15 -- at the bottom of its estimated price range -- and the stock closed the day less than 13 cents higher. The stock traded as high as $17.125 last week before closing at $15.75 yesterday.
''It tells you what people like after the tech wreck,'' said Elizabeth Dater, portfolio manager of the Warburg Pincus Post-Venture Capital Fund.
Another appealingly low-tech offering, despite its name, was Teletech Holdings Inc., a Denver-based company that operates telephone banks to handle customer calls for major corporations. The stock went public on Aug. 1 at $14.50, less than its underwriters had originally hoped. But the shares, which climbed as high as $18 during the first day of trading, closed that day at $16.875. They closed yesterday at $18.375, a 27 percent gain.
''It has worked out well and is good quality,'' said John Ballen, portfolio manager of the MFS Emerging Growth Fund.
Some I.P.O.'s are successful even when investors cannot count on profit. Although its underwriters had to slice its offering price, the Einstein/ Noah Bagel Corporation -- whose majority owner is Boston Chicken, the hugely popular I.P.O. -- is up 38 percent since its opening on Aug. 2 at $19.50. Those who seemed to be hoping that history would repeat itself bit on the deal, even though the company was not making money.
And hope continues. The stock of Hambrecht & Quist, the San Francisco investment firm that has profited handsomely from underwriting hot new issues, went public last Friday at $16. After opening at $18, the stock traded as high as $19.125 during its first day. It settled back down yesterday at $18.25.
But as long as the market remains relatively cool, investors should continue to get their choice of some good buys in the weeks ahead, according to Robert Natale, director of equity research for Standard & Poor's. He suggested that prospective buyers concentrate in areas that have been out of favor like energy, health care and technology.
Investors should still proceed cautiously, however, warned Michael Schonberg, who runs the Dreyfus Aggressive Growth Fund. ''This I.P.O. cycle has gone on for a long while,'' he said. ''In many areas, the best of the new leading companies have already come out.''
Although Mr. Schonberg said he had found some I.P.O.'s to his liking, they have been fewer and farther between.
Market PlaceWith Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto expressing his ''sincere apologies and remorse,'' Japan made its first payments today from a private fund to compensate Asian women who were forced into army brothels during World War II.
However, only a handful of the women are accepting the payments. Many others object that using private money rather than Government funds allows Japan to evade responsibility for running the brothels, which forcibly employed as many as 200,000 women, many of them teen-agers, from many Asian nations.
The initial payments of two million yen, or almost $19,000 each, were made to only 4 of the 107 former sex slaves in the Philippines today, one day before the 51st anniversary of Japan's surrender in the war.
''We finally got justice after more than 50 years,'' one of the women, Rufina Fernandez, 69, said at a brief ceremony at a Manila hotel, according to the Kyodo News Service. The payments were accompanied by a letter from Mr. Hashimoto saying that Japan is ''painfully aware of its moral responsibility'' in the affair.
''As Prime Minister of Japan, I thus extend anew my most sincere apologies and remorse to all the women who underwent immeasurable and painful experiences and suffered incurable physical and psychological wounds as comfort women,'' he wrote, using Japan's term for the women.
The Prime Minister's apology is similar to others issued since 1992, when the Government began acknowledging -- if only grudgingly and only when confronted with overwhelming evidence -- the role of the military authorities in coercing young women to have sex with as many as 20 or more soldiers a day.
Still, up until recently it was uncertain whether Mr. Hashimoto, who has nationalistic views regarding Japan's role in the war, would apologize. His reluctance forced the most prominent backer of the fund, the widow of a former Prime Minister, to resign in protest this spring.
By issuing his letter today, Mr. Hashimoto thus probably averted opening a new wound in Japan's relations with its Asian neighbors. But some critics still attacked the apology as not being strong enough.
''He does not recognize the nation's legal responsibility,'' only its moral responsibility, said Yoshiaki Yoshimi, a historian at Chuo University who unearthed much of the proof that the Government, not private enterprise, established the brothels. He said Mr. Hashimoto also used a less formal Japanese word for ''apology'' than he might have.
Even an official of the fund said the statement was not ideal. ''What the comfort women want Japan's society and Government to do is recognize that they were forcibly taken to work in the brothels, and in that regard the wording is very vague,'' said the official, Katsumi Taga.
Japan has refused to make direct Government payments because it is afraid claims will pour in from all sorts of victims of its wartime atrocities. Japan maintains that it settled all its legal obligations in agreements it reached with other nations after the war. So the Government last year created a nominally private Asian Women's Fund to solicit donations and make payments.
But that solution, too, is in danger of falling apart. Partly because of the opposition from the women, the fund has raised only about $4 million, far less than the initial goal of $10 million to $20 million and not enough for even the planned first-round payments to 300 women in South Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines.
Women in South Korea and Taiwan are refusing the payments and only seven women in the Philippines have applied, according to Mr. Taga.Thanks to Ross Perot's personal intervention, Richard D. Lamm, Mr. Perot's rival for the Reform Party's Presidential nomination, was able to to vote today in the balloting that will decide which one of them will become the new party's nominee.
Mr. Perot called Mr. Lamm, a three-term Governor of Colorado, at home this morning after reading an article in The New York Times, said Sharon Holman, the spokeswoman for the Reform Party and Mr. Perot.
The article quoted Mr. Lamm as saying that he, along with his daughter and father, had been unable to vote because as of Monday, they had not received paper ballots mailed by the Reform Party. The party was founded and financed by Mr. Perot.
While the more than one million party members and supporters have the option of voting for the party nominee on paper, by telephone or over the Internet this week, each voter must have a personal identification number; that number comes with the paper ballot in the mail.
On Tuesday Ms. Holman had said that party officials believed that they could not help Mr. Lamm and did not want to send out additional ballots. But today, Ms. Holman said that once Mr. Perot had learned of Mr. Lamm's predicament, he ''got Governor Lamm hooked up with someone from Ernst & Young so that he could vote by phone.'' The Ernst & Young accounting firm has been hired by the Reform Party to insure the fairness and integrity of voting for its Presidential nominee.
In Denver today, Mr. Lamm's press aide, Eric Anderson, said that Mr. Lamm voted by phone and that Mr. Lamm's daughter Heather planned to vote over the Internet.
''We've gotten reports from across the country from people who have not received ballots and believe they're eligible for ballots,'' Mr. Anderson said. Others have received more than one ballot, he added.
''The problem remains much bigger than this solution,'' he said.In a consolidation of two giants in the reinsurance industry, Munich Re agreed yesterday to pay $3.3 billion in cash for American Re, tripling the German company's business in the United States.
The sale was a bonanza for the investment firm of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Company, which had invested $300 million in a leveraged buyout of American Re four years ago and is to receive about $2 billion of the proceeds.
The deal follows a series of recent large acquisitions among reinsurers as companies seek to combine to accumulate greater capital and market share. It cements Munich Re's position as the world's largest seller of reinsurance -- essentially insurance sold to insurers seeking to share their liabilities with others and reduce their risk.
''Reinsurance is a mature industry and one of the best ways of getting growth is to buy it,'' said Steven Goldstein, a vice president of the Insurance Information Institute, an industry trade group.
Munich Re is paying $65 a share for American Re, whose stock has been climbing in the last three weeks on talk of a possible deal. American Re shares jumped $4.50 yesterday, to $62.875.
Saul Fox, a general partner at Kohlberg Kravis in charge of insurance investments, said his firm and the management of American Re had not been contemplating selling until early July, when the General Re Corporation, the largest American property and casualty reinsurer, took over National Re, a smaller rival, for $940 million.
National Re fetched a price that was higher than expected, Mr. Fox said. The transaction also illustrated that with power concentrating in the industry, smaller companies were likely to face increased difficulties.
''As the challenges got bigger, management felt it was going to be harder to compete with existing capital,'' he said. ''We needed access to greater pools of capital and that was something we couldn't provide.''
Following General Re's purchase of National Re, some losing bidders began talks with American Re, people close to yesterday's deal said.
Mr. Fox said Kohlberg Kravis and American Re felt the offer of $65 a share by Munich Re was ''a fair price, we felt comfortable with it,'' and agreed to the consolidation.
Michael Smith, an analyst with Salomon Brothers, said he had anticipated a selling price of $61 a share for American Re.
Even with the sale of its 64 percent stake in American Re, Mr. Fox said, Kohlberg Kravis was not leaving the insurance industry. The investment firm bought Canadian General Insurance Group Ltd. last year for $160 million and in January it agreed to buy Talegen Holdings, a property and casualty insurer, from the Xerox Corporation for $2.7 billion.
''This transaction was not planned,'' Mr. Fox said. ''It came out of the woodwork. It wasn't part of our strategy. We had to react to it. If anything, it has heightened our interest in the insurance business.''
In a phone interview from Munich, Peter M. Wagner, a senior member of Munich Re's management group in charge of North America business, called the purchase a way ''to increase our market presence in the United States in one stroke.''
Worldwide, Munich Re received $15 billion in premiums last year, including about $1 billion from subsidiaries in the United States, Mr. Wagner said. Munich Re expects the premium revenue of American Re to reach $2 billion this year, up from $1.6 billion last year, giving the new consolidated company anticipated revenue of $3 billion, he said.
The combined companies will become the second-largest reinsurer in the property and casualty field in the United States -- by volume of premiums -- after General Re. Until now American Re had ranked third. Now that spot will go to Employers Re, which reported $2.4 billion in premium revenue last year.
Tom Walker, a spokesman for American Re, said that the company would continue doing business as the American Re-Insurance Company, keeping its headquarters in Princeton, N.J.; he said that no changes in management or employee ranks were foreseen.
In addition to paying $3.3 billion in cash, Mr. Walker said, Munich Re would assume $787.5 million in American Re debt.
Mr. Wagner called the management of American Re an important selling point. ''They have an excellent team,'' he said. ''Much of what we are buying is their expertise and their client connections.''
Steven A. Gavios, an analyst for Bear, Stearns & Company, said more mergers of reinsurers were likely.On paper, it would seem that Assemblyman John Brian Murtaugh's days in office are numbered.
The 59-year-old Mr. Murtaugh, who is of Irish descent, has seen a dramatic shift in the demographics of his district in his 16 years in office. The district, which takes in the northern Manhattan neighborhoods of Washington Heights, Inwood and Marble Hill, has become less and less Irish and Jewish and increasingly Hispanic, with a burgeoning population of Dominican immigrants.
In fact, the boundaries of the district, the 72d, were redrawn four years ago to make it more likely that a Hispanic candidate would win, and the district is now almost 80 percent Hispanic and more than 50 percent Dominican. Non-Hispanic white voters account for just 11 percent of the district's population.
But the numbers do not tell the whole story. Although Mr. Murtaugh is facing a formidable challenge from Adriano D. Espaillat, 41, a Democratic district leader and longtime community advocate who was born in the Dominican Republic, it is Mr. Murtaugh who is anticipating a resounding victory in the Democratic primary on Sept. 10.
''I'll win this race,'' Mr. Murtaugh predicted in an interview in his district office, which is crammed with political memorabilia and photographs of New York City's erstwhile political leaders. ''And I'll win it with 55 to 60 percent of the vote.''
Mr. Espaillat acknowledges that his is not an easy task. ''I think that I'm going to win, but I think it's going to be a close, tough race,'' he said. ''It's difficult in any circumstance to defeat an incumbent, but the conditions right now are the best they have been.''
The campaign in northern Manhattan is, in many ways, a textbook example of a political problem that has long confronted Hispanic voting power in New York City elections. Though more than a quarter of New York City's population, Hispanic voters accounted for just 12 percent of the overall turnout in the city's 1993 mayoral election, according to the New York City Voter Assistance Commission.
''Here you have a district that is technically a Latino district, but is really not,'' said Luis A. Miranda Jr., president of the Hispanic Federation. ''And when you have an incumbent like Brian Murtaugh, who spends night and day with the Latino community, it becomes more difficult for Espaillat. You're not dealing with an incumbent who is disliked by the Latin population.''
The problem is not unique to either Hispanic voters or to New York City. Minority voting strength is often weaker than the numbers might suggest because the turnout of minority voters is usually lower than white voters. This has been the case in elections in the South, particularly Texas and Florida.
In the 72d district, the disparity, Mr. Miranda and several politicians suggest, is a result of the large number of Hispanic residents who are not yet citizens. Many of those eligible to vote, they suggest, are intimidated by the process of going to the polls, largely a result of language difficulty.
Recent voting patterns in the district show why Mr. Espaillat is fighting a difficult battle.
Though the district is almost four-fifths Hispanic, the voting strength of the Hispanic population is dramatically weaker than the population figures suggest. Nearly a third of the residents in that district are younger than 18 and, therefore, unable to vote. And that younger population is primarily Hispanic. On the other hand, the white non-Hispanic population is generally older and comes to the polls in reliable, high numbers.
Statistics from the 1993 mayoral election are also telling. Nearly half the adults in the district were not citizens. Of 68,000 Hispanic voting-age residents in the 72d, 35,000 were eligible to vote that year, according to a survey by the Hispanic Federation of New York City.
Of the 35,000 Hispanic people eligible to vote, 17,000 were actually registered, the survey said. In 1993, 16,200 people actually voted in the 72d Assembly District in the mayoral election. Of those, 7,000 were Hispanic, roughly 43 percent of the district's votes.
Five years ago, Washington Heights elected Guillermo Linares to a City Council seat, making him the first Dominican-American to sit in that body. And Mr. Espaillat would like to make history in much the same way in the Assembly by winning the September primary in this district where the Democratic nomination is tantamount to victory in November.
''This race represents a new generation of leadership for this district,'' Mr. Espaillat said, speaking in a campaign office bustling with young volunteers. ''I don't think it should center on race. Although I think the people in this community would look upon the election of the first Dominican assemblyman with a great deal of pride.''
Mr. Espaillat said that increased voter registration of Hispanic residents in the district would benefit his campaign. He said he would also rely heavily on his long record of involvement in community affairs in Washington Heights. A former commissioner in the city's Criminal Justice Agency, Mr. Espaillat has had responsibility for public safety issues in Community Board 12.
And after two unsuccessful campaigns for City Council -- he narrowly lost to Mr. Linares in 1991 -- he is well known in the district. He is now on leave from his job directing a drug-abuse prevention program.
Mr. Espaillat was also a monitor in the presidential elections in the Dominican Republic last May, an election watched with great interest in Washington Heights.
Mr. Murtaugh contends that as one of the Assembly's senior members, he has influence in Albany that can benefit his district. Moreover, he said he has been attentive to all the residents of his district during his stewardship.In a move that surprised some analysts as well as some company insiders, the National Steel Corporation said yesterday that it would strip V. John Goodwin of the post of chief executive, but would ask him to stay on as president and chief operating officer.
The chief executive's job will go to Osamu Sawaragi, the 67-year-old chairman of the board, who is a high-ranking executive with NKK, the Japanese company that owns 51 percent of National Steel.
According to National, the nation's fourth-largest steelmaker, Mr. Sawaragi, who is expected to move to the United States, will focus on finances and planning. Mr. Goodwin will concentrate on operations.
''We really don't know why Japan made this decision,'' said Ronald Werhnyak, National's senior counsel. He said Mr. Goodwin had ''taken Japan's offer to stay under consideration,'' and would decide shortly.
Analysts were similarly unsure what brought about NKK's dissatisfaction with Mr. Goodwin. ''Goodwin showed a lot of progress in improving costs, but maybe it just wasn't fast enough for Japan,'' said Richard Aldrich of Lehman Brothers.
Indeed, National Steel's second-quarter earnings of $10.4 million, or 18 cents a share, were well below the $30.3 million, or 64 cents a share, the company had realized in the similar quarter last year. But they were well above the 7 cents a share that most analysts had predicted.
Moreover, Mr. Goodwin, who joined National from U.S. Steel in June 1994, is generally given high marks for increasing production and calming volatile labor relations in the company's mining operations.
But profit under his leadership has not kept pace with that of many competitors. The company has an operating profit of about $13 a ton, compared with about $20 a ton for LTV, $21 a ton for Bethlehem Steel and $63 a ton for AK Steel, by far the industry's most efficient performer.
National's profit, like that of many competitors, was hurt when blast furnaces ran into unexpected downtime for reasons, analysts say, that had nothing to do with poor maintenance. But many analysts did say that National's persistently lackluster profits were more a sign of a bad product mix than of bad luck. They say that Mr. Goodwin, in his enthusiasm to beef up production, had concentrated too much on low-margin products.
National now ships about six million tons of steel annually, up from 5.2 million tons in 1994. But about 40 percent of those shipments are for hot-rolled steel, the lowest grade. Hot-rolled steel -- which has some uses in construction, but also goes into low-end products like garbage cans -- is a low-margin product that has run into intense competition from the many mini-mills that make it cheaply by melting down scrap steel.
Many analysts hope that Mr. Sarawagi will skew the product mix to the types of cold-rolled and coated steel used for the facades of buildings, or for one of the highest-margin uses of all, automotive bodies.
Mr. Sarawagi as been on National Steel's board since 1990. He became chairman in January 1994.
National's shares closed on the New York Stock Exchange yesterday at $11.375, up 37.5 cents.The uneven Arabic writing spray-painted in black across a bare cement wall reads ''Temporary Airport Entrance,'' with an equally crude arrow indicating a rutted sand track. The few passenger vehicles pulling off the far southern end of the Gaza Strip's main roadway negotiate the route with difficulty, fishtailing to a halt beside the old car seat and tattered umbrella that constitutes the Palestinian police checkpoint.
But the world beyond the checkpoint is anything but temporary. White jeeps with ''Gaza International Airport'' neatly stenciled across their doors whiz up and down the runway, an expanse of fresh asphalt that disappears into the horizon in the shimmering heat. Bulldozers beaver away at several sites along its edge, carving out niches for a passenger terminal, a fire station and the rising arabesque archways of what will become a six-story control tower. All that seems to be missing are airplanes.
''The airport is one of the most important symbols of the coming Palestinian state,'' said Fayez Zaidan, the director general of both the Palestinian Civil Aviation Authority and Palestinian Airlines. ''I cannot say it is the most important symbol, but at the moment it is the most tangible.''
The expanding dimensions of the airport, not to mention the sentiments behind it, contribute to growing alarm within the Israeli Government. Israeli negotiators monitoring the construction with overhead photography were dismayed to discover the runway stretching almost 3,000 yards, big enough to land major airplanes like Airbuses or Boeing 767's. Two attempts to order construction to be halted nearly precipitated gunfights between Israeli and Palestinian troops.
''We have had a lot of problems with this airport,'' said Shlomo Dror, the spokesman for the Israeli office in charge of liaison with the Palestinians. ''We don't want to see the airport as a gate for people we don't want to come into Israel. We are only talking about autonomy, they are not an independent country.''
Both Israelis and Palestinians use the airport as a prime example of the mistrust that dominates their relationship, as they try to transform myriad written agreements into reality. Israelis accuse the Palestinians of stealth in starting construction last January without prior approval. Palestinians accuse Israel of trying to stymie any real change in their lives.
The new Likud Government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, elected on a promise that peace agreements would not jeopardize Israel's security, largely halted negotiations on the entire spectrum of Israeli-Palestinian issues until this week. The airport is one of the first matters up for discussion.
The basic agreement is filled with elementary details of air transport. It says, for example, that Israel will not search the bags of Yasir Arafat or those of his wife when they use the airport. It says the Palestinians can have three fixed-wing, 35-seat aircraft for Gaza-West Bank flights. It says no Palestinian aircraft will carry weapons systems.
But the two sides have entirely different visions of what this airfield is to be. The Israelis expected something like a commuter field to help the Palestinians hop around the region, with Israel in firm control of the gateway. Now they worry that the Palestinians will open the gates to all comers or dispatch planes to places like Damascus. Flights to and from Gaza International are only supposed to be open to countries that have prior air accords with Israel.
For the Palestinians, the airport has always meant something larger. First, they want to be free of the lengthy, often humiliating searches they undergo at Israeli facilities, including occasional strip searches. But it goes beyond convenience.
''This airport will open the gate for the Palestinians, it will make us feel like we are part of the world,'' said Mahmoud El-Farra, a Palestinian-born, American businessman whose company is building the $45 million dollar airport with financial help from Egypt, Spain and Germany.
The airport could also mean more money for Gazans, by enabling Palestinians to export directly products -- such as flowers -- they now sell through Israeli middlemen.
Palestinian officials said they have no objections to Israeli control over security, air traffic control or other sensitive measures.
Mr. Zaidan noted that the fuselages will be painted with the words Palestinian Airlines and not Air Palestine -- in deference to Israel's feeling that the word Palestine carries the aura of statehood.
Two other planes have actually landed. Mr. Arafat, who usually takes off in his helicopters or his Algerian-registered executive jet from El Arish in Egypt, brought his plane down in May. Israeli officials said the Palestinians only asked to bring in a plane to test the newly completed runway, saying nothing about Mr. Arafat's arrival. The second plane was a Moroccan military flight bearing medical relief. When the Palestinians then asked for landing permission for the French Foreign Minister, Herve de Charette, Israel barred any more flights until negotiations were completed on running the facility.
''I cannot tell you the feeling of national pride, of happiness in seeing a Palestinian plane landing on Palestinian land for the first time,'' said Ramadan al-Assar, a Gaza City resident. ''But I don't think the Likud will let us open it or even use it, they are against any form of Palestinian autonomy on this earth.''
Israelis are themselves divided about the airport. Some worry that Palestinians will find a way to bomb Tel Aviv. Others wonder if it might be a cheap and convenient alternative to Israel's security-tangled airports. Some like the idea of Palestinians having a separate facility.
Israeli officials said that aside from concern about who goes in and out, they want to be able to check things like maintenance.
Above all, Israeli officials said they worry that traffic in surface-to-air missiles or illegal drugs would be hard to control without the kind of Israeli supervision in place at the two main land crossings. There, although the actual checks are done by Palestinians, Israelis hover behind the scenes and intervene in document checks or searches when deemed necessary.
No one is putting an exact date on when the facility might formally open because such negotiations are unpredictable. If construction proceeds on schedule, Gaza International Airport will be finished in June 1997, but a temporary control tower could be operating before that.In the weeks since Connecticut's high court ruled that de facto racial segregation in Hartford's public schools violates the state's Constitution, telephones of the civil rights lawyers who brought the case have rung with congratulations from colleagues across the country.
But whether from New York, New Jersey or more distant states like Minnesota, the callers were also seeking advice. In a legal war to improve inner-city schools that has been waged state by state since the 70's, when Federal courts barred integrating city schools with suburban ones unless there was intentional discrimination, the Connecticut victory opened a new front.
A product of years of discussion by leading desegregation and school-finance lawyers on how to help poor minority-group communities isolated in the nation's inner cities, the Connecticut case, Sheff v. O'Neill, is already a model for a suit seeking to integrate Minneapolis schools with those of its suburbs.
In New York, the case is being studied by lawyers challenging the state's financing of New York City schools, with their large enrollment of racial and ethnic minorities.
Its focus on improving the education of poor children by breaking up their concentration in urban districts is widely seen as the next step for school-finance cases, like New Jersey's 25-year-old Abbot suit, which have won more money for city schools without improving results.
''The notion that a segregated education is an inadequate education, whether or not there is intent, has the potential for reverberating in lots of cases,'' said Chris Hansen, senior staff counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union in Manhattan, a participant in the suit.
Though the State Supreme Court decision here sets no binding legal precedent beyond Connecticut, as similar issues are raised in other states, he said, ''There is a courage to the Connecticut decision that would make it easier for a second court to follow.''
As happened in suits challenging the equity of school finances, which have been heard in more than 40 states now, lawyers expect the decision to spur civil-rights advocates to scrutinize state constitutions for provisions guaranteeing not only equal educational opportunity, but also an adequate education for all children.
''We're learning from each other, and so, clearly everyone here was closely watching the Connecticut case,'' said John A. Powell, a University of Minnesota law professor who helped develop the Connecticut strategy as the A.C.L.U.'s national legal director, and is now involved in the Minneapolis suit. ''My anticipation is you'll see 20 states addressing adequacy issues in the next two years. Once you have four or five states adopting similar positions, it won't take the same kind of stretching.''
In New York, a lawsuit taking that approach in seeking more money for New York City schools is approaching trial next year in Manhattan. Michael A. Rebell, a lawyer for the New York plaintiffs, said, ''Sheff is helpful to us because to some extent we're dealing with the same problems, urban education in areas that have predominantly minority populations, and a situation where much of the public and many of the politicians have either forgotten these kids or are ready to abandon them.''
In 1982, the New York Court of Appeals rejected a Levittown suit charging that the state's school aid system was unfair. This time, Mr. Rebell said, ''instead of talking about disparities, we're talking in terms of an absolute entitlement,'' adding, ''The New York Constitution says every child is entitled to a sound basic education.''
In New Jersey, where the Abbot plaintiffs are again in court seeking more money, Gov. Christine Todd Whitman is addressing the adequacy issue herself, by proposing to tie state aid to the cost of meeting new state education standards.
How far legal strategies have evolved since Federal courts raised bars to desegregation suits in northern states, and the suits themselves fell from favor with many blacks as well as whites, is suggested by how the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund classifies the Connecticut suit, which it has largely financed. In the fund's Manhattan offices, the suit is nowhere to be found on the docket of desegregation cases. Instead, it is under the ''poverty and justice'' program, which was started in the mid-80's to attack entrenched poverty among blacks. An early suggestion for a name was ''the underclass project.''
While the Connecticut court based its decision on the harmful effects of racial segregation, the lawyers argued that the heart of the problem was that segregation concentrated extremely poor children in one district, compounding the problems that poverty brings to school, undermining the quality of their education.
''The goal of desegregation is always, in the beginning, a means to a true quality education,'' said John C. Brittain, a University of Connecticut law professor who is a member of the legal team. ''If 'separate but equal' had produced quality facilities, I don't think we would have had the challenge to segregation that Brown v. Board of Education produced.''
The Sheff v. O'Neill case goes back to the early 1980's.
A desegregation suit had already been withdrawn from Federal court, after the United States Supreme Court made it clear in a case involving Detroit that desegregation orders could not include suburbs unless the segregation had been intentional.
Then in mid-decade, the Hartford group aborted its own suit, on the eve of filing, because the city's minority groups weren't behind it. ''People in the communities of color had become disenchanted with school desegregation,'' Mr. Brittain said.
In addition, he said, the fastest growing minority group in Hartford was Puerto Ricans, who were more interested in bilingual and bicultural education than integration.
At about that time, however, the Hartford lawyers joined forces with the Legal Defense Fund, which was looking for new strategies to attack urban poverty. Lawyers were studying state constitutions like Connecticut's, which specifies education as a fundamental right.After years of headway by groups pushing for wider latitude in the pursuit of citizen complaints against the police, law-enforcement officers in California have begun to push concertedly back.
With a quiet but forceful lobbying campaign, some of the officers' unions and their supporters are pressing for new state laws that would remove unsubstantiated complaints from police personnel files and limit the time in which a citizen's complaint must be investigated. Advocates for the legislation say their goal is simply to guarantee due process for the officers, who may be accused of wrongdoing or abuse because of the effectiveness with which they do their jobs.
But the bills are being opposed by police chiefs in some major cities, who say they could undermine early warning systems that often depend on unsustained complaints as well as other information to identify officers who use excessive force or show a pattern of other problems that disciplinary systems may not correct.
The proposed legislation is also being watched closely by civil libertarians and others who fear the reversal of some gains made since the Rodney King beating case in Los Angeles by those seeking greater public accountability from local police forces. ''The officers do have legitimate fears about the misuse of information about complaints against them,'' said Merrick Bobb, the special counsel to the City of Los Angeles for police misconduct issues. ''But this is clearly an example of an attempt to swing the pendulum back, to bring things back to more like the way they were before Rodney King.''
State legislation in Pennsylvania that would have stripped cities of much of their authority to conduct civilian oversight of the police was defeated last year after six Philadelphia police officers were indicted on Federal charges of corruption.
In some other states, police unions have fought the tide of complaints by filing libel suits against those who accuse the officers. And in cities around the country, efforts to establish civilian review boards have frequently involved long warfare over the authority they will wield.
Attention to the issue in California has focused principally on the less ambitious of the two pending bills, the one that would remove unfounded complaints from the personnel files of local law-enforcement agencies. That bill is expected to be voted on by the state Senate as early as next week.
Supporters of the legislation insist that it would not jeopardize either the independent boards that cities have set up to review complaints or the early-warning programs that law-enforcement agencies have established themselves. Local police departments could keep track of the unfounded complaints, the supporters say, so long as the information is kept out of personnel files and not used in deciding to promote, transfer or evaluate an officer.
Still, the issue cuts to an important source of the mistrust between many police departments and their critics.
Across the country, surveys have shown that only a small fraction of the complaints made against law-enforcement officers by civilians are upheld, according to Samuel Walker, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. In the case of complaints vetted by civilian-oversight boards, the percentage is only slightly higher.
Of 10,611 complaints acted on by the Civilian Complaint Review Board in New York City over the 30 months ending last December, the board was able to determine whether misconduct occurred in only about 850 cases, according to a study by the New York Civil Liberties Union. The complaints were found to be justified in only about 4 percent of the cases acted upon. But about 70 percent of the investigations were inconclusive.
''Everyone recognizes that this kind of process is unsatisfactory,'' said Norman Siegel, the executive director of the New York group. ''People don't want to expunge the record because they distrust the process. But because of the mistrust, we wind up buying into a violation of the due process owed to the officer.''
Unlike many of its sister organizations elsewhere, the New York civil liberties group has supported the removal of unfounded complaints from police personnel files. Mr. Siegel said that was the only point that his group agreed on with police organizations in making recommendations in 1991 about how New York City should revise the Civilian Complaint Review Board.
Officials of California police unions argue that the same mistrust of the process has led to double jeopardy for officers.
''Because of Rodney King, police departments are more sensitive to complaints against their officers, and that's a good thing,'' said Bill Hemby, a lobbyist for the California Organization of Police and Sheriffs, one of the chief supporters of the pending bill.
''We've found that over the years, when an officer comes up for promotion or transfer, the people who evaluate them go on bulk,'' Mr. Hemby said. ''If an officer has a thick file of complaints, they're stigmatized.''The Food and Drug Administration has given the White House its proposed rule to ban the marketing of cigarettes to young people, an important, if interim, step in the Federal regulation of nicotine as a drug.
The still-confidential proposal, in the works for over a year, was delivered on Tuesday to the White House, which has 90 days to consider it and negotiate changes. The agency could then issue a rule, which would be final and binding because public comment has already been received. Anti-smoking advocates said today that they doubted the Clinton Administration would take that long, given the surprising potency of cigarettes as a campaign issue.
But much remains to be considered, including the impact of lawsuits by manufacturers, which could delay the enforcement of a final rule for years or even kill it outright.
Five tobacco companies last year asked a Federal District Court to block implementation of the Food and Drug Administration proposal, arguing that the agency had no legal authority to regulate nicotine. The suit has been dormant since then as the industry waited to see the final shape of the Administration's regulations.
Unless the Administration produced a proposal that cigarette manufacturers could endorse, ''final regulations would obviously activate another round of legal efforts,'' said Brennan Dawson, a spokeswoman for the industry's lobbying arm, the Tobacco Institute.
The White House review will be performed by a unit of the Office of Management and Budget, which will examine issues like the rule's cost-effectiveness and consistency with other Federal regulations.
The Tobacco Institute and anti-smoking groups said they had not seen the proposal, which is confidential. One Administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said today that the final draft was very close to the original plan made public by President Clinton at a White House news conference almost exactly one year ago.
That draft called for barring the sale of cigarettes and chewing tobacco to anyone lacking proof of being at least 18 years old, banning the sale of cigarettes in packs of fewer than 20, outlawing brand-name tobacco advertising at sports events and on items unrelated to tobacco, like T-shirts, and barring all tobacco advertising within 1,000 feet of schools and playgrounds.
Perhaps most important, the proposed rule would have banned vending-machine sales of cigarettes and restricted cigarette advertising in youth-oriented magazines to black-and-white text without photographs or drawings.
The Administration official said today that the final proposal had been rewritten to alter some advertising restrictions without diluting their effectiveness. That may reflect the influence of an important Supreme Court opinion this summer in which the justices struck down a state ban on advertising liquor prices, stating that the ban infringed free-speech rights.
The Court's ruling was seen at the time as a threat to the Administration's regulatory scheme. But officials of anti-smoking groups rebutted that today, saying the Court's decision rested on the premise that governments could not limit the flow of information without running afoul of the First Amendment.
In contrast, said John Banzhaf, executive director of Action on Smoking and Health, the agency's proposal to restrict some cigarette advertising merely prohibits ''the rugged cowboy and the sexy woman, and that's not information.''
But a second Supreme Court ruling, issued in July, may also have given the regulators pause. In that decision, the Justices ordered a lower court to reconsider its ruling upholding a ban on billboard advertising of cigarettes, in light of the free-speech implications of the earlier decision on liquor prices.
Government research has concluded that 9 of 10 smokers begin smoking before their 18th birthday. About 3,000 young people start smoking every day, and the Government has estimated that one-third of them will eventually die from smoking-related diseases.As President Clinton prepares to sign legislation ending the 60-year Federal guarantee of assistance to needy children, Administration officials are considering proposals to encourage the creation of jobs in the inner cities, possibly including new tax breaks for businesses.
Mr. Clinton's aides say he wants to unveil such a program -- most likely at the Democratic National Convention -- to show that there will be jobs available for people when they stop receiving welfare benefits under the time limits set in the welfare bill.
An announcement at the Chicago convention could also help mollify the party's liberal wing, which was angered by Mr. Clinton's decision to sign the Republican-drafted welfare legislation reversing social welfare policy begun by Democrats in the New Deal. The party split was demonstrated in the Senate, where 25 Democrats voted for the bill and 21 voted against it.
Mr. Clinton's aides say they are also examining a few more tax incentives that might be added to the President's list of limited tax breaks designed to help the middle class and working poor, which he has offered as an alternative to Bob Dole's plan for sweeping tax cuts. One idea under consideration is making it easier to receive tax relief on capital gains from the sale of a home.
But Administration officials say Mr. Clinton will not move closer to the more sweeping approach of the Republicans. Mr. Dole has said his plan will stimulate the economy with $548 million in tax cuts while still balancing the budget by 2002.
''We think the President's effort of disciplined deficit reduction combined with targeted tax cuts focused on education is clearly preferable to a massive across-the-board plan,'' said George Stephanopoulos, Mr. Clinton's senior adviser.
Mr. Stephanopoulos said Mr. Dole's proposal would either increase the deficit or force reductions in spending on Medicare and Medicaid.
The President has already begun to ridicule Mr. Dole's plan, saying it reminded him of a trip to a candy store.
''You know, 'I'll have some of that and some of that and some of that and some of that,' '' Mr. Clinton said last week in California. ''But if you eat it all at once, you might get sick.''
Clinton advisers say the President will sharpen his criticism as Democrats remind voters repeatedly that last year when House Republicans wanted to cut taxes by $245 billion and balance the budget over seven years, they also called for $270 billion in savings in the Medicare program.
While campaigning, Mr. Clinton has argued that his tax proposals serve particular social purposes, like helping people get higher education, and yet are small enough not to threaten deficit reduction. He has, for example, proposed a tax credit to make the first two years of community college virtually tuition free.
His aides said the same philosophy applied to the options they are drawing up for review next week. They include possible incentives for job creation in inner cities and for the hiring of former welfare recipients.
The job creation proposals are designed to mitigate the possible effects of the welfare bill, which will establish a lifetime limit of five years on welfare payments to any family and require most adults to work within two years of receiving aid.
''The President believes very strongly that successful implementation of welfare reform will depend on the availability of work,'' a White House official said.
Possible options, officials said, are the expansion of the enterprise zone program, which provides tax incentives for businesses to open in the inner city, or a refinement of a proposal already advanced by the President to use $2 billion in tax breaks to encourage the cleanup and revitalization of mildly contaminated urban industrial sites.
Another idea would be to offer designated tax relief on capital gains to encourage capital investment in distressed urban areas.
The tax cuts under consideration would range from $1 billion to $3 billion annually, officials said.A national political convention always gives a party a bounce in the polls, and there is evidence that the tightly scripted television gala being beamed nightly from San Diego this week is reaching into this Middle American place and winning over some of the women the Republicans are striving so hard to attract.
A week ago Nanette Ream, a Republican voter who owns Fidelity Tours, a small travel business, felt she could not support Bob Dole because he was too much the captive of big business and big money. But she liked the selection of Jack Kemp for his maverick streak, she is impressed with how well the Republicans have orchestrated their message of inclusiveness, and she got a kick out of Susan Molinari, even if the Republican Congresswoman from New York is not going to make the world forget Henry Clay or Daniel Webster. ''She's like a little Mary Lou Retton of the Republican Party,'' Ms. Ream said.
Kathy Magel, a businesswoman working out of her home, and an independent voter, was leaning toward President Clinton as of last week. But the Kemp selection, the Monday night lineup of two former Presidents who are rarely seen publicly now -- Gerald R. Ford and George Bush -- plus the Reagan video and the speeches by Nancy Reagan and Colin L. Powell absolutely dazzled her. ''Do you think they can keep it up?'' she asked the next morning, adding: ''I definitely won't vote for Clinton now. I'm leaning Dole-Kemp, though I can't take out Perot yet.''
Jana Demchak, director of development for a pregnancy center offering alternatives to abortion, usually votes Republican but remained undecided until Mr. Dole selected a running mate who opposes abortion and the party's delegates adopted its anti-abortion platform on Monday. She, too, is now on board for Mr. Dole.
Still, if the Republican ticket is narrowing the gender gap this week, there appears to be a long way to go here in Stark County, a place that mirrors national voting trends. A poll of the county in May, performed for The New York Times, showed Mr. Clinton ahead of Mr. Dole by 52 percent to 29 percent among registered female voters, and it is not hard to find Republican and politically independent women here who have not been won over by what they have seen this week, or who are are indeed angered by it.
This is a place where most of the men and women who make up the backbone of the county Republican Party -- Charles and Sarah Brown, W. R. Timken Jr., Representative Ralph Regula, Janet Weir Creighton -- believe abortion should be legal, a private matter rather than one for government.
Leading Republican businesswomen in the community like Amelia Renkart-Thomas, president of Metropolitan Industries, a fifth-generaton family floor-tile business, and Nancy McPeek, an assistant vice president for Bank One and past president of the local United Way, remain angry with Mr. Dole for what they see as his flip-flop over abortion tolerance language in the party platform.
Ms. Renkart-Thomas, who voted for Mr. Dole in the Republican primary, is now leaning toward President Clinton. Ms. McPeek is undecided. ''I have major, major concerns about the influence of the conservative right,'' she said.
The parade of Republican women speaking from the convention podium has not softened Ms. Renkart-Thomas's feelings. ''I'm angry that they'd have all those moderates speak last night who essentially say, 'Just ignore the platform, it doesn't make a difference,' '' she said. ''I'm a lawyer by training, and I think words do make a difference, and I feel condescended to.''
The gender gap is in part about social welfare policy. Programs like welfare, job training, subsidized housing and legal aid tend to serve more women than men, because women generally earn less than men and are more often the ones who must care for children when a family comes apart. In Canton, as in much of the country, these programs tend to be run by female administrators and female social workers.
Mary Cain, a Democrat who runs a free medical clinic for Canton's Republican Mayor, and Margaret Egbert, the director of the Y.W.C.A., who often votes for Republicans, including Congressman Regula and Senator Mike DeWine, both say they were willing to be persuaded to vote for the Republican ticket this time.
But both are leaning more strongly toward Mr. Clinton now. Ms. Cain resented the ''choreographed'' picture of the Republican Party she saw on television, the contrast between the march of diversity to the podium and a platform opposed to affirmative action.
''It was like every third person was black,'' she said, and ''I never saw so many sleeping babies at a convention.'' Watching the coverage, she wondered at times whether there were any white men left in the party.
Ms. Egbert, of the Y.W.C.A., was pleased with Mr. Kemp's selection and ''electrified'' by General Powell's speech. ''Then I was driving to Kiwanis,'' she said, ''and I heard a radio report that Kemp was modifying his positions on affirmative action and immigration to go along with Dole, and I said, 'It's already beginning.' ''
But if the Republican ticket still has a way to go with women, it has plainly invigorated the faithful among them this week. Cindy Lazor, a vice president of the Stark County Foundation, and Marilyn Thomas Jones, a prominent community volunteer, both feel stronger in their support for Mr. Dole because of the convention. Ms. Jones, a black Republican, a rarity here, was so thrilled about General Powell's speech that she placed a tape recorder by her television to save his words.
Ms. Creighton, the county auditor, and Ms. Brown, a community leader in nearby Alliance, are delegates in San Diego. They said in telephone interviews that the forging of a unified party there had been exciting and revitalizing.
''Abortion?'' Ms. Creighton said. ''It's not even discussed; it's old news. We heard a rumor that when Christine Todd Whitman was introduced, Kansas and Iowa were going to walk out. The Ohio delegation is right next to them. We were all ready to slide over and take their seats so you couldn't see it on TV. But nothing happened.''
Ms. Brown bought several buttons to bring back to Canton that say, ''Pro-Dole/Pro-Choice.''
Ms. Brown believes that as the election draws closer, abortion will recede as an issue, the economy will predominate, and the Republicans will win if they can convince people that Mr. Dole's pledge to cut tax rates by 15 percent is real and can be accomplished without running up the deficit.
Among those here who must be convinced is Beverly White, a supervisor in the county's department of social services who has been working in welfare programs for 29 years. Ms. White believes in welfare reform and is currently overseeing a program that trains recipients for jobs.The Government of Saudi Arabia now believes that native Saudi Islamic militants, including many veterans of the Afghan war, carried out the June 25 bombing that killed 19 American servicemen at a base in Dhahran, Saudi officials said today.
Since the bombing, the Government has detained scores of suspects who have been subjected to intensive interrogation about the bombing.
A Saudi dissident group in London, and an Arabic-language newspaper based here, say they have information that six suspects have confessed to involvement in the bombing.
But a senior Saudi official, while confirming that many militants were detained and being questioned, denied that anyone had confessed or that the case had been solved.
Saudi officials also said that they had evidence linking some of the detainees to the four men who were condemned and beheaded in connection with the bombing in Riyadh last November that killed five Americans and two Indians.
''Our mistake was to think that the first bombing was an isolated case,'' the senior official said. ''It now seems it was not an isolated case. There is an organization of violent opponents whose members are loosely connected, organized in semi-independent cells like other violent fundamentalist movements in the Arab world.''
But he added that if anybody had confessed, ''it will be announced immediately.''
''There is no reason to sit on it,'' he continued.
Officials at the Defense Department and other agencies said today that while the United States had been informed that a large number of suspects had been detained in Saudi Arabia for questioning as part of the bombing investigation, the Clinton Administration had not been informed of any confessions.
''We assume that they're rounding up all sorts of people to ask them if they know anything about the attack,'' a Pentagon official said. ''So there's no surprise that there have been detentions.''
The first report emerged on Saturday in Al Quds, a Palestinian daily based in London and known for its fierce opposition to the Saudi regime. In separate accounts the newspaper and the Movement for Islamic Reform, a Saudi opposition group, said that six Saudi Muslim fundamentalists, all former Afghan-trained fighters, had confessed to carrying out the June bombing. The six were reported to be from the Al Thoqba region of Saudi Arabia, near Al Khobar, where the June bombing took place. They represent a small part of the group of suspects detained over the last month by Saudi authorities in connection with the case.
Al Quds said the men made their confessions after having been subjected to torture.
Saudi officials confirmed that dozens of Saudi men are indeed being detained and questioned intensively. These men, willing to take up arms to defend their beliefs, are forming a new hard core of opponents to the ruling Al-Saud family.
In an interview today, Saad al-Faqih, a surgeon by training who speaks for the Movement for Islamic Reform in London, said information from ''multiple Islamic opposition'' figures in Saudi Arabia with close ties to the movement had confirmed the newspaper account.
He referred to the Interior Minister, Prince Nayef, a brother of King Fahd, in his description of the status of the investigation in Saudi Arabia.
''As far as I know, Prince Nayef is keeping the Americans away from all the details at this point,'' he said. ''But we are sure the young men have indeed confessed to the bombing, affirming their opposition to the American military presence in Saudi Arabia and to the regime. They are from a region that has supplied many of the estimated 6,000 Saudis believed to have gone and come back from Afghanistan in the past decade.''
Dr. Faqih left Saudi Arabia in 1994 and took refuge here after having signed several petitions to King Fahd demanding an end to corruption in the Saudi Government and seeking reforms. He has contacts in Saudi Arabia who keep him familiar with the militants and their views.
''Like the group that carried out the bombing in Riyadh last year, this new group is composed of young men who received training or spent time in Afghanistan,'' he said. ''They are uncompromising in their determination and will probably mount other operations against other targets.''
Their main demand is the release of noted militant religious figures jailed by Saudi authorities, particularly Safar al-Hawaly and Salman al-Awdeh. Both men, who are vehement critics of the Government, have been jailed since 1994.
Asked about the reports, a senior Saudi official who insisted on not being identified would say only: ''The investigation is ongoing. We may be headed toward a confession but we are not there yet.''In a surprise announcement that ended one of the best kept secrets of his Administration, the White House and Random House disclosed today that President Clinton has written a book about his vision for the future, and that a first printing of 400,000 copies will be shipped to stores next Wednesday.
Aides said that Mr. Clinton had finished the book, ''Between Hope and History: Meeting America's Challenges for the 21st Century,'' only last weekend, and that it had been kept hush-hush because right up until the last minute, he was not sure he could finish it to his satisfaction. Mr. Clinton has waived any royalties or advance so the hardcover can sell for the relatively low price of $16.95.
Sitting astride a horse named Wink at his vacation retreat here, Mr. Clinton said this afternoon that the book explains ''my philosophy about where America is and where we ought to go.'' He added: ''It's not an exclusive list of all the things I intend to do,'' but that ''it makes the argument about why I think the direction we're going in is right, why we're better off than we were and what I hope to do, and it's just something I wanted to say.''
It just so happens that the book will go on sale on the eve of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and every would-be President from Bob Dole to Colin Powell has pitched a book in the last year. But the White House went to extreme lengths today to insist that Mr. Clinton's effort -- a collaboration with William Nothdurft, a Seattle writer -- was not a campaign book.
''I don't want to be too cute about it,'' said Don Baer, the White House communications director, speaking to reporters on vacation with the President here on a conference call from Washington. ''But it really -- it was not conceived of, written or being published as a campaign book. You know, I don't think any of his advisers over at the campaign much knew about it.''
Aides said Mr. Clinton first conceived of the book last fall, when editors at Times Books, the Random House subsidiary that published his 1992 campaign manifesto with Al Gore, ''Putting People First,'' approached the White House through Mr. Clinton's old friend, Eli Segal, who negotiated arrangements for the first book.
But Mr. Baer and others said the new book would be less a recitation of promises than a statement of the larger themes that have filled Mr. Clinton's speeches in recent months. Its three main sections are ''Opportunity, Responsibility and Community,'' the New Democratic mantra that Mr. Clinton has sometimes described as a ''New Convenant.''
Mr. Clinton's wife, Hillary, is already a best-selling author. Her collection of essays on child-rearing, ''It Takes a Village,'' was published this winter, with an initial printing of 350,000 copies.
White House officials were extraordinarily tight-lipped about the book, giving no hint whatever that any announcement was coming today. In fact, they said, White House lawyers had ruled that Federal election laws barred Government employees from helping elected officials promote a book, so they waited even to mention it until Random House announced the news.
Mr. Clinton began working last winter with Mr. Nothdurft, a self-described independent policy consultant who also helped Mr. Gore with his recent book on streamlining Government. Random House officials said he was paid a flat fee, which they would not disclose.
Mr. Baer and another senior White House aide, Bruce Reed, also helped Mr. Clinton with the drafts, but as is the President's usual practice, he went over and over the text himself, pulling it out during trips on Air Force One. Several aides said the surprise had held in part because the consensus among the handful of senior advisers who knew of the book was that it would never actually get done in time.
Only about a dozen senior executives at Random House knew of the plan, and they went to extraordinary lengths to keep it secret. Production did not begin on the book until this week. It was set in type on Tuesday, the jackets were printed today, and it is to be printed and bound on Thursday, officials at the publishing house said.
While Mr. Clinton has often styled himself as the man from Hope, the Arkansas town where he was born, the ''Hope'' in the new book's title is actually a reference to a line from the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who gave it to Mr. Clinton in Ireland last fall.
''History says don't hope on this side of the grave,'' the line goes. ''But then once in a lifetime, the longed-for tidal wave of justice can rise up, and hope and history rhyme.'' Aides said Mr. Clinton used the line to reflect his thoughts about America's posture as it enters the next century.
The Random House spokeswoman, Ms. Roche, said Mr. Clinton did not plan to do a book tour. As it happens, of course, he will be on the road almost constantly after Labor Day, once the general election campaign begins in earnest.
''He may choose to do selected interviews in connection with the contents of the book,'' Ms. Roche said. ''And there will be other additional marketing efforts, obviously, to sell the book.''Saying there was too little news here, Ted Koppel and most of his staff left town today, leaving about 15,000 other members of the news media behind.
One question that television producers have been pondering all week is whether the Republicans have staged their convention so successfully that it no longer merits much coverage as a news event. At the end of his ABC News program, ''Nightline,'' on Tuesday night, Mr. Koppel said that that was his conclusion.
''There was a time when the national political conventions were news events of such complexity that they required the presence of thousands of journalists,'' Mr. Koppel said. ''But not this year.''
''If anything important happens,'' he added, ''we will certainly have an adequate staff here to cover it.''
''Nightline,'' which has broadcast from every convention since the program began in 1980, will take the same approach to the Democratic convention, Mr. Koppel said.
It may seem paradoxical, but the more the parties have tried to stage their conventions for the television cameras over the last two decades, the less the networks have trained their cameras on them, and the more the ratings have fallen. Returns have so diminished that one NBC producer said that in four years, the network might leave coverage of the conventions to its 24-hour cable channel.
Mr. Koppel is the first major television news figure to act on the widespread feeling here that news organizations are being had.
''This convention is more of an infomercial than a news event,'' he said, referring to the steady repetition of uniform party messages. ''Nothing suprising has happened; nothing surprising is anticipated.''
While the Republicans' message may be unalloyed, the media here are mind-bendingly mixed.
This morning, Oliver L. North, the host of a conservative radio talk show, was being interviewed at his booth by a television journalist. As they were observed by a newspaper reporter, Mr. North praised the convention's staging for the media.
''Haley Barbour has done a magnificent job of putting together a convention that allows the message to get out,'' Mr. North said, referring to the party chairman. ''It is getting through that twisted fog of the so-called mainstream media.''
Pulling at a 20-ounce bottle of Sprite, Gov. Tommy G. Thompson of Wisconsin strolled past Mr. North's booth and on down ''radio row'' here this morning. About two dozen radio hosts are arrayed on the second floor of the convention hall, offering one-stop spinning to Republican notables.
Beckoning, the microphones are lined up like so many free beers. Mr. Thompson came to do just one interview with a hometown station, but wound up doing five in less than an hour. He finished in a faint lather -- from the heat, not the questioning.
''Isn't it amazing the way the Democrats rail against tax cuts?'' Mr. Thompson was asked by Scott Hennen, whose program is broadcast across the Dakotas and into Minnesota.
In the interviews, Mr. Thompson reprised the theme of his speech at the convention on Tuesday, describing the Republicans' efforts to change welfare -- what Charles Sykes, a radio host for WTMJ in Milwaukee, called the ''empowerment agenda, which was resonating so well in the hall.''
In a brief interview between interviews, Mr. Thomspon explained the Republicans' media strategy, saying, ''We're trying to get beyond maybe the bias of some of the national reporters.''
But he did not stray long from the message itself.
''There's a dynamic duo that I think is exceptional,'' the Governor said of the ticket.
Even within the supposed anarchy of the Internet, Republicans here are trying hard to impose order. Off radio row, the Republican National Committee set up ''Internet alley,'' where politicians answer digital questions. There is a certain sameness to their sentiments.
Representative George Nethercutt of Washington wrote today, ''I believe the country will have a clear choice.'' Minutes later, Senator Richard C. Shelby of Alabama signed on with this observation, ''I believe the Republicans have put together a winning ticket for this fall and that the American people have a clear choice.''BICC Group P.L.C. of Britain reported yesterday that it had a first-half loss of $:2 million, or $3.1 million, after its operating profits were wiped out by charges linked to the elimination of 180 jobs in Germany and the writing down of assets.
A year earlier, BICC, whose businesses range from power cables to construction, had a profit of $:60 million. Revenues grew to $:2.4 billion, from $:2.1 billion a year earlier.
(Reuters)
INTERNATIONAL BRIEFSTrading in the Nintendo Company was suspended yesterday in Tokyo, after Nihon Keizai Shimbun, an economic newspaper, said the company's pretax profit would tumble 70 percent for the fiscal year. Nintendo denied the report and said its pretax profit might exceed its forecast of 27 billion yen, or $250 million.
The Kyodo News Service further reported that Gumpei Yokoi, head of Nintendo's development team, which developed Game Boy, was leaving. Nintendo shares were overwhelmed with sell orders. The Tokyo exchange said trading in the stock would probably resume today.
(AP)
INTERNATIONAL BRIEFSThe National Advertising Division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus ruled yesterday that while some complaints made by BMW of North America about a TV commercial for Volvo Cars of North America had merit, the acceleration test that was the focus of the spot was ''conducted in a reasonable manner.''
The spot -- created by the Messner Vetere Berger McNamee Schmetterer Euro RSCG unit of Havas Advertising in New York -- was labeled a dramatization of how a Volvo 850 Turbo Sportswagon accelerated faster than a BMW 328i sedan in a test from 0 to 60 miles an hour. In its protest, BMW contended that the testing was invalid, deceptive and conflicted with tests by BMW and automotive magazines.
The division found that Volvo had ''alleviated'' concerns of inaccuracy. But its ruling suggested that any future tests be labeled to indicate the use of only one testing methodology. The division also called the spot ''creatively excessive'' because some aspects of the actual test differed from those it depicted.
Robert C. Austin, marketing communications director at Volvo in Rockleigh, N.J., said: ''From our perspective, we prevailed. The fact of the matter is the Volvo out-accelerated the BMW in tests that were found to be professionally executed, fair and adequately substantiated by the N.A.D.''
Richard Brooks, a spokesman for BMW in Woodcliff Lake, N.J., said: ''Comparative claims made by individual manufacturers are more valuable to the consumer when the tests are based on a consistent methodology certified by an authoritative independent organization and presented in as straightforward a means as possible. BMW hopes this experience will be the catalyst for the industry to develop a protocol which will insure credible comparative information.''
THE MEDIA BUSINESS: ADVERTISING -- ADDENDATHERE is a timelessness about Crown Heights, a weary grittiness broken only by a flash of humor or an attempt at optimism from people who live apart even as they live together.
It was that way five years ago, when the Brooklyn neighborhood erupted in violence, and 17 years ago, during another period of unrest. And it was that way -- still -- yesterday, as word spread that a second black man had been arrested in connection with the anti-Semitic violence of 1991.
Few knew about the indictment of Charles Price for Federal civil-rights violations in connection with the stabbing death of Yankel Rosenbaum, a Hasidic student who was chased and stabbed by a gang of black men. The unrest followed the death of a black child, Gavin Cato, who was accidentally killed by a car in the Lubavitch leader's motorcade. Lemrick Nelson Jr. was tried and acquitted in state court in Mr. Rosenbaum's murder and is now facing Federal civil-rights charges.
When people on the streets of Crown Heights learned of the second arrest yesterday, most seemed to agree on one thing: ''We all want justice,'' said K Douze, a 22-year-old Kingsborough Community College student. ''I want it just like Jews want it.''
But then, as people spoke about the violence, and the neighborhood that blacks and Hasidic Jews have long shared uneasily, they voiced the same resentments and fears that have always divided the community as surely as does Eastern Parkway, the leafy boulevard bordered mostly by Jews on the south and blacks on the north.
WILL this help people to live in peace?'' asked Miriam Paltiel, a writer who moved from Worcester, Mass., three years ago. ''I sense a very funny thing here,'' she said, after visiting the synagogue in Lubavitch headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway. ''Everything is based on the pigment of your skin and not the kind of person you are. I learned when I came here that it was not advisable to talk to your neighbors, that if you make eye contact, that's a challenge. I have a baby grandchild. If I passed by in Massachusetts, everybody looked. Here, black people make believe they don't see.''
A block and a half away, Iotha Kentish stood in front of the house on Union Street that has been her home for more than 30 years, and offered a strikingly similar observation. ''Jews don't speak to me and I don't speak to them,'' said the retired nurse. She shrugged. ''They are too aggressive with their baby carriages, acting as if I'm not even there, making me walk around them. That's not fair.''
Blacks and Jews complained yesterday that they were not treated fairly by the police: blacks said that Jews still got too many privileges and were too powerful in the city; Jews said that blacks committed most of the neighborhood crimes. Some blamed ''outsiders'' for the disturbances in the summer of 1991, some worried that they would come back, and nearly everyone said that what was fundamentally wrong five years ago still is.
''If a man is guilty of murder he should be arrested,'' said Giles Francis, 28, a camera assistant for music videos. ''But we have to look past this incident and look for justice. The conditions that created that incident are real. There was real injustice.''
Absolutely, said a chauffeur, who would identify himself only as Lazer R., there is injustice to Orthodox Jews. ''Black people get more justice in New York than Orthodox Jewish people,'' he said. ''I know black people say that they have no justice, but I say it's Jews, Orthodox Jews.''
IF anything distinguished the tone of the neighborhood yesterday from that of the recent past, it was the tentative judgment that while racial divisions remained in Crown Heights, they were no longer quite as sharp as they had been.
Some Jews credited Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and his focus on law enforcement, especially compared with former Mayor David N. Dinkins, whom many Crown Heights residents still accuse of ordering the police to show restraint during the early violence. Mr. Dinkins has repeatedly denied the allegation.
Mr. Douze suggested there has been an incremental change. ''The anger is not as high as it used to be,'' he said. ''There was a lot of racial conflict in 1991. It was much different.''
Rose Gray, who was taking her daughter Kenyetta to the doctor on Eastern Parkway, said she prayed there would be no more trouble in Crown Heights. ''I don't want the trouble to be stirred up again. I want it to die.''
It was a sentiment heard many times before in Crown Heights. It will probably be heard many times again.
Metro MattersIMPERIAL CREDIT INDUSTRIES, Torrance, Calif., a financial services company, agreed to acquire as much as 49 percent of Dabney-Resnick Inc. of Beverly Hills, Calif., as part of a strategic alliance between the two.
SECTOR COMMUNICATIONS INC., McLean, Va., which owns an international long-distance telephone service, acquired an 80 percent stake in HIS Technologies A.G., Zurich, a software maker, for $10 million in cash and stock.
DYNCORP INC., Reston, Va., received a five-year subcontract with an estimated value of $565 million from Fluor Daniel, owned by the Fluor Corporation, to provide services at a former Department of Energy nuclear weapons plant.
COMPANY BRIEFSElaine Hawkins, a self-described happy homemaker from San Antonio and an alternate delegate to the Republican National Convention, is surprised, confused -- and angry. Mrs. Hawkins said she could not even recall hearing the word ''abortion'' mentioned from the podium.
''A lot of pro-life people are saying, 'What's going on here?' '' said Mrs. Hawkins, an ardent opponent of abortion. ''It's like they've squished the issue out of existence. We know it's there in print, but I don't hear anybody talking about it.''
Norman Grubb, an estate planner and delegate from North Dakota, is also upset.
''I guess Dole doesn't want it played up, so it's not an issue,'' Mr. Grubb said, ''but we should be talking about it.''
For all the attention focused on abortion as the party's platform was being drafted before the convention, abortion has remained an almost unspoken issue this week. The very forces that overwhelmed Bob Dole and his initial objections to the platform language have acquiesced in all but ignoring the issue as the party presents itself to the tens of millions of Americans who are watching the proceedings on television.
That decision has clearly angered many anti-abortion delegates here, and left the Christian Coalition's executive director, Ralph Reed, slightly on the defensive.
''I can remember having gone through the Ronald Reagan era, when everybody got warm fuzzies in the Roosevelt Room but nobody had any genuine institutional strength or influence,'' Mr. Reed said in defending the dearth of anti-abortion speeches from the podium.
He continued: ''I think that if you were to give me a choice between a prime-time speech and a third of the delegates' being associated with the religious conservative movement, I would take the latter any day of the week.
''The important point here is that the Republican Party is not a church. Its purpose is not to propagate the Gospel. Its purpose is to win votes and win elections.''
Gen. Colin L. Powell, of course, referred to abortion in his speech on Monday night, in the context of reminding delegates that he supported a woman's right to choose.
Former Vice President Dan Quayle discussed his opposition to an abortion procedure in a speech to the convention tonight. And Mr. Reed was seen encouraging delegates to cheer when Mr. Quayle mentioned the procedure, which opponents call partial-birth abortion.
Abortion opponents did have their day in the sun this morning at a huge rally under a sweltering sky, where the Christian Coalition's founder, the Rev. Pat Robertson, and other anti-abortion figures, including Mr. Quayle, proclaimed the party to be the one that opposed abortion.
Mr. Reed told the crowd: ''In case you haven't heard it from the podium the last two days, let me say it so there can be no doubt: The Republican Party is a pro-life party.''
Still, one major figure listed as an ''invited speaker,'' Elizabeth Dole, did not attend the rally. In her place was Joanne Kemp, the wife of the prospective Vice-Presidential nominee, Jack Kemp. Mrs. Kemp spoke for barely a minute, thanking the crowd for its support and introducing her children. She did not mention abortion.
Another major speaker, Newt Gingrich, also did not mention either abortion or school prayer, two topics that previous speakers had cited to inspire frenzied cheers at the rally. It was held in Balboa Park, miles from the convention site and hours before prime-time television.
Many who oppose the religious conservative movement argue that its willingness to play down abortion here does not reflect any diminution of its power in the Republican Party.
''I think the staged TV production is no indication that the party is more tolerant,'' said Michael Hudson, vice president of People for the American Way, a constitutional liberties group that is publishing a daily newsletter called ''Right-Wing Convention Watch'' here this week.
Mr. Hudson continued: ''They're tying to hide the real Republican Party that is in control of the convention by producing this 'Fantasy Island' prime-time show. They know full well that when Friday comes, their issues are going to be back in the forefront. It shows how sophisticated this movement is.''
Last week, the Christian Coalition made a major point of emphasizing its rapid-response operation on the floor of convention, in which ''whips'' can keep in touch with one another by cellular phones and hand-held computers and communicate instantaneous messages to sympathetic delegates. As things turned out, though, there were no floor fights over anything here and the operation has been inactive if not unnecessary.
What was eminently visible, however, was the emotion and intensity at the rally today. More than a dozen people held huge posters of a photograph depicting the bloodied head of an aborted fetus, and others held smaller signs of a dismembered fetus with an inscription that said, ''Repent -- Hell Is Forever.''Nearly five years after the violent racial clashes that tore through Crown Heights in Brooklyn, Federal law enforcement officials said yesterday that they had arrested a 43-year-old man whom they described as a prime instigator in the unrest that led to the fatal stabbing of a Hasidic scholar.
In an indictment unsealed yesterday, Federal officials charged that the man, Charles Price, had violated the civil rights of the scholar, Yankel Rosenbaum, by urging crowds of young men ''to find and attack Jews'' in the aftermath of a car accident that killed a 7-year-old black boy.
With the indictment, Mr. Price becomes only the second suspect indicted for crimes linked to Mr. Rosenbaum's slaying, although investigators believe that between 10 and 15 people participated in the attack. The other suspect, Lemrick Nelson Jr., was acquitted of murder in a state trial in October 1992, prompting anger and dismay among many of Brooklyn's Hasidic Jews and renewing tensions in the neighborhood.
The day after Mr. Nelson's acquittal, Federal officials began a civil rights investigation into the case in response to pleas by Jewish leaders and elected officials. That investigation led to the indictment of Mr. Nelson in 1994 on Federal civil rights charges, and to the charges now brought against Mr. Price.
Mr. Nelson, now 20, was named along with Mr. Price in yesterday's indictment after the United States Court of Appeals ruled that he should be tried as an adult, not as a juvenile as he was listed in the 1994 indictment. The maximum sentence for a juvenile is five years; for an adult, life in prison.
His lawyer said Mr. Nelson was in a probation ''boot camp'' in Georgia on an unrelated crime and would probably be arraigned after he completed that program.
Prosecutors said yesterday that the announcement of Mr. Price's indictment, just six days before the fifth anniversary of the crime, was not timed for dramatic effect or to bring the charges before the five-year statute of limitations that applies to most Federal crimes. There is some dispute over whether the statute would apply in this case.
While Mr. Nelson's indictment was expected, the arrest of Mr. Price, an unemployed laborer with a minor criminal record, was a surprise to many.
Federal officials say they now think Mr. Price is the man long sought by investigators after being seen on a videotape urging young men to attack Jews. Investigators would not comment yesterday on who shot the videotape. The tape was apparently made shortly after a Hasidic driver, in a station wagon in a procession including the Rebbe Menachem M. Schneerson, lost control of his car and slammed into a sidewalk, killing 7-year-old Gavin Cato.
The accident set off four days of violence that a state investigator later called ''the most extensive racial unrest in New York City in 20 years.'' There have been political repercussions ever since, with many Jewish leaders complaining that the police, at the direction of Mayor David N. Dinkins, delayed responding to the first reports of unrest. Those complaints became a campaign issue between Mr. Dinkins and his successful opponent, Rudolph W. Giuliani, in the 1993 mayoral race.
Investigators said yesterday it was Mr. Price who had been referred to numerous times in Mr. Nelson's state trial as the ''bald black man'' who whipped crowds into a frenzy during the unrest and who was also mentioned in a state report on the incident as a man who stood at the corner of President Street and Utica Avenue and shouted: ''Do you feel what I feel? Do you feel the pain? What are you going to do about it? Let's take Kingston Avenue!''
But, as with several other instances in which prosecutors tried unsuccessfully to track down suspects, they were never able to identify the man. One senior law enforcement official, who insisted on anonymity, said: ''The primary mystery throughout was: Who was he? We wanted to pursue and prosecute as many of the people involved in the incident as we could, as many as was appropriate. But you have to have evidence.''
An investigator on the case, who also insisted on anonymity, added, ''To a certain extent, there was a calculated, conscious silence on the part of people in the neighborhood about who this person was or might have been.''
Zachary W. Carter, the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said the Brooklyn District Attorney's office provided information that finally led Federal investigators to Mr. Price's door, though neither he nor Charles J. Hynes, the District Attorney, would elaborate yesterday on what that information was or when it was provided. But a senior law enforcement official said that a person being interviewed last year in connection with another crime implicated Mr. Price. Detectives matched Mr. Price's picture from prior arrests with his image on the videotape.
Since the beginning, the Brooklyn District Attorney has been plagued by false starts and failures in the case. In 1994, efforts to indict a man who was believed to have stabbed Mr. Rosenbaum were abandoned after a crucial witness admitted he had not been at the scene of the attack. The year before a 29-year-old, who was also described as a bald black man, accused of being the main instigator of the violence was acquitted by a Brooklyn jury on reduced charges after an hour of deliberations.
Wearing a red and black hooded sweatshirt, camouflage pants and white high-top tennis shoes, Mr. Price was arraigned quickly yesterday afternoon before Chief Magistrate A. Simon Chrein at the United States Courthouse. He pleaded not guilty. Alan Vinegrad, one of two Federal prosecutors on the case, asked that Mr. Price be detained because he was ''dangerous and a risk of flight.''
Mr. Price's lawyer, Darrell L. Paster, asked for a bail hearing, which was set for Wednesday. Then Mr. Price, who stood completely still and expressionless before the magistrate with his hands folded in front of him, was led away, unhandcuffed, by marshals.
Mr. Paster said later that Mr. Price denied the charges against him and that he was ''very confused and very frightened about the situation he is in.'' He would not comment on whether Mr. Price had been at the scene of the unrest the night that Mr. Rosenbaum was killed, or whether he was the man in the videotape mentioned by prosecutors. But he said Mr. Price ''told me that he was not involved in the crime he was accused of.''
''He hadn't been questioned about this, and he didn't know he was being considered as a suspect,'' Mr. Paster said.
Federal officials said Mr. Price had a criminal record that included several misdemeanor arrests and one felony arrest for attempted criminal possession of a weapon.The Republican Party tonight nominated Robert Joseph Dole as its candidate for President of the United States after an evening of tributes in which his friends, family and former colleagues presented him to Americans not as the familiar Washington politician but as a quiet, dignified war hero.
Mr. Dole's night of triumph at the Republican National Convention was the emotional crest of a political journey that began almost a half century ago when he was elected to the State Legislature from faded, flat Russell, Kan. It was a poignant evening for a 73-year-old politician who has overcome personal and political obstacles to embark on the last leg of his third, and most consequential, quest for the White House.
In formally nominating Mr. Dole, Senator John S. McCain of Arizona, himself a former prisoner of war who had suffered through more than five years in a Vietnamese prison, hailed the Kansan before a national television audience as ''a man of honor, a man of firm purpose and deep commitment to his country's cause.''
From a warm tribute by his wife, Elizabeth Hanford Dole, to the recollection of his daughter, Robin, about how her father managed to come up with tickets for a Beatles' concert, the program was designed to spotlight the soft and courageous side of a politician who is often noted for his sarcastic wit.
In fact, the evening was punctuated by symbols and oratory intended to smooth the edges of Mr. Dole and the Republican Party, including speeches by a former Miss America who is deaf and a former New York police officer who was wounded on the job who arrived at the rostrum in a wheelchair.
The evening's surprise, albeit a stage-managed one, came when Mrs. Dole abandoned the rostrum and roved around a front section of the convention hall like a talk show host, embracing old friends as she described ''the man who, quite simply, is my own personal Rock of Gibraltar.''
For a moment, Mr. Dole's beaming face flashed on the huge screens as he said hello to his wife from his hotel suite. ''Hey Bob -- come over here,'' Mrs. Dole said in her scripted comments. ''Now what do I do? Is he going to speak or am I going to speak?'' The scene was reminiscent of when Nancy Reagan waved to Ronald Reagan on a big screen when she addressed the Republican convention in 1984.
In the ritual roll call, the 31 votes from Mr. Dole's home state of Kansas put him over the top with the necessary 996 votes at 9:10 P.M. Pacific Time. That led the now official nominee to shout, 'All right! All Right!'' Mrs. Dole, who had been kneeling on the floor at his knee, stood up and hugged him, just after Jack Kemp, his running mate, reached across a couch to shake his hand. Throughout the countdown, Mr. Dole joked as he watched numerous supporters in state delegations praise his character and heroism.
Seated next to Mr. Dole was his longtime friend, Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa. At one point, a buoyant Mr. Dole slapped his knee and said, ''Got the Secretary of Agriculture here tonight.'' A shocked looking Mr. Grassley replied, ''I thought I was your friend.''
Before the roll call, Mr. McCain's speech had set off a prolonged floor demonstration, as frenzied delegates were bathed in large chunks of glittering red and blue confetti and chanted, ''Go Bob Dole!''
Mr. Dole himself, watching on television, was on the verge of tears at the end of the speech. ''We're on the map,'' Mr. Dole said, turning to Mr. Kemp.
In his tightly written speech, Mr. McCain declared, ''We nominate Bob Dole for President because this nation deserves better than the aimless direction we have endured for four years.
''We nominate Bob Dole for President because we will not take our leave of this century without affirming to the world that America -- blessed, bountiful, beautiful America -- will remain what she has always been: the last best hope of Earth.''
Mr. McCain added a harder edge as he sought to tell the life story of a man he depicted as more honorable than the current President.
''Others may offer you sound bites and showmanship,'' he said. ''But Bob Dole offers you leadership, leadership evident in the stature of a man who risked his life for love of country and considers service to America his honor.''
In another effort to show the Republican Party is inclusive, Mr. Dole's nomination was seconded by Henry Bonilla, an Hispanic Congressman from Texas, and Wendy Lee Gramm, a Korean-American who was a Reagan Administration official and is married to Senator Phil Gramm of Texas. She told the audience of how her grandfathers came from Korea to work in the sugar cane fields of Hawaii. With the help of a satellite hookup, the nomination was also seconded by young residents of Russell, Kan., as fireworks went off in the background.
Pressing the convention's theme of stretching the Republican tent, Gov. George E. Pataki nominated Mr. Kemp for Vice President, highlighting the former Buffalo Congressman's efforts to reach out to minorities and his vision for tax cuts.
''Tonight, we bring together two winners,'' Mr. Pataki said. ''A team that combines the leadership, the experience, integrity and honor of Bob Dole with the vigor, the vision and the ideals of Jack Kemp. I'm proud to call Jack Kemp my friend. I'm proud to call Jack Kemp a New Yorker. And I and all Americans will be proud to call Jack Kemp Mr. Vice President.''
Mr. Pataki's prominent appearance tonight was a turnabout for him after earlier in the week refusing to speak to the delegates about immigration because he disagreed with the party's platform, which calls for denying citizenship to the children of undocumented workers.
After the opening days of the convention when speakers who back abortion rights were front and center, former Vice President Dan Quayle delivered the first major address criticizing President Clinton for his veto of legislation barring one type of late-term abortion.A car bomb, presumed to be part of a long-running vendetta among groups that want independence for this French Mediterranean island, has strangled the summer tourist season most Corsicans depend on to earn a living, business leaders, hotel keepers and officials here say.
Now, they say, the question is whether a French Government package of tax breaks and aid measures that would make all of Corsica into a special economic zone next year can help end 20 years of violence.
On July 1, a huge explosion in the middle of the afternoon demolished a car parked outside a private security firm in the harbor at Bastia. Petru Lorenzi, a leader of the largest underground Corsican nationalist group, was killed, and another leader, Charles Pieri, was seriously wounded. Thirteen other people, including several French tourists, were also hurt.
''The car bomb in Bastia was a catastrophe,'' said a French Government official who asked not to be identified. ''The image of Corsica is so bad that I can understand why tourists don't want to come.''
Tourists, including a substantial number from Italy, bring about $1 billion a year to Corsica, said Alexandre de Lanfranchi, director of the Ajaccio tourist office. That is about a quarter of all the economic activity generated by the island's 240,000 people. But record-high unemployment of more than 12 percent in France and the relative weakness of the Italian lira against the French franc on currency exchange markets were discouraging visitors here even before the car bomb went off in July, some businessmen said.
A month after the bombing, the authorities say they still have no leads, though the presumption is that a rival group set off the bomb to kill the two nationalists.
Their organization, which calls itself the historic wing of the Corsican National Liberation Front, had reportedly been involved in secret contacts with the French Interior Ministry to try to arrange a political solution to the long-running struggle for independence.
The ''historic wing'' has denounced rival groups like the Corsican Nationalist Alliance and its leader, Petru Poggioli, saying they are trying to sabotage the talks.
''It is incontestable that some individuals and factions are determined at any price -- including the price of blood -- to prevent conditions of constructive dialogue from being established and preparing the way for essential reforms,'' the latest newsletter of the Cuncolta Naziunalista, the faction's legal political arm, said.
Mr. Poggioli said recently, ''All the Government wants to do is play one side against the other, to discredit all nationalists.'' Senior French Government officials say, without giving any details, that attempts by officials in Paris to start a dialogue were never limited to any one group.
''Dialogue is essential,'' one official said. ''But you don't discuss from a position of weakness.''
Prime Minister Alain Juppe tried to put things on a clearer footing during a visit here last month. ''Corsica is not and will not be a lawless zone,'' he told the Corsican territorial assembly, which includes representatives of the political arms of most nationalist organizations.
Mr. Juppe also announced a plan to create a special economic zone for Corsica for five years starting Jan. 1, with benefits that would cost France $140 million in lost revenue.
The plan, which was proposed by the Government in July but has not yet been approved by Parliament, would give Corsican businesses income tax relief and eliminate professional taxes that officials say can come to the equivalent of $20,000 a year for even a small enterprise.The airport here closed to civilian air traffic for good in 1992, but for a year it remained the only way out. Thousands of people, some carrying luggage, risked their lives in crazed sprints across the runway to a Muslim-held suburb on the other side. Dozens were killed by sniper fire. Then Sarajevans dug a tunnel beneath the runway, another route out, but not an easy one.
With a new, blue-and-white sign posted on the old terminal reading ''Sarajevo International Airport,'' this former front line reopened today in a ceremony presided over by Secretary of State Warren Christopher and Bosnian Government officials. Not to be upstaged, local NATO officials and the French military officials who have been clearing mines and readying access roads held their own opening the day before.
But from all quarters, the airport's reopening was hailed as a sign of hope and a reflection of Bosnia's slow crawl toward peace.
''This once-besieged airport, remembered around the world as a symbol of Sarajevo's isolation, is the newest symbol of this city's reintegration with the world,'' Mr. Christopher said after he landed here this morning. ''The horizons which were shrunk by four years of hatred and war are once again lifting.''
Though the airport still has only rudimentary navigation equipment and security, the first commercial flight touched down here at about 8:20 A.M. It was a Turkish charter jet, which sat on the runway as a prop during the ceremony.
As sniper fire and shelling from Bosnian Serb positions intensified in 1992, the airport closed down, then reopened to United Nations planes carrying food and relief supplies. But with the roads cut off, most people trying to flee had to get from the suburb of Dobrinja, on one side, to Butmir, the Bosnian Government-controlled suburb on the airport's other side. Dozens were killed trying to make the run, some backlighted by the glare of the spotlights of the French United Nations soldiers who had occupied the airport.
In the spring of 1993, a group of Sarajevans began to dig a tunnel from a house in Dobrinja to Butmir, although it, too, was soon subject to shelling and other dangers.
The United Nations eventually flew about 1,000 missions, with 13,000 tons of supplies, in the longest sustained airlift ever. The trips were dangerous (planes often landed with bullet holes the crew had never noticed in flight) and unpredictable.
In Dobrinja, where the courtyards of closely packed apartment buildings are dotted with makeshift graves, residents said they welcomed the reopening, even if, at the moment, most were too poor to afford air travel.
Fatima Handjic, 65, who stayed in her battered home throughout the war, said she hoped the airport would mean a renewed tourist industry and greater communication with the outside world, not to mention the fact that her daughter-in-law is an air traffic controller.
Djemal Hajdarevic, who is 42, said: ''We're starting to look like a real state. There is no real state without an airport.''
Not far away, four friends sat drinking beer in the early evening. One of them, Behrudin Bukvic, also 42, said he was glad the airport was reopening because he thought it would make arms shipments easier. ''All I can say is we want to be equal with the other side for the next war,'' he said.
They complained for a moment about how long it had taken to reopen the airport, but then Andan Berbic, 23, who had said little, piped in.
''There is a small problem,'' Mr. Berbic said. He smiled. ''We don't have any planes.''Nearly everywhere you go in corporate America, ''globalization'' is on the lips of executives seeking ways to grow. But in the eyes of the managers they send overseas to develop new business, the talk is full of lip service. Many return from international assignments feeling, not like conquering heroes, but like disillusioned victims of an ''out-of-sight, out-of-mind'' syndrome who have damaged their careers.
That is the message of a new report by the Conference Board, a business research group based in New York. It harks back to the days when American companies paid little attention to markets beyond the United States' shores and not now, when so many companies see big opportunities abroad. Last year, about 20 percent -- or $1.357 trillion -- of the total $5 trillion in sales posted by 8,800 publicly traded American companies originated in foreign countries, according to McKinsey & Company's Global Institute. That is up from 17.2 percent in 1990.
''It's very perplexing -- companies in general just are not doing a good job of planning global human resource needs and development,'' said William Best, a vice president in A. T. Kearney's international consulting business.
For its study, the Conference Board canvassed 152 companies whose 1994 sales ranged from $3 million to $75 billion -- two-thirds of them based in the United States and the rest in Europe and Asia.
It found that only 38 percent of the American respondents guarantee expatriates a position upon their return, compared with 74 percent of the European companies that answered the survey. And 87 percent of the American companies said that most repatriated executives were not promoted when they returned.
Often, companies leave executives in limbo until their tour is nearly up. Four months before repatriation, at 60 percent of the American companies surveyed, fewer than a quarter of the expatriates knew their new assignments.
The new survey shows that little has changed of late, despite the new international emphasis. A 1990 study, for example, found that 80 percent of United States expatriates felt that their overseas service was not valued by their companies. Two years later, a different survey disclosed that 77 percent of Americans sent overseas returned to jobs with less responsibility than the positions they held abroad. Up to half of them quit within three years of their return.
These bleak dispatches from expatriates do not mean that companies are not trying hard to increase their business in other countries. ''Companies still have great difficulties expanding overseas, but it has more to do with local conditions of competition, regulation and similar factors,'' said William W. Lewis, director of McKinsey's Global Institute. ''We've not studied this, but this could be a lower-level factor.''
Yet the problem is both costly and could grow. For 97 percent of the companies surveyed by the Conference Board, the cost of overseas postings equals at least twice the expatriate's salary, and for 68 percent of them the tally was three to five times the expatriate's salary.
In the last five years, 68 percent of survey respondents said they had sent more managers overseas. The majority -- 56 percent -- said they planned to increase the number of overseas assignments.
To remedy the problem, the Conference Board recommends that companies make global assignments part of career planning and give more support to returning executives and their families. Mr. Best offered another proposal. ''The companies that have done better jobs at this have mentoring programs,'' he said, ''that keep a senior mentor in the home country in touch with the expatriate.''SOME days it seems that everybody in Times Square is speaking German, or Spanish, or Japanese or any of a dozen other languages. As a tourist destination, Times Square is flourishing again.
''I have friends who haven't been here in years, and they walk through Times Square and they don't believe it; they're stunned,'' said Ken Kessler, the general manager of the Manhattan Chili Company, which opened at 1500 Broadway, at 43d Street, two years ago after 10 years in Greenwich Village. ''They seem to just be jamming the streets. There's almost a festival atmosphere.''
And no matter where the visitors come from, they all have to eat. As many have discovered, Times Square is turning into a giant food court.
In just the last couple of months, Times Square has seen the opening of Hansen's Times Square Brewery, a brewpub serving German and British food; Ferrara Pasticceria and Caffe Italiano, specializing in Italian pastries; O'Lunney's Times Square Pub, an Irish bar and grill, and Stardust Dine-O-Mat, a diner swathed in World War II nostalgia. Piccola Pizza Pasta Cafe, on Broadway near 43d Street, is to open soon.
At a higher culinary level, Coco Pazzo Teatro recently opened at the Paramount Hotel on West 46th Street, while John's of Bleecker Street is renovating an old church next to the St. James Theater on West 44th Street for a new pizzeria, to open next year.
But Big Theme restaurants predominate. Coming soon are: David Copperfield's, specializing in magic; Marvel Mania, specializing in comics, and Comedy Nation. Robert Earl, the theme-restaurant impresario who opened the All-Star Cafe, at Broadway and 45th Street, last year, has another restaurant planned (theme to be announced) for 1501 Broadway, at 43d Street.
It's as if Times Square were more a theme than a place nowadays. Step right up, get your ticket to Times Squareland! On West 43d Street, dark, dingy bars of 1940's vintage have been supplanted by restaurants nostalgically recreating the 1940's. Mythology is replacing history, and Disney and Madame Tussaud's haven't even arrived yet.
Not that any of this is inappropriate. In the old days, out-of-towners came to Times Square to gape at giant lobster palaces like Rector's or at the original Lindy's, where the raffish Runyonesque element indigenous to Times Square would hang out. Luc Sante, the New York City historian and writer, says that Times Square cannot exist as anything but a theme park anymore.
''When you read about Times Square in the 1940's, it's sort of so distant that the theme park is the only perspective that can approach it,'' he said. ''You can say that places like Lindy's were early theme parks. It was the kind of place that Times Square was best known for.''
Lindy's, of course, still exists, but not in its original form. The name is owned by the Riese organization, which foreshadowed the current theme craze with its own nostalgic revival.
Does this bode well for the appetite? Theme restaurants sell themes; food is incidental, sometimes made with as much thought as souvenir T-shirts. But with careful navigation, it is still possible to find good, satisfying food. Here is a look at six of the newest inexpensive restaurants to open around Times Square, along with three slightly older restaurants in the area.
Hansen's
160 West 42d Street, (212) 398-1234.
What is the appeal of the brewpubs that are sprouting all over town like mushrooms? The beer, of course. Since the beer is brewed downstairs (or upstairs, or in the back), it ought to be significantly better than store-bought beer, like fresh eggs or milk from a farm next door.
Hansen's Times Square Brewery feels not so much like a restaurant with a brewery in back as a brewery with a restaurant attached. Despite the shiny copper brewing tanks, the ground-level bar with its cinder-block walls is ugly and industrial, with supplies stacked in unsightly corners. The sweet aroma of malt can be enticing, but Hansen's smells more like a bar after closing.
The atmosphere improves greatly in the upstairs dining room. Large windows look onto Times Square north to Duffy Square. The people-watching is great, and tables are full of diners enjoying themselves, drinking great steins of beer and even, at the biggest tables, tapping their own kegs.
If only the beer deserved that kind of enjoyment. Four homemade brews ($4.25 to $4.50 a pint) are offered. One, a Dusseldorf amber, is awful, more like muddy water than beer, while the summer wheat beer is one-dimensional. Stick with the delicate, hoppy Pilsener and the malty bock, both decent but no competition for well-made bottled beers. The best appetizer is also the least expensive: a pale, soft pretzel. At $2.50, it is twice as expensive as a pretzel on the street, but it comes with sinus-clearing mustard and excellent coleslaw flavored with caraway seeds, and you get the view.
All the dishes should be as good as the grilled bratwurst ($10.50). The juicy, flavorful sausages are great with sharp mustard, crisp, greaseless fried onions, red cabbage and garlic mashed potatoes. But the veal cutlet ($15.50), as the Wiener schnitzel is called on the menu, is more bread than meat, served with limp fries, and fish and chips ($11.50), cylinders of breaded fish that seem prefabricated, should be wrapped in newspaper and then thrown out.
That said, the view from Hansen's is worth a trip, especially with children. Stay simple with food, maybe try a lager and lime ($4.50), Pilsener flavored with lime juice, and forget about those fresh eggs.
Stardust Dine-O-MatFor as long as people can remember, there have always been songs on summer nights filtering through the trees from the camp at continent's end. Today, the children, from Japan to New York, gathered as always to get a four-week imprint of the Pacific Northwest on their souls, are singing a Camp Nor'wester classic.
Let it rain,
Let it pour,
Let it rain a whole lot more Cause I got the deep river blues.
The blues are for real this time. One of the oldest summer camps in the West has been given one month to close out everything, to pack up the tepees, the canoes, the horses, the old piano, the books and backpacks, all the rag-tag bits of memory and leave Sperry Peninsula forever.
The man who handed Camp Nor'wester its eviction notice, Paul G. Allen, is one of the world's richest men -- better known as someone who makes dreams come true. A co-founder of Microsoft, with a net worth of about $8 billion, Mr. Allen was initially viewed as a savior when he bought the 387 acres that Camp Nor'wester has leased for half a century.
After all, he has used his software millions to finance new libraries, museums, parks, even the search for extraterrestrial life. To camp directors, he seemed an ideal landlord.
''When we heard the new owner was Paul Allen, everyone breathed a sigh of relief,'' said Paul Henriksen, the director of the camp. ''We thought Camp Nor'wester was saved, and that we could rest easy. Here was a man who was trying to do good things for the community, and he understood this region.''
But then, later this year, came a notice from the new owner: there was no place for Camp Nor'wester in the plans of Mr. Allen. He intends to build a house as long as a football field -- 300 feet on one side alone -- that will displace the open-air lodge and little buildings that have formed a collective church of the outdoors for nearly 20,000 children over a course of 50 years.
The announcement set off alarms among three generations of Camp Nor'wester alumni, a group that includes a White House speechwriter to President Clinton, an Olympic gold medalist in skiing, a former Governor of Washington State, and the late mother of Mr. Allen's longtime friend and fellow Microsoft founder, Bill Gates.
They lobbied. They wrote letters. They sent camp songs on cassette tapes. They sent videos of ''Free Willy II,'' which was filmed at Camp Nor'wester. And in late June, as the first of the two annual four-week summer sessions was getting under way, they set up a tepee on little rock bench above the bay.
''That's Paul Allen's tepee,'' said Crista Campbell, co-director of the camp. ''We still hope that he comes up and stays for least one night. All we want is for him to see what we do here, and maybe hear a song.''
Mr. Allen, through a spokeswoman, said he had no plans to visit Camp Nor'wester. Nor does he intend to extend the deadline for the camp's departure date. ''There is going to be a lot of construction going on there,'' said Susan Pierson, Mr. Allen's spokeswoman. ''It's not compatible with a summer camp.''
Mr. Allen would like to see the camp stay alive -- just not on his property. ''He thinks it's a great camp -- he clearly understands the value of it,'' Ms. Pierson said. She said Mr. Allen had offered to move the camp onto a small island he owns, just offshore from Lopez, about 80 miles northwest of Seattle.
But the island has no ferry service, unlike this island, which is the third largest in the San Juans. And it has no protected bays for the canoeing, sailing and rowboating that have long been integral to the camp.
When Mr. Allen bought the peninsula for $8 million, he got more than the three miles of shoreline, the old growth forest of cedar and fir, and the rock platforms with views to the 10,775-foot volcano of Mount Baker. He bought, as it turns out, what may be one of the finest collections of Northwest Coastal Indian art not encased in a museum.
The camp has long ties to the Kwakiutl Indian tribe of Vancouver Island, just across the water in British Columbia. After World War II, Bill Holm, a young apprentice to Kwakiutl chief Mungo Martin, began carving totems and canoes at Camp Nor'wester, where he worked as a part-time counselor.
Mr. Holm designed a Kwakiutl longhouse, or ceremonial and community center, that art experts say may be one of the most valuable structures of that kind still standing. Camp children still sing and tell stories around a fire inside the big house that is decorated with masks, murals and other artwork. It may rival some of the best coastal Indian artifacts inside New York's American Museum of Natural History.
Throughout the camp, there are totems and little mask carvings. A thirty-five foot Haida Indian canoe is anchored in the bay. Experts in Northwest Coastal Indian art say that Camp Nor'wester, almost by fluke, became one of the main threads that kept authentic tribal crafts alive when the native culture was nearly erased in the early years of the 20th century.
So, it put a considerable scare into some Camp Nor'wester counselors when they overheard members of the Lopez Island Fire Department tell some of Mr. Allen's contractors they would like to burn down most the camp's old cedar structures.After several months of hotly contested bidding, a former president of Hearst Magazines won an auction for the Petersen Publishing Company yesterday.
The former Hearst executive, D. Claeys Bahrenburg, declined to disclose the price for Petersen, which publishes such established titles as Hot Rod, Motor Trend, Guns & Ammo and Sassy. But a person close to the negotiations said that the winning bid was $450 million.
Mr. Bahrenburg agreed to buy the company, which is based in Los Angeles, with the backing of Willis Stein & Partners L.P., a private equity fund based in Chicago.
''It is rare -- and it's often a long wait -- to see a very valuable portfolio of magazines come on the market,'' Mr. Bahrenburg said in an interview after he agreed to the purchase.
Willis Stein also declined to confirm the price of the purchase. ''It is fair to say it was competitive,'' said Avy H. Stein, a managing partner at the firm.
Mr. Bahrenburg said that he would serve as chairman and chief executive and that he had appointed Neal C. Vitale as president and chief operating officer. Mr. Vitale will be leaving his current position as group vice president in charge of entertainment at the Cahners Publishing Company in Los Angeles.
The bidding, handled by Goldman, Sachs & Company, came down to two finalists, Mr. Bahrenburg and the K-III Communications Corporation, which publishes such magazines as New York and Soap Opera Digest, another person close to the negotiations said.
''We will not overpay,'' said David Adler, a spokesman for K-III, ''and we have a highly disciplined valuation process.'' K-III is majority owned by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Company, the New York investment firm.
Others who had at one time entered the running included the Times Mirror Company, which, along with its newspapers, publishes magazines like Outdoor Life and Popular Science; Mortimer B. Zuckerman, who owns U.S. News & World Report and The Atlantic Monthly, as well as The Daily News in New York; and American Media Inc., which publishes The National Enquirer and The Star.
Robert Miller, a former executive of Time Inc., also bid for the company, with the backing of Freeman Spogli & Company, a buyout firm.
Robert E. Petersen, the chairman and founder of Petersen Publishing, started Hot Rod magazine in 1947. Since then, the company has amassed 27 regular monthly magazines and 57 that are published sporadically, and about 43 million adult readers. The company is privately held; its annual operating cash flow is about $25 million.
Mr. Petersen will continue on with the company as chairman emeritus.
Willis Stein was set up in 1995 with $343 million by the lead managers of the Continental Bank Corporation's leveraged-buyout business, shortly after the bank was acquired by the BankAmerica Corporation.A 13-year-old who ran away from her Long Island home in March has been found slain in Easton, Pa., where she had taken a new name and lied about her age but could not flee her troubled past, the authorities said yesterday.
A suspect is in custody and two more are being sought in the torture and killing of the girl, Richezza Williams of 1315 Circle Drive West in Baldwin, L.I. She was known in Easton, in eastern Pennsylvania, as Materon Buffy Smith, 19, until dental tests and other examinations on her decomposed body established her real identity on Wednesday.
The girl's corpse was found in a wooded cemetery near the Delaware River last Sunday, five days after ''Materon Smith'' was reported missing, Lieut. Steve Parkansky of the Easton Police Department said yesterday.
He would not elaborate on the circumstances of the girl's death, but according to an affidavit filed in court, a woman told detectives that she saw three men drag the girl into the basement of an Easton house on July 28, saw them gather torture implements and heard the victim scream for mercy.
After the screams stopped, the three carried the girl's body from the basement in a box for disposal, the woman told investigators.
The suspects had traveled between Brooklyn and Easton, Lieutenant Parkansky said. A suspect, who is 19 and whom the authorities called Corey Maeweather (he called himself Corey Wallace at his arraignment in Pennsylvania yesterday), has been charged with homicide, kidnapping, aggravated assault and conspiracy.
The two who were being sought last night on the same charges are Stanley Obas, 18, and Kwame Simmons, 20, the Easton police said. They might be in Brooklyn and might be armed, the police said. The Nassau County police said yesterday that Miss Williams had been spotted in Brooklyn several times after her family reported her missing on March 19.
The Nassau County police said they thought she had slipped into a shadow life where drugs and prostitution are routine. What is known of her time in Easton seemed to bolster that theory. She lived for a while with a male companion in a building occupied by a used-furniture business, telling the owner she was 19.
The building where she was tortured and killed is about four blocks away. A neighbor said in a telephone interview last night that the police are called to the building several nights a week to disperse crack dealers and their customers.
Lieutenant Parkansky declined to comment on a possible motive for Miss Williams's slaying, but investigators are said to be checking a report that it involved a debt of drugs or money or both.
The suspect in custody served part of a 9-to-23-month term for cocaine trafficking before being paroled from Northampton County Penitentiary near Easton on May 16.
The woman who told the police of witnessing the abduction gave her account after Mr. Maeweather and Mr. Simmons broke into her home early on Aug. 5 and tortured her and a friend with knives and heated wire hangers, according to a detective's affidavit submitted at Mr. Maeweather's arraignment.
The police declined to comment on whether they thought the Aug. 5 assault was meant to intimidate witnesses to Miss Williams's slaying. In any event, a victim of the Aug. 5 assault, who had been convicted earlier of credit-card fraud and drug charges, went to the police.
She told them not only of being tortured but of having seen the three men take Miss Williams away on July 28 after brutalizing her. Mr. Maeweather was arrested on Aug. 5 after the assault and so was already in the Northampton County jail when the homicide charges were filed against him.THE stock market apparently was stunned when the Medaphis Corporation, a medical information company, disclosed after trading ended Wednesday that it would report a loss. But trading in the options market makes it appear that someone had advance knowledge that problems were on the horizon.
Medaphis, which had grown rapidly through acquisitions and become a Wall Street favorite, plunged $21.375 a share yesterday, to $14.25, with volume of more than 42 million shares, well over half the 71 million shares outstanding. The prior day, its share price had declined just 25 cents, on volume that was under a million shares and only a little above normal.
But if stock analysts were shocked by the news, there are indications that some people were not. Volume in put options -- options giving the buyer the right to sell Medaphis stock at a set price -- had begun to rise a few days ago, and zoomed starting at 2 P.M. Wednesday. That was more than two hours before the bad news was released.
The heaviest concentration of that buying Wednesday came in puts giving the buyer the right to sell Medaphis shares at $35, but only through today. With the stock trading above $35, and expiration so near, buying such options looked like a gamble. But it paid off. The buyers paid a total of $14,556, plus commissions, for the 232 such contracts traded Wednesday, paying premiums of between 50 cents and 75 cents a share. Their value at yesterday's close: $493,000. That is a one-day return of more than 3,000 percent.
Including puts with strike prices of $30 and $35, and expiration dates of today or late next month, a total of 664 contracts traded on Wednesday, up from 231 the day before and up from 8 such contracts the previous Wednesday.
The options were traded at the American Stock Exchange and the Chicago Board Options Exchange. Market-makers at both have complained, and although neither exchange would confirm that an investigation was under way, it is standard practice to begin one in such cases.
''There were six or eight of us that lost a combined $2 million on the day'' at the Chicago exchange, said John Henkel, a market-maker in the Medaphis options. ''I'm a little bit shell-shocked.'' He said the buying had come from more than one brokerage house.
A Medaphis spokeswoman, Lisa la Magna, said the company had not been aware of the unusual options trading, and had no idea who had made the trades. She said that prior to the close of trading Wednesday the company had not told anyone on Wall Street of the problem, although it had been discussed with the company's legal and accounting advisers.
The company said that it was having problems with a major European contract, and was reporting a loss on that contract, which involved designing and installing a computerized accounting system. It took a write-off of profits already reported on that contract. And it said that its efforts to consolidate offices in another operation, which provides accounting and billing systems for physicians and hospitals, was taking far longer than expected.
The company has been controversial for some time, with bears contending that its reported profits concealed cash-flow problems. The most recent report on short interest, covering trades through July 10, showed that almost 2.9 million shares had been sold short and not covered, presumably by traders betting the price would fall.
Robert Olstein, the manager of the Olstein Financial Alert fund, a mutual fund based in Purchase, N.Y., said he had recently sold the stock short because of concerns about the company's accounting, including rises in capitalized software costs and in what are called ''unbilled revenues.'' Such revenues reflect work done on contracts for which customers have not yet been charged. Apparently, it was the profits resulting from some of those revenues that were wiped out in the write-off that provoked yesterday's plunge.
For Medaphis, the loss of status as a Wall Street favorite threatens to end its rapid expansion through acquisitions, mostly with stock. Shares, which peaked in March at $53.25, fell as low as $12.81 yesterday.
For now, shareholders are big losers and some options speculators have made a windfall. But they will probably have to explain to investigators just how it was they came to place their bets when they did.
Market PlaceThe Hewlett-Packard Company, confirming an earlier warning of bad financial news, reported a 26 percent decline in its fiscal third-quarter earnings today.
The company, whose warning of a growth slowdown early last month had helped send technology stocks plummeting, reported profits of 40 cents a share -- well below the 49 cents a share that had been predicted in the latest survey of analysts by Zacks Investment Research.
Shares of the company's stock plunged $3.50, to $40, today. But analysts were unwilling to predict whether the selloff would affect other technology stocks on Friday, in part because another computer company, Cisco Systems Inc., reported better-than-expected profits today after the stock market closed.
As Hewlett-Packard had warned last month, its earnings were reduced by a pre-tax charge of $135 million, or about 13 cents a share, to cover the company's withdrawal from the computer disk-drive manufacturing business and to account for losses in that business.
Without that charge the company would have met Wall Street's earnings estimate, Hewlett-Packard's chief financial officer, Robert Wayman, said.
But David Wu, an analyst at the Chicago Corporation, said, ''It really didn't matter whether they met expectations. This wasn't a good quarter for H.-P.''
The earnings for the quarter totaled $425 million, compared with $576 million, or 55 cents a share, in the comparable quarter a year earlier. Revenue rose 17.7 percent, to $9.11 billion from $7.74 billion.
The most recent quarter, which ended on July 31, put an abrupt end to the rocketing earnings growth that the electronics manufacturer, which is based in Palo Alto, Calif., had enjoyed in recent years; earnings increases of 20 percent were not uncommon. But now the company's executives are expressing concern about the uncertain business climate Hewlett-Packard is facing in diverse markets including personal computers, work stations, peripherals, test equipment and components.
For the quarter, Hewlett-Packard said orders were up 8 percent, well below the 24 percent rise reported in the second quarter of this year and the 34 percent gain in the third quarter of the 1995 fiscal year.
In the third quarter, orders in the United States grew 4 percent, to $3.9 billion, while orders from outside the United States increased 11 percent, to $4.8 billion.
Company officials cited transitions to new products and a general economic slowdown in major markets for some of the slowdown. They also said that the company's fiscal third quarter had traditionally been slow and that last year's period had been unusually strong for the company.
''Our PC growth continues at or above the industry growth rate,'' Mr. Wayman said. ''But it is slower than when we were rapidly gaining market share.''
Mr. Wu, the analyst, said he was concerned that the company's growth appeared to be weak in both the United States and Asia. ''And when the computer business goes to single-digit growth, that's ominous,'' he said.
Cisco Systems, the leader in equipment and software used for controlling the flow of information in corporate computer networks, said that its fiscal fourth-quarter earnings rose 85.7 percent, to $266.8 million, or 45 cents a share. Analysts surveyed by Zacks had been expecting earnings of 40 cents a share.
Revenue in the quarter, which ended on July 28, soared 176.3 percent, to $1.72 billion, from $621.2 million a year earlier.
The results do not include earnings and revenue from the Stratacom Corporation, a networking vendor that Cisco bought last month, and $15.5 million in pretax expenses for the acquisition. With those results, Cisco had earnings of $276.6 million, or 41 cents a share.
Cisco reported its earnings after the Nasdaq market closed; its shares had ended the day's regular trading session up $1.125 at $57.75, in anticipation of good news. Trading in the stock, at volume of 9.9 million shares, was the third most active in United States markets. Cisco shares rose 37.5 cents, to $58.125, in after-hours trading.
COMPANY REPORTSOnly a month and a half after his current budget took effect, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani ordered $500 million in new cuts yesterday, saddling virtually all city agencies with another round of sharp reductions.
By ordering new cuts so early in the fiscal year, the Mayor appeared to be moving quickly to shore up soft spots in the $33 billion budget and to address looming budget gaps in the future that fiscal monitors have warned might trigger the city's worst fiscal crisis since the 1970's.
Only a week ago, Mr. Giuliani sharply rebuked the monitors, saying their criticisms were misguided and often politically motivated. He even renewed his call for the abolition of the state's Financial Control Board, which has overseen the city's finances since its brush with bankruptcy in 1975. But with the cuts ordered yesterday, he has embraced the sorts of steps the monitors have been urging.
The new cuts fall on top of more than $1 billion in reductions that were part of the budget that Mr. Giuliani and the City Council adopted in June for the 1997 fiscal year, which began July 1. And the announcement left some commissioners reeling, at least privately, about the prospect of digging still deeper into already strained agency budgets.
The $500 million represents for most agencies a 12 percent reduction in discretionary spending, or that part over which City Hall has control. Spending mandated by law, like Medicaid and welfare payments, are exempted from the cuts.
Only the Board of Education and the Department of Aging were excluded from the new cuts, while the uniformed services -- the Police, Fire, Corrections and Sanitation Departments -- face 5 percent cuts. The new Administration for Children's Services, whose budget the Mayor earlier this year vowed to hold steady after a highly publicized rash of child abuse cases, faces a reduction of 8 percent.
Mr. Giuliani's aides did not specify which programs or services would be cut, but his budget director, Joseph J. Lhota, sent commissioners a memorandum yesterday asking them to submit proposals during the next month. Working with the smaller pool of discretionary spending, agencies will likely have to cut their budgets for things like supplies and equipment, as well as contracts with private companies and personnel costs, such as overtime.
In recent weeks, the city's new budget has come under increasingly sharp criticism from bond raters and fiscal monitors, including the city and state comptrollers and the Financial Control Board.
They have warned that Mr. Giuliani has done little to ease the city's chronic budget problems. Rather, they say, he has simply shifted problems into the future and, in some cases, worsened the city's fiscal condition by relying on questionable fiscal maneuvers, such as refinancing debt, that will increase future costs.
Yesterday, First Deputy Mayor Peter J. Powers discounted the influence of the monitors, but said that the city needed to continue its efforts to bring spending under control.
''It's planning, planning to manage the budget,'' Mr. Powers said of the Mayor's order. ''It's the whole planning process starting earlier in the year.''
The state's Comptroller, H. Carl McCall, a Democrat who has been a target of the Mayor's ire, applauded the Mayor's actions. ''Although the Mayor in public rejects the advice of the fiscal monitors, he in fact follows it,'' Mr. McCall said. He praised Mr. Giuliani for ''beginning to take a long-term view'' of the city's budget problems.
The Mayor informed his commissioners of the cuts yesterday morning at his monthly cabinet meeting. Afterward, some commissioners discussed the new cuts with a grim resignation.
''It's really pretty depressing,'' one said, speaking on condition of anonymity. ''It's just unending.''
Another commissioner, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said it would be hard to make more cuts because the recent labor contracts that the Mayor negotiated with the city's unions forbid layoffs until 1998. Payroll is the largest part of any agency's budget, the commissioner said, and the no-layoff pledge precludes dramatic, money-saving steps like eliminating whole programs or services.
''I think it's going to be really difficult, coming right on top of serious, serious cuts,'' the commissioner said. ''Our agency is already about as skeletal as they come.''
In his memo to commissioners, Mr. Lhota said the new cuts were needed to start closing the projected budget gaps, including one for the next fiscal year, which begins July 1, 1997, that has already reached $1.7 billion. In future years, those gaps are expected to balloon, reaching at least $3.4 billion in 2000 -- the largest ever, both in absolute dollars and as a percentage of the city's budget.
The $500 million in cuts could reduce the future gaps significantly. It could also help reduce the need for still more dramatic cuts later this year or in next year's budget.
Mr. Lhota's memo ordered commissioners to do a ''functional analysis'' of their departments to determine what programs or services could be eliminated. He also said agencies should consider more reductions in the city's payroll, now at roughly 200,000 employees, through attrition and an early-retirement program already being planned.
''All areas of your agency's spending should be reviewed with the goal of operating more efficiently,'' Mr. Lhota wrote. ''In addition, the elimination of non-essential, non-core functions should be proposed.''Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin announced a new Cabinet today that looked remarkably like the old one -- with one striking exception.
Vladimir O. Potanin, 35, president of Oneximbank, one of Russia's richest and most powerful private banks, was put in charge of coordinating economic policy, including the sensitive issue of privatization.
Mr. Potanin, the only newcomer, is no stranger to the inner workings of government. One of a select clique of bankers and business leaders who bankrolled President Boris N. Yeltsin's re-election campaign, Mr. Potanin was also one of the main architects of a controversial privatization deal known as ''loans for shares,'' in which a few Kremlin-favored banks lent the Government money in return for the chance to buy shares in some of the state's most valuable assets at bargain prices.
The appointment of the brashly capitalistic bank president signaled the Government's commitment to continuing free-market reform. But it also suggested that the cronyism and sweetheart deals that veined the economic reform effort during Mr. Yeltsin's first term will not vanish in the second.
And those dueling characteristics of Russian economic decision-making will inevitably haunt the deliberations of the International Monetary Fund, which this week dispatched a team to Moscow to weigh whether to approve the next installment of its $10.2 billion, three-year loan. In July, the fund delayed handing out $330 million because of the Government's inability to collect sufficient taxes.
Two days before Mr. Potanin's appointment was announced, President Yeltsin granted tax breaks worth close to $1 billion to Norilsk Nickel, a troubled industrial giant that produces platinum and a quarter of the world's nickel. Oneximbank bought 38 percent of the company during the loans-for-shares sale last year.
''The tax break was necessary,'' Andrei Arofikin, an analyst at CS First Boston told the Moscow Times. ''But the question remains: where does the budget plan to get all its money if such companies as Norilsk Nickel cannot pay their taxes?''
Mr. Potanin, who said today he would probably resign from Oneximbank, is one of three First Deputy Prime Ministers who will report to Mr. Chernomyrdin. Viktor V. Ilyushin, 49, a longtime ally of Mr. Yeltsin who was his senior aide in the Kremlin and a key strategist of his re-election campaign, was put in charge of social issues.
Aleksei A. Bolshakov was named first among the Deputy Prime Ministers and propelled into the second-highest job in the Government. Until today, Mr. Bolshakov, 56, held the little-noticed post of Deputy Prime Minister in charge of relations with other former Soviet republics.
Mr. Bolshakov, who will be responsible for industry, construction, transport, communications and mineral resources and will also fill in for Mr. Chernomyrdin in his absence, is not beloved by radical reformers.
''This Cabinet is not worse,'' said Mikhail L. Berger, economics editor at the newspaper Izvestia, ''and maybe it is a little better because Potanin is better than his predecessor. But the rest is the same.''
Aleksandr Y. Livshits, 50, the President's economic adviser in the Kremlin, was named Finance Minister and one of the Government's eight Deputy Prime Ministers. Oleg I. Lobov, a Yeltsin crony since the days when Mr. Yeltsin was the party boss in Sverdlovsk, was demoted from First Deputy Prime Minister to Deputy Prime Minister. Most recently the President's envoy in Chechnya, he was replaced by Aleksandr I. Lebed.
Mr. Chernomyrdin grew touchy today when asked about how his team will coordinate with Mr. Lebed, the national security adviser, who was just given broad powers to reach a settlement in Chechnya, a task that until recently, was Mr. Chernomyrdin's.
''Don't impute confrontation; there will be no confrontation,'' he said sternly. He insisted that the President's advisers and his Cabinet will work as a team, ''and it will never be otherwise. Those who do not understand it or who don't like it should resign, and they will not work with us.''
Despite Mr. Chernomyrdin's pledge to reorganize and shrink the bloated bureaucracy, only one senior official was left out in the cold: Vladimir V. Kadannikov, a former director of the state-owned car company Avtovaz, who was named First Deputy Prime Minister last January to replace Anatoly B. Chubais, a liberal economic reformer.
Mr. Chubais, who had become a scapegoat for nationalists and Communists opposed to economic reform, was fired in January after the Government did poorly in the December parliamentary elections.
It was the ''loans for shares'' program, whose blatant favoritism loomed as an issue in the presidential campaign, that ultimately cost him his job.
While Russian financial leaders rejoiced over Mr. Potanin's appointment, politicians struck a more sour note. ''This is not a coalition government, and it is not a team of top professionals,'' said Viktor V. Parshutkin, an adviser to Vladimir P. Lukin, a leader of the liberal Yabloko Party in Parliament. ''This is a Cabinet of people who supported the President's re-election campaign.''Sears, Roebuck & Company agreed yesterday to buy the Orchard Supply Hardware Stores Corporation for $308 million as part of a rapid national expansion of its chain of hardware stores.
Orchard, based in San Jose, Calif., has 61 hardware stores, all in California. Sears has 115 hardware stores in 14 markets east of the Mississippi, but none in California. The company has said it may have as many as 500 hardware stores nationwide by the end of the century.
Brokerage analysts generally praised the strategy in Sears's acquisition of Orchard. ''It makes perfect sense; it's going to be a very nice supplement to Sears's existing business,'' said Kimberly K. Walin, a retail industry analyst at Furman Selz, a New York brokerage firm. ''Sears did not have an existing California business, so Orchard is a very good fit.''
Under the terms of the offer, which was approved by Orchard's board, Sears will pay $35 a share for all of Orchard's 8.8 million shares, or $308 million. Sears will also assume about $107 million of Orchard's debt. Freeman Spogli & Company, the leveraged buyout firm that acquired Orchard in 1989 and is still its largest shareholder, has agreed to tender its 1.6 million shares, which represent 18.2 percent of the company.
Shares of Orchard jumped $5 yesterday, to $34.75, on the New York Stock Exchange. Sears shares fell 25 cents, to $44.625.
''I think Sears got a steal,'' said Aram Rubinson, an analyst with Paine Webber, another New York brokerage firm. ''This accelerates Sears's push into this off-the-mall retail strategy.'' That, he explained, means more hardware stores outside typical locations.
George C. Strachan, retail analyst at Goldman, Sachs & Company, said, ''Strategically, it's a very well-conceived transaction, but in the big picture this is a fairly small event.''
That is because the acquisition of Orchard, which has a little over $500 million in sales, will not have much effect on the earnings of a giant like Sears. But, Mr. Strachan said, it should more than double Sears's stand-alone hardware stores, get it into California immediately, and allow it to use its private brands, such as Sears Craftsman tools and DieHard, more extensively.
''By combining the strengths of Orchard and Sears hardware stores, we will accelerate the growth of our successful off-the-mall hardware business,'' Arthur C. Martinez, Sears's chairman and chief executive, said in a press statement, referring to the strategy of developing more stores outside typical mall locations. Mr. Martinez, 56, took the helm at Sears in August 1995, and has shaken up Sears, cutting its work force, while focusing on its more profitable retail businesses.
Jan Drummond, a Sears spokeswoman, said the Orchard acquisition pre-empted a national expansion plan for its hardware stores, which would not have included California until 1998 or 1999. ''We have no Sears hardware stores in California,'' she added. ''This whole off-the-mall business is our fastest-growing business. Our growth strategy is focused on non-mall locations.''
Sears currently has no plans to change the name of Orchard Supply, Ms. Drummond said.
Orchard said yesterday that its earnings for its second quarter, which ended July 28, grew by 5 percent, to $5.9 million, from $5.6 million in the period a year earlier, while sales rose 11.3 percent, to $161.9 million from $145.5 million.Fidelity Investments has asked the Securities and Exchange Commission for permission to set up an affiliated insurance company to guarantee its money market mutual funds against certain losses of up to $100 million.
The plan, if approved, would give Fidelity a potential advantage over competitors in the mutual fund industry: the ability to assure shareholders in all Fidelity's nearly 40 money market funds that their investments would be at least partly insured against losses if an issuer of a security owned by the funds were to default.
That could serve to give Fidelity -- a unit of the FMR Corporation -- a big lift in sales of its money market funds, particularly to people who up to now have shunned such funds, preferring the safety of federally insured money market accounts at banks. Unlike bank money market accounts, money market funds, like all mutual funds, are not insured; therefore, investors face the theoretical possibility of losing some or all of their investment, although such occurrences are very rare.
Robert C. Pozen, a senior vice president at Fidelity, said in an interview yesterday that Fidelity did not intend for the insurance program to guarantee its money market funds against all losses. In fact, he said, the insurance would offer only a ''modest amount'' of protection in light of the $80 billion in assets invested in Fidelity's money market funds.
In addition, Fidelity said in its application to the S.E.C. that it did not intend to use the insurance plan as a marketing tool at all. Mr. Pozen said, however, that the plan was likely to be disclosed in each money fund's prospectus.
Some industry analysts said that the insurance plan could give Fidelity a big advantage over its much smaller competitors, which would be hard pressed to match the plan. That is because the Internal Revenue Service, which has already approved part of Fidelity's insurance plan, said that the plan was feasible in part because Fidelity could spread the risk across more than three dozen money market funds. Few, if any, other mutual fund companies can match that ability.
The proposal by Fidelity contemplates the formation of a mutual insurance company, which would be owned by the mutual funds it insures. Those funds, in turn, are owned not by Fidelity but by the shareholders in the funds. Barry Barbash, director of the S.E.C.'s division of investment management, said that although the agency had dealt with some of the legal issues involved in Fidelity's request, ''this kind of proposal is novel and unique.''
Geoff Bobroff, a mutual fund consultant in East Greenwich, R.I., said the self-insurance option would give Fidelity ''a huge advantage'' as investors sought safe places for their money.
This is not the first innovation Fidelity has brought to its money fund products. In May 1974, the company was the first to offer customers the ability to write checks on their money market fund accounts, which contributed to a huge inflow of cash to the Fidelity funds.
The issue of how to protect money market funds against unexpected losses grew prominent in 1994, when soaring interest rates led to big losses at several money market funds that had invested in derivatives that were sensitive to interest rate changes. In addition, the 1994 bankruptcy filing by Orange County, Calif., raised questions among fund managers about how to limit their risks from what they called unforeseeable events.
Money market funds are generally the most stable type of mutual funds, investing primarily in short-term notes issued by the Federal Government or private companies. But because there are a limited number of investments they can make under S.E.C. rules, money market funds try to distinguish themselves by squeezing every bit of yield, or return to investors, out of the securities they purchase.
Municipal bond funds and some tax-exempt money market funds are wholly or partly insured against some losses. The insurance typically is underwritten by the governmental body that issues the securities in the portfolio or by a third party, like MBIA Inc., a municipal bond insurer, at the issuer's expense. In addition, fund managers sometimes buy their own insurance on individual holdings in their portfolio.
But that type of insurance, which might cost up to 1 percent of the amount of assets insured, is prohibitively expensive for money market funds, which typically offer investors an annual return of only a few percentage points.
Mr. Pozen said in setting up its own insurance company, Fidelity could offer affordable insurance for the money market funds. ''This is simply a cost-effective and tax-efficient way to deal with a relatively remote risk,'' he said.
In seeking to play down the importance of the insurance effort, Mr. Pozen stressed that the insurance would cover only losses attributable to default by the issuer of a security. Not covered by the insurance, therefore, would be losses resulting from changes in interest rates, so-called market risk, or losses from operational risk, such as fraud on the part of Fidelity or its employees.
The latter forms of losses are arguably much less likely to occur. In the wake of the derivative-related losses by several money market funds in 1994, the S.E.C. tightened restrictions on what type of investments money market funds can hold. And by investing their money with Fidelity, customers are assuming that Fidelity has in place safeguards against its employees absconding with shareholder money.
And while the amount of the insurance coverage contemplated by Fidelity is relatively small at $100 million, that is more than the losses faced in recent years by many of the money funds that ran into derivative-related losses. Those losses most often were made up by the fund management companies, several of which made cash infusions into funds faced with derivative-related losses to avoid ''breaking the buck'' -- having the fund's net asset value fall below the $1 a share that all money market funds try to maintain.
Not all such losses were made up, however. In September 1994, Community Assets Management liquidated a money market fund because it could not make up the fund's $2 million of losses.
In reviewing Fidelity's request to set up the insurance company, the S.E.C. must consider whether to exempt Fidelity from certain provisions of the Investment Company Act of 1940, which prohibits certain transactions and lending arrangements between fund companies and the funds they manage.One of Cambodia's tandem Prime Ministers, Hun Sen, said today that a top Khmer Rouge leader implicated in the mass killings of his countrymen should be welcomed back into society, and he personally guaranteed his safety.
Mr. Hun Sen embraced Ieng Sary, a close comrade of the Khmer Rouge founder Pol Pot, as signs emerged of a severe split within the guerrilla movement in which his faction has talked openly about a truce with the Government.
Here in the capital the remarks by Mr. Hun Sen -- himself a onetime Khmer Rouge soldier who switched sides in 1977 -- reopened the painful question of how Cambodia is to deal with the unhealed wounds of its past.
The comments drew cries of protest from people who refuse to forgive or forget and came despite growing demands for Mr. Ieng Sary's trial for mass murder during the Khmer Rouge rule from 1975 to 1979. During that period, from several hundred thousand to -- according to recent scholarship -- as many as two million people were executed or died of disease or starvation under conditions of forced labor.
Mr. Hun Sen's remarks also pointed up widening divisions within the Government, in which a faction opposed to Mr. Hun Sen, declaring Mr. Ieng Sary ''the chief of the murderers,'' asserted that he is not welcome to come in from the jungle.
Mr. Hun Sen, in a speech today, said: ''I wish to guarantee the life of Ieng Sary, the security of Ieng Sary, and congratulate him and encourage him to link his forces with our forces. The past is another matter.''
He added: ''If we do not allow him to come, he has no choice. What can he do? He has to lead his forces to fight to the end. Whatever we do, we must not push them into a corner.''
His words drew an angry reaction from the country's most prominent opposition politician, Sam Rainsy, who said: ''They are making an alliance with the devil. We do not want to be associated with people whose hands are full of blood.''
Mr. Hun Sen's remarks also directly challenged his co-Prime Minister and rival, Prince Norodom Ranarridh, who has remained in the background as the Government works to forge a tactical alliance with the breakaway faction of the Khmer Rouge. Mr. Hun Sen said last week that this faction could include 3,000 or more soldiers -- more than half the Khmer Rouge force.
In a statement on Wednesday, a radio station loyal to Prince Ranarridh said that Mr. Ieng Sary was wanted for trial and that if he was concerned for his safety he should seek asylum in another country, not in Cambodia.
Some people here, still terrified and mistrustful of the Khmer Rouge, seemed convinced that a vicious war of words between elements of the group was a ruse by the guerrillas to edge their way back into society and eventually into power.
But analysts of the Khmer Rouge said the split appeared to reflect long-running differences in philosophy and tactics that have been heightened as the movement loses influence within the country and support from its backers in Thailand and China.
''All this is part of a long-term pattern; it's not something that comes out of the blue,'' said Steven Heder, an expert on the Khmer Rouge who is now at the University of London. ''These are the kinds of fissures and feuds we have seen for a long time.''
These feuds have come to the surface in the wake of still-unconfirmed reports two months ago that Pol Pot had died. His death or incapacitation could also have touched off the infighting, the analysts said.
Confronted with the possibility that thousands of rebels might wish to join the Government side, and that Mr. Hun Sen might welcome back one of their key leaders, people here are coming face to face with a question the nation has mostly avoided: how to deal with the mass killers in their midst.
The Khmer Rouge leaders have never been brought to trial and many of their former troops now live side by side with their victims in an uneasy calm.
Voicing the feelings of some people here, Chhan Song, an adviser to the National Assembly, called for retribution rather than reconciliation, for the good of the country's soul.
''I am not a bloody person who wants to put everyone on the guillotine,'' Mr. Song said, ''but at least we must hold people accountable for what they did.
''The Cambodian people are very, very, very confused between the right and the wrong, the good and the bad. If we welcome back the killers, what do we tell our children about Cambodia?''
The rifts in the Khmer Rouge emerged a week ago when the guerrillas' clandestine radio broadcast an unexpected attack on Mr. Ieng Sary, 71, calling him ''a piece of excrement'' who had ''unmasked himself as an enemy of the nation.''These are exciting times for makers of women's sports apparel. With a big shift to casual wear and an explosion of interest in women's sports, sales are soaring at athletic-wear giants like Nike and Reebok.
So these must be happy days at Danskin Inc., the 114-year-old maker of dance and exercise clothes that for years had the women's athletic-apparel market virtually to itself, right? Guess again.
Sales have slumped 7 percent over three years to $125 million, and the company is so hobbled by $40 million in long-term debt it can barely afford to advertise. During the Olympic Games, the Danskin name, worn by some of the biggest stars at the 1994 Winter Olympics, was absent from the airwaves.
Last month, the Nasdaq stock exchange threatened to delist Danskin's shares because the company's losses over the last three years exceeded its book value. The stock was subsequently moved to Nasdaq's less prestigious Small Cap Market.
Meanwhile, a power struggle has been roiling the company for nearly two years. Last summer, after serving 11 months as Danskin's chief executive, Howard D. Cooley was named chairman at an annual meeting that may have violated the company's bylaws. Mr. Cooley subsequently spurned at least two offers from investors to inject capital into Danskin, which is based in New York. And in June, when one-third of the company's outstanding stock came up for sale, the board passed a so-called poison pill that made it prohibitively expensive for a suitor to gain more than a 34 percent stake.
Wall Street cheered Mr. Cooley's initial appointment as chief executive because of his reputation as president of the underwear maker Jockey International. He seemed just the man to revive a company that had been rocked by a series of ownership changes in the 1980's.
But under his leadership at Danskin, sales have sagged and the company's most important asset -- the Danskin name -- has languished. The stock price has hardly budged in the same period, during one of the biggest bull markets in history. Critics say Mr. Cooley and Mary Ann Domuracki, Danskin's former chief financial officer and president who was elevated to chief executive in April, lack the fashion sense necessary to turn the company around and are hanging on to their jobs at all costs. And people familiar with Jockey say Mr. Cooley has exaggerated his 12-year track record there -- and indeed, that he was forced out in 1992. (Mr. Cooley says he left on his own accord.)
Danskin's desperate condition vividly illustrates how the excesses of the 1980's takeover binge, combined with self-aggrandizing management, can sap the strength of even the strongest brand name. Some insiders wonder if the company can survive, while investors speculate whether Danskin, whose stock closed yesterday at $3.125, or about 75 percent below the $13 it commanded when it went public in 1992, is worth more dead than alive.
''This company is four stars excepts it's been raped and pillaged over the last couple of years,'' said Michael D. Barrett, a critic of management who heads a group that controls more than 200,000 shares.
In an interview, Mr. Cooley, who only last June raised his own holdings above 100,000 shares, brushed off Mr. Barrett as a ''pest.'' He defended his tenure at Danskin, saying the company was on the brink of bankruptcy when he arrived and blaming a downturn in the hosiery business and a lack of working capital for its more recent troubles. And he was upbeat about its prospects, predicting a big response to its new line of walking, golf and tennis wear.
His critics retort that Mr. Cooley only recently became convinced of the need to appeal to female athletes and in fact scotched a foray into so-called high-performance athletic wear shortly after he arrived. And while Mr. Cooley contends he has cut spending to the bone, Wall Street thinks otherwise. Steve Marotta, an analyst with Auerbach Pollak & Richardson in Stamford, Conn., said that at more than 30 percent of sales, Danskin's general expenses far exceed the normal industry range of 15 to 22 percent.
By all rights, Danskin should be raking in profits. Founded in 1882 by the brothers Joel and Benson Goodman, the company sparked a revolution in the 1950's by making the first nylon body wear. Its body-hugging tights and leotards became synonymous with dance. Its children's line bound the Danskin name with every women's memory of her first pink tutu.
As virtually the only established brand of women's athletic wear in the early 1990's, Danskin was perfectly positioned to take advantage of the explosion in women's sports. But by then, it had been orphaned after its parent company was passed from hand to hand in a series of high-profile takeovers.
In 1980, the Goodman family sold Danskin to International Playtex, a unit of Esmark Inc. Four years later, Esmark was bought by Beatrice for $2.8 billion. Two years after that, Beatrice was bought by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Company for $6.2 billion in one of the decade's more celebrated leveraged buyouts.
But none of the management teams were able to capitalize on Danskin's name. In one particularly disastrous move, sales collapsed after Playtex tried to transform Danskin into a mass-market brand by distributing cheap tights and leotards to discount retailers. Spotting a bargain, a young lawyer and investment banker by the name of Byron Hero approached Kohlberg Kravis Roberts in 1986.
Coincidentally, the buyout firm had transferred all of the assets of Esmark except Danskin and a little hosiery company out of the company for accounting reasons. It happily sold the stripped down Esmark to Mr. Hero in 1986 for $15 million, plus $12 million in debt.
Mr. Hero returned to Danskin's roots as a supplier of body wear to dancers and athletes. In less than 18 months, it went from losing more than $47 million to turning a profit. In 1991, the company made nearly $6 million. The next year, it went public, issuing three million shares.
Mr. Hero, who said he was trying to put his struggles with Danskin behind him, was praised by former colleagues for his enthusiasm and vision. But many criticized him for his inability to put the company on a sound financial footing.
A plan to diversify into water sports was his undoing in 1994, when Esmark borrowed $14.5 million from Sunamerica Inc., the Los Angeles insurance company, and $4.5 million from its own Danskin subsidiary. When the plan went awry and the loans could not be repaid, Danskin was hit with a class-action shareholder suit that accused it of making a sweetheart deal with its parent.
In September 1994, Danskin's board asked Mr. Hero to step aside as chief executive while he worked to solve Esmark's problems. Mr. Hero, who remained chairman, was replaced by Mr. Cooley, a Danskin director.On its high mountain perch, the fortress town of Chechaouen is celebrating the bounty of the Moroccan summer. The donkeys hobble through the medieval gates under loads of coriander and onions. The melons are swollen and the olives are getting plump.
But all this pales compared with the activity in the fields where marijuana plants have risen as tall as humans. On the humid slopes and the steep terraces great contingents of men, women and children are getting ready for the harvest.
This Berber town in Morocco's northern tip is the gateway to the country's vast marijuana plantations. Beyond here, cannabis fields cover 160,000 acres of the Rif mountain range, which rises in breathtaking cliffs out of the Mediterranean plain. And this is the season when a great cottage industry gets under way, with people cutting, drying, sifting and pounding until they have turned the plants into the pasty brown concentrate called hashish.
''Allah's chocolate'' is what the young men call it as they offer it for sale in the maze of alleys within Chechaouen's ancient walls. In the right doorway, one can order bricks of the stuff by the pound. Or by the ton, for that matter. The Rif crops are so plentiful that they supply not only the Moroccan market but much of Europe's voracious demand.
Specialists say the Rif has expanded its hashish output tenfold in the past decade. With an estimated 1,500 tons in 1994, Morocco had overtaken competitors in the Middle East and West Africa to become the world's leading hashish exporter.
But a problem awaits the Rif harvest of 1996. Early this year, the Moroccan Government began an anti-drug campaign intended to break up the network of local dealers who take care of deliveries to Amsterdam, Paris, London or Berlin.
Morocco has announced such drives before, but this one appears draconian by local standards. The police have staged some spectacular raids, making hundreds of arrests and seizing yachts and speedboats. Several prominent shipping businesses in nearby Tangier were charged with routinely hiding hashish in their Europe-bound trucks and containers of tomatoes, oranges and frozen fish. A respected carpet merchant in Rabat was accused of stuffing almost 1,000 pounds of hashish in a shipment of hand-woven rugs to Belgium.
''The seriousness of the drive became clear,'' said a diplomat, ''when the nation's two top customs officials and a former governor of Tangier were thrown in jail. This shocked many people.''
Hence the apprehension in Chechaouen about what will happen next. ''Everybody is nervous,'' said the owner of a teahouse near the Bab el Ain city gate as the aroma of burning hashish wafted down from an upper floor. ''We don't know what to think. We may all be arrested.''
Mokhtar Benfalah, who said he did odd jobs and ''a little chocolate business,'' observed that ''people say it's getting difficult to buy the road,'' meaning the paying of bribes to officials for safe passage of hashish. Mr. Benfalah said marijuana had been ''like a vitamin'' for Chechaouen, making possible the new villas and restaurants springing up on the edge of town and the Mercedes Benzes zigzagging over the mountain roads.
Hashish, or the plain, chopped marijuana leaves known as kif, have been around the Rif mountains at least since the 16th century. Villagers use cannabis as medicine for a variety of ills and call it ''the healing plant.'' The Rif farmers have long supplied the teahouses from Tangier to Casablanca, where men smoke the stuff in tiny pipes. Women put hashish in cakes and jams for special occasions.
''My aunt does it for her friends,'' said Rajina Tligi, whose family is from Marrakesh. ''It makes them giggle.''
But Europe's growing tolerance and huge appetite for marijuana has drastically changed the scene. Drug barons have sprung up in Morocco, gaining fortune and power and sometimes overtaking the traditional oligarchy. Moreover, American and French officials warned Rabat that cocaine and heroin traders from Latin America and Asia had linked up with the hashish distribution network.
The final straw, according to a senior official, came last year when a report prepared for the European Union said Moroccans protecting the drug trade ranged ''from the humblest customs functionary to confidants of the palace.'' King Hassan II was furious, the official said, and Moroccan newspapers quoted the King as snapping, ''I will not have people saying that I protect thieves and tricksters.''
In early August, police checkpoints were operating on the route from the port of Tetuan to the lower Rif mountains. Yet as the road climbs and cactus hedges and sunflower fields give way to pine forest, young men can still be encountered waving bars of hashish at approaching cars.
Most Moroccans have heard about the crackdown, which is widely trumpeted in newspapers and on television, but young foreign backpackers and freelance couriers roaming through the Rif apparently have not. The police say that close to 100 foreigners are now jailed in northern Morocco, most of them young Europeans.
In late July, a French couple coming from the Rif was arrested with almost 200 pounds of hashish in a false roof. He is 69, she is 68. They have joined the other foreigners in Tangier's notorious jail.
The Government in Rabat says it will begin a big crop substitution program for the Rif cannabis farmers and has asked Europe to help pay for it. But whatever different crops they grow, farmers will have to take a huge cut in income.
The issue is politically sensitive because relations between Rabat and the Rif have always been strained. In 1956, as Morocco became independent from France, King Mohammed V, the father of the present King, promised the Rif people, who had staged important guerrilla actions against the French, that they could keep growing cannabis.
''Everybody here knows about King Mohammed's promise,'' said Hassan Benimol, a carpet salesman. ''Let's see how this King will deal with that.''The chief Federal law-enforcement official who is investigating the crash of Trans World Airlines Flight 800 said yesterday that the piece of evidence needed to prove that a criminal act brought down the plane is probably no larger than a football and lost in the sand at the bottom of the Atlantic.
The official, James K. Kallstrom, assistant F.B.I. director in New York, acknowledged in an interview that he and 1,000 additional investigators, divers, technicians and others could use a stroke of luck, ''sort of like the lottery balls.''
If wreckage holding clear forensic evidence is never found, Mr. Kallstrom said, the Federal Bureau of Investigation may have to try to build a circumstantial criminal case. Right now, he added, the F.B.I. has far too little evidence to do that. As a result, the inquiry could last many weeks or months.
And, he conceded, the vagaries of a circumstantial case could be as unsatisfying to jurors as it would be to the public.
In the early days after Flight 800 exploded off Long Island on July 17, killing all 230 people aboard, Mr. Kallstrom repeatedly said he was confident that investigators would determine the cause quickly. But even after four weeks of frustration, Mr. Kallstrom continues to express optimism that the telling evidence will be found.
Scuba divers have retrieved more than half the wreckage from the Boeing 747 jumbo jet, and experts have told Mr. Kallstrom that conclusive forensic evidence of a bomb or a missile could be limited to an extremely small area -- a seat cushion, a patch of carpet or a shard of metal.
Because the wreckage has been under water for a month, some evidence has dissolved or washed away. The elusive evidence has a dual purpose. It would tell investigators what occurred, and it might be a forensic fingerprint that could identify criminals.
''We can't charge somebody with bombing an airplane if we can't show the airplane was bombed,'' he said. ''If we get 99 percent of the plane up and we don't have anything, I don't know what we'd do. But you know that endgame -- I don't think I've even really thought that through.''
In a two-hour interview in his office in lower Manhattan, Mr. Kallstrom, 53, detailed the methodical search for wreckage and explained why -- given that most investigators believe that a bomb brought down the plane -- it is so important to prove the cause of the crash.
He offered these thoughts about the progress and propects of the investigation:
*Most evidence and intelligence so far tends to support the possibility that a bomb destroyed the T.W.A. plane.
*Investigators will not begin to chase possible suspects aggressively until the cause has been determined.
*If chemical residue from an explosive is not detected by the F.B.I. laboratory in Washington, investigators face a possibility that the only evidence of a crime would be forensic experts' subjective analysis of the damage to metal debris.
*Besides the relevance to a criminal inquiry, the official declaration of the cause would be important financially and politically for the aviation industry and the nation.
''I think the ramifications of whether this is an accident or a criminal act are huge,'' Mr. Kallstrom said. ''I mean, it's who people are going to sue. It's the liability to pay, whether T.W.A. pays for all this or the Government pays.''
Mr. Kallstrom's immediate concern is to determine the cause of the crash and, if it is a criminal act, who may be responsible. Beyond that, the final determination of the cause could mean millions of dollars in legal liability for the airline or the companies that manufactured the plane and its parts.
Three weeks ago, President Clinton chartered a commission to examine whether the Government should spend billions of dollars to buy new bomb detectors for American airports. That initiative could lose whatever momentum it has if investigators determine that a bomb did not cause the crash.
Mr. Kallstrom, who has been with the bureau for 26 years, said he was keenly aware of the competing pressures, adding that several groups had clear ''rooting interests'' in the outcome.
''Boeing doesn't want to have a failure,'' he said. ''Pratt & Whitney doesn't want to have a failure. The pilots' association doesn't want to have pilot error. The stewardesses' union doesn't want anything they did to contribute to it. So basically all those people want it to be a bomb or missile.''
Mr. Kallstrom refused to identify his best guess about the cause, a gut feeling that he has coyly mentioned at several press briefings. Instead, he said, three theories are being investigated: a bomb, a missile attack and a catastrophic mechanical malfunction. ''The facts are going to be the facts,'' he said.No self-respecting, ethics-rules-abiding member of Congress at the Republican Convention here would be caught accepting a fancy restaurant meal in the company of a lobbyist.
On the other hand, plenty of members of Congress have been the guests of honor this week at elaborate receptions here costing thousands of dollars and hosted by corporations or trade organizations that just may have matters pending before their committees. Under House and Senate ethics rules, it is perfectly O.K. for them to show up.
That is because of the ''widely attended event'' exception to the much-talked about ethics rules that both the House and Senate imposed upon themselves last year. While those new rules for the most part forbid free meals or other gifts from individual lobbyists, they do not ban lawmakers from being feted at bashes for more than 25 people.
And there are few places where this loophole is so vividly on display as it is here in San Diego -- at events like a cruise for House freshmen sponsored by the United States Chamber of Commerce; a reception sponsored by the securities industry for Representative Jim Leach of Iowa, the chairman of the House Banking Committee; or a dinner aboard a refurbished Union Pacific train evoking the glory days of passenger rail travel, given by the rail company to honor Representative Bud Shuster of Pennsylvania, the chairman of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.
Democrats, meeting at their own convention in Chicago later this month, will probably not be shy about invoking the exception either.
The theory behind it is that at big gatherings, no lobbyist could succeed in monopolizing the time of a representative or senator, the way he might while lingering over Cognac at The Palm. Nonetheless, to many watchdog groups, the exception is a loophole big enough to push a buffet table through -- or dozens of them.
''The bottom line is, these rules don't pass the straight-face test,'' said Ellen Miller, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit group in Washington, D.C., that follows money and Federal politics. Even if he or she is the guest of honor at a reception, a member of Congress is not required to list the event as an in-kind contribution, nor is the sponsoring company or group required to report it as anything other than a business expense.
Some experts argue that in imposing the new rules, Congress may have taken away a lobbyist's incentive for a small-scale gift, like dinner or a golf game, and substituted motivation to give something of much greater financial value.
''The one-on-one lunch is out the window,'' said Kenneth Gross, a former chief of enforcement at the Federal Election Commission who is now in private practice and teaching campaign finance and ethics at George Washington University.
''But it's like the air in a balloon,'' he continued. ''If you squeeze it in one place, it's going to manifest itself someplace else.''
Generally, and not too surprisingly, members of Congress insist that neither their votes nor their ethics are compromised by being hailed at a dinner or cocktail reception.
Mr. Shuster, the Pennsylvania Congressman who was the guest of honor at a dinner on Tuesday aboard the vintage railway cars, has made that point in the past; he did not respond to messages left for him.
Drew L. Lewis, the chairman and chief executive of Union Pacific, who is both a Pennsylvania delegate and a former Secretary of Transportation, has held several receptions and meals here in the past week. The yellow, red and gray railroad cars on a special siding extension built for the convention have been a popular feature of both Democratic and Republican conventions in past years.
''Sure, people do enjoy coming aboard,'' Mr. Lewis said at a luncheon here the other day in one of the domed observation cars, but he played down the notion that its hospitality translated into any important benefits. ''As a company,'' he said, ''you really don't gain anything by doing this.''
Many of the delegates here have been showered with gifts, like Frisbees and disposable cameras emblazoned with cigarette brand logos. Congressional ethics rules allow members to accept ''items of nominal value or ''home state products for display or distribution.''
There are plenty of other kinds of fund raising going on inside the convention hall here and at the estimated 800 parties associated with the Republican gathering this week. The San Diego Host Committee, which is in charge of putting on the convention, has collected more than $11.8 million in corporate contributions, and a fund-raising event for 3,500 Republicans on Wednesday night took in $6 million to $7 million, party officials said.
THE REPUBLICANS: THE MONEY FACTORMasayoshi Son has struck again.
Japan's most hyperactive entrepreneur, who stunned the personal computer industry last year by buying the giant Comdex trade show and the Ziff-Davis magazines, today announced the $1.5 billion acquisition of the Kingston Technology Corporation, a Southern California company that is the world's largest supplier of add-on memory boards for PC's.
The purchase is another bold step in Mr. Son's ambitious quest to position his company, the Softbank Corporation, at the hub of the worldwide computer industry, and in many of its spokes as well.
The deal moves Softbank into hardware manufacturing for apparently the first time. Until now Mr. Son has said his company will concentrate on providing the ''infrastructure'' for the computer industry -- distribution, trade shows, magazines and networks -- rather than on developing its own software and hardware products.
Some analysts, however, questioned the wisdom of the deal, saying that there did not appear to be obvious synergies between Kingston and the rest of Softbank's holdings and that with memory chip prices now in decline, the memory board business might weaken.
''My first response was 'Why Kingston?' '' said Mahendra Negi, an analyst at Merrill Lynch & Company in Tokyo.
The purchase will also add at least $750 million to Softbank's already hefty $2.4 billion in debt, contributing to fears that the 39-year-old Mr. Son is overextending himself and building a financial house of cards that might eventually collapse.
Officials at Softbank, which had about $1.6 billion in sales in its last fiscal year, dismissed such concerns. They also said that they regarded Kingston not as a manufacturer but as a service and distribution company and that they expected synergies, such as the sharing of client lists among the memory-board, magazine and trade-show businesses.
Kingston, which is based in Fountain Valley, Calif., was founded in a garage in 1987 by two engineers who grew up in Taiwan -- the president, John Tu, who is 55, and the vice president, David Sun, 45. The company, which is owned jointly by the two men and has 500 employees, had revenue of $1.3 billion in 1995, up from about $800 million the year before, Mr. Tu said. Earnings before taxes in 1995 were about $147 million.
Softbank, based here, will acquire 80 percent of Kingston for $425 million in newly issued Softbank stock and the remainder in cash. Mr. Tu and Mr. Sun will own a combined 4.9 percent of Softbank, the largest stake except for Mr. Son's, which is greater than 50 percent.
Mr. Tu said in an interview here tonight that Kingston originally asked Softbank about three months ago to distribute its memory boards in Japan. As the executives from the two companies started talking, though, he said that they found ''the chemistry was extremely good,'' and decided on a merger instead, which would help give Kingston more resources to grow.
While Mr. Tu said he and Mr. Son shared many philosophies, they also differed in one important one. Mr. Tu is proud that Kingston has never accepted a loan. Even its corporate headquarters were paid for in cash. Mr. Son, though, is aggressive in borrowing to expand his empire.
Mr. Son is of Korean descent, which made him the target of discrimination in Japan. He attended the University of California at Berkeley, and made his first fortune in the United States by distributing video-arcade machines and inventing an electronic translator.
Upon his return to Japan, he started Softbank in 1981 and built it into the nation's largest distributor of software. Mr. Son really became of note to American computer businesses about 18 months ago when he embarked on what, with today's announcement, has now become a $4.5 billion acquisition spree.
In February 1995 he bought the Interface Group -- which runs computer trade shows including the giant Comdex conference -- for $800 million, making Softbank the world's largest computer trade show company. In November, he announced the $2.1 billion acquisition of Ziff-Davis Publishing, the world's leading publisher of computer magazines, known especially for PC Magazine and PC Week.
Mr. Son has also invested $200 million in about 30 Internet-related start-up companies, including a 37 percent stake in Yahoo, a World Wide Web search service. Recently, he teamed up with the News Corporation to buy 21 percent of a Japanese television broadcaster as part of an effort to provide digital satellite TV service in Japan.
But with each acquisition, doubts are growing about whether Mr. Son can keep up the pace.
The buying binge has been made possible in part by Softbank's high stock price, which Mr. Negi of Merrill Lynch said is about 70 times the company's projected earnings, far higher than valuations even in the United States.
By acquiring Kingston, Softbank could double earnings while increasing the number of shares by only 5 percent, thereby increasing earnings per share, Mr. Negi said.
Indeed, while the stock of most companies goes down when they announce an acquisition, Softbank's usually goes up. Today its shares rose 700 yen, to 17,000 yen.When law enforcement officials announced the arrest of the man they called ''the key person'' in inciting racial unrest in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in 1991, they described the suspect as a sturdily built bald black man who had been identified from television video footage.
But the year was 1992, not 1996. And the man in custody was Raymond Wesley, then 27, not Charles Price, 43, the man Federal investigators arrested on Tuesday and charged with instigating the violence that led to the death of a Hasidic scholar, Yankel Rosenbaum.
Federal prosecutors have now described Mr. Price as that ''bald black man'' seen in the videotapes.
The prosecutors must now try to prove that Mr. Price, a sometime laborer, was responsible for urging a group of young black men at President Street and Utica Avenue to attack Jews. But an investigator who worked on the previous case said yesterday that detectives had also thought they had that man in 1992.
The investigator, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that Mr. Wesley was arrested on the belief that he was the bald man caught on a videotape and identified by witnesses, whose cries sent youths streaming down President Street, where Mr. Rosenbaum was later stabbed to death.
But evidence proving that Mr. Wesley was that man did not materialize and the case fell apart, a failure that speaks to the difficulties Federal prosecutors face in persuading a jury that, nearly five years after the unrest, Mr. Price is the long unidentified man on the videotape.
Law enforcement officials said yesterday that there are two tapes that show the suspect, one taken by Channel 4, WNBC, and the other by a private citizen who hoped to use it to show police brutality. They have had both tapes since the unrest, officials say.
Darrell L. Paster, Mr. Price's lawyer, said yesterday that the arrest of Mr. Wesley as the main instigator calls the Government's case into question. ''I think it's extremely significant that two people are identified and prosecuted by law enforcement for the same crime and for being the same person, essentially,'' Mr. Paster said, adding that the prosecution of Mr. Wesley, and now Mr. Price, ''raises serious questions about the quality of eyewitnesses.''
Officials at the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office, which prosecuted Mr. Wesley, refused to comment on the case yesterday.
In the beginning, Mr. Wesley was arrested on a complaint of inciting a riot that led to Mr. Rosenbaum's death, a felony. But several days later, when the grand jury acted, it returned a charge that made no mention of Mr. Rosenbaum's slaying, saying only that Mr. Wesley had urged people to ''engage in tumultuous and violent conduct,'' a misdemeanor.
Even police officers involved in Mr. Wesley's arrest came to doubt that he was the main instigator. The man on the videotape, they said, appeared older and darker skinned.
During his trial in January 1993, the prosecution called a police officer who testified only to the fact that rioting had occurred, and called a witness who at first declined to identify Mr. Wesley from the stand.
''The man almost became a hostile witness,'' said Mr. Wesley's lawyer, Clover M. Barrett. ''His testimony really did very little to prove that Wesley did anything that night.'' In the end, the jury took one hour to acquit Mr. Wesley.
It is unclear in Mr. Price's case whether Federal officials have collected more accurate accounts from witnesses or other evidence in the years since the first arrest.
According to law enforcement officials who spoke on condition of anonymity, witnesses who came forward after the stabbing have now identified Mr. Price as the man they saw shouting ''Get the Jew'' as youths began to charge toward Mr. Rosenbaum. That incident was five blocks away from the accident scene at President and Utica and after the videotape was made, officials say.
Prosecutors said they were certain he is the man seen on two videotapes in the middle of a gathering crowd, screaming for people to attack Jews and take the streets.
The disturbances in Crown Heights in summer 1991 erupted after a black child, 7-year-old Gavin Cato, was struck and killed by a car driven by a member of an entourage of the Lubavitch Hasidic spiritual leader, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson.
The child's death sent hundreds of black demonstrators to the streets, where Mr. Rosenbaum was killed three hours later. In turn, Mr. Rosenbaum's killing caused members of the Hasidic community to stage demonstrations, and over the next three days more than 130 people were arrested.It is hard to say what more the Republicans could have done here.
They hid Pitchfork Pat Buchanan behind a haystack somewhere. They pushed contentious policy issues so far to the periphery of their convention that they may risk falling into the Pacific. They used every symbol at their disposal -- charismatic black orators, people coping bravely with disabilities, moms with babes in arms and even a macho governor of Texas sharing the spotlight with his ex-schoolteacher wife -- to send a message of diversity and inclusiveness.
There was only one flub: Jack Kemp's seeming flip-flop, within hours of being designated as the Vice Presidential candidate, on matters he had always professed to care deeply about: immigration and affirmative action.
Tonight, the party's nominee for the last Presidential election of this century, Bob Dole, surely the last member of the World War II generation to seek the White House, strove mightily to define himself and his values for a country that has still not figured him or them out after all his years of campaigning.
Mr. Dole's words took flight, even if his delivery -- his cadences and his gestures -- remained earthbound. He avoided, for the most part, the terse, cryptic asides that so confounded his audiences on the campaign trail.
Now the great imponderable is whether Mr. Dole converted enough of his unseen audience, the nation's politically agnostic voters, to give himself a real chance in November. He spoke for 57 minutes, straining the limits of television's short attention span. But at a minimum, he used the largest audience of his life to give a much fuller account of what makes him tick than ever before.
Speaking to an overwhelmingly urban and suburban nation that longs for the small-town verities of Jefferson's and Jackson's America, he portrayed himself as a man with his feet planted on the bedrock of American tradition, a John Wayne or a Jimmy Stewart doing battle with a President whom he pictured as rootless, glib, expedient and imprudent.
Speaking to a nation that has turned unwontedly pessimistic in the last decade, he described himself as ''the most optimistic man in America.''
His frequent invocation of God and his repeated paeans to grit and patriotism, to say nothing of his assaults on Bill Clinton's record at home and abroad, buoyed the delegates and sent many of them home believing a Republican victory might be within reach.
Those on the floor cheered, they shouted, they waved their red-white-and-blue placards, and a few of them cried, especially when Mr. Dole talked of the poverty of his parents.
''I am here to tell you,'' the Kansan said in a speech full of elegant, eloquent passages, ''that permissive and destructive behavior must be opposed, that honor and liberty must be restored and that individual accountability must replace collective excuse.
''I am here to say to America, do not abandon the great traditions that stretch to the dawn of our history, do not topple the pillars of those beliefs -- God, family, honor, duty, country -- that have brought us through time and time and time and time again.''
Mr. Dole indulged in no generalized diatribes, as so many other Republicans have done recently, against the institution in which he labored for decades. The Federal Government, he said, can be ''the bridge between failure and success'' for people, and he promised to safeguard Medicare, Social Security and the rights of immigrants. He invited those who disagreed with his stirring stand against racism to use the ''clearly marked'' exits to leave the hall.
He kept his finger off the hottest of hot buttons, like abortion and school prayer, and sometimes sounded as if he were talking back to the platform his party adopted this week.
It was a values speech more than a programmatic speech, except for some specific economic promises. It was a conservative speech that brought together the traditional conservatives' longing to safeguard the old and good and the newer, more radical conservatives' determination to rip out the new and bad. In that sense, it was a unity speech.
It was a candid speech, neither apologizing for nor ducking Mr. Dole's age (73) or his lack of political glamour. ''Good Presidents and good candidates don't run from the truth,'' the nominee said at one point.
It had moments of real humility. ''I can only look up, and at a very steep angle, to Washington and Lincoln,'' he said.
It was also a partisan speech, in which Mr. Dole mocked President Clinton's ''touchy-feely'' style with the comment ''I don't need the Presidency to make or refresh my soul,'' and scorned Hillary Rodham Clinton's book, ''It Takes a Village,'' with the insistence that no, ''it takes a family'' to raise a child. He credited Republicans and Republicans alone with winning the cold war.
But the speech was free of rancor. Often accused of harshness, Mr. Dole went out of his way to say of Mr. Clinton, ''He is my opponent, not my enemy.''
For some commentators and some Republicans, the convention was too pat. They bemoaned its dearth of fresh ideas and its reliance on the technological and dramatic capabilities of television, epitomized by Elizabeth Dole's performance as the Oprah Winfrey of nominating night. A few suggested that platform fights and formal, podium-bound nominating and keynote speeches might now be passe.Bob Dole accepted the Republican Party's Presidential nomination tonight and sought to turn his age and his temperament into virtues by urging Americans to embrace him as ''a fighter by principle and the most optimistic man in America.''
Putting aside the bitter disputes that have come to characterize Republicans, Mr. Dole also left behind for this night the wavering mood that has characterized his campaign. Instead, he offered determination and his rarely seen but winning smile to an audience yearning for him to seize the moment. He reached back to some earlier, loftier time of the nation and his party as he appealed to voters around the nation who have been repelled by what they view as a harshness from its leaders.
''The Republican Party is broad and inclusive,'' Mr. Dole declared as he summoned the hall to a frenzy of flag-waving. ''It represents many streams of opinion and many points of view. But if there is anyone who has mistakenly attached himself to our party in the belief that we are not open to citizens of every race and religion, then let me remind you: Tonight this hall belongs to the party of Lincoln, and the exits, which are clearly marked, are for you to walk out of as I stand this ground without compromise.''
Standing before his party as its leader after two failed campaigns for the Presidential nomination, Mr. Dole set out to take advantage of the largest television audience he has ever attracted -- with a bold self-portrait of a patriarchal figure rooted in timeless American values.
Written largely by the novelist Mark Helprin, the speech sometimes seemed at odds with Mr. Dole's laconic style, often marked by incomplete sentences. In another striking departure, the ordinarily oblique Mr. Dole repeatedly referred to himself in the first person. $(Text, page A26.$)
Despite the written flourishes, Mr. Dole drew an often pallid reception from the hall, and it was uncertain whether he connected with the television audience. Mr. Dole, still uneasy with the twin teleprompter screens that flank a modern politician's lectern, looked dour and uncomfortable at times as his eyes flicked from side to side and he often looked down.
In his evocative finale to the four-day convention, Mr. Dole kept up the tone that has marked speech after speech here: The word abortion appeared only once in text and there was scant mention of his 35-year career in the House and Senate, where he was majority leader until he retired in June.
The presentation veered repeatedly into oddly placed political messages, mixing, for example, an attack on teachers' unions with passages about his life, his country and his vision.
Mr. Dole also seized the prime-time opportunity to present once again his plan to cut taxes by 15 percent and balance the budget as a sure way to ''restore the promise of America.'' Mocking Bill Clinton's campaign mantra of four years ago, he said: ''Which is more important, wealth or honor? It is not, as was said by the victors four years ago, 'the economy, stupid.' It's the kind of nation we are.''
In his acceptance speech for the Vice-Presidential nomination, Jack Kemp, a former Buffalo Congressman and former Housing Secretary, also sketched out the economic plan as he asserted that, ''The genius of the American people is being stifled -- our economy is growing at the slowest pace of any recovery in the century.''
Between the well-crafted appeals to all voters, Mr. Dole's purpose tonight was to close President Clinton's advantage in the polls, and he did not shrink from raising doubts about the President's character and accusing him of ''a continuous four-year campaign for re-election.''
While he sarcastically described Mr. Clinton as trying to be ''a good Republican,'' Mr. Dole also cited ''crystal clear differences'' with him on a range of issues, from school choice, to building up the military to battling crime to unraveling of American families.
Early on in the 57-minute address, Mr. Dole confronted two issues that have dogged his campaign: that, at the age of 73, he would be the oldest President elected to a first term, and that he is too combative to lead the country.
After recalling his humble origins in Russell, Kan., ''a small town in the middle of the prairie surrounded by wheat and oil wells,'' Mr. Dole portrayed himself as a man of the people who has the maturity to lead as he asked voters to turn to a man of the World War II generation.
''This perspective has been strengthened and solidified by a certain wisdom that I owe not to any achievement of my own, but to the gracious compensations of age,'' he said. ''Now, I know that in some quarters I may be expected to run from the truth of this. But I was born in 1923, and facts are better than dreams, and good Presidents and good candidates don't run from the truth.''
Depicting himself as driven not by ambition but by devotion to the people, Mr. Dole went on: ''I do not need the Presidency to make or refresh my soul. That false hope I will gladly leave to others. For greatness lies not in what office you hold, but in how honest you are, in how you face adversity -- and in your willingness to stand fast in hard places.
''Age has its advantages,'' he continued. ''Let me be the bridge to an America that only the unknowing call myth. Let me be the bridge to a time of tranquillity, faith and confidence in action. And to those who say it was never so, that America has not been better, I say, you're wrong: And I know, because I was there. And I have seen it. And I remember.''
Then Mr. Dole moved to assure people that despite his reputation as a legislative mechanic who is known for his sharp asides, he has the calm temperament to be President. ''To those who believe I am too combative, I say, if I am combative it is for love of country. It is to uphold a standard that I was born and bred to defend. And to those who believe that I live and breathe compromise, I say that in politics honorable compromise is no sin, it is what protects us from absolutism and intolerance. But one must never compromise in regard to God and family and honor and duty and country.''
Mr. Dole's address capped a cheery demonstration of smiling Republicans united behind the retired Senator. All week, the televised images were not of partisan squabbling over abortion, immigration or affirmative action but of an inclusive, diverse party that, for viewers who remember the hard-edged Houston convention in 1992, represented a complete metamorphosis. The convention also offered a tamer face for Speaker Newt Gingrich and the Republican Congress that was elected in 1994.
But the tableau of harmony -- reinforced as Patrick J. Buchanan and other primary opponents joined him on the podium tonight -- was essentially a television program that was precisely controlled by Mr. Dole's campaign and the Republican Party.Don't count on Jeremy Roenick playing for the Islanders this season. The Phoenix Coyotes made sure of that yesterday.
After the Chicago Blackhawks traded the rights to Roenick, a restricted free agent, to the Coyotes in a four-player deal, General Manager Mike Milbury of the Islanders termed his team's chances of acquiring the all-star center ''dormant, if not dead.''
In exchange for Roenick's rights, the Blackhawks obtained Aleksei Zhamnov, also a restricted free agent center; Craig Mills, a right wing prospect, and Phoenix's first-round selection in next summer's draft.
Roenick still has to come to terms with the Coyotes, formerly the Winnipeg Jets, and his agent, Neil Abbott, said yesterday that ''nothing is closed.'' But Milbury sounded as if the door had been slammed on his bid to bring to the Islanders the offensive presence they lack.
''I've got to believe that Phoenix will do whatever they have got to do to get him signed,'' said Milbury. ''I did try to call Phoenix today to see if they were interested in talking. They're not. I do not expect to get back in the hunt. But I'll keep my eyes and ears open.''
And his checkbook. The Islanders had agreed to a deal in principle with Roenick, at five years for $22 million, hoping that they could swing a deal for him, either by signing him to an offer sheet or making a straight swap. But the Islanders did not have enough to give up to land a player of Roenick's magnitude, and the Coyotes managed to deal with Chicago because of their willingness to part with Zhamnov.
''We shook the tree real hard,'' said Milbury. ''But somebody else caught the apple. I knew going in that this was not a high percentage play. It was high risk, low percentage. I played it as long and hard as I could. We made a credible bid. I even carried an offer sheet in my bag for about a week and a half.''
And now the Islanders are left holding the bag, still searching for offensive help.
SLAP SHOTS
The Rangers are apparently close to shipping the 33-year-old MARTY McSORLEY and his nearly $2 million-a-year contract to San Jose for defenseman JAY MORE, a draft pick and a prospect. The deal is expected to be finalized in the next few days, according to published reports.
HOCKEYStaring out from the beach at a point in the sky over the shimmering Atlantic Ocean today, Michael Russell grew reflective. ''I wish I hadn't been here,'' he said. ''I wish I hadn't seen it.''
But there was no changing the fact that a month ago, in his work as a civil engineer, Mr. Russell was aboard a boat, heading south a mile offshore at dusk, when he witnessed the destruction of Trans World Airlines Flight 800. His memory still burns with the image of a sharp flash, a pause, then a blossoming fireball and two-tongued cascade of fire.
He is just one of several hundred people who gave Federal investigators their accounts of the explosion and crash. Some have described lights streaking into the sky, suggesting a missile attack. Others have said that even from the Long Island coast, they could see the plane clearly as it split in two and burst into flames. But Mr. Russell's sober, understated story was one of only a few that investigators have judged credible. Methodically sifting the flood of information by using personality profiles and by watching for hints of hyperbole, interviewers from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Transportation Safety Board have spent the last few weeks culling the crop to fewer than a dozen accounts -- including Mr. Russell's -- that they consider believable enough to hold clues to what happened, or did not happen, in the sky south of Long Island at 8:31 P.M. on July 17.
These prime witnesses, investigators said, have helped shape both the technical inquiry into the cause of the crash and the F.B.I.'s hunt for clues to any possible criminal acts.
Their clear accounts have among other things substantially weakened support for the idea that a missile downed the plane, although the F.B.I. has still not dismissed the theory altogether.
Over all, Mr. Russell's account of a quick flash well before the large fireball, which was echoed by the other witnesses considered credible, has bolstered the idea that a bomb, and not an exploding fuel tank, triggered the disintegration of the airplane.
It is also consistent with the prevailing opinion on what happened, namely that an initial explosion split the plane in two, sending its forward section plummeting to the ocean first. The rest of the jet apparently flew on for less than half a minute, then was engulfed in a ball of flame, broke apart and fell.
The winnowing of witnesses' accounts, investigators have said, involved teams of Federal agents and safety board officials. They watched for distinctive body language and listened for phrases that appeared to have been taken from newspaper headlines about the crash. Certain cues marked some witnesses as ''pleasers,'' or people eager to say what they thought interviewers wanted to hear, said one crash investigator, who refused to be identified.
Most of the accounts were embellished, with many approaching the outlandish, the investigator said. To separate fact from fancy, he went on, the teams tested what was possible by viewing Boeing 747's flying nine miles away -- the distance of the crash from the beach -- under lighting conditions similar to those on the night of the crash. From that distance, the distinctive hump of a 747 is discernible, but little else about the plane is.
The key to sifting out the most reliable descriptions of the crash was to look for people like Mr. Russell, whose accounts were understated and clear. He and most other credible witnesses had some technical background that added substance to their descriptions. In his case, it was an engineering degree from Texas A & M University.
''He was very distinct in what he saw without saying it was an airplane,'' the investigator said. ''He wasn't letting his imagination and after-events paint a picture for him.''
Today, Mr. Russell was well along in the project he had been preparing to start the night the jumbo jet blew up -- a $17 million Federal effort to rebuild an eroded beach here. But as he watched bulldozers spread sand pumped through a pipeline from a dredge offshore, he said he still found himself replaying the events of July 17.
At 8 that night, he added, he and two other men were headed out through Moriches Inlet in the Rogue River, on a 40-foot work boat, toward the floating dredge, which was anchored a mile south of the beach. A computer on the dredge needed some last-minute adjustments before the three-month-long digging project could start on schedule at midnight.
At 8:30, just before they reached the dredge, ''there was a glint, quick and sharp,'' in the right side of his field of vision, Mr. Russell recalled. He turned toward that part of the sky, which then remained dark for a few seconds. ''It's hard to know how long,'' he said.
Moments after that initial light, which had been as abrupt as a camera flash but not as bright, he said, a ball of brilliant orange light suddenly expanded around roughly the same spot and then ''seemed to fall straight down,'' leaving behind it a spreading column of fire that did not follow like a comet's tail but hung in the air and unfurled from its now-plummeting source.
The descending tongue of fire then split in two, he said, forming a glowing inverted Y of flames. In the clear sky there was no trace of a streak or contrail, he added, only the fire, then a rising pillar of dark smoke and a shield of white smoke up high.
''I have 20-15 vision,'' he said, ''and I wouldn't have missed something like that.''
He and his colleagues turned their boat toward the crash site and saw light pieces of debris in the sky, caught by the fading sunlight and falling ''like silvery rain coming down out of the air.''
Their group was the first to arrive in the wreckage field. After three hours of probing the debris for survivors -- and after reporting to the Coast Guard their sighting of a little girl lying face down in the water -- they headed back to the dredge to complete the computer adjustments they had set out to make earlier in the night.
Around 3 A.M., they motored to their berth at the Coast Guard station at East Moriches, which was just beginning to fill with an army of investigators, rescue workers and police officers.Markets in Argentina are expected to show increasing volatility in the coming weeks as a new economic policy team struggles to put into effect some unpopular tax measures intended to close a huge budget deficit.
Roque Fernandez, who replaced Domingo Cavallo as Finance Minister last month, announced the revenue-generating measures this week, including higher taxes on fuel, private education, cable television, advertising, medicines, life insurance and public transit.
The new measures, which include raising the retirement age for women to 65 from 60, are expected to increase tax revenue by $1.2 billion to help offset an expanding budget deficit, which reached $2.5 billion in the first half of 1996. That figure exceeds the limit that Argentina accepted in an accord with the International Monetary Fund.
The Government is facing vigorous opposition to the tax measures by political and union leaders, who have threatened to call a three-day national strike on the heels of a one-day strike that crippled transportation and delivery last week.
Critics said the tax measures, which require approval from the legislature, would discourage consumer spending and reduce company profits by raising operating costs, thereby slowing Argentina's growth, which is projected at 4 percent for the year.
The country is slowly recovering from a stubborn recession that has produced record unemployment and has raised fears that Argentina might devalue its currency, a move the Government has steadfastly denied it would take.
Stock market analysts and economists say that uncertainty over exactly how the new tax measures would affect Argentina's growth has caused wide fluctuations in the markets, and the volatility is expected to continue for several weeks. Investors are especially concerned that any new taxes would lower corporate earnings.
''The name of the game in Argentina will be volatility for the next few weeks, as the economic team wins some of the new tax measures in Congress and loses others,'' said Luis Secco, an economist for Broda Consultants, a leading economic forecasting firm here.
Stocks did rise today. The Merval index of the 28 most-traded stocks on the Buenos Aires stock exchange rose 8.43 points, or 1.6 percent, to 525.09. The broader-based General Index gained 177.14 points or 1.1 percent, to 16,166.14. Trading was lighter than usual, ahead of a national holiday on Monday.
After Mr. Fernandez announced the tax measures on Monday, the Merval index tumbled 4.8 percent on Tuesday. But stocks have recovered in the last two sessions after the measures won support from leading executives here.
Eduardo Cabrera, a Latin America analyst for Merrill Lynch, has advised investors to trim their holdings in Argentine securities. In a report this week, Mr. Cabrera said that the Government's deficit-closing program ''avoids the restructuring of public-sector expenditures and does little to stimulate economic growth through structural reform.''
Mr. Cabrera said he was concerned that the economy would remain sluggish as the Government acted to keep interest rates high.
Those sentiments were echoed by Charles Brown, an economist with Morgan Stanley, who said the Government's projected growth of 4 percent for 1996 is unrealistic in view of the conservative lending policies of Argentine banks. Mr. Brown said he expected the Argentine economy to grow at about 2.2 percent this year.
Many economists have expressed dismay that the Government has chosen to close the budget gap by increasing taxes rather than reducing spending. The economists estimate that overall Government spending has increased 75 percent in the last four years, from $47.3 billion in 1991 to $82.3 billion in 1995, even as the state privatized industries and drastically reduced its payroll.
INTERNATIONAL BUSINESSAfter blood-soaked decades of internal conflict and outside interference, Cambodia is struggling to regain political and economic equilibrium. With so many of its political leaders associated with the violence, Cambodia cannot make a completely fresh start. But as political alliances shift, the killings should not be forgotten or excused. Justice may have to wait, but its time must come.
The issue arises again because the No. 2 Khmer Rouge leader, Ieng Sary, wishes to be welcomed back into lawful Cambodian society. The regime he served, alongside his friend and brother-in-law Pol Pot, killed more than a million people, roughly one Cambodian out of seven, between 1975 and 1979.
Hun Sen, Cambodia's co-Prime Minister and himself a former Khmer Rouge official, offered Thursday to guarantee the life and safety of Mr. Ieng Sary, now 71 years old, if he follows through on his offer to align thousands of armed followers with Government military forces.
The offer is not easy to endorse, but seems justified as a step toward stability, provided it does not come with immunity from future prosecution if Mr. Ieng Sary is shown to have had a direct role in the mass murders of the 1970's.
The defection of Mr. Ieng Sary's estimated following of 3,000 guerrillas could drain away half the present troop strength of the Khmer Rouge, allowing the Government to re-establish control of the resource-rich northwestern border region with Thailand. That in turn would weaken the Khmer Rouge's ability to finance political destabilization activities in Phnom Penh.
A week ago Mr. Ieng Sary and several Khmer Rouge generals publicly split from the hard-line leadership of the organization, calling for reconciliation with the Government and repudiating the murderous Khmer Rouge policies of the past, for which they conveniently blamed Pol Pot. The split came two months after reports that Pol Pot had died, and it may have grown out of internal maneuvering to succeed him. Whatever the motive, Mr. Hun Sen wants to capitalize on the split.
Supporters of Cambodia's other co-Prime Minister, Prince Norodom Ranarridh, have condemned dealing with Mr. Ieng Sary. So has the chief opposition leader, Sam Rainsy. But for most of the 1980's, Prince Ranarridh and his father, King Norodom Sihanouk, were militarily allied with the Khmer Rouge in a guerrilla war against the Vietnamese-backed Government. That guerrilla alliance was also supported by China and the United States, although since the 1991 peace agreement Washington has worked hard to isolate the Khmer Rouge and supported efforts to investigate the details of its crimes.
While it might indeed be awkward for Cambodia's present Government to put Mr. Ieng Sary on trial for his actions in the 1970's, Cambodian society as a whole is owed a chance for truth and eventual justice.
If Mr. Ieng Sary, who knows well enough his own degree of complicity, does not want to face the risk of trial and punishment, he can remain in the northwestern jungles or retire to China or North Korea rather than return to Phnom Penh.The global cola war between The Coca-Cola Company and Pepsico Inc. heated up in Venezuela yesterday, as Coke raided Pepsi's venerable bottling company there, and Pepsi threatened legal action.
In what was viewed by analysts as an embarrassment to Pepsi-Cola and a blow to the company's international expansion plans, the Coca-Cola Company announced yesterday that it had formed a joint-venture company with the Cisneros Group of Venezuela, a Pepsi bottler for five decades.
As one of the oldest of Pepsi's independent franchise operations, the bottler had made Venezuela one of the few holdouts against Coca-Cola's international market domination.
The announcement, made before the close of the New York Stock Exchange, drove Coca-Cola shares to a 52-week high, up 62.5 cents, closing at $51.75. Pepsi closed at $31.50, up 25 cents in a rising market.
Contending that Pepsi had a contractual agreement with the Cisneros group until the year 2003, Keith D. Hughes, a spokesman for Pepsi, said, ''We believe this sale is illegal on several counts, and Pepsi will exhaust all legal measures both in Venezuela and the United States to insure that our rights and those of our consumers are protected.''
A spokesman for Coke, Randy Donaldson, replied: ''We believe there is no basis for any legal action. The agreement that exists between the Cisneros Group and Pepsi recognizes the possibility of a change.''
The Cisneros Group said it had aligned itself with Coke to insure future expansion. In a statement, Oswaldo Cisneros, chief executive of the Embotelladoras Coca-Cola y Hit de Venezuela, the new name of the group of 18 bottling plants, said that the company would ''undoubtedly become a participant in major expansion in the north of Latin America.''
Analysts who follow the international cola wars said they were stunned by the news. ''What a coup,'' said Jesse Meyers, founding publisher of Beverage Digest, an industry newsletter published in Old Greenwich, Conn.
''I can't remember a more dramatic switch since Leo Durocher of the Brooklyn Dodgers went overnight to manage the Giants,'' he said. ''This was the country where Pepsi had the biggest lead over Coca-Cola, and where the bottler had a close personal relationship to Roger Enrico,'' Pepsi's chief executive.
In Venezuela, Pepsi-Cola will go from an 85 percent market share to zero, Andrew J. Conway, a beverage analyst for Morgan Stanley & Company, said. ''And overnight, Coke goes from 10 percent to more than 55 percent,'' he said.
The reason is that in the deal, Coke has bought the Cisneros Group's Hit soda brand, which has 45 percent of the cola market in Venezuela, and the group will discontinue bottling Pepsi, which had a 40 percent share. ''Now Pepsi has to buy bottling assets or find another route to market,'' Mr. Conway said, adding that Pepsi's volume has been 225 million unit cases, the fourth largest in Latin America.
Coca-Cola's president and chief operating officer, M. Douglas Ivester, crowed that ''for decades, Venezuela has been the only dark spot on the global Coca-Cola map.''
''Today,'' he added, ''it has become one of the brightest.''
''Pepsi has earmarked the international market for its major move forward, and this setback must be hard for Pepsi,'' Mr. Meyers said. And perhaps harder because it follows other setbacks.
Last month Pepsico was forced to take over its important but troubled Buenos Aires bottling company, known as Baesa, announcing that the bottler would incur substantial Argentine losses in 1996.
Also last month, in a stunning departure, Christopher A. Sinclair, the 45-year-old chairman and chief executive of the Pepsi-Cola Company, resigned after less than four months on the job, citing ''personal reasons.''
Indeed, the affront to Pepsi was so great that Mr. Hughes, the company spokesman, termed the deal with the Cisneros Group ''an outright betrayal of the Venezuelan people, and -- as an attempt to deny the Venezuelans their freedom of choice in soft drinks -- it should be opposed by everyone.''For the first time in nearly a decade, there are encouraging signs that soaring rates of juvenile crime may be tapering off. According to the latest data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the homicide arrest rate for teen-agers dropped in 1994 and 1995 and the overall rate of juvenile violent crime dropped in 1995. While it is difficult to know whether this is only a blip or a longer-term trend, the decline gives some experts hope that efforts to crack down on guns and to prevent teen-agers from committing crimes are beginning to work.
Epidemics of violent juvenile crime seem to come in cycles. There was a wave of teen crime from 1968 to 1975, a leveling-off from 1976 to 1985 and another big increase over the past decade, when the homicide arrest rate for youths aged 10 to 17 surged from 5.4 per 100,000 in 1984 to 14.5 in 1993. The latest F.B.I. numbers show the youth homicide arrest rate falling for two years in a row, to 13.2 per 100,000 in 1994 and 11.2 per 100,000 in 1995.
Looking more broadly at all violent youth crime, there were 311 arrests for robbery, assault, rape and murder per 100,000 youths aged 10 to 17 in 1987. The rate peaked in 1994 at 527 and fell back slightly to 512 in 1995.
Many experts attribute much of the sharp rise in violent-crime rates in the 1980's to increased drug and gun activity, particularly among minority males in inner cities. Police in cities like New York and Boston have now gotten smarter about going after guns, and have escalated their efforts to take guns out of the hands of teens with criminal records. One result is that Boston has not had one juvenile victim of a gun homicide this year.
Other communities have been trying a variety of approaches, including curfews, community policing, midnight basketball, peer mediation and conflict resolution strategies and youth development programs. A key predictor of criminal behavior is the initial age of involvement, and a recent Rand study concludes that it is smart and cost-effective to invest in programs that prevent youngsters from committing crimes in the first place.
The number of teen-agers in America is expected to increase by 1 percent each year for the next 15 years. Thus, even if the juvenile crime rate remained stable, the total number of crimes committed by youths would increase. That makes it imperative to pursue more aggressive efforts to divert juveniles from a life of crime.If you are a Republican and trailing in the polls, it makes no sense to revive the dark memories of Watergate, especially if you plan to make an issue of Bill Clinton's character. The ghost of Richard Nixon was therefore not much in evidence here this week. Haley Barbour, the Republican National Chairman, paid brief tribute to Mr. Nixon's foreign policy successes and recognized Tricia Nixon and her husband at 10 A.M. on opening day, when the convention hall was half-empty and the TV cameras were off.
Thereafter, delegates in search of Mr. Nixon had to settle for visits to the G.O.P.'s memorabilia room, where for only $6 you could get your picture taken sandwiched between life-sized cutouts of him and Elvis Presley.
None of this is the least bit surprising. But for a reporter who had covered Mr. Nixon's comeback in 1968, and had heard him speak often of his fondness for California, there was something at once eerie and sad about his near-total exclusion from a gathering of the Republican faithful in his home state, and in a place he once called his ''lucky city.''
Still, Mr. Nixon's legacy was felt here in many ways. Patrick Buchanan owes his start in politics to him, and Bob Dole may owe him even more. But the strongest evidence of his influence, though not visible to the television audience, was the presence of a cadre of old Nixon hands, veterans of the 1968 and 1972 campaigns, who gathered here to help create the kind of controlled, tightly scripted pageantry that Mr. Nixon himself virtually invented. Most of these graying Nixon types learned their skills as advance men, the people who get the candidate where he is supposed to go, assist the media, assemble the crowds and make sure the balloons drop on time. Here they were again, working for someone else. But as one of them put it, ''The old man would have been proud to see us here.''
A stroll by the command posts and trailers parked inside the convention hall produced a dozen sightings in as many minutes. There were Bill Timmons and Tom Korologos, who ran the White House Congressional liaison office. Mr. Timmons helped put this show together; Mr. Korologos is a senior aide to Mr. Dole. Henry Cashen, deputy White House Counsel under John Ehrlichman, kept the endless procession of convention speakers under firm control. Ron Walker, a legendary advance man in the old days, was chief troubleshooter.
Elsewhere on the premises were other Nixon veterans who are likely to occupy major posts in the coming campaign. Donald Rumsfeld, whom Mr. Nixon brought from Congress to the White House, is Mr. Dole's policy director. Bob Ellsworth, the former Kansas Congressman, was chairman of the Vice-Presidential search committee that produced Jack Kemp. John Sears is thought to be in line for a pivotal post in the Kemp campaign. Mr. Ellsworth and Mr. Sears ran Mr. Nixon's pre-convention campaign in 1968, until John Mitchell shoved them aside. Like Mr. Nixon, both are survivors.
These and the other Nixonites said they understood why Mr. Nixon had been virtually erased from the party's institutional memory, and they showed no bitterness. Gerald Warren, Mr. Nixon's deputy press secretary and later editor of The San Diego Union, put it this way: ''The party wants to heal, not reopen, old wounds. Under the circumstances, I don't see what more the convention could or should have done.''
Not a single member of the Nixon old guard has taken part in the Buchanan campaign, even though Mr. Buchanan was a fellow soldier in the earlier Nixon wars. They are pragmatic, non-ideological people, and while they see some linkage between Mr. Buchanan's combative ''us vs. them'' posture and Mr. Nixon's often divisive appeals to the ''silent majority'' in 1972, they do not believe the President could have swallowed Mr. Buchanan's harsh nativism on immigration or foreign policy.
Joining up with Mr. Dole was an easier matter. Though the relationship between Mr. Nixon and Mr. Dole was ambiguous and sometimes stormy, Mr. Dole was the President's strongest Senate ally in the early White House years and a loyalist during Watergate. Beyond that, Mr. Dole shares with Mr. Nixon the same humble upbringing and the same political tenacity. It is not surprising that Mr. Nixon's proteges found themselves drawn to San Diego. Their only regret was that the man who introduced them to the political game flew so far off course that even today he is denied honor in his own party.
ROBERT B. SEMPLE Jr.
Postcard from the CampaignJean-Baptiste Gaube du Gers says he's found a foolproof antidote to stress, and it is built in a factory a short drive from this central Italian city.
Mr. Gaube du Gers is the 48-year-old general manager of Odiot, a Parisian gold and silversmith, and when a transport strike shut down the French capital in 1990, he got so tied up in traffic that his doctor warned him about getting an ulcer.
''He was the one who told me I should switch to a two-wheel vehicle,'' Mr. Gaube du Gers said. Instead of 90 minutes, he now needs about half an hour to get to work on a perky little scooter built by Piaggio Veicoli Europei S.p.A., the Italian company best known for the classic Vespa.
''It's ideal,'' he said, still giddy after five years of scootering. ''You can slip in between cars, you can even drive up and down stairs!''
Mr. Gaube du Gers's choice lifts the spirits of executives at Piaggio, based just east of here, who still recall the bitter days not too many years back when Europe's scooter manufacturers, who invented the sputtering two-wheelers after World War II, almost went out of business.
Now, sales are booming in many parts of Europe and beyond, making the scooter the unlikely subject of an upbeat case study of the push and pull of global competition.
When the market revived, in the 1980's, it was largely thanks to the Japanese, who used a combination of low-cost manufacturing skills and high-tech innovation to make the scooter once again the object of Europeans' desire.
Yet now, European companies like Piaggio, whose $1.4 billion in annual sales makes it the market leader, are faring better than ever. For once, the chastened Europeans learned their lesson, and with a flutter of sexy new scooter models wrested back control of their home turf, and are even carrying the battle back to Japan, shipping scooters to Asian markets and winning customers in Japan itself.
In India, Piaggio already turns out 250,000 scooters a year in a joint venture with local partners, nearly half the volume of its production in Europe, where it makes roughly 30 percent of the Continent's annual output of 1.6 million machines.
Last year, it began production in China, by far the biggest scooter market in the world.
The new generation of scooters, equipped with clean-burning engines and some with catalytic converters, is also on its way to the United States, where the Europeans failed to find a home once before.
In the decades after World War II, scooters such as the Vespa captured the American imagination, until the tough new emissions laws of the 1980's drove them from the roads. Though few in the industry expect scooter sales to take off in the United States in a big way, both Piaggio and Aprilia S.p.A., another Italian manufacturer, are planning to introduce models there.
While motorized two-wheeled vehicles, like motorcycles, have been around since early in this century, it was not until 1946 that the scooter was born. Engineers at Piaggio, a former manufacturer of aircraft engines, cast around for an economical means of transport for Italians just emerging from wartime destruction and came up with the Vespa, or ''wasp'' in Italian, because of its pinched shape.
Sales of scooters fell in the late 1950's, as cheap small cars like the Volkswagen Beetle and Fiat 500 became available. But demand revived in the 1970's, when the youth of Europe's rebellious generation of 1968 rediscovered them. By the early 1980's, that boom had fizzled, too, until the arrival in the middle of that decade of the Japanese.
Learning from European leaders like Piaggio, which by the early 1980's was shipping about 17,000 scooters a year to Japan, Japanese manufacturers such as Honda grasped the market's potential and began turning out high-tech copies. Lavishing them with new features like disk brakes, automatic transmissions and light but strong plastic bodies, the Japanese began a European offensive. To accelerate the invasion, they bought into European competitors. Thus, Honda acquired 25 percent of the scooter division of the French auto maker Peugeot, the market leader there, while Yamaha took over France's No. 2, MBK.
Pressed to the wall, the Europeans fought back. Adopting the Japanese innovations, like plastic bodies, the Europeans, particularly in Italy, flooded the market with snappy new models and competitive prices.
Aprilia, Europe's No. 2 maker, with annual sales of $372 million, is a case in point.
Aprilia's engineers develop new models with computer-aided design systems. While final assembly is done at plants north of Venice, the components are made by a network of about 350 small, independent suppliers throughout the region.
Last year Aprilia, which makes eight scooter models ranging in price from $2,000 to $3,000, increased sales of all of its two-wheeled vehicles, including motorcycles, to 170,000, from 47,200 in 1991, and much of the gain came from scooters.
Piaggio, similarly, relies on dozens of local suppliers, though it typically manufactures larger components, like motors, itself. Piaggio makes 35 models, with new ones continuously in the pipeline.On a cold night last March, Deborah J. Zimmerman, drunk and nearly nine months pregnant, was wheeled into a local hospital for an emergency Caesarean section.
As the obstetrics staff pleaded with her to allow attachment of a fetal monitor, Ms. Zimmerman at first refused. Insisting that she did not want to give birth, she told a surgical aide, ''I'm just going to go home and keep drinking and drink myself to death, and I'm going to kill this thing because I don't want it anyways.''
Later that night she gave birth to a girl whose blood alcohol level was .199, nearly twice the threshold for a legal finding of intoxication in Wisconsin. Ms. Zimmerman herself, who had long had a drinking problem and had been downing white Russians in a bar just before she arrived at the hospital, had a blood alcohol level more than three times the threshold. The baby was sluggish and smaller than normal, and her forehead was flatter than it should have been, all signs of fetal alcohol syndrome.
Now Ms. Zimmerman, a 35-year-old waitress, has been charged with attempted murder, in a case that is stirring passions far beyond this working-class city of 85,000 people on the shores of Lake Michigan.
''As far as we can tell, this is the first time where a fetus has not died that a prosecutor is using a murder statute,'' said Priscilla J. Smith, a lawyer with the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy, in New York. ''That makes it unique. But this prosecution is only a culmination of the various attempts across the country to punish pregnant women for the disease of drug abuse or alcohol abuse.''
Since the late 1980's, Ms. Smith said, at least 200 women in more than 30 states have been prosecuted for behavior while pregnant that posed danger to their fetuses. The vast majority of the cases have involved use of illegal drugs, and the women have usually been charged with child abuse or the delivery of a controlled substance to a minor.
Most of those cases have eventually been dismissed, although in July the South Carolina Supreme Court ruled that a woman who had taken drugs while pregnant could be prosecuted for child abuse, a decision that Ms. Smith believes to be the first in which a state appeals court has upheld a verdict of guilty in such a case.
Now prosecutors here say they hope to use Wisconsin v. Zimmerman to help persuade legislators to carve out new laws that would specifically prohibit pregnant women from hazardous behavior, like drinking or smoking, that would remain entirely legal for all other adults.
''You look for cases that will help make good law,'' said Joan M. Korb, the Racine County assistant district attorney in charge of the case. ''Hopefully we'll start holding women accountable for the harm they do their unborn children.''
Alcohol abuse during pregnancy is one of the leading and costliest causes of neonatal problems in the United States, said Linda P. Kaplan, executive director of the National Association of Alcoholism and Drug Abuse Counselors, who notes that the effects of fetal alcohol syndrome can haunt a baby from the cradle to the grave.
But women like Ms. Zimmerman need treatment, not prosecution, Ms. Kaplan said. While the intent of charging them may be to compel pregnant women to take care of themselves and their fetuses, she said, she is ''concerned that more and more women will run away and hide and not seek treatment if these prosecutions continue.''
That is a chance that prosecutors here are willing to take. ''You see situations where children are damaged for life but you can't do anything about it,'' Ms. Korb said. ''These are often the same kids who end up in the judicial system as criminal defendants. The only one off the hook is the mother.''
Prosecutors and advocates for pregnant women are not the only ones divided over the Racine case. Patrick Monaghan of the conservative American Center on Law and Justice, in Washington, hailed the prosecution as ''a clear signal that life should be protected.'' But a fellow Washington conservative, Tim Lynch, assistant director of the Cato Institute's Center for Constitutional Studies, said, ''This seems to be an example of prosecutorial overreaching.''
Ms. Zimmerman's lawyer, Sally A. Hoelzel, pointed out that Wisconsin had no statute prohibiting drinking while pregnant, and said: ''I don't know how it got this far. She has a drinking problem. She needs help, not a prosecution.''
Until now, no woman has ever been charged with a crime in Racine County for harming her fetus, although at St. Luke's, the hospital where Ms. Zimmerman gave birth, at least one baby a week is born with traces of cocaine in its system. And four to six times a year, said Dr. Raja Nandyal, the director of the hospital's neonatology department, a baby is born there with fetal alcohol syndrome.
''Why we are picking on this woman, I don't know,'' said Dr. Nandyal, who was one of the physicians present when Ms. Zimmerman had her baby. ''Use of alcohol in pregnant women is pretty common. Five percent of the women who have babies at St. Luke's say they used alcohol during pregnancy.''
But at the heart of the state's case against Ms. Zimmerman is not so much that she drank during pregnancy, or even how much she drank immediately before she arrived at the hospital, but instead what she said she would do if she could just get out of there. Ms. Korb, who specializes in child abuse and neglect cases, said Ms. Zimmerman's threat to drink the fetus to death had clearly demonstrated an intent to kill her unborn child.
But her lawyer, Ms. Hoelzel, is hoping that the courts will ultimately take into account how drunk Ms. Zimmerman was when she spoke. ''Essentially,'' Ms. Hoelzel said, ''the prosecutor is talking about the ravings of a woman who was incredibly afraid and intoxicated.''
Ms. Zimmerman has had a drinking problem for years. Earlier on the day her daughter was born, she waited in a parking lot for a bar to open at 2 P.M. Her mother, Donna Zimmerman, fearing for the unborn child, eventually arrived at the bar and took her to the hospital, where she was scheduled to have an induced delivery two days later.
There, among the things that Ms. Zimmerman told the surgical aide, Julie A. Maher, was that she was afraid of pain and that the baby's father, with whom she had lived in Arkansas, had abused her.Having tried for years to persuade prostitutes to stop littering telephone kiosks with small cards advertising their services, Britain's telephone company, in partnership with London's largest borough, Westminster, has decided to crack down on the likes of ''Domination Mistress Nancy'' and ''Cuddly Elana.''
Starting next month, a new task force of inspectors will note down the telephone numbers of prostitutes who post sexually explicit notices in central London's 700 telephone booths, enter them into a computer and issue the prostitutes an order to stop displaying their numbers. A week later, any prostitute still posting the ads, will have his or her incoming telephone calls blocked.
The Government-controlled telephone company, British Telecom, figures that no incoming calls will mean no customers and therefore cut down on the kiosk cards.
Prostitution is legal in Britain and advertising of sexual services will probably continue in other outlets, such as community newspapers.
Robert Moreland, chairman of Westminster's planning and environment committee, said the authorities' objection ''is not with prostitution as such, but with the people who illegally litter and deface the city's streets with this offensive and often pornographic advertising material.''
British Telecom says that the sexually explicit cards, many of which are illustrated, discourage some people from using the bright red telephone booths that have become London landmarks. Teachers complain that schoolchildren have been found collecting and trading the cards.
The last time Westminster officials tried a similar scheme, five years ago, Oftel, the Government telecommunications regulating authority, said that blocking incoming calls was a violation of advertisers' rights. So, this time, British Telecom has changed the contract for all its customers, stipulating that they cannot advertise their telephone number in public phone kiosks.
The plan, scheduled to go into effect next month at a cost of ''tens of thousands of pounds,'' is a sign of a long-simmering frustration with what in the past five years has become more than a simple nuisance.
Walk into almost any of these telephone booths, especially in plush London neighborhoods like Chelsea and Kensington, and chances are there will 10, 20, sometimes 100 cards introducing the services of a ''top-class new Caribbean dominatrix'' who can provide a ''good spanking if you've been a bad boy'' or a ''continental blonde with a cuddly figure who will not rush you.'' The fee is discussed over the phone.
Clean-up teams, working as early as 6 A.M. each day, pick up 150,000 of these cards on an average week. But no sooner do the sanitation people depart than the so-called ''vice carders'' are back making sure the view is again blocked with more ads.
The mostly young men who distribute them tend to work for four to five prostitutes each, putting up as many as 200 to 300 cards a day, and have been known to beat up people who object.
Over a recent eight-week period, British Telecom and Westminster sanitation teams picked up 1.1 million such cards. Over a year, as many as seven million are removed throughout London. In some places the infestation is so thick, it is impossible to see out of the booth.
''Existing legislation is not sufficient,'' said Andrew Hillier, a spokesman for the City of Westminster. ''So we had to find more creative solutions, like apply pressure.'' Mr. Hillier and BT spokesmen say the problem, which began in the mid-1980's has worsened recently as prostitutes have competed for attention.
For much of the last decade, the ads were discreet, found on bulletin boards at news agents advertising somewhat benign things like ''French maid'' or ''private lessons.''
''It was all hint-hint, nudge-nudge,'' a British Telecom spokesman said. But now they have taken entirely new dimensions that the company says upset customers and dissuade others from using pay phones.
One prostitute, Kirsty, doubted the plan would have much effect.
''You know, darling, they've tried that before,'' she said, over the telephone number she had advertised in a phone booth on the Old Brompton Road. ''They don't call it the world's oldest profession for nothing.''Preliminary examination of all four engines from Trans World Airlines Flight 800 shows ''nothing really extraordinary,'' according to the official in charge of the investigation, largely ruling out the idea that engine failure caused the Boeing 747 to crash offshore here a month ago.
The finding also cast doubt on the idea that a heat-seeking missile hit the plane.
The official, Robert T. Francis, vice chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said that the engines, the fourth of which was brought ashore only on Thursday, had been taken apart in an unusually quick process by experts from Pratt & Whitney, their builder, T.W.A. and the International Association of Machinists.
Mr. Francis also said that an object found in engine No. 3, the one closest to the fuselage on the right wing, was not something sucked in from the outside but was part of the engine itself. Earlier, officials had said that the engine showed ''foreign object damage,'' most likely from something blown off the airplane.
But Mr. Francis' presentation, the first official briefing since Tuesday, was at times contradictory. He said technicians were adding a large piece of wreckage found Thursday night to the reconstructed section in an old Grumman hangar in Calverton, L.I.
Asked what that part was, he said, at first, that it included part of the center fuel tank. But when he was asked again later, James K. Kallstrom, the head of the New York office of the F.B.I., who was standing in his usual position on Mr. Francis' left side at the podium, whispered something to him, and Mr. Francis said the wreckage was actually part of the plane's roof.
In any case, he said the part had come from the debris field farthest from Kennedy International Airport, where the wings and center and rear portion of the fuselage were also found.
Most of the section of plane being re-assembled on the scaffolding was found in another, middle, debris field along with the nose. That field is 1.5 miles closer to Kennedy airport. Still more wreckage has been pulled up from a third debris field, closest to the airport. Thus it now appears that the re-assembly of the plane has reached a new level, in which pieces of the puzzle from different areas are beginning to come together.
Mr. Francis indicated that experts were surprised to find the new piece with the main body of wreckage. Charles Welti, the investigation's Chief Medical Examiner, reported that three more bodies had been recovered today, raising the total to 204. Nine days ago, officials began trying to lower expectations about the possibility of finding the remains of all 230 people on board, but since then, they have found eight more.
Whether by chance or design, the part of the Boeing 747 that some engineers are looking at most closely is within inches of the location identified by British investigators as the site of the bomb that destroyed Pan Am 103 eight years ago.
The final report on that crash, by the Air Accidents Investigation Branch of the British Department of Transport, refers to ''a small region of structure bounded approximately by frames 700 and 720'' as the site of the bomb. The numbers are inch-by-inch locations between the nose and the tail.
Engineers in the hangar here are looking very closely at the area between inches 700 and 740, a section near the front of the part of the plane that is now being rebuilt. Parts that make up that area come from the debris field nearest Kennedy, meaning they were the ones that came off the plane first and presumably are nearest to where the catastrophe began.
An obvious difference between the two crashes is that the Lockerbie bomb was in the cargo hold, and indications so far is that if the T.W.A. explosion was caused by a bomb, it was not in a cargo container but probably in the passenger cabin.
Another difference is that aviation experts believe that to do as much damage, a bomb exploding on Flight 800 at 13,700 feet -- its maximum altitude -- would have to be larger than the bomb on the Lockerbie plane, which was cruising at 31,000 feet, where the outside air is thinner.
If Flight 800 was brought down by a bomb, it had to be larger, because the plane apparently lost all electric power almost instantaneously. Power could be knocked out by a bomb in the electrical and electronic compartment, near the cockpit, but that wreckage does not show blast damage.
Another way to cut all power would be to sever the electric cables. These run from the point where the wings come together to the front of the plane, under the passengers' feet. But those cables, one each from four generators, each located next to an engine, run in pairs, and the two pairs are separated by 8 to 10 feet, implying a big blast.
As the job of sorting and re-assembling wrecked airplane parts continued in the hangar, Safety Board managers have carried out plans to rotate experts. Immediately after the accident, many of them had been working 12-hour days with only occasional days off. Recognizing that the reconstruction will likely take weeks or months, safety board managers say more engineers are being sent back to their home bases, in Washington or elsewhere, for longer periods.Democrats responded to the Republican Party's four-day show of moderation and unity today much as they have responded to Republicans all year: by branding the party a radical, intolerant institution bent on siphoning Federal largesse from ordinary folk to the rich.
It is a strategy that had forced the Republicans into a defensive crouch for most of this campaign season, and Democrats resumed it in interviews and television commercials even before the convention cleanup began in San Diego.
Hours after the Democrats released a new television spot on Thursday linking Mr. Dole to Speaker Newt Gingrich and cuts in Medicare spending, President Clinton's senior adviser, George Stephanopoulos, made the rounds of the networks with the quasi-official White House reaction.
Mr. Stephanopoulos said today that the made-for-television Republican meeting camouflaged the party's real agenda.
''They put out pro-choice speakers on the podium but struck the word 'tolerance' from their platform,'' he said on the NBC News program ''Today.'' ''They had welcoming words in the speeches about immigration and affirmative action but forced Jack Kemp to flip away from his moderate positions on those issues.''
''The real victors in this convention were Pat Robertson and Pat Buchanan,'' he added. ''They control Republican policy, no matter what you heard from the podium.''
The general chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Senator Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, joined Mr. Stephanopoulos on the ABC program ''Good Morning America'' to hammer the point home.
''It was what I would call the illusion of inclusion,'' Mr. Dodd said, referring to a major theme of the Republican convention, that theirs is an open-door, tolerant party.
Mr. Dodd called the Republican delegates in the convention hall ''potted palms,'' arranged for cameras ''while they trotted out a lot of moderate-sounding candidates who probably never would have gotten 10 percent of the delegate votes had there been actually an election here.''
President Clinton, who has largely chosen to cast himself as above politics rather than pick fights, did nothing to change that today. In the final days of a family vacation in Jackson, Wyo., the President stepped off a putting green to say that he had not watched the Republican convention and did not want to talk about it.
''I want to let them have their convention,'' Mr. Clinton said. ''We can afford to have two more days of enjoyment. Then we can go back and deal with all that.''
In so doing, Mr. Clinton sidestepped an opportunity to respond to a speech by the Republican Presidential nominee, Bob Dole, that surprised some for its critical references to the entire Clinton family.
Without mentioning her name, Mr. Dole drew Hillary Rodham Clinton into his speech by mocking the title of her recent book on child-rearing, ''It Takes a Village.'' Mr. Dole said it epitomized the Democratic view that Government, rather than individuals, are responsible for the welfare of families.
And he made an oblique reference to the Clintons' daughter, Chelsea, who attends a private school, by arguing that all parents should enjoy ''the same right as the person who lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue -- the right to send your child to the school of your choice.''
Mr. Stephanopoulos and other Democrats bridled at that today. ''The only person he left out last night was Socks,'' he said. ''It was very negative.''
Representative Charles B. Rangel of New York, one of the most prominent black members of Congress, called the convention ''an extraordinary piece of showmanship.'' But he expressed distress at the party's stance on racial issues, symbolized, he said, by the decision of Jack Kemp to drop his longstanding support of affirmative action.
''What the hell happened to the party of Lincoln?'' Mr. Rangel asked. ''Lincoln's dead and his ideals died -- I'm not saying with him, but they're just as dead. It saddens me as a politician.
Mr. Rangel said he was gratified to hear Mr. Dole tell his convention on Thursday that any delegate who was intolerant of others should head for the convention hall exits. ''I think he believes it,'' Mr. Rangel said, ''but it has nothing to do with the Republican Party. Anybody that doesn't look like you're rich is going to get hurt.''
BUSINESS HAILS SPEECH, DOUBTS PLAN
Wall Street and corporate executives praised Bob Dole's acceptance speech but questioned whether his economic program could work.An eight-foot section of a wing flap broke off a Trans World Airlines Boeing 727 approaching Kennedy International Airport late Thursday and plunged onto a Queens street, leaving deep gashes in the roadway.
The incident was the second this week in which parts of an aircraft fell to earth in Queens. On Wednesday night, small pieces from an engine on a Delta airliner landed in Flushing.
The plummeting wing flap Thursday caused no injuries on the ground or aboard the 727, the authorities said. The flight, 782 from Orlando, Fla., to New York, landed at Kennedy at 11:27 P.M.
A T.W.A. spokesman, John McDonald, said yesterday that the mishap had posed no danger to the passengers or difficulties for the pilot. Mr. McDonald said the falling of the flap had been discovered during an inspection just after the landing.
''The pilot had reported that the controls were a little heavier than they normally would be,'' he said.
The footwide piece of the right wing, from a rear flap, was found near the intersection of 156th Avenue and 89th Street in South Ozone Park, a residential neighborhood about a mile from the airport.
The police were notified just before 9 A.M. yesterday. Several residents told of having heard a loud thud hours earlier, a noise they had dismissed as ''just a bump in the night,'' said Capt. Bernard Gillespie of the Queens detective unit.
With daylight, residents and motorists recognized the length of metal, which bore a serial number, as part of an airplane wing, Captain Gillespie told reporters.
T.W.A. reported the incident yesterday afternoon to the Federal Aviation Administration's Flights Standards District Office in Garden City, L.I., according to Arlene Salac, an aviation agency spokeswoman. By law, she said, the airline had 72 hours to report the incident.
''We will be doing an investigation,'' Ms. Salac added, ''looking into it from a maintenance perspective.'' She said the wing flap had been taken to Garden City for inspection.
Mr. McDonald said it was too soon to tell what had caused the mishap -- he cited a collision with a bird and a maintenance problem as possible causes -- and said the airline would examine the flap at its Kansas City, Mo., maintenance center when the aviation agency released it.
Mr. McDonald said yesterday that the plane was being repaired at Kennedy and was expected to be back in service today.
Late Wednesday, several small fragments from an engine on a Delta Air Lines 727 fell onto Flushing as mechanical problems forced the plane to land at Kennedy after having taken off from La Guardia Airport. No one was hurt.
A spokesman at the F.A.A.'s aeronautical center in Oklahoma City, Roland Herwig, said yesterday that this week's mishaps over Queens had set officials to researching how often objects fall from airplanes.In an unusual civil rights lawsuit being heard in Federal District Court in Manhattan, three current and former officers in the corruption-ridden 30th Precinct are accused of punching, hitting, kicking and wrongly arresting a mother and her son in Harlem in 1991.
To bolster their case against the officers and the city, lawyers for Willie Mae King, 58, and her son Michael, 26, have enlisted the aid of the Mollen Commission report, the celebrated 1994 report on police corruption and brutality crucial to the investigation into the 30th Precinct. Mother and son were both charged with assault and resisting arrest in the 1991 incident, charges that were later dismissed.
On Thursday, one of the Kings' lawyers, Karen Smolar, read brief excerpts from the Mollen Commission report to the jury in an effort to discredit the testimony of the officers who are defendants in the case. One of the officers, Joseph Walsh, has pleaded guilty to Federal civil rights charges in an incident unrelated to the Kings' suit and has left the department.
The other officers, John McGrath and Robin Godwin, have not been charged with criminal wrongdoing and remain on the job in the 30th Precinct. City officials deny the accusations in the Kings' $10 million lawsuit, and Officer McGrath, testifying this week, said that Ms. King hit him with a baseball bat. The trial will resume on Monday.
At least four other civil lawsuits have been filed in Federal court against officers from the 30th Precinct in recent years, some of which have been settled, city officials said. But defense lawyers said this was the first time that portions of the Mollen Commission's voluminous report had been introduced as evidence in a civil rights case.
The report, released two years ago, concluded that corruption, brutality and efforts to cover it up were pervasive within the Police Department. In all, 29 officers from the 30th Precinct have been convicted in state or Federal court, or both.
On Thursday, with Officers McGrath and Godwin and the Kings looking on, Ms. Smolar read excerpts from the report, detailing the commission's conclusion that lying and cover-ups were ''widely tolerated'' within the department and that there is a code of silence in which officers will not incriminate fellow officers involved in wrongdoing.
Ms. Smolar and her co-counsel, Allan Brenner, said later that the commission's conclusions were an important tool in casting doubt on the officers' denials that they brutalized the Kings.
''What I've got is this practice where cops lie to protect other cops, and it's real, and here's somebody to tell you it's real,'' Mr. Brenner said. ''That's a pretty hard combination to beat.''
The suit stems from an incident that occurred on the evening of Oct. 22, 1991, when Officers McGrath and Godwin were on patrol in the neighborhood of 148th Street and Convent Avenue. The officers stopped to question some young men at the corner of 148th Street, because, Officer McGrath testified yesterday, several pedestrians had complained of drug dealing there.
In their suit, the Kings say that Officer McGrath, after asking Mr. King for identification and without provocation, cursed him, hit him in the face, kicked him in the back and chest and then arrested him. Ms. King said she attempted to shield her son from the beating, and as a result was severely beaten herself by several officers, dragged down her front steps, ''then kicked into the police van.''
Earlier in the week, testifying haltingly, Ms. King said she still suffered from the effects of the incident. ''I felt degraded, I felt humiliated,'' she said. ''My whole inside was turning inside. My emotions were in shreds. I can't think of any more words to describe it, except outright abused.''
In his testimony, Officer McGrath depicted Mr. King as the aggressor, saying the young man cursed him, struck his patrol car with a bottle and violently resisted arrest.
While he was trying to arrest the young man, the officer said on the witness stand, he ''felt a hard shot to the back of my head.'' He looked up and ''saw a woman standing over me, swinging a baseball bat.'' He was hit again, he said, this time in the back.
Taken to the hospital, he said he was ''in excruciating pain.''
''My back hurt very bad, my head hurt,'' Officer McGrath said, also testifying that he had missed several months of work as a result of the attack.The melody that matches Ruth Binzer's mood these days is something in a minor key. That rules out two of her favorites, Mozart's ''Eine Kleine Nachtmusik'' (second file cabinet on the right) and the ''Exultate'' from Verdi's ''Otello'' (fourth file cabinet on the right). Her brother-in-law, Norbert Grunau, suggests Chopin's ''Funeral March'' Sonata (first file cabinet on the left). But there is a problem.
''I think that's gone,'' she tells him, thumbing through the bottom drawer to be sure.
Soon, her sheet-music store on the Upper East Side will be gone, too. After a lifetime of selling scores to instrumentalists, vocalists and a conductor or two -- from private-school band directors in her Upper East Side neighborhood to stick wavers from across town at Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall -- Miss Binzer is closing the store her father bought, her mother ran and she and her sister inherited.
The narrow little shop at 218 East 81st Street, between Second and Third avenues, where the business moved 12 years ago after 30 years on East 85th Street, is where the actress Celeste Holm bought the score she needed when a last-minute call came for a White House appearance. It is where the conductor Erich Leinsdorf sometimes stopped in. It is where composers like Lukas Foss and Otto Leuning were sure to find just about everything they had ever published.
Once, it was all in those file drawers.
But a couple of months ago, Miss Binzer put up a going-out-of-business sign at the Binzer Music House, in part because she was worried about rising costs, in part because she felt that it was just time to retire. Now she has a new headache: the city's Department of Consumer Affairs has refused to extend her 90-day going-out-of-business-sale permit until the end of the month, which is when her lease expires.
''I said, 'What's another three weeks?' '' Miss Binzer recalled. ''This lawyer at Consumer Affairs said: 'Absolutely not. If I give it to you, I've got to give it to those schlocky guys on Fifth Avenue and 42d Street.' '' Or words to that effect.
The closeout at Miss Binzer's was anything but schlocky. There was not a single gray-market camcorder or imitation designer watch in sight. And no wonder: for some years now, Miss Binzer has been a rarity in the city that was once the sheet-music capital of the world.
After all, it was New York that gave the world Broadway, Tin Pan Alley and song pluggers -- pianists hired by music publishers to help sell sheet music by playing brand-new tunes over and over. And in Miss Binzer's specialty, classical music, New York had not only Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, but also recording studios for professionals and instrumental ensembles, church choirs and glee clubs for amateur musicians.
But the demand for sheet music in New York City has dwindled for a variety of reasons. For one, a surprising number of New York-based musicians make their recordings in places like Purchase or Troy, N.Y., where costs are lower. Columbia's legendary 30th Street studio, where everyone from Glenn Gould to Rudolf Serkin to Isaac Stern made some of their best-known recordings, is long gone. And RCA's Studio A on West 44th Street was turned into office space for the Internal Revenue Service.
As for sheet-music shops, only a handful remain. The venerable G. Schirmer store has been gone for a decade. Some are near concert halls: Patelson's Music House, behind Carnegie Hall on West 56th Street, and Brown's Music Company, at 44 West 62d Street, across Columbus Avenue from Lincoln Center.
''There are so few stores like that left,'' said Robert Lissauer, a musicologist and the author of Lissauer's Encyclopedia of Popular Music in America, 1888 to the Present (Facts on File). ''They used to have them in every neighborhood. They had the mom-and-pop music store and the mom-and-pop record store, and every home had a piano with sheet music on it, plus the Chopin etudes that the children in the house were learning.''
No more. Steven Blier, the co-artistic director of the New York Festival of Song and a teacher at the Juilliard School, said that it is not in rock stars' interest to glamorize the idea of learning to play an instrument -- it cuts into record sales. And so the number of music stores continues to dwindle.
''It is very frustrating for us,'' said Susan Feder, a vice president at G. Schirmer, now a music-publishing unit of Music Sales Inc., ''that when we issue a classical orchestral score, there are only about 10 dealers in the country who will accept it automatically. Even here in New York, you can walk into the stores that are left and they say, 'Don't have it; can't get it,' which isn't true, but because of the manpower required to get it and the cost of real estate needed to hold on to it, the economics don't work very well anymore.''
As Miss Binzer has learned.
''We've always been able to pay our bills,'' she said. But she decided to close because her lease was expiring on Aug. 31 and she figured the rent would go up. How much? ''I didn't even discuss it'' with the landlord, she said. ''I think he wanted $300 more a month. I'm paying $1,300 now. It's not that we have a tremendous space here, but it is the Upper East Side. The neighborhood has never been really cheap.''
And if her expenses are not exactly breaking her, they are creeping up at a time when sales are not keeping pace. Her insurance premium, for example, is up to $2,700 a year, she said.
And then there is the damage done by the rise of copying machines. ''Singers used to buy two copies, one for their pianist and one for themselves,'' said Mr. Blier of the New York Festival of Song. ''Now they barely buy one copy. I try to discipline myself not to just go for Xeroxes, but it's very tempting.''
Miss Binzer realized when customers were giving in to the temptation. ''Sales dropped,'' she said, ''and the publishers don't know what to do. Some guy walked in here from I.B.M. to sell me a machine. I said, 'Excuse me, it's against the law.' ''
Miss Binzer tried to sell the store in the spring, before the going-out-of-business sale. She was asking $50,000 to $70,000. ''Potential buyers, every one of them, I could see it, wanted a quicker return on the investment'' than sheet-music sales permit, she said.Black doormen in elegant colonial uniforms stand guard at most luxury hotels in Lima.
Stern-faced black pallbearers in tuxedos carry the coffins at most upscale funerals in the city.
The doormen are usually the only black employees of the hotels, and the pallbearers are typically the only black faces among the affluent mourners. In Peruvian society, these and other menial jobs are reserved almost exclusively for blacks, and their skin color is considered to bring an aura of prestige to the work.
Help-wanted advertisements seeking chauffeurs, cooks, doormen, butlers and maids often state a preference for ''negros'' or ''morenos,'' as blacks are known in Peru, an Andean nation of 23 million people who are mainly of Spanish and Indian descent. Blacks make up less than 1 percent of the country's population.
Among the wealthy, having a black butler or a black maid to attend the door or a dinner party is considered chic. No proper funeral would be complete without black pallbearers, and most funeral agencies provide this service for about $200.
Many black Peruvians who hold these posts say they are proud of their work and consider it a tribute to their race that blacks are preferred for these tasks.
''Why do the whites want blacks for this job, you ask,'' said 73-year-old Augusto Chevez, who has been bearing coffins of the rich for 60 years. ''Because we are so strong and so serious yet we look so elegant. Who else could do a better job?''
But not all black Peruvians take pride in working these menial jobs, which some view as a throwback to Peru's long history of slavery, which was abolished in 1854.
''Anyone who thinks it's esthetically pleasing to see black people in subservient and demeaning roles has a medieval mind at best, and at worst is a racist,'' said Jorge Rodriguez Reina, who heads the Movement for Human Rights of Blacks in Peru, one of three black political groups that have emerged in recent years.
The country's Indian majority suffers much of the same racism as blacks. But deep hostilities have kept Indians and blacks from uniting. In the colonial era, Spanish masters often used black men to oversee Indian laborers. Today, many aristocratic families in Lima place a black woman in charge of a household staff of Indian maids.
As a result, there are few ties between the two groups, which often discriminate against one another and refer to each other in the same derogatory terms used by many in the Hispanic elite.
Some black activists said they resent the international aid and attention that many indigenous groups have received under the administration of President Alberto Fujimori, who routinely dresses in Indian clothing and makes highly publicized trips to Indian villages.
Mr. Rodriguez and other black activists said that while most Peruvians contend that their country is free of racism, unspoken discrimination and benign neglect has kept a high proportion of Peru's blacks in menial jobs and deplorable living conditions.
Although nightclubs feature Afro-Peruvian musical groups and a third of Peruvian soccer players are black, the number of black professionals is estimated at fewer than 400, and there are no black executives of Peruvian companies, no blacks in the diplomatic corps, judiciary, or the high ranks of the clergy or military. The country's even smaller Japanese community has produced the current President, but no black politician has risen even as far as Congress.
While incidents of open discrimination are far less common in Peru than in the United States and Brazil, which has the largest black population in Latin America, blacks here say they encounter racism daily.
In public, they say, they are frequently called derogatory names like ''son of coal'' or ''smokeball.'' At job interviews, they say, they are often told that their experience and references are excellent but that the owners are looking to hire people with ''good presence'' -- a euphemism for someone who is white.
Cecilia Ramirez Rivas, a black woman, said she finished at the top of her nursing school class but works as an independent within the black community because she has been refused work at mainstream hospitals and doctors' offices.
In shops and restaurants, blacks say, they must often wait for white customers to be served first or they are denied entry outright.
''The worst is that nobody acknowledges that these events take place,'' said Paul Colino Monroy, director of the Francisco Congo Negro Movement, a black advocacy group that promotes pride and black cultural identity. ''Whites deny that there's racism, and most blacks never protest. They blindly assume that this is way things are supposed to be.''
Even if blacks protested, the activists said, there would be little recourse because there are no laws or penalties in Peru to protect them from racism. The Government has no programs or agencies charged with defending the rights of blacks or indigenous people. Despite numerous calls to various Government agencies, no official agreed to be interviewed on the issue of racism.From Wall Street to board rooms around the country, business executives praised Bob Dole yesterday for displaying energy, decisiveness and even youthfulness in his speech accepting the Republican Presidential nomination. But many questioned whether his economic program could work.
''Given the concerns about his age, I think one of the enduring impressions will be the energy level and intensity that he brought to the speech,'' said Peter Peterson, chairman of the Blackstone Group, an investment banking firm, and a former Commerce Secretary in the Nixon Administration. ''That will be very reassuring to the public.''
The Dole tax cut proposals drew high marks from most of the executives -- just the tonic needed, they said, to bring the economy to a higher level of growth than it has been able to achieve during President Clinton's tenure. But most of the bottom-line-oriented executives saw balancing the budget as equally important and wondered whether a Dole Administration -- or any Administration -- could manage the necessary spending cuts to offset those tax reductions.
''He has captured the spirit of much of the country in saying that we have to have a less intrusive Government,'' said Joseph T. Gorman, chief executive of TRW Inc., a large and diverse manufacturing company based in Cleveland. But ''if Dole's not going to change Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security,'' he added, ''then it is going to be very difficult to find the spending cuts.''
Mr. Dole's convention speech on Thursday in San Diego included a call for support of his economic plan, which was first announced on Aug. 5. The main proposals -- lower income and capital-gains taxes, less regulation of business and a balanced budget by 2002 -- have drawn relatively little public comment from the nation's chief executives over the last two weeks.
On Wall Street, there was concern that the tax cuts could be inflationary if they were not offset by spending reductions.
''Right now we are close to full employment in a strong economy,'' said Henry Kaufman, chairman of Henry Kaufman & Company, a money management firm, ''And,'' he added, ''if you cut taxes you run the risk of overheating the economy with too much stimulus, bringing on inflation. That concerns the financial markets.''
Mr. Peterson has been arguing for years that spending programs for the elderly must be restrained to avoid a ballooning of the Federal deficit to crisis levels when the baby-boom generation retires in the next century. Mr. Dole promised not to change these programs before 2002, Mr. Peterson noted, ''but I hope the Republicans don't say anything that would tie their hands on entitlement reform after that date.''
Others, like Sanford Robertson, president of Robertson, Stephens & Company, a San Francisco-based investment bank that is a major backer of several Silicon Valley enterprises, praised Mr. Dole for promising to lower the capital-gains tax. ''I wouldn't be surprised if the Democrats respond with something similar,'' said Mr. Robertson, a lifelong Republican who supported Mr. Clinton in 1992 and still backs the President. He complained, however, that Mr. Dole's program harked ''back to the Reagan era, a little bit more of the 'trickle-down' stuff,'' adding, ''I don't think there's any great inspiration there.''
T. J. Rodgers, the outspoken chief executive of the Cypress Semiconductor Corporation, a major chip maker in San Jose, Calif., said Mr. Dole's best move was to name Jack Kemp as his running mate. ''They're going to cut taxes and give money back to the American people,'' he said. ''Kemp is going to be the spark plug of this campaign.''
Whatever their political leanings, corporate executives were encouraged that Mr. Dole had put the issue of economic growth at the top of the nation's agenda. Several business leaders have been arguing that the right policies could foster a greater output of the economy without higher inflation than the 2.5 percent growth rate now considered the upper limit by many economists.
Stanley C. Gault, the recently retired chairman of Goodyear Tire and Rubber, praised Mr. Dole for offering policies that Mr. Gault said would promote more growth than the Clinton Administration has considered possible. ''Dole has taken a bold move, one that he and his people have been thinking about and analyzing for many months,'' Mr. Gault said in an interview after Mr. Dole outlined his economic program but before the speech.
And not everybody on Wall Street is spooked by faster growth.
''I fall into the growth camp,'' said Elizabeth R. Bramwell, president of Bramwell Capital Management Inc., a money management firm, insisting that Mr. Dole's tax cut proposals are the right avenue to lifting the economy.
For Tracy O'Rourke, chairman of Varian Associates, a health care and semiconductor equipment company, Bob Dole has upstaged Bill Clinton on the economy. ''Clinton's policies have locked us into a 2 percent to 2.5 percent growth rate,'' said Mr. O'Rourke, a Republican. ''The key thing about the Dole growth plan is that it is a balance of cutting taxes, reducing the regulatory burden and trying to balance the budget.''
But many of the executives expressed concern, before and after Mr. Dole's speech Thursday night, that his proposed spending cuts were too vague, and his goal of balancing the budget might be undermined, not only by leaving Social Security and Medicare untouched, but by increasing military spending, as Mr. Dole said he would do.
''His tax cuts are viable and good,'' said Douglas Durst, who heads the Durst Organization, a New York real estate developer. ''But I don't see any reason to increase defense spending. What enemy do we have that we need a large army to fight against?''
Social issues steer Roger McNamee, general partner of Integral Capital Partners, a venture capital firm, away from the Republican camp. ''I have a really hard time reconciling Bob Dole the individual with the increasingly extreme social program of the Republican Party,'' Mr. McNamee, a Democrat, said. ''As appealing as the words are that Bob Dole uses to describe his economic program, that meat comes in the wrong sandwich bread.''
For Paul O'Neill, chairman of the Aluminum Corporation of America, neither Democratic nor Republican economic proposals offer the central reason for selecting one candidate over the other. ''Three years from now, you don't know what events will be on the table,'' he said. ''Therefore my vote will go to the candidate I trust and that is Mr. Dole. Trust is the issue.''For Dr. Jack Kevorkian, Thursday was a fairly normal day in the life of one of the Detroit area's most recognizable celebrities. He played a little golf and appeared at a popular lunch hangout to auction off his well-known powder-blue polyester cardigan for the Children's Leukemia Foundation.
Later that night, Dr. Kevorkian, a retired pathologist, and his associate, Dr. Georges Rene Reding, a psychiatrist, appeared at Pontiac Osteopathic Hospital with the body of a Massachusetts woman.
The woman, Judith Curren, 42, who had a nervous disorder and chronic fatigue syndrome, had become the 35th person known to die ''in the presence of Dr. Kevorkian'' since he began a crusade in 1990 to win acceptance of doctor-assisted suicide.
Dr. Kevorkian's longtime lawyer, Geoffrey Fieger, acknowledged that Mrs. Curren had not been terminally ill. ''But she was suffering horribly,'' he said, ''and it was getting worse.''
While reports of a Kevorkian-assisted suicide once produced news bulletins, they are now barely newsworthy. Mrs. Curren's death was mentioned only briefly on local television and radio news.
''This should not even be treated as news,'' Mr. Fieger said in an interview today, ''but as an everyday occurrence.''
The Associated Press did report tonight that Mrs. Curren's husband, Franklin, a psychiatrist who was also present at her death, had been arrested three weeks ago on a charge of domestic violence. But Dr. Kevorkian said tonight that he had asked the Currens if they had any domestic problems, as is his policy, and that they had said no.
What appears to have happened in Michigan is, in effect, the decriminalization of physician-assisted suicide -- at least as practiced by Dr. Kevorkian. Richard Thompson, the Oakland County prosecutor who has been a longtime foe of Dr. Kevorkian, lost two expensive trials against Dr. Kevorkian earlier this year. Last week, the prosecutor was soundly defeated in a Republican primary by an opponent who said he would no longer waste the taxpayers' money by trying to convict Dr. Kevorkian ''unless the Legislature gives me an enforceable law.'' The Democratic nominee takes a similar position.
Michigan has no statute against doctor-assisted suicide, although the state Supreme Court ruled in 1994 that it could be a common-law crime. Earlier this week, Mr. Fieger filed suit in Federal District Court in Detroit, seeking to have that ruling found a violation of the United States Constitution.
Two Federal appeals courts have ruled that assisted-suicide laws are unconstitutional, and the United States Supreme Court may agree to decide the issue this fall.
State Senator Jim Berryman, a Democrat who plans to run for Governor, has tried to get a bill passed that would legalize suicide but impose strict guidelines, and he seeks a statewide referendum. ''But it is always blocked by Right to Life, which controls a substantial number of legislators and doesn't want any legalization,'' Mr. Berryman said, referring to Right to Life of Michigan.
''They won't allow a statewide vote,'' he said, ''and Jack Kevorkian won't stop, and no jury will convict him, so that is where we are, and it is embarrassing.''
For Detroiters, it is more like the same old story. On Thursday morning, after news of the latest suicide became known, a radio station staging the sweater auction, WCSX-FM, announced that Dr. Bill Aurick, an emergency room doctor at Detroit's Sinai Hospital, had offered the winning bid for the cardigan: $4,200.
That might seem extravagant, given that Dr. Kevorkian paid $1.50 for the sweater some years ago.
''You have to remember, though, that it is for a really good cause,'' said Jim Johnson, a local disc jockey who was the auctioneer.
The winning bidder, he said, will also have his picture taken with Dr. Kevorkian and will get an imitation ''death certificate'' signed by him.Despite signs of a tight labor market and an uptick in consumer inflation, Federal Reserve policy makers are expected to leave short-term interest rates unchanged when they convene on Tuesday, economists said today.
A string of recent statistics has generally confirmed expectations of a slowing of activity this summer, including today's report that builders broke ground on 5.7 percent fewer single-family homes in July than in June.
''Most people, probably rightly, believe they won't do anything,'' said William C. Dudley, chief United States economist at Goldman, Sachs & Company, putting the chances of a decision to tighten monetary policy at just 10 to 15 percent because of a lack of compelling evidence that the economy is growing too fast.
''They're probably going to stand pat,'' agreed Maureen F. Allyn, chief economist at Scudder, Stevens & Clark. Pointing to criteria that Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, cited last month before Congress -- inflation, economic activity and signs of bottlenecks -- she said the Fed could not credibly justify an increase in rates, especially since it would mean a policy reversal.
The last time the Fed policy-making panel, the Federal Open Market Committee, adjusted rates was to lower the Federal funds rate, an overnight lending rate, by a quarter of a percentage point in January. The move was regarded as an insurance policy against the possibility of recession, which disappeared quickly with the approach of spring.
But while growth in the April-June quarter came in at a very robust annual rate of 4.2 percent, most data since then have turned mixed.
Blue Chip Economic Indicators' survey of 50 economic forecasters last week came up with a consensus growth rate of 2.6 percent for the third quarter and 2.1 percent for the fourth.
Consumer prices have edged up of late but inflation at earlier stages of production has not. Factory activity has slackened and corporate purchasing managers are finding little delay getting deliveries from suppliers.
Moreover, retail sales scarcely rose last month while hourly earnings retreated from a June surge.
Today came word that the housing sector, also cited by Mr. Greenspan as something to be closely watched, was faltering.
''Evidence now is really solid that the single-family market has topped out,'' said David Seiders, chief economist for the National Association of Home Builders and a Fed alumnus.
''They'd really be hard pressed to rationalize it now,'' he said, referring to a decision to raise rates as significant economic sectors were slowing. ''It would be quite a dramatic thing if they moved next week.''
Although the Fed tends to assign foreign developments low priority at its policy meetings, analysts also noted that the Bundesbank was scheduled to meet on Thursday in an atmosphere of heightened speculation, fueled this week by comments of its chief economist, that it will cut short-term rates.
Analysts said the Fed would prefer not to raise rates here if the German central bank lowers them.
And the Fed, given any choice, would also rather not raise rates during a Presidential election campaign, the record showing rate changes to be only half as common during September and October of Presidential election years as in other years, Mr. Dudley said.
Many Fed watchers, in fact, think the central bank will probably sit tight into 1997. After Tuesday's session, the schedule for the Federal Open Market Committee shows meetings for the balance of this year on Sept. 24, the final one before the election, and on Nov. 13 and Dec. 17.
But since the bulk of its policy changes take effect only after a lag of many months, the Fed must to a large degree base decisions on future projections, not just on the latest figures. This is a notoriously imprecise exercise, however, further arguing against raising rates this month, Ms. Allyn said.
''You could be pre-emptive if you had accelerating growth,'' she said, ''but I don't know anyone who thinks the economy's speeding up now.''
Housing starts were down by 1.3 percent over all in July, the third consecutive monthly decline, the Government's report also showed, with July's annual pace of 1,445,000 at 4 percent below the peak in February, and June starts revised downward into negative territory.
Permits for future construction rose 2.6 percent, but those for single-family dwellings, economically more important than apartments, fell 1.4 percent, the third straight decline.For those who remember the days when Indian leaders led the world in condemning the moral evils of nuclear weapons, there was a special irony in the moment this week when Prime Minister H. D. Deve Gowda slammed the door shut on efforts to persuade the New Delhi Government to go along with a worldwide ban on nuclear testing.
For months, American diplomats have worked to head off a threatened veto by India that would torpedo negotiations in Geneva on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, considered by many to be the most important step yet toward curbing the spread of nuclear weapons.
On Thursday, as the oppressive heat and humidity of the Indian summer pressed in on a sea of people gathered for the anniversary of India's independence in 1947, Mr. Deve Gowda stood on the ramparts of the Red Fort and, by promising to continue opposing the global treaty, removed the last slim doubt about India's stand.
''I want to assure the people that the security needs of the country will be our top priority and the programs of the Agni and Prithvi missiles will be continued,'' he said, referring to two missiles developed by Indian scientists that are capable of being fitted with nuclear warheads and fired at targets as close as Pakistan, in the case of the Prithvi and as far away as the heartland of China, in the case of the Agni.
India's public explanations for rejecting the test-ban treaty, more than 40 years after Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru became the first world leader to call for a ban on nuclear blasts, have been linked to traditional Indian demands that any accord curbing nuclear arms be linked to their eventual elimination, and with it the ''nuclear monopoly'' held by the acknowledged nuclear-weapons states -- Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States. With a covert nuclear research program of its own, including the explosion of a nuclear ''device'' in 1974, India has long been prickly about any international meddling in its plans.
But what Indian leaders have not said publicly is that they also see a newer, more pressing reason for India to retain what analysts here call its ''nuclear option'' -- the rising economic and military power of China, and the growing nuclear forces that go with it.
Among diplomats who have negotiated with India on the test ban, and among Indian defense analysts, there is general agreement that it is the specter of China's emergence as the most powerful nation in Asia that is driving India to be the spoiler on a test-ban accord that was, in a sense, an Indian idea in the first place.
Along with that, diplomats and analysts say, the Indian stand reflects the changing nature of India itself, from a country that was an economic backwater but, in its sense of itself, a moral superpower to a nation that is increasingly like others -- inspired by a determination to match its Asian neighbors in prosperity, and to punch its weight in economic and military power. In short, a country much like China, with which India shares a 2,400-mile border that arcs along the high ridges of the Himalayas.
''By trying to force us into accepting the test-ban treaty, Western democracies are undermining India's capability to deal with the uncertainties that flow from any future threat from China,'' said Jasjit Singh, a retired Indian fighter pilot who is director of the influential Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses in New Delhi. China, Mr. Singh said, had emerged rapidly in recent years as ''a superpower of a sort,'' with one of the world's fastest-growing economies and nuclear forces to match, ''and this has forced India to re-evaluate its strategic posture.''
For Mohandas K. Gandhi and Mr. Nehru, the leaders of the independence struggle, a guiding principle was solidarity among former colonial nations, and China was seen as a natural ally. In 1962, Indian trust was shattered by a border war in the Himalayas that left Chinese troops occupying thousands of square miles of territory previously held by India.
But while Mr. Nehru died not long afterward, of what his family described as a broken heart, it is only recently that Indian policymakers have begun to focus on the long-term challenge China poses.
During the negotiations on the test-ban treaty, Indian officials have barely mentioned China. In his Red Fort speech, Mr. Deve Gowda came closer than usual, saying that India had to ''keep in mind the overt and covert nuclear activity by our neighbors,'' but even that was interpreted by Indian newspapers as referring to Pakistan, which is said by Western intelligence officials to have its own small stockpile of nuclear weapons, or at least the ability to assemble them rapidly if the need arises.
Privately, Indian officials acknowledge that they use public expressions of concern about Pakistan as a subterfuge for what worries them far more, the growing might of China. Western intelligence estimates in recent years have put Pakistan's probable stockpile of nuclear weapons at about 20, and India's in the range of 60 to 100. Moreover, India vastly outguns Pakistan in conventional forces.
According to the most recent estimate by the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, China has at least 205 warheads in its ballistic-missile force as well as a huge conventional military. India and Pakistan, in contrast, still must must rely on aircraft as nuclear delivery systems.
Analysts in New Delhi say that China has never renounced its territorial claims on vast areas along the border between India and China, including large parts of India's Himalayan state of Arunachal Pradesh. Also, Indian strategists have become increasingly alarmed by Chinese military activities on two islands belonging to Myanmar, the former Burma, that are across the Bay of Bengal from India's eastern coast.
For now, India and China have a slowly improving relationship, with growing ties in cross-border trade, and a new round of border talks. But outside India, defense analysts who have followed the Geneva negotiations agree that India has reasons for long-range concern about China and for a fear of, if not necessarily an outright attack, bullying by a powerful nuclear neighbor.
''The Indians have fought a war with China, albeit a small one, so this is a reality for them,'' said Col. Terence Taylor, assistant director of the Strategic Studies Institute in London. Colonel Taylor said that the United States and the other major nuclear powers, by pressing India on the test-ban treaty, were hardening attitudes in New Delhi. ''I think it's a recipe for not getting a treaty,'' he said.
Although the treaty has not been officially declared dead, efforts to keep it alive in Geneva appear to be faltering. On Wednesday the Indian delegate said that India, under the conference's consensus rule, would not allow the draft treaty to be forwarded to the General Assembly of the United Nations, where the United States had hoped it could be formally adopted by mid-September. India has already made it clear it would not sign on to a test ban itself. But in the treaty draft, India objects to a provision that it fears could attract further world condemnation on the issue: a requirement that all countries with nuclear arms, suspect nuclear programs or research reactors sign on before the treaty takes effect.
Privately, Indian officials say that at this point, no concession by the nuclear powers would be likely to persuade the Deve Gowda Government to back down, because of the political furor the issue has stirred. Since India's first and only nuclear test in 1974, Indian nuclear policy has been an uneasy compromise between hawks who would like an all-out drive to turn India into a major nuclear-weapons power, and Gandhian loyalists who see a nuclear-arms program as a betrayal of India's moral legacy. The result has been what Indians call ''nuclear ambiguity,'' meaning a weapons program that is never publicly acknowledged.
But now the balance has shifted toward the hawks in the course of the treaty debate.In a significant expansion of New York City's workfare program, homeless adults living with their children in city shelters will now be required to work for the city in exchange for their welfare benefits, aides to Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani said yesterday.
The plan, which the Giuliani administration confirmed yesterday after reporters began making inquiries, will take effect this fall for most of the 5,700 adults with children who live in city shelters. Those whose children are over 3 years old will be told to report to work, city officials said. If they refuse, they can lose a substantial part of their welfare benefits, though they will not be removed from the shelters.
The city now requires 34,000 welfare recipients to work for their benefits, cleaning parks and performing other routine tasks, but until now few them were homeless parents with children.
Administration officials said that as the city begins to expand its workfare program from childless adults to parents, it is only natural that homeless parents also go to work.
''We think it's positive to ask people to work for their benefits,'' said Peter J. Powers, the First Deputy Mayor. ''It's a way of building up self-esteem, and people in the shelter system should also be asked to contribute something back.''
Legal advocates for the homeless immediately denounced the plan, saying the city's priorities should be focused on providing shelter to those who seek it. Each night, up to 200 families sleep on floors and tables in an office of the city's agency for the homeless, in explicit violation of a court order that forbids the practice, and for which the city is being fined millions of dollars.
''This further sharpens the city's bed-of-nails policy with respect to homeless families,'' said Steven Banks, the lawyer who heads the Legal Aid Society's Homeless Family Rights Project. ''Instead of devoting city resources to finding housing for families, they are spending the money putting people to work and splitting up families.''
Mr. Banks said homeless families are often in a greater state of crisis than the 280,000 other families in the city who are on public assistance, and are already required by the city to search for permanent housing as a condition of receiving shelter. Putting adults into workfare during the day and children into city child care will only deepen the strains on such families, he said, adding that Legal Aid plans to file a court challenge to the plan on Monday morning.
The plan as it took shape late yesterday at City Hall appeared to differ substantially from the one originally considered by social service officials. According to two city employees who participated in planning meetings earlier in the week, the administration originally intended to place into workfare families at the Emergency Assistance Unit, the Bronx office where people are sleeping on floors and tables.
Under that plan, said the employees, who asked not to be identified, adults who showed up at the emergency office seeking shelter would immediately be put into workfare and their children into day care. The deterrent effect of such a plan, which the employees said was to start on Monday, would have been to reduce the number of families staying overnight at the office, and thus reduce the size of the court-ordered fines against the city.
But after reporters learned of the plan and began making inquiries, city officials announced a different plan late yesterday. Gordon Campbell, Commissioner of the Department of Homeless Services, said that adults would go into workfare only after their families had been placed in one of the city's 70 homeless shelters, not while they are staying at the Emergency Assistance Unit. He denied that the plan was ever intended to reduce the numbers of people staying at the office.
Until recently, most of those in the city's Work Experience Program, as workfare is formally called, have been childless adults receiving benefits under the joint city and state Home Relief program. Earlier this year, the city began moving heads of families in the much larger Federal welfare program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, into workfare, and now there are 14,000 parents, mostly single mothers, working for their benefits.
Under the new Federal welfare bill that President Clinton intends to sign later this month, as many as 200,000 people could be in state and city workfare programs by the year 2002. City officials say they have already called in about 75,000 parents to determine their eligibility for workfare, and said it was only a matter of time before homeless people were called.
''The fact is, everyone is being called in,'' said Richard Schwartz, the Mayor's senior adviser, who oversees the city's welfare policy. ''This is simply a logical extension of the plan.''
The Mayor's critics, however, questioned whether the city should be moving so quickly to put homeless parents into workfare, since only a fraction of welfare receipients are now working for their benefits.
''It would probably be best if the next generation of people put into workfare were those in private residences and stable environments, rather than compelling people in shelters into the program,'' said Mark Green, the public advocate. ''They seem to be jumping from A to W.''
Among the homeless mothers waiting for shelter at the Bronx Emergency Assistance unit yesterday, reaction to the new proposal was mixed. Some mothers said they were eager to work.
''You can give me a job tomorrow,'' said Teresa Falu, a 33-year-old mother of three in the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, who has been sleeping at the office since Aug. 5. ''But first I need to get out of here, to get a house, a bed to sleep in.''
Other women worried, however, that the proposal would interfere with their plans for further education and that the city would not provide day care for their children.
''I want to further my education so I don't have to depend on the city,'' said a 28-year-old woman who said she intended to start college in the fall and asked that her name not be used. ''I have a 7-year-old daughter, and I'm not going to allow just anybody to take care of my daughter.''For more than two years after little Kali Ann Poulton disappeared outside her home in this Rochester suburb, people hoped, or prayed, or at least pretended, that she was still alive.
Then on the night of Aug. 8, television stations interrupted programs to announce that someone had confessed to killing Kali and had told the police where to find her body. Suddenly, the Rochester area's best-known 4-year-old, whose smile beamed from thousands of missing-child posters and whose song, ''Have You Seen Kali,'' was a radio standard, was truly lost.
''She'd been gone two years, but when the TV said it, it was like she died right then,'' said Patricia Ball, a grandmother from Bloomfield, about 10 miles away, who had come to the town house complex where Kali lived, Gleason Estates, to sit by a memorial garden for her. ''It was like something right through your heart.''
There are various explanations for why the disappearance of Kali (pronounced KAY-lee) on May 23, 1994, became a defining event for so many people, pulling strangers into a crusade by her mother to search until she was found, and finally drawing 2,500 people to a memorial service Tuesday in Rochester's convention hall that tens of thousands more watched on television.
But when the search ended so suddenly, all the hopes and prayers generated by the crusade, all the fears and concerns given form by it, needed a place to go.
And so people began arriving at Gleason Estates, at the raised flower bed dedicated to Kali on the first anniversary of her abduction. Eerily, necessarily, the garden began to grow as the visitors left flowers, balloons and stuffed animals. They left hundreds of candles, so many that neighbors' children became their full-time caretakers.
After the memorial service, hundreds of people drove across the East Side of Rochester to stand vigil at the garden. Today people continued to leave flowers, cards and candles, to add their names to the guest book and to sigh at the inexpressible sadness of a garden still growing for a little girl.
Why does Kali's garden grow so, when every week brings new tragedies in which children die? A neighbor, Mary Hinton, pulled a visitor over to a photograph of Kali in the garden.
''See that little girl?'' she said. ''Wouldn't she steal your heart? Wouldn't you be concerned?''
Next to the photograph stood a bronze plaque that expressed the conviction of those who carried on the search that Kali could still be alive:
Your garden grows
with the tears
of sorrow
shed by all
in your absence
and the tears
of joy
upon your return.
''I really felt deep in my heart that she would come home,'' Mrs. Hinton said. ''Not in this manner, but that somebody would bring her back.''
But according to the police, Kali had been killed within an hour of being taken from the walk in front of her home that May evening, in the apartment of a 22-year-old neighbor only a few buildings away.Opposition party members are being terrorized and beaten by agents of the Muslim-dominated Government in a campaign of intimidation that further erodes any pretense of fairness in the coming local and parliamentary elections, according to opposition leaders, senior NATO officers and international monitors.
Reeling under the offensive of detentions, interrogations, public assaults on party supporters and attacks on political rallies, opposition leaders in some towns say it has become nearly impossible to organize or conduct a campaign for the Sept. 14 elections.
''Everyone I know who supports our party has been called into the secret police headquarters for long interrogations, some of them repeatedly,'' said an opposition-party organizer in a conversation at his home in Bihac. ''Sometimes the police just ask about how the party is organized, but often they are beaten too.''
In a coffee shop in the town of Cazin, with his back to the wall and his eyes constantly scanning the surroundings, another organizer said: ''The worst times are when they call and threaten my family. My wife and I know that they can do anything they want with impunity.''
Opposition leaders in several towns in Muslim-controlled regions said their supporters were afraid to even discuss politics openly.
NATO officers say the power behind the intimidation campaign, a Bosnian Government intelligence organization called the Agency for Investigation and Documentation, has hundreds of agents working across Muslim-controlled areas of Bosnia, especially in the northwest, where President Alija Izetbegovic's Party of Democratic Action considers its opposition the strongest.
Opposition candidates and international agencies monitoring the fairness of the campaign say that in the northwest, there are prolonged interrogations and detentions, coupled with beatings, almost daily.
''It's a typical secret-police, night-riding operation,'' a senior officer of NATO said.
The pressure has reached the point where the former Prime Minister, Haris Silajdzic, leader of the most popular opposition party, cited intimidation as a factor in his party's impending decision on withdrawing from the campaign.
On Thursday explosive devices were detonated outside the homes of political opposition members in Cazin, a United Nations official said today. No one was injured.
Foreign diplomats and United Nations monitors say there is an obvious alliance among the secret police, local officials and local leaders of the governing party to coordinate the intimidation of opponents.
Last week, after the president and vice president of a local opposition party were arrested by the police on smuggling charges, the police in another town tried to evict the leader of the main opposition group there. At the same time, international monitors said, some workers in state-owned businesses are being told that they will be dismissed if they do not support the governing party.
Field workers at the regional headquarters of international agencies responsible for monitoring the fairness of the election said they were not able to work freely because their telephones are tapped.
These elections, provided for in the Dayton peace accords that ended the fighting between Muslims, Serbs and Croats in Bosnia, are seen by the United States as crucial to rebuilding a country that has only the barest skeleton of a political system.
When an international agency monitoring human rights began to look into the secret police, a Western intelligence service warned it to stop. ''They told us it would be very dangerous for our staff -- someone would get hurt,'' an official said.
''They told us all our phone calls are monitored by these people and they have infiltrated agents in our staff,'' he said. ''The more we learned about them, the more dangerous it would be for us.''
Mr. Izetbegovic's party, which is all Muslim, contends that the best way to unify Bosnia is to maintain a very strong Muslim party that can counter the great power of Croatian and Serbian nationalist parties that want to partition the country.
He and Mr. Silajdzic worked together until Mr. Silajdzic resigned as Prime Minister to found his Party of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Mr. Silajdzic says the only way to prevent partition is with a party like his, which he says tries to include Serbs and Croats.
The general secretary of Mr. Izetbegovic's party said that the agency was only supposed to collect information on war criminals and that any intimidation was being conducted by renegades. ''We have warned them to stop, if they are doing this,'' said Ismet Grbo, the general secretary. ''We are a party founded on ethical principles.''
A far more chilling explanation was given by a senior party official in Bihac. Adnan Alagic said party leaders considered all opponents to be enemies of the state and therefore considered it the Government's duty to investigate them. ''Our opponents, even the Muslims, know that by working against us they can harm the Muslim people,'' he said.Every year they gather on a wood-plank dance floor built in the sand, dressed -- but not too dressed -- in swim suits, gym shorts, kilts or costumes.
The Morning Party, an annual gay dance at the edge of the Atlantic, draws thousands to Fire Island Pines, long the summer retreat of the well-heeled and well-groomed, a community of gray-shingled homes nestled in dense woods where the likes of the entertainment mogul David Geffen stroll the boardwalk. (In fact, his foundation is a sponsor of the party.)
About 4,500 people, paying $75 a ticket, are expected at 11 A.M. tomorrow for this year's event, at a fenced-in area the size of a football field on the east end of the Pines.
''It brings people from all over,'' said Bob Howard, a local real estate broker who is also a party sponsor. ''It has probably usurped the Fourth of July as the biggest weekend on the calendar.''
But the Morning Party is more than a highlight on the informal circuit of gay dance parties across the country. It also raises hundreds of thousands of dollars for the Gay Men's Health Crisis. And that has raised more than a few objections.
It is widely known that drugs like cocaine, the amphetamine derivative Ecstasy, and ketamine, an anesthetic often called ''K,'' have become an integral part of the Morning Party; not officially sanctioned, of course, but not hard to find, either.
And critics are questioning whether the Gay Men's Health Crisis, arguably the most important private AIDS service organization nationwide, is sending a dangerously mixed message. They contend that the agency is turning a blind eye to drug use, which impairs judgment and reduces inhibitions, often leading to the sexual behavior that can result in transmission of the AIDS virus.
''We started the organization to change all that, not perpetuate it,'' said Larry Kramer, one of the agency's founders, who is now one of its harshest critics. He attended the Morning Party two years ago.
''I was pretty shocked,'' Mr. Kramer recalled. ''It was as if AIDS had never happened and I was back in 1974 again. The drugs were rampant and so was the sexuality of it all, the hedonism. I was ashamed of G.M.H.C.'s affiliation with it.''
On July 26, there was a stir in the Pines when it appeared that the agency had withdrawn from the event. A letter on what looked like official stationery arrived at every house in the Pines, stating, ''It has become clear that the Morning Party and G.M.H.C.'s mission are at cross purposes and our involvement with the event must end.''
Within hours, the document was denounced as a fake in an open letter from Louis A. Bradbury, president of the board of the Gay Men's Health Crisis, and Mark Robinson, its executive director. ''In reality, G.M.H.C. is proud to continue its longest-running fund-raising event,'' they wrote.
The author of the forgery has not stepped forward.
Mr. Bradbury and Mr. Robinson said the Morning Party, which raised $350,000 last year, not only supports general programs -- buddies for AIDS patients, treatment information, meals, legal assistance and government lobbying -- but it also provided seed money for a substance-use counseling and education program.
''G.M.H.C. helps people address their substance use, not encourage or ignore it,'' they wrote. ''It's a fantasy to think that G.M.H.C.'s withdrawal from the Morning Party would strike a meaningful blow against alcohol and drug use.''
Michael T. Isbell, the associate executive director of the agency, said volunteers are instructed to discourage drug use and to inform the authorities if they witness drug dealing. He said signs stating that drugs are not permitted are posted on the portable toilets, where much of the drug use takes place, and elsewhere around the party area.
A flier prepared for the Morning Party carries the headline: ''Enjoy yourself. Don't destroy yourself.''
''Taking drugs involves risks,'' it continues. ''Mixing drugs (like 'K' and ecstasy) and mixing drugs with alcohol increases the risks. Alcohol and drugs, particularly ecstasy, can cause overheating. . . . If you have a medical problem, or you feel lightheaded, dizzy or nauseous, go to the First Aid Tent . . . If you have sex while high on drugs or alcohol, make sure to use a condom . . . Remember, possession of ecstasy, 'K,' cocaine and other drugs is illegal. Dealing them is a felony.''
Troy Masters, the publisher of L.G.N.Y., a lesbian and gay newspaper that is a sponsor of the party, said the flier amounted to a ''stamp of approval,'' since it did not go into more detail about the drugs' dangerous effects.
''That's not harm reduction,'' he said. ''That's drug promotion.''
And Adam R. Rose, a real estate executive in Manhattan and former donor to the Gay Men's Health Crisis said, ''A party whose point is really drug use has no place benefiting an organization that is fighting for intelligent decisions that lead to safer sex.''RABBI ISRAEL SHEMTOV seems to pop up in the right place at the right time. Three years ago in his Crown Heights neighborhood, he rescued a woman who, bleeding profusely from nearly a dozen bullet wounds, was crawling out of a basement. He hauled her into his car and sped to a nearby hospital. On Monday, three years to the day, he was driving over the Brooklyn Bridge when he stopped and talked a distraught man out of jumping.
Others might say he has a knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The founder of a Lubavitch Hasidim neighborhood patrol, Rabbi Shemtov admits with a sly smile that he has been arrested ''many times'' for obstructing government administration. In the sometimes zealous pursuit of assorted bad guys, as well as in reaction to insults to his brethren, he has been charged over the years with assault, rioting and just plain getting in the way.
Sometimes he bends the rules. But he insists that he always follows the Book.
''In different parts of the Torah, it is quoted that he who saves one soul, it is as if he saved the entire world,'' said Rabbi Shemtov, a pixie-ish man with gray hair and a red-flecked beard. ''It's totally immaterial whether they're black or white or any race or religion or color. A human being you have to help.''
Other people would just as soon walk away from a fracas or a crime rather than risk injury or arrest. Rabbi Shemtov says he can't ignore what goes on around him. His record, as well as the numerous cars he has driven into the ground after one chase too many, is the price he cheerfully pays.
''Any lady cooking in her house would have bandages in the medicine cabinet,'' he said. ''Every now and then, she gets a little cut. The only one who doesn't get cut is somebody who doesn't step into the kitchen.''
Or drive into Manhattan.
CROSSING the Brooklyn Bridge on Monday to take a friend into Manhattan, he saw a group of police officers looking upward. A man, Atta Boamah, was perched on the cables.
''You think we should stop?'' he asked his passenger, who probably didn't realize it was a rhetorical question.
''No, let's continue,'' was the reply.
''No,'' he said. ''You never know.''
He approached the police, who said Mr. Boamah was upset over having lost his job. The rabbi said he thought the jumper would not listen to the police because they were paid to do this. As a clergyman and unexpected passer-by, he might have some sway. With traffic backed up, Rabbi Shemtov began to shout up to the man.
''He was yelling and screaming that he was taking his life,'' Rabbi Shemtov said. ''He lost his job. He said his wife died. He was just fed up with everything else.''
The man kept yelling he wanted a job. So he promised he would help him find one. Curious but cautious, the man insisted the rabbi write down the promise before allowing the police to remove him.
''I wasn't trying to con him,'' the rabbi said. ''You can do anything to save anybody's life, even if you have to twist a little bit.''
OTHER twists have not been as innocuous. More than once he has been accused of assault in apprehending suspected muggers, although charges against the rabbi were often dropped or reduced. He was convicted of obstructing the police during a melee that erupted when officers tried to arrest a fellow Hasid over a traffic dispute and drive him to the station on Succoth, a holy day when riding in cars is prohibited.
Some people have called him a vigilante. Others, like the children who sometimes make a ruckus playing basketball at night on his street, have called him a meddler. He says it's his right to stick up for the community, regardless of a person's race.
Alec Earle, a black man who is the rabbi's neighbor, applauds his involvement in the community. He even keeps a picture of the two of them in his office at the City University, where he teaches math.
''This is a mixed community, and a lot of people don't take the time out,'' Mr. Earle said. ''The perception is Jews and blacks do not get along. I see other changes in Crown Heights, I see more communication between people. A good amount of that is attributable to Israel Shemtov and his involvement in the neighborhood.''
It's in his nature: Do what you can. Take a chance.In a signal that he may veto a bill to make English the official language of Suffolk County, County Executive Robert J. Gaffney issued a statement today saying that he would oppose the measure if he concluded that it singled out Hispanic people.
''He doesn't want to isolate any one community and hurt it in any way,'' said Rick Belyea, a spokesman for Mr. Gaffney.
If adopted, the measure would be the first of its kind in New York State.
The bill, which was approved by the County Legislature on Tuesday by a vote of 10 to 5, with 3 abstentions, would require that all official county business be conducted in English. To become law, it must be approved by voters in a referendum.
Mr. Belyea said Mr. Gaffney ''hasn't been in favor of English-only bills in the past, which is all the more reason why he is going to give this one a real long, hard look.''
If he vetoes the bill, it would take the votes of 12 legislators to override. Mr. Gaffney has until Sept. 13 to decide, but for the measure to appear on this November's ballot, action would be needed by Sept. 6. If he were to sign the bill after Sept. 6, the measure could not reach the voters until November 1997.
The bill was opposed by John B. Wingate, the county's Social Services Commissioner. Mr. Wingate said it ''could end up costing the county a considerable amount of money'' by hampering communication with non-English-speaking welfare clients and slowing welfare-fraud and child-abuse investigations.
The sponsor of the bill, Michael M. D'Andre, a Republican from Smithtown, called on Mr. Gaffney to sign the measure and let the voters decide.
''The bill doesn't mention any nationality,'' Mr. D'Andre said. ''We have nothing against any people. All I am asking is that if this is the country that defends you, shelters you and feeds you, the least you owe it is to speak the language, English.''A seven-member jury at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio has acquitted a female Air Force major charged with sodomy and conduct unbecoming an officer.
The sodomy charges against the officer, Maj. Debra L. Meeks, 41, were based on an accusation that she had had a homosexual relationship over two years with Pamela J. Dillard, a civilian. Ms. Dillard, the military's main witness, also accused the major of threatening her with a gun in 1994, the basis for the unbecoming-conduct charge. The five-man, two-woman jury deliberated for seven hours before reaching their decision on Thursday evening.
Major Meeks, who enlisted in the Air Force in 1974, has not said whether she is gay. Had she been convicted, she faced eight years in military prison and loss of her pension, estimated at $1,800 per month.
Telephone calls to Major Meeks's residence in San Antonio were not returned. She was quoted by The Associated Press as saying, ''I'm just glad this nightmare is over.''
Major Meeks was prosecuted under the sodomy provision of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which has been on the books since 1951. The sodomy provision applies to both heterosexual and homosexual sex, but critics say the Air Force and other branches of the military focus only on gay men and lesbians.
The defense sought to place the court-martial, which began on Monday, into the context of the Clinton Administration's ''don't ask, don't tell'' policy, which the military instituted in 1993 and under which homosexuals are allowed to serve in the military but must keep their sexual orientation private.
Dixon Osburn of the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network said that the military had failed to adhere to its own new policy on homosexualty and that ''if the Air Force had followed its own regulations, there would never have been a court-martial.''
The network provides legal aid to military personnel who are harassed or prosecuted because of their perceived sexual orientation.
During the court-martial, Air Force prosecutors presented five witnesses. The defense team, headed by Michael Tigar, a University of Texas Law School professor who is also a lead defense lawyer in the Oklahoma City bombing case, did not call any witnesses. The defense repeatedly attacked Ms. Dillard's credibility and argued that Ms. Dillard had made up her assertions about a romance with Major Meeks.
Interviewed after the verdict, Mr. Tigar said, ''I hope it encourages other people who may be the victim of charges to stand up and fight.''
Asked why he chose to represent Major Meeks, he said, ''I was offended by what had happened to her and how she had been treated. It seemed to me that having a pajama police force was a waste of money.''
Irene Witt, a spokeswoman for Lackland said: ''The military justice system worked. The matters charged were given full and careful consideration by the court members before they reached a verdict. We respect and abide by their decision.'' Ms. Witt could not provide an estimate of the cost of the case.
Mr. Osburn pointed out that none of the officers held responsible for the April 3 crash of Commerce Secretary Ron Brown's plane in Croatia had been court-martialed, even though Mr. Brown and 34 others were killed.
''Why in the world is our military spending millions of dollars trying to throw people suspected of being gay in jail rather than insuring our airplanes are safe to fly?'' he asked.
Mr. Osburn's group estimates that the Pentagon spent more than $21 million in 1995 to train replacements for personnel discharged because of their sexual orientation.The chief negotiators in baseball's labor dispute met yesterday in Manhattan for the first time since Monday, but movement in the talks was not up to them.
For the fourth straight day, Bud Selig, the acting commissioner, spoke with owners by telephone, determining where the group was headed on the deal the negotiators have basically in place.
After meeting with Randy Levine, the owners' chief labor executive, for about an hour, Donald Fehr, the head of the union, said of Levine: ''He said he remains committed to a deal, and I believe him.''
Levine, however, was faced with opposition from at least some owners. The primary issue has been service time the players want for time missed during their 1994-95 strike.
But a person on the owners' side said yesterday that concern had surfaced about a sixth year in the agreement that the union would have at its option.
BASEBALLUnder rules taking effect today, hundreds of commuter planes in service around the country will have to fly farther behind jet airliners when approaching or leaving airports to reduce the risk of crashes. But the change will probably also increase delays.
The point of the new rules, issued by the Federal Aviation Administration, is to keep the smaller planes out of the wakes of big jets. The agency's action comes after crashes in 1992 and 1993 of a Learjet and a Westwind that had been following Boeing 757's.
Aviation officials were reluctant to predict how much difference the new rules would make, but they said the new rules would mean that air traffic controllers would keep planes farther apart in the vicinity of airports. That will increase the interval between landings by a few seconds. That will reduce the number of planes able to land each hour at busy airports, including La Guardia and Newark, in the New York area; Los Angeles; Miami, and O'Hare, in Chicago.
The rules will have less impact away from airports. Planes cruising between cities are kept farther apart anyway because radar in those areas is less accurate. Also, in long-distance flights, big jets fly much higher, where they do not encounter small planes.
Under the old rules, planes of less than 12,500 pounds were classified as ''small,'' and small planes have to fly a prescribed distance behind planes classified as ''large'' or ''heavy.'' The new rules change the definition of small to include more planes: those under 41,000 pounds.
Under the old system, a Cessna 152, a popular private plane, was classified as small; now the classifications of such commuter models as a Shorts 360, a British Aerospace Jetstream 31, a Fairchild Metro III and a Rockwell Sabreliner, which had been called large, have been changed to small.
Large planes under this system include some 727's and all DC-9's; heavy planes include DC-10's, Boeing 747's and 757's, and Lockheed L-1011's. DC-8's were reclassified from large to heavy. In addition, the Boeing 757 is considered large but is given more space in the air than other large planes.
The minimum safe distance for a small plane to follow a Boeing 757 is five nautical miles; a large plane can follow a 757 at four nautical miles.
A study released by the F.A.A. shows that the change would add substantially to the number of planes classified as small.
The effect on delays will be complicated. At some airports, arrival delays will increase, but as incoming planes are spaced out more, air controllers will allow more planes to depart and those delays will decline. The computer projection done for the F.A.A. indicates that delays will increase nationally by 17 percent in good weather and 9 percent in bad weather, when delays are longer anyway.
At Los Angeles International, according to the study, delays will increase 80 percent in good weather because demand for runway space is so high that even small changes cause big disruptions and because the number of planes being reclassified as small is so high.
At Newark and La Guardia, delays would increase by about 10 percent, according to the projection.
The F.A.A. released the study late yesterday afternoon. Terry Benczik, a spokeswoman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, said last night, ''Obviously safety comes first, and we're going to be working closely with the F.A.A.'' In any case, it is the F.A.A. that runs the control towers and the movement of airplanes.
The safety problem that the rules seek to address is a phenomenon called wake vortex, in which airplanes generate synthetic tornadoes at each wing tip in horizontal trails behind the plane. Light aircraft can be flipped if they encounter one.
Wake vortexes have been a subject of intense study since the 1994 crash of a Boeing 737 approaching the airport in Pittsburgh. That accident has not been explained, but the plane's problems began shortly after it ran into the wake of a 727.Branded a traitor by his comrades and now suing for peace with his longtime enemies, Ieng Sary -- a founding member of the brutal Khmer Rouge insurgency -- leveled a harsh attack today on his oldest comrade in arms, the Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot.
Calling him a liar, a cheat and ''the chief of the cruel murderers,'' Mr. Ieng Sary accused Mr. Pol Pot of the kind of crimes in which he himself has been implicated, saying the Khmer Rouge leader executed people ''even though they had done no wrong'' and carried out purges on flimsy pretexts.
It was the first public statement by Mr. Ieng Sary, the central figure in a severe new rift in the Khmer Rouge, who according to Cambodian military officers has just returned from unspecified medical treatment to his home in the village of Phum Dong, 15 miles south of here.
On Thursday, one of Cambodia's tandem Prime Ministers, Hun Sen, shocked many of his countrymen by offering to welcome Mr. Ieng Sary back into society, although he is implicated together with Mr. Pol Pot in mass deaths -- totaling, by various estimates, from hundreds of thousands to as many as two million -- during the years of Khmer Rouge rule from 1975 to 1979.
In his statement today, broadcast on Government radio, Mr. Ieng Sary confirmed that he was the leader of a breakaway Khmer Rouge faction that has been negotiating a truce with Government forces in this trading town on the Thai border, less than three miles from the front lines of battle.
Military officers here said a truce had been reached on Thursday, after four days of talks, that will allow the Khmer Rouge troops to come under the formal command of the Government while retaining control of their territory and their weapons and maintaining their military rank.
One of the Government negotiators, Brig. Gen. Duong Sokhon, said further talks starting on Saturday would determine just how many soldiers and family members were involved in the agreement and would also address the rebels' needs for community development including road-building and mine-clearing.
Mr. Hun Sen has said as many as 3,000 guerrillas, or half the rebel force, were prepared to join the Government side, but officers involved in the negotiations said the actual number was not yet known.
Although the Khmer Rouge troops in this key battlefield in northwestern Cambodia will now formally be under Government command, General Sokhon said, the Government forces have agreed not to enter or occupy their territory.
The Khmer Rouge have controlled much of the jungle and mountain areas near the Thai border since being driven from power in January 1979 by a Vietnamese invasion. Over the years they have been reduced to more a deadly rebel band than an insurgency that seriously threatens the Government.
Though Mr. Ieng Sary has not attended the negotiations, General Sokhon said the Khmer Rouge participants were carrying out his instructions and were flown by helicopter to his home today after the agreement had been reached.
The role of Mr. Pol Pot in the rift has been an even deeper mystery: it is not clear whether he is alive or dead. Reports two months ago that he had died have still not been confirmed, and Government officers who have talked with the Khmer Rouge here said they still did not know the truth.
Mr. Pol Pot has played no role in the current talks, and until today his name had not been mentioned in a weeklong exchange of insults broadcast by the two sides.
In an intriguing reference, Mr. Ieng Sary said hard-line Khmer Rouge leaders had been ordered by Mr. Pol Pot ''in the last few days'' to attack the breakaway group, but it was not clear whether this was more than a rhetorical flourish. Even if Mr. Pol Pot is still alive, he has been reported to be seriously ill.
Known as ''Brother No. 1'' in the Khmer Rouge movement, Mr. Pol Pot was a schoolboy friend and brother-in-law of Mr. Ieng Sary, who was his Foreign Minister during his years in power and was sometimes referred to as ''Brother No. 2.''
The two men were tried together in absentia for genocide and sentenced to death in 1979 by the Vietnamese who occupied their country, and they are now among the key figures being investigated by a United Nations-sponsored research project that is preparing materials for a possible new prosecution.
In his statement today, Mr. Ieng Sary, 71, presented these accusations against his old friend, accusations that echoed those of the Vietnamese and of uncounted others since then:
*His forced evacuation of Phnom Penh, sending many people to their deaths, ''without regard for their standard of living or welfare.''
*His killing of intellectuals -- particularly those Mr. Ieng Sary had invited to return home from abroad when he was Foreign Minister -- based on wild accusations that they worked for foreign intelligence services.
*The weakening of the Khmer Rouge movement itself with mass purges that caused internal conflicts and mistrust.With one last display of fireworks and burst of confetti, Bob Dole and Jack Kemp bounded out of their nominating convention in San Diego this morning, launching a campaign to change voters' views of the Republican Party and to turn the Presidential election into a referendum on tax cuts.
''Fifteen, fifteen, fifteen percent tax cut!'' Mr. Dole said at a farewell rally in San Diego before flying here this evening. ''Keep that in mind.''
''Jack and Joanne have four children and eleven grandchildren,'' Mr. Dole continued, gesturing to his running mate and his wife on the stage, and then explaining to a momentarily perplexed audience what had prompted that observation: ''Fifteen! Fifteen! Keep that in mind.''
Mr. Dole and Mr. Kemp began a three-day cross-country tour this morning with a comparatively restrained and moderately attended rally, on a platform set up behind a Hyatt hotel, within sight of the San Diego waterfront. The Republican Presidential and Vice-Presidential nominees spoke for a combined 18 minutes to an audience made up mostly of convention delegates and hotel workers.
Mr. Dole and Mr. Kemp used the rally to reprise, and sharpen, the themes they presented on Thursday night, when they accepted their party's nomination: a call for tax cuts, a depiction of their party as one that cares about all Americans and an attack on Democrats as elitist defenders of big government.
But all the oratory and ceremony of today -- as well as the opportunity to watch Mr. Dole and Mr. Kemp begin the honeymoon of their political union with a trip that will take them to Buffalo, Springfield, Ill. and Pittsburgh -- was overshadowed by the drama of Mr. Dole himself. He was, from the start of the day, unrestrained in his elation, demonstrating at every opportunity his delight at having won a nomination he first sought 16 years ago.
Mr. Dole startled his aides at 9 o'clock this morning, when he emerged from his hotel suite and -- with only a turn of his thumb and an ''oakie-dokie'' -- announced he was heading downstairs for a speech to Republican leaders. The former Senate majority leader, who had obediently followed the script drafted by his political advisers this week, was 45 minutes ahead of schedule. He showed up before most of the reporters and before Mr. Kemp himself, who came bouncing onto the stage just as Mr. Dole was concluding his remarks.
Mr. Dole greeted the crowd, many of them old friends from conventions past, with an oblique and poignant comment on how he viewed the events in San Diego, the ninth convention he had attended since entering politics in Kansas 43 years ago.
''I've been coming here since 1964 and I never got to talk last,'' he said, speaking to a hotel room full of Republicans. ''Last night it finally happened. I got to say the last word.''
''I'm now leaving full of excitement and full of enthusiasm and full of confidence,'' he declared.
The nomination his, Mr. Dole went on to needle his critics, many of them in his own party, who had complained that the candidate had failed to lay out a defining theme for his campaign. Mr. Dole told Republican leaders that while delivering his 57-minute acceptance speech on Thursday evening, ''I saw my optometrist right there in the front row.''
''They say I don't have any vision,'' he continued. ''There he was, right in the front row. A man of vision. Twenty-twenty.''
Mr. Dole's aides said they intended to make the trip today and the rest of the weekend, including a visit to Mr. Kemp's adopted hometown of Buffalo, as an opportunity to reprise the themes of the convention and present the Republican ticket to the American people. Mr. Dole's aides hope that the nominee and his running mate will, as a ticket, prove to be as politically successful as Bill Clinton and Al Gore were in the 1992 campaign, and thus there was a great deal of focus on the what they said.
Still, today was given to celebration. And in an appropriately choreographed ending to a tightly produced convention week, Mr. Dole and Mr. Kemp opened their rally in San Diego by walking down a staircase from the ballroom level of the Hyatt to the sounds of ''Signed, Sealed, Delivered'' (the Stevie Wonder version). Mr. Dole's campaign has, with increasing frequency, turned to Motown for the musical backdrop of its events.
Among those greeting the candidates at the rally was the cheer-leading squad of the San Diego Chargers, where Mr. Kemp began his career as a quarterback in the American Football League. The scantly clad cheerleaders waved gold tassles as the candidates and their entourage made their way to the stage.
Elizabeth Dole, smiling, jerked her head back in astonishment when she caught sight of the cheerleaders. Still smiling, she turned on her heels and worked the other side of the crowd. Her husband chose to face the cheerleaders.
The primary political focus of the day, first in San Diego and then in a late afternoon rally here in Denver, was Mr. Dole's tax cut plan, which includes a 15 percent cut in income tax rates and a halving of the tax rate on capital gains. Mr. Dole, anticipating a barrage of attacks from the Democrats on his plan at their own convention in 10 days, asserted that cutting income taxes, as well as halving the capital gains tax, would not create a catastrophic reduction in government services.
''I would not propose a tax cut, and I would have not proposed the economic package, had I not been certain that we could achieve it without hurting Social Security, without hurting Medicare,'' he said. ''But I really believe we have an obligation to families with children and taxpayers all across America to make our tax code flatter and fairer and simpler.''
''We have one simple message,'' Mr. Dole said here. ''We're going to balance the budget and we're going to cut taxes at the same time. And we're not going to apologize for putting more money in your paycheck.''
Mr. Kemp made the same argument, saying: ''Don't let anybody tell you this is the party of the rich. This is the party of Bob Dole, and wants everybody to reach their potential as a child of God.''IN the spirit of the Olympic Games -- gone but not forgotten -- and in the spirit of good faith -- strained but not lost -- I've decided to change my method of judging the Jets this season.
For the last several years, each new season for the Jets has been met by a granite wall of pessimism and their fans' eternal lament: How will they mess this up? The burden of proof, low expectations and cynicism have been a heavy weight to carry.
So this season I've decided to grade the Jets the way judges grade gymnasts: They go into the season with a perfect score. How close to a 10 will the Jets be on Dec. 22 when the season ends? Like the gymnasts, the team will pick up points for level of difficulty as well as for meeting special requirements -- passing, catching, executing. They will receive bonus points for action above and beyond the call of duty: playing hurt, overcoming huge deficits to win or making a lopsided game close.
The Jets have declared a new day, a spirit of positive thinking: Out with the old, in with the new.
''I think there's something going on, I think it's growing here,'' Rich Kotite said Thursday after practice. ''This is a serious group. They know that they're going to be the underdogs, they know people don't think a lot of them at this point.''
Kotite was granted not just three but four wishes this season. He wished for a top-flight quarterback. Poof! Neil O'Donnell. He wished for the best college receiver in the nation. Poof! Keyshawn Johnson. He wished for a fleet of wide receivers to join Johnson in catching O'Donnell's passes. Poof! Poof! Poof! Jeff Graham, Webster Slaughter and Alex Van Dyke.
Then Kotite wished for experienced linemen to protect the new quarterback and give him time to throw to his new receivers: Poof! Jumbo Elliot. Poof! David Williams.
Now, eight months after a demoralizing loss to New Orleans ended the Jets' miserable 3-13 season, the perception of potential has changed so dramatically that Kotite can stand before reporters on a wonderful August afternoon and dismiss the idea of picking up someone on waivers for front-line help.
''It's hard to believe that there will be someone on waivers who can beat out the guys we have right here,'' Kotite said.
The underlying theme for the Jets this year is pulling together. There are so many disparate pieces, so much talent -- O'Donnell, fresh from a Super Bowl appearance with Pittsburgh; Ron Erhardt, architect of the Steelers' slashing offense, and Graham, coming off his best season as a professional.
The most compelling figure is young Johnson, U.S.C.'s former Rose Bowl hero who is already defying convention. An effervescent personality, he refuses to indulge the veterans' ideas of silly rookie sacraments.
Kyle Brady, the second year tight end, looks at Johnson across the locker room and shakes his head. He knows that the young Californian is carrying that heavy burden of proof.
''Sometimes you do feel the weight of expectation on your shoulders,'' Brady said. ''I just hope he can handle the things that are going on around him and not get so caught up in people's expectations. He's got to focus internally rather than looking at the craziness going on around him because this city can chew you up and spit you out sometimes.''
Ultimately, winning conquers all.
Harry Boatswain, the Jets offensive tackle, wears dreadlocks, but he also wears a Super Bowl ring from his days with the San Francisco 49ers. O'Donnell sports a goatee, but he also sports a Super Bowl ring. Keyshawn Johnson wears an earring and wears his cap backward like Joe Walton, the former Jet head coach who sported that look when he was the team's offensive coordinator. As long as the scoreboard is ringing up points and the home team is winning, all is fine.
The Jets have not won in several seasons. And there is an atmosphere of heightened expectations that in many ways is unrealistic for a team coming off a 3-13 season. The rookie from U.S.C. may not feel it yet, but Kotite does. O'Donnell does.
''In Pittsburgh they expected every time you step on the field to win,'' O'Donnell said. ''I know here they want the page to turn right now; they expect it to happen tomorrow, too.''
Three weeks into August the Jets are 0-2. But in the spirit of the Olympics and the spirit of good faith, on my chart for now they are a perfect 10.
Sports of The TimesBill Clinton, the nation's highest-profile baby-boomer, is not going quietly into that sixth decade that he says signifies he has ''more yesterdays than tomorrows.''
Instead, Mr. Clinton plans to celebrate the Big Five-O by concentrating on one of his driving priorities of the present: raising campaign funds, this time through an elaborate birthday bash on Sunday at Radio City Music Hall, which will be beamed by satellite to 80 other fund-raising parties across the nation.
Planned for months by Hillary Rodham Clinton, the party will look less like political dinner fare and more like the Oscars, whose producer, Jeff Margolis, is also staging this pageant. Stars will celebrate every decade of Mr. Clinton's life.
The lineup begins with Tony Bennett for the 1940's and runs through Jon Bon Jovi, Aretha Franklin and Smokey Robinson, Carly Simon, Kenny Rogers and Jennifer Holliday, until country music star Shania Twain gets to the Presidential years of the 1990's. Whoopi Goldberg will be the master of ceremonies.
The extravaganza and all the related events -- including Tipper Gore's own 48th birthday celebration at the Grand Ole Opry -- will yield a birthday present of $8 million to $10 million, Democrats calculate. Tickets range from $100 for the satellite events to $15,000 per person or $20,000 per corporation for a ''Birthday Host,'' who gets 10 tickets for the Radio City music show and to a pre-show reception. Some of the biggest money of the evening will be raised after the Radio City show at a dinner at the Waldorf, where the ticket minimum is $10,000 per person. (The birthdays of both Mr. Clinton and Mrs. Gore are actually on Monday.)
The gala is just another sign of the premium Mr. Clinton has put on fund-raising in a campaign year in which both parties are breaking previous records.
His determination not to be outspent has led him to throw a number of small dinners in Washington hotels, where, fund-raisers say, his guests give as much as $50,000 or $100,000 to hear Mr. Clinton discuss topics of the day, and to tell him what's on their mind.
While no one precisely tracks the hours a President spends raising money, both Mr. Clinton's aides and campaign finance monitors say that certainly no Democratic President and possibly no President ever has put as much of his time into fund-raising as Mr. Clinton.
''He's the king of fund-raising,'' said Ellen Miller, the executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, a group that tracks political money. ''He never seems to stop. It fits the pattern of the overall picture of money in politics. There's more than ever before and larger amounts from fewer people.''
In the last three and a half weeks in July alone, the President, for example, attended 16 Democratic fund-raising events, sometimes wrapping appearances at three separate receptions into the same day.
For months virtually every campaign swing Mr. Clinton has made has been built around fund-raisers. And Mr. Clinton and Vice President Al Gore between them have already appeared at a fund-raiser for virtually every incumbent Democratic senator and are now beginning a second round, one White House official said.
And while Mr. Clinton pledged in 1992 to reform the campaign finance system, his aides have no apologies for his prodigious money-raising, noting that a reform effort died in the Republican Congress. ''There's no glory in unilateral disarmament,'' said Joe Lockhart, Mr. Clinton's campaign press secretary.
The money Mr. Clinton is raising now goes to the party and not directly to his own campaign. Both Mr. Clinton and his Republican challenger, Bob Dole, will receive $61.8 million from the Government for their fall campaigns. But on top of those public funds, Presidential campaigns now routinely use national party money as an essential part of their campaigns.
The national parties are allowed to use the huge and unlimited sums they collect in an election year for ''party building activities,'' a concept vague enough to allow a range of activities that benefit Presidential candidates.
Democrats credit Robert A. Farmer, the main fund-raiser for Michael Dukakis as the first to successfully use the head of the ticket to bring the Democrats up to fund-raising parity with Republicans. Mr. Dukakis actually exceeded the Republicans in money raising in 1988, but still went down to defeat.
This year, with the Republicans the incumbent party in Congress, the Republicans are still running ahead, but the Democrats have remained competitive, largely because of Mr. Clinton's efforts. Republican national party committees raised $263.9 million in the 18 months ending in June, compared with $172.6 million brought in by their Democratic counterparts, according to Election Commission reports.
Marvin S. Rosen, the finance chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said the Republicans were getting more corporate contributions. ''It's going to be very hard to match them because of the large corporations and what they're giving to the Republicans,'' he said. ''We're going to do our best to match them by expanding our base and getting many more individuals and smaller participants.''
A great equalizer for the Democrats is labor, which is running its own campaign against the Republican Congressional majority. The A.F.L.-C.I.O. has set up a separate $35 million war chest to pay full-time organizers and educate voters on the issues. That comes on top of the $40 million in contributions from union members to political action committees.
White House officials say Mr. Clinton's success at raising money stems from the decision made by the President, Harold M. Ickes, the deputy White House chief of staff, and Terence McAuliffe, the Clinton-Gore finance director, to begin the President's primary season money-raising extremely early in 1995. The tactic was primarily intended to frighten away from the race anyone who might be considering a primary challenge, and also make sure Mr. Clinton could begin running television ads.
''He wanted the money for the media,'' said one Democrat who has met with the President. ''He felt that he had allowed the Republicans on health care to go out and buy all the TV time and define him. He wasn't going to allow this to happen in his own campaign.''Jean Kuhn is an early riser and hadn't stayed up to see much of the Republican convention on television this week, but Thursday night the retired Hoover Company worker sat down to watch the acceptance speeches by Jack Kemp and Bob Dole. She is a longtime Republican and voted for George Bush in 1992.
''I started watching Kemp,'' said Mrs. Kuhn. ''But I fell asleep. He was good -- what I saw.'' Indeed, she will vote enthusiastically for the Dole-Kemp ticket come November.
Sue Shane, a housewife married to an accountant, had just returned from vacation and she, too, felt bad about missing the convention on TV. ''I was doing laundry last night,'' she said. When asked who she would vote for in November, she wasn't sure, although Hannah, her 8-year-old, piped in, ''Dad said we're probably Dole.''
Democratic voters like Ron Aguado, a firefighter, and Glenn Shaffer, a retired steelworker, went out of their way not to see the Republican convention. ''As soon as the news would come on showing Elizabeth Dole walking around making that speech again,'' Mr. Shaffer said, ''I'd hit the remote and switch channels. It's a bunch of bull.''
It didn't seem to matter if it was the Fishers Foods supermarket in Republican North Canton where Mrs. Kuhn was interviewed in the frozen food section. Or the Fishers market on Cherry Avenue in Democratic Canton, where Mr. Aguado spoke while shopping for produce. Or the Fishers in Perry Township, a blue-collar Reagan Democrat area (Mrs. Shane, checkout line; Mr. Shaffer, produce). The overwhelming response from shoppers when asked what they thought of the Republican convention this week was, ''I didn't watch it.''
And that is not a reflection of how the Republicans did in San Diego or the popularity of the Dole-Kemp ticket. Most Republicans and independents interviewed who saw it gave Mr. Dole high marks. Sitting in the family room of his North Canton home, John G. Evans, a retired Goodyear executive was so moved and excited as he watched Mr. Dole's speech that he applauded at the finish, and his wife, Sally, said aloud, ''I think it's going to be O.K.,'' meaning that for the first time she could envision a Dole victory.
Nor does public indifference necessarily portend better things for Democrats. Robert Caughey (deli section, North Canton Fishers) is a union man who expects to vote for President Clinton but won't watch the Democrats' show from Chicago. ''I shouldn't say this,'' he said, ''but I don't get much out of conventions.''
Nationally the viewership of the Republican convention this year is down about 25 percent from 1992. Local television stations that did not air it actually have received a ratings boost in some cases. In Canton, people watch Cleveland television. Channel 8, the Fox station there, reports a jump in ratings for its 10 P.M. news this week, with viewers tuning in as the other networks' convention coverage began.
This is a place that every four years usually votes as America does for President, and there is no institution more at its heart than Fishers, a grocery chain of six stores that was founded in 1934 by Joseph Fisher and is now run by his grandson Jeffrey.
So it says something that only seven of the four dozen Fishers shoppers interviewed today in three very different sections of the county said they watched the convention.
Yet at the same time, they do seem to be picking up the new ideas that are important to them, and more than anything else, that seems to mean economic issues. Mr. Dole's proposal to cut the income tax rate 15 percent is widely known at all these Fishers stores, and a surprising number of people already have a strong opinion about its feasibility.
While several Republicans interviewed, like Tom Violand, a physician, and his wife, Nancy, a nurse, were delighted, it was plain that Mr. Dole still had a lot of selling to do, even among his fellow Republicans.
One Democrat, Dolly Potter, a housewife married to Tom, a truck driver (frozen foods, Fishers North Canton), asked where the cuts are going to come from if the budget is still to be balanced. ''Medicaid, Social Security things that are important to people like me?'' she said.
And Virgil Hiltner, a retired Superior Dairy vice president, who will vote for Mr. Dole, doubted whether Congress would ever have the backbone to stand up to lobbyists and make the cuts that would be necessary to keep the debt from soaring. Bill Sterling, a retired insurance agent, who also expects to vote for Mr. Dole, said his support for such a tax cut would depend on whether it benefited people of incomes of less than $50,000 a year.
Shoppers like Raymond Vance, a factory worker for Rubbermaid who votes Democrat, and Terry Capper, a Canton firefighter who votes Republican, say they are better off than they were four years ago at the start of the Clinton Administration. The unemployment rate in Stark for July, which came out today, is 5 percent, compared with 8 percent in 1992. In a poll of the county by The New York Times in May, 82 percent said they were better off or about the same as four years ago; 18 percent said they were worse off.
''I do fire inspections, and I always ask how business is doing,'' Mr. Capper (cereals, Fishers Canton) said. ''For two years now, people have been saying 'better.' ''
Major corporations here like The Timken Company and Diebold have been posting record profits the last few years.
At the same time, the weakness that exists in the economy -- downsizing and stagnant wages for the average worker -- seems to work to the political advantage of the Democrats. Asked whom they blame for these economic trends, 52 percent of the people polled here blame corporations a lot, while 19 percent blame unions a lot.
But Mr. Clinton is vulnerable here, as elsewhere, on character issues; 34 percent polled in May felt he had more honesty and integrity than most people in public life, while 53 percent said he did not.
By emphasizing Mr. Dole's war record, his recovery from his wounds and his humble background, the Republican convention this week indirectly hit hard at Mr. Clinton's vulnerability.Under pressure from Washington to cut costs and streamline itself, the United Nations today released the outline of its 1998-1999 budget that projects no overall growth in expenditures for the rest of the century while staff reductions continue.
By 2000, the United Nations will have reduced the size of its permanent secretariat staff by 30 percent since 1985, and half of those cuts will have taken place since the beginning of this year, said Joseph E. Connor, Under Secretary General for Administration and Management. About 1,500 jobs will be lost from January 1996 until the end of 1999.
Mr. Connor, a former chief operating officer of Price Waterhouse who was nominated for his United Nations job by the Clinton Administration, said that efficiency savings and better accounting might actually produce a small amount, about $6 million, to reopen a contingency fund for unexpected needs.
Madeleine K. Albright, the United States representative, welcomed the Secretary General's budget announcement as ''an important and responsive step toward fiscal reform.'' She added: ''Now we have to turn the momentum for reform and sound budgeting into a permanent part of the way the U.N. does business.''
The United Nations, which works on a two-year budget cycle, is budgeted for $2.608 billion in appropriations for 1996-1997. Accounting for inflation but not currency fluctuations, the 1998-1999 expenditures are budgeted at $2.559 billion. This covers the staffing and operations of the New York headquarters and offices in Geneva and Vienna. It does not include separate agencies like Unicef or the World Health Organization, which have their own budgets.
But agencies are now being integrated in a new computerized management system for the collection and sharing of data bases, which is expected to lead to broader reductions and more efficient coordination, Mr. Connor said in an interview today.
While the Clinton Administration and the Republican leadership have been criticizing the United Nations for what politicians continue to call its profligate ways, Mr. Connor has become one of the strongest defenders of Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali's management and fiscal reform programs.
He said today that the ''constant lambasting'' of the organization in the United States has taken its toll on a generally skilled staff. ''People are hurt,'' he said.
The United Nations is still in financial crisis because it is owed $3 billion in members' unpaid dues, including $1.7 billion from the United States. The Clinton Administration, now under Congressional orders to certify that the United Nations is not exceeding its budget before any money is released, paid the organization a $47 million installment this week and promises another $40 million in September. It is the only permanent member of the Security Council to be in default.
Mr. Connor said today that the largest cuts in the coming budget will be in administration and building management. The cost of publishing documents will be reduced by 27 percent and travel will take a 26 percent reduction, he said.President Boris N. Yeltsin's national security adviser, Aleksandr I. Lebed, launched his boldest challenge to the Yeltsin administration today by demanding the dismissal of the Interior Minister, who was reappointed to the Cabinet only a day earlier.
Returning from his second round of talks with rebel leaders in war-torn Chechnya, Mr. Lebed called Interior Minister Anatoly S. Kulikov, one of two top Russian generals leading the war in the secessionist republic, an inept ''Napoleon'' bent on more death and destruction.
In a response that seemed to play into Mr. Lebed's hands, General Kulikov said he would resign unless he received a formal retraction, and told the news agency Interfax, ''I am afraid he will cripple not just one man's fate in his maniacal striving for power.''
The two men have been on a collision course ever since Mr. Lebed won broad powers to seek a settlement in the 20-month-old war last Saturday. The national security adviser, a former general and Afghan war veteran, has vehemently argued that Russia cannot afford to continue its costly and bloody offensive in Chechnya. He places great faith in his own ability to broker a face-saving peace.
General Kulikov, who served on one of the early Russian negotiating teams, has just as insistently scorned the peace process, labeling the rebels as ''medieval savages'' who cannot be trusted.
Intent on ridding himself of General Kulikov and apparently unable to bend the Kremlin to his will in private, Mr. Lebed made his case publicly in a news conference today.
There was no reaction from Mr. Yeltsin tonight to Mr. Lebed's demand. The President is preparing to go on an extended holiday, which, for the first time, the Kremlin said included intensive medical treatment.
Mr. Yeltsin's press secretary, Sergei Yastrzhembsky, said today that the President was still mulling over where he would go, but that he was planning to stay not far from Moscow and would undergo ''diagnostic examinations'' and ''a set of preventive procedures.'' He did not explain what Mr. Yeltsin would be treated for.
Mr. Yeltsin, 65, who was hospitalized twice last year for heart disease, has mostly stayed out of public view since his re-election. His aides have spoken publicly only of his ''exhaustion'' after the intense election campaign. Some aides concede he would benefit from bypass surgery and one adviser recently said that that the coming holiday would be an opportune time.
Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin, who has not hidden his annoyance with Mr. Lebed's assertiveness, did not comment either, but NTV news reported tonight that one of Mr. Chernomyrdin's aides spoke scornfully of Mr. Lebed's remarks: ''It is the prerogative of the President to evaluate the performance of his ministers. Kulikov was appointed by the President at the recommendation of Mr. Chernomyrdin.''
General Kulikov, who defended his record in Chechnya, blamed civilian officials in Moscow for the disaster in the rebel republic.
''The August events in Chechnya are not the result of any mistakes by the Interior Ministry or any other law enforcement body,'' he said, referring to the Aug. 6 rebel offensive that overran Grozny, the Chechen capital. ''They are a testimony to the crisis of Russian power.''
An aide to General Kulikov who attended the Lebed news conference said, ''We knew their relationship was bad, but we weren't expecting this.''
But Mr. Lebed clearly relishes his reputation as a bull in the Kremlin china shop.
''They think that they have lassoed me and that I have to obey and play by the rules,'' he said. ''But I am not a clerk. Eleven million people are behind me,'' he said referring to the 15 percent of the electorate that voted for him in the first round of the presidential elections, when he ran against Mr. Yeltsin. ''They trust me. And it is their sons who are dying in this crazy war.''
In Chechnya, where rebels remained in edgy control of a city Moscow thought it had subdued 19 months ago, journalists reported a slight lull in the fierce fighting that has cost hundreds of lives over the past 10 days. Tonight, Russian television showed ghastly images of Russian soldiers dumping bodies into mass graves, without coffins or ceremony, juxtaposed against footage of Chechen rebels riding triumphantly around town in captured Russian armored vehicles, waving rifles and Islamic green flags.
After his meeting with rebel leaders, Mr. Lebed expressed some optimism about a possible truce. The rebel leader, Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, agreed, saying, ''Lebed has every chance of bringing peace to Chechnya and the whole North Caucasus.''
But Russian field commanders, echoing the views of General Kulikov, were more guarded. ''The situation in Grozny is not being defused despite the assurances of the warring sides,'' Gen. Stanislav Kavun, deputy commander of the Russian Interior Ministry troops, told reporters.
Mr. Lebed, who said he had a plan to end the fighting in Chechnya, made clear that he believed senior Russian officers were unwilling to seek peace. And he blamed General Kulikov for allowing the rebels to sneak back into Grozny on Aug. 6, despite what he described as indications as early as Aug. 3 that an offensive was imminent.
''The Minister of Interior did not fulfill his duty to Russia,'' Mr. Lebed said. ''I am completely certain he cannot remain Interior Minister any longer.''Taylor Touchstone, a 10-year-old autistic boy who takes along a stuffed leopard and pink blanket when he goes to visit his grandmother, somehow survived for four days lost and alone in a swamp acrawl with poisonous snakes and alligators.
He swam, floated, crawled and limped about 14 miles, his feet, legs and stomach covered with cuts from brush and briars that rescuers believed to be impassable, his journey lighted at night by thunderstorms that stabbed the swamp with lightning.
People in this resort town on the Gulf of Mexico say they believe that Taylor's survival is a miracle, and that may be as good an explanation as they will ever have. The answer, the key to the mystery that baffles rescue workers who have seen this swamp kill grown, tough men, may be forever lost behind the boy's calm blue eyes.
''I see fish, lots of fish,'' was all Taylor told his mother, Suzanne Touchstone, when she gently asked him what he remembered from his ordeal in the remote reservation on Eglin Air Force Base.
Over years, Taylor may tell her more, but most likely it will come in glints and glimmers of information, a peek into a journey that ended on Sunday when a fisherman found Taylor floating naked in the East Bay River, bloody, hungry but very much alive.
He may turn loose a few words as he sits in the living room, munching on the junk food that is about the only thing his mother can coax him to eat, or when they go for one of their drives to look at cows. He likes the cows, sometimes. Sometimes he does not see them at all, and they just ride, quiet.
Taylor's form of autism is considered moderate. The neurological disorder is characterized by speech and learning impairment, and manifests itself in unusual responses to people and surroundings.
''I've heard stories of autistic people who suddenly just remember, and begin to talk'' of something in the far past, Mrs. Touchstone said. ''But we may never know'' what he lived through, or how he lived through it, she said.
His father, Ray, added, ''I don't know that it matters.'' Like his wife and their 12-year-old daughter, Jayne, Mr. Touchstone can live with the mystery. It is the ending of the story that matters.
Still, they have their theories. They say they believe that it is possible that Taylor survived the horrors of the swamp not in spite of his autism, but because of it.
''He doesn't know how to panic,'' Jayne said. ''He doesn't know what fear is.''
Her brother is focused, she said. Mrs. Touchstone says Taylor will focus all his attention and energy on a simple thing -- he will fixate on a knot in a bathing suit's draw string -- and not be concerned about the broader realm of his life.
If that focus helped him survive, Mrs. Touchstone said, then ''it is a miracle'' that it was her son and not some otherwise normal child who went for a four-day swim in the black water of a region in which Army Rangers and sheriff's deputies could not fully penetrate. He may have paddled with the gators, and worried more about losing his trunks.
''Bullheaded,'' said Mrs. Touchstone, who is more prone to say what is on her mind than grope for pat answers. Instead of coddling and being overly protective of her child, she tried to let him enjoy a life as close to normal as common sense allowed.
Taylor's scramble and swim through the swamp, apparently without any direction or motive beyond the obvious fact that he wanted to keep in motion, left him with no permanent injuries. On Wednesday, he sat in his living room, the ugly, healing cuts crisscrossing his legs, and munched junk food.
''Cheetos,'' he said, when asked what he was eating.
But when he was asked about the swamp, he carefully put the plastic lid back on the container, and left the room. He did not appear upset, just uninterested.
Lifelong Swimmer At Home in Water
Taylor has been swimming most of his life. In the water, his autism seems to disappear. He swims like a dolphin, untiring.
His journey began about 4 P.M. on Aug. 7, a Wednesday, while he and his mother and sister were swimming with friends in Turtle Creek on the reservation lands of the Air Force base. Taylor walked into the water and floated downstream, disappearing from sight. He did not answer his mother's calls.Formosa Plastics Group, Taiwan's largest business group, suspended a planned $3 billion power project in China yesterday under pressure from Taiwan's Government. Formosa Plastics signed a contract in May with the southern Chinese province of Fujian to build a thermal power plant before applying to Taiwan's for approval.
Tsai Lien-sheng, executive secretary of Taiwan's Government Investment Commission, said the company withdrew its application yesterday, saying it would hold off on the project until a new official guideline on investment in mainline China was set. Taiwan fears investments could make its economy vulnerable to political pressure from Beijing, which regards the island as a renegade province.
(AP)
INTERNATIONAL BRIEFSCS Holding said yesterday that it had reached agreement with employee organizations on how to eliminate 3,500 Swiss jobs that are to be cut as part of the bank's reorganization ''almost entirely'' without dismissals. The bank said an early-retirement program would account for about 1,500 jobs, while the rest would be cut by increasing the share of part-time jobs to 20 percent from 16 percent.
When Switzerland's second-largest bank announced its reorganization on July 2, it said it would take a charge of about a billion francs ($820 million). As part of the reorganization, the parent of Credit Suisse and CS First Boston will also cut 1,500 jobs outside Switzerland.
(Bloomberg Business News)
INTERNATIONAL BRIEFSA United States Postal Service worker who was charged with possessing 18 illegal assault weapons said yesterday that the police in Plumsted Township, where he lives, permitted him to own the guns. But state officials said they had yet to find the paperwork that would verify his claim. Rodger J. Johnson, 44, a letter sorter at the Trenton Processing and Distribution Plant in Hamilton Township, was arrested after the police raided his apartment and confiscated 85 weapons and fireworks, pepper spray and thousands of rounds of ammunition.
NEW JERSEY DAILY BRIEFINGThe Federal Environmental Protection Agency has ordered three former owners of a mercury-contaminated building to help pay for the building's cleanup and the relocation of its 37 residents, who were evacuated in January after a tenant discovered mercury under the floorboards. E.P.A. officials did not say how much the former owners, the General Electric Company and David and John Pascale, a son and father from Hoboken, would have to pay.
The residents, most of them artists, bought the building from David Pascale in 1993, paying $1.5 million; officials said the owners would be expected to reimburse the residents for their investment. A spokesman for General Electric said that G.E. was an ''inappropriate'' target of the lawsuit because it had not owned the building for almost half a century. Michael Edelson, a lawyer for David Pascale, said his client had worked in the building for 17 years himself and was unaware of the mercury contamination.
NEW JERSEY DAILY BRIEFINGMirage Resorts, whose plans for a $750 million casino resort have helped spur a second wave of casino development in Atlantic City, has purchased an $8 million piece of property on the south end of the Boardwalk that, when combined with an adjacent two-acre lot it already owns, could house a 1,000-room hotel, company officials said.
The latest purchase gives the Las Vegas casino company three prime parcels of casino-zoned land. The main one is a 150-acre site in the marina district where Mirage has planned to build a 2,000-room resort. In addition to the Mirage casino, Circus Circus Enterprises and the Boyd Gaming Corporation plan to build developments on that site, company officials said.
NEW JERSEY DAILY BRIEFINGA state judge ruled yesterday that the Corrections Department can continue using a private company for prison health care services. The company, Correctional Medical Services of St. Louis, took over health care services at the state's 12 prisons in April, under a $62 million-a-year contract. But the company has been under attack from the Communications Workers of America Local 1040, which complained that it was planning to use unlicensed workers to perform psychological services in the prisons. Assignment Judge Philip S. Carchman of Superior Court in Mercer County allowed the company to proceed after it promised to have only licensed psychologists conduct psychological services.
SARAH KERSHAW
NEW JERSEY DAILY BRIEFINGDallas Green didn't know whether to laugh or cry. He chose to laugh.
''Did we show those Mexicans how to play baseball or what?'' Green asked after the Mets were beaten, 15-10, by the San Diego Padres in a game they once trailed by 15-0 and made interesting only by scoring seven runs in the ninth inning.
''I don't think I've seen a worse game in my life,'' he said. ''I've been in this 41 years and I haven't seen a game worse than that.''
It was a historic game, the first regular-season game played outside the United States and Canada. An enthusiastic crowd of 23,699 filled Monterrey Stadium eager for the first glimpse of major league baseball. Instead, the circus came to town.
The Mets were dreadful early, falling into the 15-0 deficit in six innings, as the Padres pounded four home runs, including a grand slam by Greg Vaughn. Starter Robert Person yielded three of the home runs before leaving the game after giving up nine runs on eight hits in four and one-third innings.
Fernando Valenzuela, a Mexican native, was playing the part of homecoming king, holding the Mets scoreless over the first six innings. Valenzuela (10-7) beat the Mets for the third time this season and left to a standing ovation with a 15-1 lead after giving up two singles and a walk in the sixth.
''I think it's very great for the fans and for Mexico,'' said Valenzuela, who allowed six hits and three runs. He also walked four and struck out three. ''For me, it's very nice to come back and pitch in this park.''
Person (2-4) surrendered eight hits and three home runs: a two-run shot by Steve Finley in the first; a three-run blast by Ken Caminiti in the fifth; and a solo homer by John Flaherty in the fifth. The rookie Derek Wallace took over and yielded the slam to Vaughn in the sixth.
The 15 runs were the most the Mets have allowed all season and the most since they gave up 19 at Pittsburgh in 1992.
But the Padres' easy waltz grew harried in the ninth when the Mets scored seven runs on seven hits, including a home run by Andy Tomberlin. The Mets sent 12 batters to the plate in the inning.
''We battled and scratched and clawed, but it was too little, too late,'' Green said. ''We didn't do anything for seven innings.''
BASEBALLAccording to the U.S. Consumer Products Safety Commission, of C.P.S.C., there have been 42 deaths of in-line skaters since January 1992; of these, 9 occurred in New York, the most of any state. Nearly all of these deaths were of people not wearing helmets, as was the case with 28-year-old Liora Natelson, who died on Wednesday of massive head injuries after colliding with a bicyclist last Sunday.
Correction: August 20, 1996, Tuesday
A chart on Sunday summarizing fatalities and injuries among in-line skaters misstated the date on which Liora Natelson, a skater in Central Park, died. It was last Tuesday, not Wednesday.The crash of T.W.A. Flight 800 off Long Island last month has set off a new round of security discussions, inside the United States and on the international level after a meeting of G-7 countries on security held in Paris at the end of last month.
From Rome to Athens, London to Paris, terrorism has taken a deadly toll at a number of European airports in the last decade, and in its wake has left a patchwork of security measures that reflect continuing regional concerns. Given their experience with terrorism, European officials say that security is already high, and on certain procedures -- from passport control to hand-luggage checks -- higher than at most international airports in the United States.
But a new crash in which terrorism is suspected invariably leads to a tightening of security procedures. At Fiumicino International Airport in Rome, for instance, random luggage checks have increased, bomb-sniffing dogs inspect more United States-bound flights, and all airport personnel boarding those planes are being frisked.
''The system of cross-checking based on F.A.A. standards, which have been in place at Fiumicino for years, has been stepped up,'' said Francesco Girasoli, a police security official at the airport. ''This happens during periods of emergency.''
But security procedures continue to vary across Europe. At most German airports, passengers with lap-top computers are asked to turn them on. In some cases the computers are tested by the officers themselves using special electronic devices.
At most European airports, passengers are quizzed by airline employees about where they have been, where they are going, how their bags were packed and who packed them. In Athens, United States-bound passengers have their hand luggage checked twice, once by the Greek police and again by the airlines' private security companies.
In Istanbul and Moscow, international passengers and their hand luggage also pass through metal detectors a second time, just before they board the plane, after they have finished trolling through the duty-free zone. In some countries, boarding passengers are frisked with electronic wands or by security officers.
The level of airport security varies from country to country, sometimes even airport to airport. And in each country the responsibility for maintaining security is assigned in different ways: in Germany, for instance, the Government provides security at airports, which are publicly owned, whereas in the United Kingdom, where many airports are privately owned, airline and airport officials are responsible for meeting national and international security requirements.
While Europe is moving toward uniform standards on everything from olive oil to currencies, security remains a preserve of national sovereignty. And almost everything to do with airport security remains a secret, except the part that is visible to travelers themselves.
European countries are among the 184 that belong to the International Civil Aviation Organization, which sets minimum requirements for international airport security. In addition, 33 European countries are members of the Paris-based European Civil Aviation Conference, which in recent years has adopted further standards particularly suited to European needs.
''We have for several years thought that while not deviating from the I.C.A.O. requirements, European conditions required something complementary,'' said Gerry Lumsden, director of the security group for the European Conference. For instance, the group has created a mechanism that puts European airport-security experts in instant contact with one another in the event of a major emergency.
But a general rule of thumb is that the level of security at a particular airport depends on the level of threat perceived by the local government -- one reason why security at the airport in Luxembourg, for instance, is less tight than in, say, London.
European security experts say that their standards are constantly changing. All hand luggage is now screened at least once, and while many airports still screen only about 30 to 40 percent of checked luggage, Mr. Lumsden said steady progress is being made toward screening it all.
One problem is keeping up with the increasing sophistication of terrorists. Airports in Europe, like those in the United States, are exploring new screening equipment that can detect concealed explosives. But with the price tag for each machine set at about $1 million, such purchases would require most international airports to redesign their boarding areas.
For many Europeans who have lived with the threat of terrorism at close quarters for a long time now, the heightened concern in the United States is very familiar. ''It has happened here,'' said Mr. Lumsden, ''and we understand.''
TRAVEL ADVISORY: CORRESPONDENT'S REPORTEVERY WEEKNIGHT AT 10 O'CLOCK sharp, a boyishly handsome young Peruvian named Jaime Bayly enters a darkened television studio in Miami Beach and sits at a desk that is bare except for two glasses of water. Thousands of miles away, in Caracas and Buenos Aires and Mexico City and Santiago, viewers are tuning in, waiting for the affable talk-show host to begin another of his deft interviews with one of the actors, singers, athletes, models, writers and other celebrities who make up the world of Latin American show biz -- known in Spanish as la farandula.
Mr. Bayly has been doing his hourlong interview show in one form or another for nearly a decade, and until February 1995, ''El Show de Jaime Bayly'' was broadcast from his hometown, Lima, Peru. But when he and the cable channel Sur decided they wanted to expand his horizons with ''a talk show for all of Latin America,'' Mr. Bayly said, they knew there was only one place he could go and be assured of elevating both his ratings and the quality of his guest list.
''If I want to do a truly Latin American program and reach an international audience, I have to be where the celebrities are, and that means Miami,'' Mr. Bayly explained recently. ''A good number of them live here, and even those who don't are always coming to work or to visit. So if there is any one place that can claim to be the entertainment capital of Latin America, I would say it is here.''
Julio Iglesias, the Spanish crooner who is one of the few figures from la farandula known in the English-speaking world, and Jose Luis Rodriguez, the dashing Venezuelan soap opera and recording star known to his female fans as El Puma, would undoubtedly agree. Both have left their native lands and settled in the Miami area, joining home-grown talent like Gloria and Emilio Estefan and their Cuban exile protege, the singer Albita. So too have such fixtures of the Latin American firmament as the Mexican actress and singer Lucia Mendez, the Nicaraguan salsa star Luis Enrique, the Dominican comedian Charytin and the Spanish singer Raphael, the Monster of Song, who has long occupied the Key Biscayne mansion that was once Richard Nixon's favorite retreat here.
But Miami is much more than just a tropical refuge where the richest and most famous names of Latin American show business can relax, enjoy the fruits of their success and socialize with one another at restaurants and nightclubs eager to treat them like stars. It is also the place where, increasingly, they must come to film television shows, make records, shoot videos, submit to the attentions of swarms of paparazzi and huddle with the executives who control their careers. In short, Miami has become the very heart of la farandula, a Hispanic Hollywood where entertainers from Tijuana to Tierra del Fuego aspire to make their mark.
Both Univision and Telemundo, the two main Spanish-language networks in the United States, have their corporate headquarters in Miami, as do popular cable channels that are beamed all over the hemisphere, like MTV Latino and Gems. Latin America's top-rated television variety show, ''Sabado Gigante,'' is shot in a studio just west of Miami International Airport, not far from the set of the daily talk show of Cristina Saralegui, known as the Hispanic Oprah. And the makers of Mexican, Brazilian and Venezuelan telenovelas, or soap operas, have discovered that their ratings automatically soar whenever they include episodes set here.
In addition, both Sony Discos and WEA Latina, the Latin music divisions of the two largest record companies in the world, are based in Miami, along with most of their competitors and the songwriters, studio musicians and producers on which the industry depends. An affluent Hispanic population and a steady stream of Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking tourists eager to spend money mean that Miami also offers Latin America's biggest singers and musicians a ready-made audience that can fill the house at two of its most prestigious concert halls, the James L. Knight Center and the Jackie Gleason Theater.
More than half of the two million people living in the Miami metropolitan area are of Hispanic descent. Cubans, who accounted for 90 percent of the area's Hispanic population 25 years ago, now constitute barely half of a much larger Hispanic population, and there are rapidly growing Columbian, Brazilian, Venezuelan, Central American and Peruvian colonies.
''We moved to Miami first and foremost because of location, location, location, as the real estate people always say,'' said Sergio Rozenblat, the Argentine-born managing director of WEA Latina, which relocated here from Los Angeles in 1994. For Latin Americans, ''Miami is what Rio de Janeiro is to non-Latins, a city that has a magical name, an aura,'' Mr. Rozenblat added. ''Whatever works in Miami is going to influence what goes on in Latin America.''
Though the MIAMI Film Festival introduced the actor Antonio Banderas and the director Pedro Almodovar to American audiences and continues to promote Latin American cinema, movies are not really at the core of la farandula, unlike its much more prosperous and better-known English-language equivalent. No studio or producer in Spain or Latin America has the means to compete with Hollywood, where it costs an average of $30 million to make a movie these days.
Of course, Hollywood itself has taken a greater interest in Miami recently, as demonstrated by studio productions like ''Miami Rhapsody'' and ''The Birdcage.'' Some after-hours socializing between Hollywood luminaries and their counterparts from la farandula also goes on. But in the professional realm, the two are separate universes, and even English-speaking residents of Miami, white and black, are largely oblivious to the entertainment capital springing up around them.
Instead, the real focal points of la farandula are television, both network and cable, and music. ''Madison Square Garden and Radio City Music Hall may be more important to you Americans, but the big dreams of Latin artists are here, because whatever they do in Miami has impact in their homelands,'' said Mario Kreutzberger, the Chilean who, under the stage name Don Francisco, has been host of ''Sabado Gigante'' for 34 years, the last 10 of them in Miami. ''When they go back home, people say to them, 'Oh, you were on ''Sabado Gigante'' and Cristina and you sang at the Knight Center and the Tropigala nightclub, so you must really be doing well.' ''
If the booming Miami scene has a power corridor, it is probably Lincoln Road in Miami Beach. At one end is MTV Latino's corporate headquarters, from whose windows the offices of Sony Discos are visible just down the street. At the other end, just across the street from Yuca, an upscale nouvelle Cuban restaurant and club that has become a favorite spot for show biz types, is the former bank building that now houses the studios where both Mr. Bayly and MTV Latino tape their shows.
Ten years ago, of course, there was very little to point to here. But once Univision and Telemundo decided that Miami's proximity to Latin America and its well-educated, bilingual work force made it the logical center of their operations, the rest of the business was not long in following.
''The fact that both TV networks are here is an amazing advantage,'' said Mr. Rozenblat. ''You can have daily contacts and establish relationships because they are basically just down the block, and that's very important,'' especially since television soap operas dominate prime-time programming throughout Latin America and getting one of your songs or artists featured in one is the surest road to success.
In addition, with more than 20 countries in Latin America, divided by a host of traditional jealousies and rivalries, Miami is regarded by all as neutral ground, ''an entertainment Switzerland,'' in the words of Richard Arroyo, the first managing director of MTV Latino. ''By being here, you avoid a lot of political baggage,'' Mr. Arroyo's successor, Tom Hunter, explained during a recent interview at the channel's gaudily decorated headquarters. ''If you're based in Argentina, the Mexicans are going to think you're an Argentine operation, and vice versa.''
JUST AS IMPORTANT, AS Latin American stars and their managers have discovered, are the business advantages of being based here. In Miami, ''you don't have the political and economic uncertainties'' that have long been a part of life in Latin America,'' said Frank Welzer, president of Sony Discos. ''You don't have to worry you're going to wake up some morning to find that the banks want to seize your accounts or that the currency has been devalued.'' Nor, several celebrities hastened to add, need you fear that guerrillas are going to kidnap your child.
Whatever the reasons, the increasing Latin American presence has transformed and revitalized the entertainment business here. Criteria Recording Studios, for instance, is famous among American musicians as the place where James Brown recorded ''I Got You (I Feel Good),'' Eric Clapton turned a case of unrequited love into ''Layla'' and the Bee Gees hit the jackpot with ''Saturday Night Fever.'' Indeed, the aura of success permeating the nondescript two-story building in a rundown neighborhood of North Miami, attested to by the dozens of gold records displayed on the walls, is one of the reasons many of today's most popular rock groups, like Aerosmith and R.E.M, continue to record there.
But the backbone of Criteria's business these days is represented by Latin pop singers like Julio Iglesias, Roberto Carlos, Ana Gabriel, Rocio Jurado, Luis Enrique and Paloma San Basilio or up-and-coming Latin American rock-and-roll bands like Soda Stereo and Los Tres. At other facilities around town, like Emilio Estefan's Crescent Moon Studios and South Beach Studios, where recent clients include Los Fabulosos Cadillacs, Chayanne and Charley Garcia, the situation is much the same.
AT LEAST 50 PERCENT of what we do, if not more, is Latin music,'' said Trevor Fletcher, the studio manager at Criteria. ''Miami does tend to be the crossroads of the Americas, so you've got a lot of bilingual support services here, which is important for someone whose English may be limited. Plus there are a lot of Latin musicians and world-class producers in town, so if you want someone to play flamenco guitar or need four different percussionists to bang a stuffed gourd, that's available.''