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234720_4

Pipeline Proposal Is Still Unloved, But Very Much Alive

who have been keeping a close eye on the proposal for the region as a whole is Lynn Werner, the Valley Watch director for the Housatonic Valley Association, a Cornwall Bridge-based environmental organization. She said she was encouraged that Iroquois, which had hoped to have the project approved quickly, had not succeeded. But she said she was discouraged that the Federal regulators had not yet focused on the need for the natural gas. ''We're not against a pipeline and not against natural gas,'' she said. ''We began to realize, in reality, that this pipeline, as it was proposed, was not taking into account the kind of things we were concerned about, so for the first two years, we have been pushing for an assessment for need, and then for a route that is environmentally sound. That's a very straightforward thing, but, unfortunately, it's gotten tossed in the wind.'' As for the progress the pipeline proponents have made, she said: ''I don't think Iroquois is doing very well at all. I think it's kind of 50-50. I think they had originally anticipated they'd be building their pipeline by now, and they're not, so FERC has slowed the process down, and that's good. But on the other hand, I don't think FERC is listening to us on the question of the need for the gas.'' Optimism at Iroquois Gary Davis, a spokesman for Iroquois, said he thought Iroquois was winning the battle for public opinion. ''I think the tenor of the opposition has remained the same, but I think the effectiveness of the opposition has changed,'' he said. ''I think people are now better able to understand the proposal, and, while we still have opposition, I'm not so sure the opponents are gaining supporters. People are coming to understand the construction of the pipeline is not long-term destruction of the environment, but a short-term effect for long-term environmental benefits.'' He said the proof of the change in opposition was that more and more townspeople were willing to discuss the proposal with Iroquois, and discuss how the effects on their communities might be mitigated. ''I think our relationships with towns are improving,'' he said. ''People are dropping into our office in Shelton to talk.'' A Mayor Speaks Among those now willing to talk with Iroquois officials is Mayor Alberta C. Jagoe of Milford, who had previously resisted any discussions with the consortium. Mayor

234871_1

A Bristol Visit Anchored In the Past

provide a constant water level), which allowed Bristol to continue against all odds as a major seaport through the 19th century; and the Clifton Suspension Bridge, which soars over the Avon Gorge. Though expansive and exposed rather than encompassed, vertiginous rather than claustrophobic (and thus the antithesis of Great Britain's drydock), the walkway of this handsome bridge is another admirable spot from which to understand the machinations of Brunel. The bridge - 702 feet long, riding 245 feet above the Avon - connects the Leigh Woods, a protected forest, with elegant Clifton, now a part of Bristol but once a separate suburb. It was to Clifton that Brunel had come in 1828 to recuperate from injuries sustained while working in London as resident engineer on a Thames River tunnel project - an undertaking directed by Brunel's father, Marc Isambard, a French royalist in exile. (Brunel's mother was an Englishwoman, the former Sophie Kingdom.) While in Clifton, Brunel learned of a competition - sponsored by Bristol's Society of Merchant Venturers - to select a design to bridge the Avon Gorge, a precipitous cleft cut by the river on its way to the Bristol Channel at Avonmouth. This unlikely contest had its genesis in a 1753 legacy of 1,000 pounds left by a Bristol merchant with the stipulation that, when the principal increased tenfold, it would be invested in a bridge over the Avon Gorge. Brunel won the competition, and work on his bridge began in 1831 - only to be suspended almost immediately because of financial and legal problems. FIVE years later work recommenced and continued until 1843, when it stopped with the abutments and towers completed but nothing else. This was all that Brunel would ever see of his bridge, since no further progress was made until after his death in 1859, when money was raised to complete the span as a memorial to him. The bridge was finally opened in 1864. Today you can pay a pedestrian toll of two pence and walk out past a shapely stone tower to mid-span. From there the vistas are broad: Bristol around the bend to the south, the green of Leigh Woods to the west and of the Downs to the east. If the tide is low, you'll look down to see a trickle of cafe-au-lait river stretched along the bottom of a deep, muddy trough - the Avon at its characteristic

235002_1

Study Finds More New York Trash, Despite 'Crisis'

eventually require recycling of 25 percent of the city's waste. It would also call on city residents to separate recyclable material from their trash. But several environmental groups have maintained that the recycling goals should be much more ambitious. Otherwise, the groups say, there would be tremendous pressure to burn the remaining large amounts of trash. In fact, said Larry Shapiro, an environmental lawyer with the group that published the report, some communities might even find that recycling and incineration would conflict because the incinerators require large amounts of trash to generate the fees needed to pay off the bonds used to build them. ''A community could get locked into a situation where they have to produce X number of tons per day in order to keep the incinerator going,'' Mr. Shapiro said. ''The point is, ironically, it could establish a tremendous financial disincentive to reduce the amount of trash and develop recycling.'' Tracking several cases of what it said were serious cost overruns in incineration projects in the Northeast, the group said that incinerators were ''plagued with staggering financial and operating problems,'' in addition to pollution. In contrast, it said, recycling programs, some involving the culling of more than 50 percent of trash, were found to be working in several communities in the United States. But it remains clear that New York State is running out of landfill space. A report last year by the New York State Legislative Commission on Solid Waste Management found that about 300 of the state's 500 landfills had been closed in the previous decade. Gov. Mario M. Cuomo earlier this year proposed creation of a $150 million state fund to help local governments deal with solid waste problems. But the money would be generated through taxes on automobile tires and batteries, an idea that appears unlikely to survive budget negotiations. The report said more than a million tons of solid waste were exported out of New York last year, more than double the amount in the previous year. But it said the costs for this exporting were enormous - $800 million annually for the New York metropolitan area alone - and noted that as many states were filling up their landfills, they were increasingly refusing New York's trash. New York's per-capita rate of garbage output is about one-third higher than the national average, the report said, and twice that of Paris and Rome.

234895_2

Why Seek The Sound Of the Past?

the meaning of slurs or accents in various contexts - and, of course, financing. The musical past is dealt with, but most often in a parochial way. Occasionally, an iconoclast such as Frederick Neumann or Nikolaus Harnoncourt will take a larger view, perhaps pointing out that historically authentic performance is a chimera, a legendary animal impossible to meet in real life, and that zealots may be preaching a naively narrow doctrine. Oddly, the more rigorous zealots regard such arguments as somehow threatening, rather than as possible roads to more understanding. Mr. Harnoncourt, whose Concentus Musicus has been promoting the cause for 36 years, certainly does not neglect the whys in his ''Baroque Music Today: Music as Speech,'' a 1982 collection of essays published in an English translation last year by Amadeus Press. He wrestles manfully with such basic problems as why today's opera and concert audiences seem to enjoy Mozart so much despite being unaware of the ''heart-wrenching'' power that contemporary critics heard in his music. Instead of understanding the sources of that power, which is only possible through intimate knowledge of music's 18th-century language, most modern listeners are content to admire Mozart's beautiful surfaces. We have become preoccupied with the merely sonorous in older music because we know too little about what that music meant to listeners in its time. Far removed from the culture, in spirit as well as time, we cannot easily grasp its rhetorical gestures and expressive subtleties. So we revel in sound as sound. Much of Mozart's finely articulated complexity is lost, for instance, when he is played in the endless legato style of Wagner and his successors. Not everyone will agree that Mr. Harnoncourt is a profound thinker about the whys of the early-music revival. But he asks the right questions, including this one: why are we confronted by an exploding interest in old music and simultaneously by a ever-shrinking audience for contemporary composition? Few others in his field even recognize the anomaly. Mr. Harnoncourt suggests that the primary value of early-music reconstruction may be to give modern listeners a rich understanding of what music once was and thereby force them to consider what the music of their own time could and must be. In the most cultivated eras, music for both instruments and voice was understood principally as a rhetorical language founded on human speech patterns. Such a language of tones once was

234936_2

Ecological Threats, Rich-Poor Tensions

of the world control pollution. But they said that the developing countries must also do their part by instituting reforestation and vigorously seeking alternatives to fossil fuels and chlorofluorocarbons. The global environmental battle could be lost, the London conference was told, if the third world continues to follow the industrialized nations' example of trying to achieve the good life by burning fossil fuels and producing chlorofluorocarbons for refrigeration and other uses. In building a modern economy, for instance, China hopes to draw on its huge coal reserves. ''If China expands its coal use as planned, there will be no hope, I think, of stemming the greenhouse problem,'' said Dr. Michael Oppenheimer, senior scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund, expressing a fear that haunts other Western environmentalists as well. Moreover, these environmentalists say that developing countries like Brazil are doing little to control massive deforestation for agriculture and hydroelectricity. When trees are burned or when they are cut and die, they release carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that promotes global warming. Alive, they absorb it. There need be no either-or relationship between economic development and environmental responsibility, many Western environmentalists contend. In the end, they argue, responsible development is more economical because energy production would be more efficient while many of the social costs of an industrial economy -health care, for one - would be reduced. Straight to Solar To a country like China, which has so much cheap coal, the cost of bypassing the fossil-fuel stage of development and going straight to renewable energy could be enormous. But a number of third world countries are thinking in that direction; India, for example, is vigorously pressing solar power. Dr. Oppenheimer raises a provocative question: Fifty years from now, will the United States be buying its solar units from India the way it now buys electronics from Japan? Attention is beginning to focus on the role of international aid agencies in promoting environmentally sound projects in the third world. The World Bank, for example, finances the development of coal-fired power plants in developing countries. Could it not also, as a condition for its loans, require steps to encourage more efficient use of energy? Some World Bank officials say yes. ''It is perfectly appropriate,'' said Ken Piddington, the bank's environmental director. In the end, the issue will be won or lost in the give-and-take of international politics. Both worlds, Dr. Oppenheimer says, have

234941_3

The Struggle for Land in Latin America

- has it achieved both social justice and economic efficiency. The Mexican Revolution, between 1910 and 1917, was fought around the banner of land for those who work it, and in the decades that followed most large haciendas were turned into communal farms. But peasants were rarely given the education, credit, fertilizer and machinery to make them productive. Today, the Government has to import grain to feed the urban population. Cuba's land redistribution after the 1959 revolution was more drastic, with the state taking over all but a handful of small farms. The living conditions of the rural population are better than in any other Latin nation, yet the country remains dependent on sugar exports. When Peru's leftist military leaders decreed land redistribution in 1969, the strategy was for peons who worked on expropriated estates to run cooperatives. But because the farms were managed by Government officials, the peasants had little incentive to work. By the mid-1970's, the program was floundering. Today most cooperatives have been broken up into individual plots. In the 1980's, Nicaragua showed it had learned little from the experience of other countries. The Sandinista Government turned many huge estates into state farms and cooperatives and took over marketing for small landholders. But this alienated many peasants, who preferred to farm and sell on their own. Now, with the country plagued by food shortages, the Government is again trying to encourage private farming. Paradoxically, while the land redistribution promoted by the United States in El Salvador has failed to weaken the political power of the landed wealthy, it has benefitted about 31,000 families that formed cooperatives and an additional 52,000 families that acquired tiny plots. Yet El Salvador has gone from being a net exporter to being a net importer of cotton and sugar. After almost a century of debate, then, trapped between social pressure and economic necessity and often complicated by cultural tradition, the land remains one of the great unresolved issues in Latin America. Some experts say the solution will come naturally, as migration slowly depopulates rural sectors. But others argue that this process is creating a crisis in overcrowded cities that is just as explosive. In Brazil's North-East, there is hardly a peasant who does not dream of moving to Sao Paulo. But when he gets there, it is not long before someone asks him aggressively, ''Why don't you go back to the North-East?''

234863_4

A Short Skyscraper With a Tall Assignment

side Mr. Meier has produced a facade of remarkable strength and self-assurance, a 16-story concave surface of metal that both possesses great impact as pure geometric form and makes great sense within its difficult urban context. The tower faces Main Street with a large plaza, and there is something genuinely spectacular about marking one side of a plaza with a 16-story high concave wall. The splendid visual element of this curving front is not a pure abstraction, set alone in open space; it is tightly woven into a complex building form that relates intelligently to the demands of the street. A low, projecting wing sheathed in red granite closes off the plaza, defines one corner of the site and helps relate the building to the public square diagonally across the street; the other end of the plaza is enclosed by the rich Romanesque mass of the building's neighbor, the Barnum Museum, a splendid 19th-century building that the People's Bank has renovated as part of this project. The exhilaration of viewing this facade continues inside the main lobby, in the glass-roofed atrium behind it, and in the curving banking hall. These are all spectacular public spaces, rooms in which Mr. Meier's skillful manipulation of geometry produces lyrical results. Like much of Mr. Meier's best work, they manage the nearly impossible trick of being at once energetic and serene. And light is handled with particular grace here; the sun breaks in and sends shadows like frozen streaks across the high, white walls. Mr. Meier has described the building as a kind of village rather than a single tower. So it is, and in this remark lies the key to both the building's strength and its weakness. By making this building a set of disparate parts, including curving sections sheathed in white metal, straight sections sheathed in gray metal, and a towerlike section sheathed in red granite, the architect has helped the structure fit comfortably beside its much smaller neighbors. But there is still a nagging sense that the building is rather more complex than it had to be, as if every idea Mr. Meier ever had about a tall building had been put into this single project. And perhaps it has. After all, Richard Meier has waited for years to get a tall building built; while he has had a couple of chances to design skyscrapers that were not built, in general

234747_0

A Note on Work At Croton Site

LEAD: The Feb. 19 article entitled ''The Wiew From: The Croton Reservoir Gatehouse'' is well done, except that one vital component of the project is totally missing: Mergentime Corporation is doing all the construction work reported on with such interest. The Feb. 19 article entitled ''The Wiew From: The Croton Reservoir Gatehouse'' is well done, except that one vital component of the project is totally missing: Mergentime Corporation is doing all the construction work reported on with such interest. Trevor Ibbotson, identified as manager of the project, is the New York City Department of Environmental Protection's resident representative, responsible for seeing that contract specifications are met. The actual project manager who directs all construction is Thomas Goedjen, a Mergentime employee. Mergentime Corporation is known nationally as an engineering contractorfor particularly difficult jobs. The cofferdam mentioned briefly by Ms. Ames is one of the largest presently extant in the United States. Mergentime also is currently at work on five contracts for the Washington subway, as well as several other jobs across the Northeast. LORA W. JONES Marketing Director Mergentime Corporation Flemington, N.J. The Times welcomes letters from readers. Letters for publication should include the writer's name, address and telephone number. Letters should be addressed to The Editor, Westchester Weekly, The New York Times, 229 West 43d Street, New York, N.Y. 10036. We regret that because of the large volume of mail received we are unable to acknowledge or to return unpublished letters.

234773_2

been less and less service at higher and higher prices to many relatively out-of-the-way places. The result has been that only the relatively wealthy can enjoy flying to and from those less well-known places (with some exceptions). In the late 70's, airline bottom lines were doing badly, everyone was fed up with route and rate regulation and the nation embarked on an experiment of deregulation. Airlines invented complex frequent-flyer programs and multifaceted fare and route structures that, while impossible for most lay people to understand, were designed to make flying attractive and competitively priced with car, train and bus travel. The airlines succeeded in some ways beyond their fondest hopes. Air travel has grown much more rapidly than the economy. But the airlines spawned a grossly distorted pattern that unduly favors major travel points and travelers who, by chance, can plan reliably well ahead of their trips. If genuine competition existed on most routes, and if travelers could really have access to full knowledge about competitive fares, perhaps the market for fares would respond to consumer pressures and provide service to all on a fair and equitable basis. But that is clearly not happening, and shows less and less signs of being possible. How, then, can public pressure be brought in order to try to redress this unfairness without some new form of Government regulation? When the nation embarked on airline deregulation, Congress set no standard for airline service. But if Federal law required that airlines provide transportation to all on a equitable and consistent basis, the market system involving air service and fares could be tested in Federal courts against the standard. Judges almost certainly would have different views on what the standard meant, but any set of rational views would be better than the void that now exists. Passengers, individually and in various classes, could challenge airlines' offerings against the Federal standard. If the standard was violated, courts could rule that ticket contracts were not enforceable, and airlines could be liable for damages. What is likely is that before any cases ever entered the courts, the existence of a legal standard would create new pressures in the marketplace and thus encourage the genius of market-oriented airline executives to design route and fare structures that are sane and fair. If such a standard was found unworkable, then, and only then, should we consider some new form of rate regulation.

229440_1

Many Fires Ravage Brazil's Coastal Jungles

remaining coastal jungles are being destroyed by thousands of fires along a 420-mile stretch of coast, the Government said today. Brazil's few remaining coastal jungles are being destroyed by thousands of fires along a 420-mile stretch of coast, the Government said today. The Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources said fire was destroying virtually all the forest cover in an Indian reserve of the Pataxo tribe in southern Bahia. Luciano Pizzato, director of the institute's national parks division, said from Brasilia that there were thousands of fires, big and small, along the coast of southern Bahia and northern Espirito Santo state. ''We have no precedent for a situation as difficult as this,'' he said. There are 78 fires in the Pataxo Indian reserve alone and no possibility of controlling them, he said. He said the 1,200 Indians there were safe. Park Fire Under Control A fire in the adjacent Monte Pascoal National Park is under control, Mr. Pizzato said. He said 1,235 acres of the 34,600-acre park had been affected. He said there was a possibility fires had been deliberately started by loggers who are active in Bahia, illegally cutting timber in the officially protected forests. Pataxo Indians are also known to have started fires in the region to clear forests for planting. The institute gave no estimate for how much forest had been destroyed by the fires, but environmentalists put the figure at more than 74,000 acres. Scientists say that only about 4 percent of the jungles that once stretched along Brazil's coast survive. Since the arrival of the Portuguese colonists in 1500, the forests have been denuded to meet demand for wood and land to cultivate or develop. Environmentalists in Bahia say they campaign to save the coastal forests at risk of their lives. A leading campaigner, Elie Teixeira Leite Franca, said local politicians interested in property development had sent professional gunmen to threaten her. #4 Death Threats Reported ''They threatened to kill me and my husband,'' she said, adding that she had received four death threats in the last 12 months. Mrs. Franca said the fires were the worst in recent years and accused the Government of inaction. ''The authorities are doing hardly anything,'' she said. Mr. Pizzato said there were 50 men fighting the fires. He cited the country's scarce resources. ''Brazil does not possess one airplane to combat forest fires,'' he said.

229381_0

Siblings of Retarded

LEAD: Studies on the interaction between children with Down's syndrome and other children in the family show that the disability does not prevent the retarded child from having normal sibling relationships; in fact, a more positive interrelationship was noted. Studies on the interaction between children with Down's syndrome and other children in the family show that the disability does not prevent the retarded child from having normal sibling relationships; in fact, a more positive interrelationship was noted. Some researchers had previously maintained that a child with Down's syndrome tended to have an adverse effect on the family. In a study published in The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 28 families with a moderately retarded child and a normal child were followed. Two psychology professors at the University of Toronto, Carl Corter and Rona Abramovitch, found that the normal child, whether younger or older, assumed the role of a first-born child in a nondisabled family. But the researchers also found that the normal child, while assuming leadership, was more supportive and shared more with the Down's syndrome sibling than is usually found in a normal family. The retarded child behaved much as a second-born in a family with no disabled children and followed the lead of its sibling, imitating more often but initiating fewer actions and tending to ignore any negative behavior. SCIENCE WATCH

309259_0

GATT Critiques U.S. Policy

LEAD: In its first examination of overall United States trade policy, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the world body that oversees trade, said today that its 96 member nations saw the United States as one of the countries most open to imports. But it added that they were troubled by persistent protection for certain parts of the In its first examination of overall United States trade policy, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the world body that oversees trade, said today that its 96 member nations saw the United States as one of the countries most open to imports. But it added that they were troubled by persistent protection for certain parts of the American economy and a trend toward unilateral retaliation in trade disputes. Trade ministers agreed last December to begin detailed country-by-country examinations, to give a lift to the four-year round of negotiations to liberalize trade. The United States, the world's biggest importer, volunteered to be among the first three candidates, along with Australia and Morocco. The report praised the United States for a ''low'' level of trade barriers ''over a broad range of products.'' But it also noted that ''certain sectors of the U.S. economy, such as sugar, dairy and other agricultural products, textiles, clothing, steel, machine tools, automobiles and semi-conductors, enjoy relatively high levels of protection'' and that the number of protected sectors has ''increased over the years.''

312297_5

Despite Perception, New York City Is on the Mend

the city would grind to a halt. What the Critics Say Uncovering Delays And Cost Overruns Some critics dispute the contention that the rebuilding effort has been a success. They say too many projects have been completed behind schedule and with large cost overruns - assertions that city officials contest. Many critics also say that the capital budget is not prepared or carried out in a way that allows the public to monitor the city's progress The Citizens Budget Commission, in a report two years ago, found that only 15 percent of 209 capital projects it examined had been finished on time. The study concluded that the most serious delays occurred not during construction but during the early stages of design and in the letting of contracts. A updated report issued last month by the commission said there have been similar delays in the last two years. Many delays were caused by the city's elected leaders, who often changed their minds about a project's scope, the study said. In other instances, it said, municipal agencies were slow to begin authorized projects. City officials dismissed the report, saying the Citizens Budget Commission had assumed incorrectly that projects are begun immediately after they are appropriated in the capital budget. The officials said plans often change after a project first appears in the budget. They said community groups and members of the city's Board of Estimate frequently persuaded city agencies to alter the scope or design of projects. Robert Esnard, the Deputy Mayor for Policy and Physical Development, said the city had completed 9,000 rebuilding and construction projects since 1978. The actual cost of an average project was eight percent more than the estimated cost, he said, and construction on most jobs took less than 18 months. ''Look at how much we do, how diversified it is, how complicated it is,'' Mr. Esnard said. ''Then look at the number of successful projects we've completed. It's impossible to say we've done a bad job.'' How Rebuilding Started After a Drought, Money Was There When the city's finances were stabilized in the early 1980's, the Koch administration was able to return to the financial markets, where bonds that pay for capital programs are sold. With money available, the administration began to re-create the capital program, focusing first on the water-supply and sewage systems - where the needs were great and where Federal money was available

312297_11

Despite Perception, New York City Is on the Mend

and Manhattan to Queens. This first section of Water Tunnel 3 is to be completed in 1992. Three more stages are planned, with the second to be completed by about 1996. The tunnel will improve water pressure in some sections of New York, and it will provide flexibility in routing water. But its primary purpose will be to allow engineers to inspect the two existing tunnels, which were completed in 1917 and 1935. Sections of the tunnels cannot be shut for inspections, and closing an entire tunnel would leave much of the city without water. City officials maintain that there is no reason to assume that the tunnels have deteriorated. They are lined with concrete, embedded in rock and, because the water moves by gravity, have virtually no mechanical parts. Still, officials said, it would be useful to inspect them now. The water tunnel, along with new and renovated sewage-treatment plants and new water mains and sewers, were given high priority early in the Koch administration. Water Quality Is Up When the renovation of three older sewage plants is completed in a few years, all the city's sewage will for the first time be treated at the maximum levels mandated by Federal law. The quality of the water in New York's bays and rivers has begun to reflect these improvements, officials said. Readings of the amounts of oxygen and fecal matter in the water - the critical measures of water quality -have improved significantly since the 1970's, they said. About 640 miles of water mains, or 10 percent of the 6,000-mile system, have been replaced since 1978, and another 500 miles are to be replaced by 1993. Environmental officials said their top priority was replacing the smallest mains, which are six feet wide and are the most likely to rupture. To limit disruptions, the officials also try to replace water mains under streets that are being rebuilt. About 100 miles of new sewers have been installed, primarily in Queens and Staten Island. Another 322 miles of old sewers have been replaced. Major problems remain. More than $2 billion must be spent over the next decade to prevent sewage in treatment plants from overflowing into rivers and bays during heavy rains, and to dispose of the sludge that the plants produce. New sources of fresh water will also have to be found. NEXT: An outlook of daunting challenges and fiscal uncertainties.

312463_0

Samuel Beckett Is Dead at 83; His 'Godot' Changed Theater

LEAD: Samuel Beckett, a towering figure in drama and fiction who altered the course of contemporary theater, died in Paris on Friday at the age of 83. He died of respiratory problems in a Paris hospital, where he had been moved from a nursing home. He was buried yesterday at the Montparnasse cemetery after a private funeral. Samuel Beckett, a towering figure in drama and fiction who altered the course of contemporary theater, died in Paris on Friday at the age of 83. He died of respiratory problems in a Paris hospital, where he had been moved from a nursing home. He was buried yesterday at the Montparnasse cemetery after a private funeral. Explaining the secrecy surrounding his illness, hospitalization and death, Irene Lindon, representing the author's Paris publisher, Editions de Minuit, said it was ''what he would have wanted.'' Beckett's plays became the cornerstone of 20th-century theater beginning with ''Waiting for Godot,'' which was first produced in 1953. As the play's two tramps wait for a salvation that never comes, they exchange vaudeville routines and metaphysical musings - and comedy rises to tragedy. An Alternative to Naturalism Before Beckett there was a naturalistic tradition. After him, scores of playwrights were encouraged to experiment with the underlying meaning of their work as well as with an absurdist style. As the Beckett scholar Ruby Cohn wrote: ''After 'Godot,' plots could be minimal; exposition, expendable; characters, contradictory; settings, unlocalized, and dialogue, unpredictable. Blatant farce could jostle tragedy.'' At the same time, his novels, in particular his trilogy, ''Molloy,'' ''Malone Dies'' and ''The Unnamable,'' inspired by James Joyce, move subliminally into the minds of the characters. The novels are among the most experimental and most profound in Western literature. For his accomplishments in both drama and fiction, the Irish author, who wrote first in English and later in French, received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969. At the root of his art was a philosophy of the deepest yet most courageous pessimism, exploring man's relationship with his God. With Beckett, one searched for hope amid despair and continued living with a kind of stoicism, as illustrated by the final words of his novel, ''The Unnamable'': ''You must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.'' Or as he wrote in ''Worstward Ho,'' one of his later works of fiction: ''Try again. Fail again. Fail better.'' Though his name in the adjectival

306851_0

Gambling on a New Recycling Device

LEAD: In states with container-deposit laws, people can insert their used cans or bottles in a ''reverse vending machine'' and get back their nickel or dime deposit. But delivering an immediate reward that encourages such recycling is not as easy in states without deposit laws. Now, the Howard Marlboro Group, a sales promotion division of the giant Saatchi & In states with container-deposit laws, people can insert their used cans or bottles in a ''reverse vending machine'' and get back their nickel or dime deposit. But delivering an immediate reward that encourages such recycling is not as easy in states without deposit laws. Now, the Howard Marlboro Group, a sales promotion division of the giant Saatchi & Saatchi advertising agency, is trying to combine technology, merchandising and gambling to stimulate recycling and help fend off more deposit laws. Its tool is a combination can crusher and slot machine. When a can is placed in the deposit slot, a sensor determines whether it is made of aluminum, steel or another material. If steel or aluminum, it is accepted and five wheels spin behind transparent windows. The reward, which can be coupons of differing values for various products or services, depends on the alignment of symbols after the wheels come to rest. Someone depositing an empty soda can might receive a discount coupon for the purchase of more soda or other products. Meanwhile, a ram crushes the can and a switching device puts steel and aluminum in separate bags for collection. With the crusher, the machine can store 2,000 cans. Versions are being developed to accept glass and plastic bottles and old batteries, which are a hazard in incinerators because of the heavy metals they contain. The device was developed by Egapro Management A.G. of Zurich. In Europe, one incentive on the coupons is an entry in a lottery. In the United States, Howard Marlboro is trying to use coupons that encourage sales of consumer products. Marlboro, the developer of the plastic-egg packaging of L'eggs pantyhose, is now looking for consumer product companies to offer coupons and sponsor the device. BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY

306885_0

Greenpeace Asserts Navy Was Malicious During Protest at Sea

LEAD: The protest group Greenpeace today accused the Navy of maliciousness in ramming its flagship during a protest of the test launching of a Trident 2 missile off Florida on Monday. The protest group Greenpeace today accused the Navy of maliciousness in ramming its flagship during a protest of the test launching of a Trident 2 missile off Florida on Monday. The Navy continued to deny that it rammed the 887-ton ship Greenpeace, saying that it did only what was necessary to protect its vessels. ''We have a message for the Navy,'' Peter Bahouth, Greenpeace USA's executive director, said at a news conference. ''We are going to take legal action. They are going to have to pay us damages.'' He declined to say how much the group might seek for the incident Monday in the Atlantic Ocean 50 miles off Florida. The protest was part of a ''nuclear-free seas'' campaign Greenpeace began in 1987, Mr. Bahouth said. William M. Arkin, a Greenpeace leader, said, ''We do expect to mix it up with the Navy; that's the point of protesting.'' But he added, ''We had never expected this kind of force, this kind of maliciousness.'' At the news conference, Greenpeace leaders showed videotapes of two vessels identified as the Navy tugs Grasp and Kittiwake spraying water on the decks of the Greenpeace and pulling alongside. The tapes showed holes in the hull of the Greenpeace. Group leaders said the gashes resulted from rammings by the tugs. A spokesman at the Pentagon, Pete Williams, denied that the Navy rammed the Greenpeace and said that while the Government ''respects the right of Greenpeace to express its opinion through peaceful demonstrations,'' it also ''reserves and will exercise its right to protect its vessels and crews engaged in lawful high-seas activities and protect them from interference.''

305579_1

Prostitution Called Link in Rochester Deaths

been arrested, and some convicted, on such charges. The killings form a story of prostitutes slain while earning money to satisfy a deep addiction to cocaine while others continue to defy the risks of streetwalking and soliciting. It is also the story of the Jones Park neighborhood, a middle-class, multiracial community that once considered vigilantism to rid itself of prostitutes and their customers yet turned out for a memorial mass for the victims on Nov. 20 at St. Anthony's of Padua, a small Roman Catholic church on the park. Another side of the story has added a dark chapter to the glorious history of the Genesee River, its three waterfalls and its 300-foot-deep gorge. The river, which flows through the heart of Rochester, has been the city's landmark and economic lifeblood since the early 1800's. A century ago, Frederick Law Olmsted, creator of Manhattan's Central Park, designed three parks along the Genesee. These parks and much of the riverbank woodland at the bottom of the gorge have been preserved in their desolate, natural state, forming a living laboratory of geology, archeology and wildlife for city children. But the bodies of four of the women were found in the seclusion of the gorge, the police said, and three others were found in isolated spots along Lake Avenue, a busy commercial strip that parallels the gorge and the river on its seven-mile northward course to Lake Ontario. Lake Avenue, especially near Lyell Avenue and a bit farther north near Jones Park, has been the heart of Rochester's prostitution district for years. Those still soliciting along Lake and on its adjacent streets are carrying knives now and working in pairs or bringing men to protect them. ''I thank God I got out when I did,'' said one woman, who said she had worked the Lake Avenue district until August, long after two of her friends -Dorothy Blackburn, 27 years old, and Nicola Gurskey, 24 - were killed but two months before another friend, Patricia Ives, 25, was slain. ''Any one of those girls could have been me if I was still out there,'' she said. ''If I go back, I'm dead, either from the drugs or the killer.'' The woman, who said she was no longer working as a prostitute and did not want to be named, said one of her friends is still soliciting. 'You Get Desperate' ''She's got a guy on

305464_0

Catholicism With a Human Face

LEAD: It is fitting that, on the way to his shipboard summit meeting with George Bush, Mikhail Gorbachev is stopping today at Vatican City for an audience with the Pope. More than any American President or Western leader, John Paul II has played a crucial role in the historic liberalization of the Communist world. It is fitting that, on the way to his shipboard summit meeting with George Bush, Mikhail Gorbachev is stopping today at Vatican City for an audience with the Pope. More than any American President or Western leader, John Paul II has played a crucial role in the historic liberalization of the Communist world. It was Solidarity, after all, that first broke the grip of Communist totalitarianism, and Lech Walesa himself has described this Pope's galvinizing effect on his movement. If Mr. Walesa is the father of the breakup of monolithic Communism, the Pope is its spiritual godfather. Thus, there is poignancy for Roman Catholics in knowing that the man who helped open the way to democracy in the East is also the man who slammed shut the window of renewal that Pope John XXIII opened in 1962. For many Catholics, the effect of John Paul II's papacy has been profoundly - and often literally - demoralizing. Should the Communist rulers of Rumania ever be deposed, the Pope may be left as the last absolute authority in Europe. But as we listened to Mr. Gorbachev's astounding affirmation of religious values yesterday in Rome, we remembered that it was his visits both to Beijing and to East Berlin that seemed to spark an outpouring of democratic sentiment. Perhaps the world's top Communist can give the head of the Catholic Church some advice today on letting go outmoded controls to save what is essential to an organization and to a creed. But perhaps John Paul II will have to be pressed from below like the hardline leaders of Eastern Europe were. Is it too much to hope that, in the wake of Mr. Gorbachev's visit to the Vatican, Catholics too might give vent to their long suppressed frustrations and demand change? What would we say, if we did? First, we would demand that women be admitted to the priesthood at once; their second-class status is a clear injustice. We would demand that the Pope vigorously support the priests and nuns who preach human rights in Central America. And we

310753_4

Higher Cancer Risk Found in Radiation

amount that nuclear plants may give off, may also be affected. It will take some years for the conclusions of the report to change regulatory standards. Dr. Arthur Upton, a former head of the National Cancer Institute who was chairman of the committee that wrote the report, said that daily radiation exposure is essentially negligible for individuals. He explained that X-rays for medical treatment only increase a person's risk of cancer by something like one in a million, and these X-rays are the greatest man-made source of radiation to which the average person is exposed. But Dr. Upton, who is now chief of environmental medicine at New York University, said such small risks when multiplied by the whole population are not negligible and are therefore important in public health studies and policy. Radiation risks have become important public health concerns largely since World War II. Since that time scientists have carried on much study of the health effects of radiation. The greatest body of evidence on exposure to radiation has come from the study of 76,000 survivors of the atomic bomb attacks in Japan. Changes in those data were the chief factors in altering the research council's conclusions. It has been difficult to estimate the actual radiation put out by the two nuclear bombs dropped on Japan in 1945. Computer calculations done several years ago revised downward the number of energetic particles, or neutrons, that were given off. At the same time, more cancers than expected were appearing in the survivors. A number of cancers have already appeared in those who were infants up to 10 years old at the time of the bombings, and the committee used the medical history of those cases to extrapolate how many more cancers might be expected. Risks for Fetus Infants who were in the womb at the time of the bombing have been followed through adulthood. New studies of their comparative performance on intelligence tests shows marked damage compared with other infants, the report said. The risk of retardation was found to be 4 percent greater in cases involving an instantaneous dose of 10 REM. The damage is most likely for those who were exposed between the 8th and 15th weeks of pregnancy. Copies of the report on exposure to low levels of ionizing radiation can be obtained from the National Academy Press, 2101 Constitution Avenue, N.W. Washington. D.C. 20418, for $35 each.

308680_0

South Pole Emerging As Center of Astronomy

LEAD: Fighting chronic fatigue caused by thin air and deadly cold, scientists here are assembling a new type of telescope that may reveal the mysterious origin of cosmic rays. Fighting chronic fatigue caused by thin air and deadly cold, scientists here are assembling a new type of telescope that may reveal the mysterious origin of cosmic rays. The new instrument is the first large telescope ever brought to the South Pole. It is part of a concerted campaign begun recently to exploit Antarctica's unique physical qualities for astronomical research. Among the other new Antarctic projects expected to shed light on cosmic rays will be the launching from Ross Island later this month of a gigantic balloon. The balloon, flown by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, will carry four astronomical experiments, including two cosmic-ray analyzers built at the University of California at Berkeley. Scientists expect the winds at altitudes more than 100,000 feet to carry the balloon westward along the 78th parallel completely around the world in about 15 days, perhaps returning to within a few hundred miles of its launching site. The South Pole is now basking in 24-hour-a-day summer sun at the relatively mild temperature of about minus-10 degrees Fahrenheit, and many scientists shed their red National Science Foundation parkas while working outdoors. But the touch of an unprotected fingertip to cold metal can produce pain and frostbite. Another problem is the altitude. The South Pole is 9,300 feet high, and because the air is very cold, it is as thin as the air on top of an 11,000-foot-high elevation in a temperate zone. People living at the Pole grow accustomed to having a difficult time sleeping, tiring quickly and becoming absent-minded. A lack of oxygen makes a few of them sick. But despite the discomforts and the monotonous view of the featureless polar plateau, astronomers are delighted with the scientific advantages of the site. Not only does night become continuous in winter, but the thin air obstructs relatively little light and radiation from space. The atmosphere is almost completely free of water vapor, which blocks infrared radiation useful to astronomers. This is because the South Polar Plateau is the driest desert in the world. The Earth is a huge magnet, moreover, one of whose poles is in Antarctica. This creates a kind of magnetic funnel through which charged cosmic ray particles stream toward the ground in great

308665_0

Uncle Sugar, Uncle Milk

LEAD: Christmas brings candy canes, chocolate bonbons - and a woeful tangle of Federal meddling. Candy makers' grief over sugar import quotas peaks during this big selling time. Milk chocolate makers suffer added grief this year, over milk quotas. What's happening is regulation gone haywire. Christmas brings candy canes, chocolate bonbons - and a woeful tangle of Federal meddling. Candy makers' grief over sugar import quotas peaks during this big selling time. Milk chocolate makers suffer added grief this year, over milk quotas. What's happening is regulation gone haywire. Quotas protect sugar growers against foreign competition - and mean that American consumers pay an extra $3 billion a year for sugar and sugar products. With sugar's price jacked up artificially, the demand for substitutes has risen, and their prices too. Candy canes - 60 percent sugar and 40 percent corn sweetener - catch it both ways. According to Bob's Candy, a Georgia specialist in candy canes, U.S. producers pay roughly twice as much as foreign producers for the two ingredients. The inevitable result: America is importing more candy canes. Milk chocolate producers have the same problem with sugar quotas - and now have a milk quota problem as well. Milk chocolate is half sugar, one-quarter cocoa and one-quarter nonfat dry milk. Annual imports of dry milk in this form are limited to 820 metric tons. That's barely a one-day supply for the American milk chocolate industry, which uses 300,000 tons a year. The absurdity of Washington's tight curb on dry milk imports has been compounded this year. The Government is subsidizing milk exports - on top of last year's drought and earlier programs to cut dairy herds. Earlier this year it cost 80 cents to buy a pound of nonfat dry milk in this country. It now costs twice as much. Two New Jersey companies, M&M Mars and Van Leer Chocolate, are pressing the Department of Agriculture to lift the milk quota briefly. Good luck. Bob's Candy and legions of other sugar users have railed against sugar quotas for years. In Washington, when it comes to protecting farmers versus protecting consumers, the consumer loses.

310192_1

Newspapers Promise to Use More Recycled Paper

on newspaper recycling, and it was made voluntarily. Newspapers have been coming under increasing pressure to use recycled newsprint. Florida recently imposed a 10-cent-a-ton tax on newsprint made from trees, and legislators in New York and New Jersey have discussed ways to increase the use of recycled paper. Less Solid Waste Sought The publishers making the pledge included Capital Newspapers, Gannett Newspapers, Newhouse Newspapers, Newsday, The New York Times and Ottaway Newspapers. Officials at all levels of government are encouraging the recycling of newspapers to reduce the solid waste hauled to landfills. According to the report, newspapers make up about 7 percent of the solid waste generated by typical communities. Old newspapers can be readily converted into new newsprint once they have been reduced to a watery pulp in a mixing tank and the ink has been removed with the aid of chemicals. But newspaper recycling efforts in several areas of the country have been stalled because few newsprint mills are equipped to accept them as raw material. As a result, warehouses have filled with newspapers collected by communities, and prices have dropped to the point where communities have to pay to have the papers hauled away. By inducing publishers to buy increasing amounts of recycled newsprint if it is available, state officials hope to persuade newsprint manufacturers to add capacity to process old newspapers, including building a new recycling mill in New York. 'It Is Feasible' ''We have studied the issue and found that it is feasible,'' said Vincent Tese, the chairman of the task force. He said he hoped to have a commitment from mills to increase recycled production within nine months. Since recycling damages some of the fiber in newsprint, the report said about 50 percent new fiber from trees will be needed continuously to maintain quality. Paper with too little fiber tends to tear in the press and blot when it is inked. But the task force report also said the amount of old newspapers recycled could be increased from 35 percent at present to 65 percent by 2000. The publishers have agreed to increase their use of recycled fiber incrementally, increasing to 11 percent by 1992, 23 percent by 1995, 31 percent by 1997 and 40 percent by 2000. Of the 17 million tons of newsprint produced in North America each year, 1.4 million tons is used in New York State, according to the report.

310208_3

Salvation Army Is More Than Christmas Kettles

New Sounds for Christ. It has performed from Detroit to St. Thomas, the Virgin Islands, and often plays on Friday and Saturday evenings. Like her mother, Mrs. Burton directs Sunday school at the Temple, runs Bible study groups for young people in her home and belongs to the Home League, the Army's women's organization. Mrs. Burton, who has a degree in occupational therapy from New York University, said. ''I chose to stay in a hospital that services the poor,'' because of her Salvation Army background and because ''I was poor once, and know what it's like to get shabby health care.'' Its bands and its military imagery are the most colorful aspect of the Salvation Army. The bands were adopted because brass bands were a popular part of English working-class life a century ago and also a handy way to drown out hecklers at outdoor services. Congregations are known as corps and members of the clergy are referred to as commissioned officers. The Army's basic declaration of doctrine and duties is called ''The Articles of War,'' and people formally subscribing to it become soldiers. The group's chief publication has long been The War Cry. When Salvationists die, they are said to have been ''promoted to glory.'' Unusual Mixtures But the Army is unusual in other, perhaps more important ways. It mixes traditional evangelical beliefs with a concern for social ills more characteristic of liberal religious groups. It adheres to strict moral and theological principles. In 1976, the American branch dropped out of the United Service Organizations Inc. because the U.S.O. had begun serving alcohol to servicemen. In 1984, citing Scripture, the Army joined John Cardinal O'Connor and the New York Roman Catholic archdiocese in challenging Mayor Edward I. Koch's order barring discrimination against homosexuals in programs supported by city contracts. But the Army, although it sticks to a literal understanding of the Bible, manages not to enmesh itself in debates about Scripture. Influenced by the Quakers, it does not consider any sacraments necessary for salvation. ''The sacraments have been the source of so many disputes and wars over the centuries,'' said Commissioner James Osborne, the national commander of the Army. In the United States, the Army's headquarters are in Verona, N.J. Local units plan and pay for their own projects, but total spending for the country is about $864 million a year. Ninety percent comes from individual donations, national officials

309449_0

Brief Closing for Pisa's Tower

LEAD: The Mayor of Pisa signed an order today that will close the Tower of Pisa to the public from Jan. 7 to April 7 for safety reasons. Mayor Giacomino Granchi said officials would at least consider adopting safety measures that would allow a limited reopening of the tower. Shifting ground under the 180-foot tower left it tilting almost from the time that Bonnano Pisano started building it in 1173. The Mayor of Pisa signed an order today that will close the Tower of Pisa to the public from Jan. 7 to April 7 for safety reasons. Mayor Giacomino Granchi said officials would at least consider adopting safety measures that would allow a limited reopening of the tower. Shifting ground under the 180-foot tower left it tilting almost from the time that Bonnano Pisano started building it in 1173.

309411_0

Administration Supports Family Planning

LEAD: To the Editor: To the Editor: To paraphrase my fellow Missourian Mark Twain, assertions of the demise of United States support for family planning in developing countries are highly exaggerated and without foundation. Many opinion leaders, including you, have concluded that because the Bush Administration opposes abortion and coercive sterilization, it opposes family planning (''Abortion and the Real George Bush,'' editorial, Oct. 23; ''How to Embarrass Americans,'' A. M. Rosenthal column, Oct. 24). The Bush Administration is strongly committed to family planning assistance to developing countries. The United States is the world's leading source of such aid, providing more than 40 percent of donor funds for international population programs. Since 1981, the United States has obligated $2.3 billion for population activities through the Agency for International Development. In 1989 alone, A.I.D. allocated $250 million for voluntary family planning in 95 developing countries, including 45 in sub-Saharan Africa. Nor does the bulk of this go to natural methods. Consider the following: * A.I.D. is the source of 75 percent of donor-provided contraceptives for the developing world. Since 1968 this has included 4.5 billion condoms, 630 million cycles of oral contraceptives and 37.5 million intrauterine devices. Two-thirds of the condoms, three-fourths of the IUD's and nearly half the oral contraceptives have been provided since 1981. * A.I.D. has trained some 150,000 family planning service providers in 120 countries - two-thirds of them since 1981. * A.I.D.'s research program has revolutionized our understanding of population dynamics, with 139 demographic surveys in 65 countries. We are the world's largest supporter of such research in the developing world. * In 1988 alone, more than 30 million couples received family planning services through programs supported by A.I.D. The 28 countries with the largest A.I.D. population programs have seen a 26 percent decline in the average number of children per woman, from 6.1 in the 1960's to 4.5 today. When Indonesia expanded family planning in 1974, women were averaging more than 5 children each; by 1987 the rate had plunged to 3.3. In Mexico, fertility dropped from 6.3 children per woman in 1973 to 3.8 in 1986. The drop reflects changes in Mexico's population policy and a national family planning program begun in the early 1970's. This Administration opposes abortion and coercion as methods of family planning. But to leap from that to a conclusion that we no longer support family planning is a canard, pure

311527_0

Recycling: Creative Challenge

LEAD: I really enjoyed ''Recycling as a Permanent Life Style'' (Dec. 3). In addition to conserving materials and protecting the environment, the author demonstrated prudence and wisdom in approaching packaging from more than one perspective. I really enjoyed ''Recycling as a Permanent Life Style'' (Dec. 3). In addition to conserving materials and protecting the environment, the author demonstrated prudence and wisdom in approaching packaging from more than one perspective. As a teacher I try to engage all my students in looking and seeing in new ways. This means often examining accepted notions and uses of materials. Recycling provides a creative challenge to go beyond the primary use for which a product (or its package) was intended. The practice of seeing beyond what something is or how it is used, to discovering what it can be, or how it can be utilized in a new way is recycling and more. In Oceanside, educating for recycling as a responsible way to protect our ecosystem from mountains of garbage is a life lesson that is too close to home. As for what to do with your egg cartons and shoe boxes, these are prized items in my art room, where they can function as storage or art materials. Other prized recyclables include: telephone wire (trunk line), Styrofoam trays, plastic sherbet/ice cream containers and lids, TV dinner trays, inner-tube rubber, spools, cloth, ribbons and trims, cigar boxes, lumber scraps, baby food jars. With prices rising and budgets shrinking, recycling helps the art program. Contributions gratefully accepted! MARGARET WEINBERG Art Teacher Boardman Elementary School Oceanside The Times welcomes letters from readers. Letters for publication should include the writer's name, address and telephone number for verification. Send letters to The Editor, Long Island Weekly, The New York Times, 229 West 43d Street, New York, N.Y. 10036. We regret that because of the large volume of mail received we are unable to acknowledge or to return unpublished letters.

311871_1

Trees Don't Vote

not share the romantic and pastoral view held by the sort of ecological groups that defend trees more ardently than the human beings who starve under them. Nor do they take the paternalistic stand of the industrialized nations that, having burned their own forests, now think Brazil incapable of caring for the Amazon without some kind of international tutelage. ''The forest's fate,'' write the authors, ''will depend on the vision and the political sagacity of the people who live in it.'' Without a doubt ''The Fate of the Forest'' is ambitious. It begins with the history of the Amazon - told with a few exaggerations - and includes a full and rather boring chapter on the intricate geography of the region. Then it offers a balanced description of the mechanism by which the delicate ecological equilibrium of the forest is being undone. ''The Fate of the Forest,'' however, is primarily about the people who have left their marks on the Amazon. It leads the reader through a grandiose cast of characters - from American tycoons like Henry Ford in the 1930's and Daniel K. Ludwig in the 70's and 80's, who saw their expensive projects buried by the forest, to more modest actors such as the rubber tappers' union leader Chico Mendes, who lost his life a year ago while fighting the economic exploitation of the region and its people. Rightly, Ms. Hecht and Mr. Cockburn take straight aim at the culpable - the Brazilian elite. But in launching most of their attacks at the Brazilian military rather than the business elite, Ms. Hecht and Mr. Cockburn miss the mark. In Brazilian history, the destruction of the Amazon has gone on regardless of whether the military has been in power or not. The authors argue that the devastation of the tropical forest is a direct consequence of a geopolitical vision conceived by the Brazilian military - more specifically, by Gen. Golbery do Couto e Silva, who was the power behind three of the five generals who ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985. It's true that the military did authorize depredations in the area. But the real force behind the destruction was and is found in the Brazilian business community, particularly the sector involved in the development of cattle ranching. In an effort to make connections that justify their scenario, Ms. Hecht and Mr. Cockburn practice what could be called ''orthopedic

311694_0

PORTRAIT OF THE 1980's; What the Rich and Famous Did to Be So Noticed

LEAD: Disgrace was a main theme for the famous (Jim Bakker), along with wealth (Donald Trump) and tastelessness (Morton Downey Jr.). Not a few of the big names were big, and appear here, because they did something wrong. Disgrace was a main theme for the famous (Jim Bakker), along with wealth (Donald Trump) and tastelessness (Morton Downey Jr.). Not a few of the big names were big, and appear here, because they did something wrong. The decade before this one will surely be known to ages yet unborn as The Cronkite Years. What this decade will be called we know not yet, but we have reason to be concerned. The future felt safe until March 6, 1981, the night WALTER CRONKITE retired as anchorman of the CBS Evening News, leaving the nation floundering and leaderless. DAN RATHER's nervous, confrontational intensity is going to get us all into trouble someday. Already he's been beaten up by two weirdos who repeatedly demanded ''Kenneth, what is the frequency?''; provoked into walking off the set and leaving the network with six minutes of icy darkness all because an extended tennis match ate into valuable air time; and goaded into a live shouting contest by George Bush (then Vice President and candidate for higher office). Televised confrontation may have peaked, however, when GERALDO RIVERA (who got his own daily show in 1987) had his nose broken in an on-camera brawl in 1988. MORTON DOWNEY JR. reported being attacked by vicious skinheads at the San Francisco airport last April - an account vigorously disputed by airport officials - and his show was canceled in July, a possible sign of returning civility, but let's not hold our breaths. Telling was stronger than kissing and blood was colder than water in the literature industry. Eleven former officials (by one count) of the Reagan Administration and every child but one (and we'll get to him) of the First and pre-First Couples published a book, and pretty unkind some of them were. Former Secretary of State ALEXANDER M. HAIG (''Caveat'') started it all in 1984, likening the White House to a ''ghost ship'' with no one at the helm. DAVID A. STOCKMAN, the former budget director (''The Triumph of Politics''), asked wistfully, ''What do you do when your President ignores all the palpable relevant facts and wanders in circles?'' DONALD REGAN, the abruptly retired chief of staff, told all (''For

311814_7

For an Amazon Indian Tribe, Civilization Brings Mostly Disease and Death

world opinion on the Amazon issue, Brazil's Government has taken several steps to defuse charges of ''genocide through negligence.'' On Nov. 1, a new Funai state director took office here and dispatched four airborne medical teams to Yanomami areas. In a change of tone, he said he would welcome the return of qualified private medical aid groups. [ President Sarney has freed $1.8 million for an emergency health program for the tribe, which is to start Jan. 4. ] ''What really worries us is that what we are getting at the Indian House may only be a small faction of the problem out there,'' said the director, Jose Maria Nascimento. Built for 50 Indians, the Indian House has been accepting 30 new patients a week. On Oct. 20, a judge in Brasilia ordered Funai to expel all non-Indians from the Yanomami area. Mr. Juca, the state governor, immediately denounced the order as ''out of touch with the reality of the Amazon'' and announced that he would not use the state's military police to carry out any expulsion. The local chief of the Federal Police, with only 27 men to patrol the state, said his force could not handle the job. In September, two of his agents drowned in a river while trying to expel miners near a Catholic mission. [ On Jan. 7, the Federal Police, with 250 agents from out of state, is to enforce a Dec. 12 presidential order for a gradual withdrawal of ''invaders'' from the Yanomami areas. ] Agreement on All Sides: The Indians Need Help In the meantime, people as diverse as Mr. Chagnon, the American anthropologist, and Jose Altinho Machado, president of the Amazonian Gold Miners Union, agree that the medical needs of the Yanomami must be met. Mr. Chagnon, a professor at University of California Santa Barbara, has started collecting money for a Yanomami Survival Fund. Mr. Machado advocates establishing a secure source of financing for Funai by earmarking 1 percent of all mineral receipts for the Indian agency. To insure the Yanomami's long-term survival, Indian defenders and gold miners will have to reach a compromise on the boundaries of a reserve. ''History has shown us that when Indian groups go through the contact phase, many die,'' said Mr. Nascimento, the Funai director here. ''Once they have a defined, protected area, they return to normal life, the population stabilizes and then it increases.''

311532_2

DES Victims: Search Must Go On

who took the drug to prevent miscarriage are at 44 percent greater risk for breast cancer.) Vital to the identification and treatment of the DES-exposed is a research project called the DES-Adenosis Study (Desad), which has been funded by the National Cancer Institute since 1974. The $271,000 grant needed to continue this work has been denied for 1990. Unless funding is restored for fiscal year 1991, research work will cease and the cohort group of 4,000 DES-exposed daughters, plus 1,000 nonexposed controls, will be disbanded. That cannot be allowed to happen. Many more men and women are victims of DES than those of other medical problems that gain most of the attention and money. The money needed to fund Desad is laughably small compared to what is being spent on other medical problems. For years, we've had to be satisfied with this drop in the bucket; now the National Cancer Institute is squeezing the faucet closed completely. It is but the latest example of the inaction that has allowed the DES problem to go untreated for many of those affected. The story of DES is disgraceful. As far back as 1953, the drug was known to have no positive effect on sustaining pregnancies, the purpose for which it was created, yet it was administered until 1971 in the United States. It is still being administered abroad, in some cases sold over the counter. In the United States, DES is still authorized for estrogen replacement in menopausal women and is the active ingredient in the morning-after birth-control pill. It is in widespread use overseas to suppress lactation in women who choose not to breast-feed. The termination of the Desad project will destroy a vital source of information that we need to continue our efforts to study the effects of DES and identify and educate the DES-exposed. It is also vital to our colleagues in Europe and Canada, where Desad is their only source of research information. The cohort base it has taken 15 years to build must not be allowed to erode through neglect. The cessation of DESAD will have long-term negative effects on the large numbers of DES- exposed, those that we have identified and those still unaware of their exposure. Anyone interested in more information on DES may get in touch with DES Action USA, Long Island Jewish Medical Center, New Hyde Park, N.Y. 11040; 516-775-3450. LONG ISLAND OPINION

311706_1

Educating The Handicapped

year, 9.9 percent (about one in 10 students), 297,000, were registered in special education programs. This number will increase as drug-addicted babies and infants with fetal alcohol syndrome will need and enter into special education programs. Although special education students are individually tested every three years, no information from these triennial evaluations are ever published. This information is absolutely essential if these programs are to be honestly evaluated. Personal testimony from administrators and parents is the only information we receive about the merit of these programs. Special education benefits but does not educate all students. There are pupils who leave these programs with a mental age no greater than that of an infant, toddler or child starting kindergarten. These handicapped children should certainly receive services, and this is not the issue or the dilemma. The question to be answered is if all the services given to children should be labeled and funded as education. Have these profoundly handicapped children been given another totally different service in the context of an educational setting? Parents and educators will write that these youngsters become independent in special education programs, but they are misusing the word ''independent.'' You are not independent as an adult because you have learned how to wash your hands or brush your teeth or hold a spoon. You are only independent as an adult if you can earn money enough to provide yourself with the necessities of life: food, clothing, and shelter. If children are in school to learn self-help skills, should these services be provided by a teacher? Shouldn't we train people to do this work? I've always operated under the assumption that you pay a professional salary to a person who has professional duties and responsibilities. This is not true in the world of special education where teachers feed children. Mrs. Kislik sounds defeated over a situation she feels cannot be changed. I share her concern and sometimes when I'm really depressed think a foreign power has infiltrated our educational system. This doesn't make too much sense but it seems incredible that a country would permit a situation to exist where the most costly education in the country is the teaching of self-help skills. This situation exists in New York State. I believe that in a democratic country nothing is ever written in stone. Changes can be made when all the facts are available. JANE GOLDBLATT East Northport

311773_2

A CHURCH WITHOUT PRIESTS

to rise. In the Fort Worth diocese, the growth is expected to be dramatic. These are some of the considerations that propelled the Fort Worth diocese into an experiment in church governance four years ago. At present, seven parishes, including San Patricio, are entrusted to the care of men and women who are not priests: three are permanent deacons (men, married or unmarried, ordained for a ministry of service in the church); four are women religious (nuns). The Fort Worth diocese is not alone in this experiment. The first pilot project for priestless parishes was started in 1981 by Bishop Raymond Lucker, of the Diocese of New Ulm, Minn. By 1987, 56 dioceses had indicated that they expected to adopt Bishop Lucker's model in five years or less and 70 dioceses had already done so, with a total of 193 faith communities already involved. Nuns have accounted for the majority of these pastoral administrators - 125 out of 201. The pastoral administrator in Throckmorton is one of their number. ALTHOUGH SHE WEARS NO HABIT, THE FRIENDLY 58-YEAR-OLD woman who greets me at the door of the church - Sister Trinitas Keltgen - is unmistakably the presider at San Patricio. I have come early on a Sunday morning - out from under a sudden, bone-chilling rain. The interior of the church is dark-paneled but seems to be glowing. I glance around. The statues of Mary and Joseph flanking the crucifix are standard. They strike me as somewhat pallid here, for it is the large olive-skinned figure of Our Lady of Guadalupe, patroness of Mexico, who seems to have gathered in most of the light and color, with her halo of electric lights, votive candles at her feet and her two mantles, one the traditional light blue, one handsewn of indigo velvet, both spangled with gold stars. Sister Trinitas is clearly at ease as she leads a communion service in the absence of a priest. Children writhe and fidget, but the adults listen respectfully as she delivers a pastoral reflection on the discernment of our loving and unloving choices. The care that has gone into preparing her reflection is obvious, but there is nothing radically new or different being proclaimed here. After the service, Sister Trinitas drives with Debbie and Steve Trejo to the grave of their 2-year-old son, killed in a baling accident eight months earlier. The burial site is all

311847_0

IN SHORT: Nonfiction

LEAD: THE DIVERTED DREAM: Community Colleges and the Promise of Educational Opportunity in America, 1900-1985. By Steven Brint and Jerome Karabel. (Oxford University, $24.95.) The United States sends more of its young people to college than any other nation in the world. Approximately half of them are enrolled in community colleges, where they are channeled into low- and mid-level technical and vocational programs. THE DIVERTED DREAM: Community Colleges and the Promise of Educational Opportunity in America, 1900-1985. By Steven Brint and Jerome Karabel. (Oxford University, $24.95.) The United States sends more of its young people to college than any other nation in the world. Approximately half of them are enrolled in community colleges, where they are channeled into low- and mid-level technical and vocational programs. It is this paradox between the democratization of higher education and the tracking of students into a highly stratified occupational structure that Steven Brint and Jerome Karabel address in ''The Diverted Dream.'' In the process they attempt to explain both the phenomenal growth and the particular orientation of today's two-year institutions. Small liberal-arts ''junior'' colleges, designed to prepare students for transferring to four-year colleges, were transformed into large-scale ''community'' colleges, intended to provide large segments of the population with vocational programs and terminal degrees. This change required a lengthy and substantial effort, including the use of testing and guidance services, to persuade students and their parents to lower their aspirations. Mr. Brint, who teaches sociology at Yale University, and Mr. Karabel, who teaches sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, reject the notions that the transformation occurred because students-as-consumers chose vocational tracks and that business and industry played a dominant role in shaping this transformation. Instead, they argue, the leaders of the community college movement fashioned a particular mission to secure a niche for themselves in the competitive educational marketplace. The book is well documented and raises important questions about the role of education in our society. For the working class and minority students that predominate in two-year institutions, this book serves as a cruel reminder of the limits of opportunity in a class-structured society. GREGORY MANTSIOS

311763_1

Ten Escapes to the Exotic: Zimbabwe

is fortunate that the fantastic nature show is combined with one of the grand hotels of Africa. The Victoria Falls Hotel, spiffed up during 1989 after becoming a little dilapidated, began life in 1904 as a wood and corrugated iron shack for railway workers. But by the 1920's, when Rhodesia was developing into a premier British colony, a graceful two-story building with courtyards shaded by mango trees had taken shape. The hotel retains much of its colonial atmosphere - a grand dining room with red plush chairs, lobbies with wooden framed armchairs and terraces with attentive service and plentiful buffets (especially for English-style desserts). A swimming pool, shaded by brilliantly red-flowered trees, known locally as flamboyants, makes for wonderful recovery after a few weeks in the bush. Ask for a front room looking toward the falls so that, when you arrive, you catch your first tantalizing glimpse of the falls. The hotel is situated above the falls, about a mile away. From there, you look out onto a forest of trees with the white spray from the thundering water rising so far above the top of the falls it resembles the dense smoke from a bush fire. The falls, an easy walk from the hotel, often in the company of baboons who inhabit the bush along the dirt track, should really be inspected at different times of the day. At 6 A.M, for example, with a clear blue sky and a silvery half moon, the only sound is from the thundering water, so loud it is like a permanently bass orchestra. By midday, the crickets in the surrounding rain forest are in full song and the air has taken on a muggy temperature. Fifteen different viewing points at the rim of the gorge give different perspectives. Perhaps the eeriest is the viewing point, almost darkened from overhead foliage and vines, below the statue of David Livingstone, the English explorer who was the first white man to sight the falls. Stone steps, arched with trees and vines permanently damp from the spray of the falls, lead down from the statue into the gorge. From here you are face to face with the gushing water and seemingly so close to the rainbow across the falls that you want to reach out and touch it. Falls-watching is not the only amusement. For the more intrepid, there is white-water rafting down the Zambezi River.

306734_5

The Cost of Drug Abuse: $60 Billion a Year

arrests. New patterns of flight capital, particularly from Peru, Colombia and Bolivia, are also being perceived by economists. Most of the cocaine smuggled into the United States and Europe is processed from coca plants grown in the Andes. Drug Profits Invested The Latin drug dealers have traditionally moved a substantial share of their profits out of their relatively poor and unstable countries, adding to economic and political difficulties there, and reinvested the money in apparently legitimate enterprises in North America and Europe. A major share now, however, is going to Hong Kong, where the money is said to be easier to conceal. Indeed, officials say, Hong Kong has become an international center for drug-money laundering. Experts estimate that as much as $250 billion in assets owned by Latin Americans is invested abroad. A recent report by the House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control concludes that most of the world's cocaine profits do not return to producer countries but are invested in tax havens, offshore bank accounts and real estate abroad. In those instances where some money does remain in these drug producing nations, it is not used to help build a solid economy. ''Cocaine traffickers are not captains of industry like the Harrimans, Rockefellers and Carnegies of yore,'' said Rensselaer W. Lee 3d, a consultant who is teaching at George Washington University. The way the narcotics traders ''invest'' their money locally, he added, was in bribing law enforcement officials, operating assassination squads and buying arms. A Lift for Peasants Nevertheless, the report by the House Select Committee notes, the cocaine industry has ''revolutionized expectations and aspirations within Andean societies, for peasants especially.'' It added, ''Television sets, videocassette recorders, stereos and cars have become attainable.'' Thus the cocaine trade has spawned new constituencies that place new demands on Andean political systems. And, as Mr. Lee put it, entire regions of South America have come to depend economically on coca cultivation. In Boliva alone, where the export of legal goods is about $800 million each year, illegal cocaine exports may exceed that amount. As a result, the drug industry has become an institutionalized source of many jobs. It is estimated that 1.5 million people are employed in Andian production of cocaine and as many as 50,000 work in marijuana production in Colombia alone. 'A Safety Valve' So for the short term at least, the drug industry clearly has some value,

306711_2

Tight Limits Proposed for Popular Farm Chemical

those uses would not take effect until the spring of 1991, unless the manufacturers act voluntarily. Environmentalists asserted such a delay represented a health hazard, but the Government said the additional risk was negligible. The delay could be greater if manufacturers seek an administrative hearing to fight the ban. EBDC's have been used since 1935. As many as 18 million pounds are used annually in the United States, and more than that overseas, according to the environmental agency. About 75 percent of their use is on fruits and vegetables. Hope of Reversing Plan Jay J. Vroom, president of the National Agricultural Chemicals Association in Washington, said he was pleased that Mr. Reilly told consumers that they need not change their buying or eating habits, because risks associated with the fungicides could be reduced by washing or peeling fruits or vegetables. Don Collins, an association spokesman, said the industry expected the study of food from grocery shelves to show that fungicide residues on potatoes, tomatoes and bananas are in safe consumption ranges. The major domestic manufacturers of the EBDC fungicides are the Pennwalt Corporation, the Rohm & Haas Company, BASF Corporation and Du Pont. The chemicals are manufactured overseas by Rhone-Polenc Inc., a French concern. Estimating Cancer Risk The agency's action is based on studies of laboratory animals showing that exposure to a substance formed when EBDC's degrade, ethylenethiourea, may pose increased risks of cancer to consumers from dietary exposure. Such exposure may also increase risks of birth defects and thyroid disorders. The Government said the maximum risk of someone getting cancer under the current widespread use pattern during a 70-year lifetime was 4 in 10,000. The estimated cancer risk from the 10 crops the agency proposes to retain is 3 in 1,000,000. The estimates may overstate actual risk because they reflect higher residues than the agency expects to find on grocery shelves. The bans will change the way many farmers do business. ''It will make my life harder; it will be harder to control disease,'' said Timothy Nance, a production specialist with Naples Tomato Growers, in Naples, Fla., one of the state's leading growers. Mr. Nance said many tomato growers would probably use other chemicals to defend their crops against funguses, which thrive in moist climates. But the substitutes are not as effective as EBDC's, he said. Two primary replacements, captan and chlorothalonil, have also been identified as possible carcinogens.

306707_1

After Skirmish With Protesters, Navy Tests Missile

one three feet long, and began to flood. Protesters said the Navy turned water cannons on the ship to flood her further. They supplied a videotape showing water from the hoses pouring onto the deck. The Navy declined to comment on the videotape. By late in the day, the Greenpeace, with about 30 people on board, had managed to restart her engines and head back to Jacksonville, Fla. No injuries were reported. ''We were rammed many times over three hours,'' Robert Visser, a 29-year-old photographer for Greenpeace, said from aboard ship, where he was reached over a telephone-satellite link this evening. ''We stuffed mattresses into a hole about a meter square. But water was rushing in. Some fuel tanks were punctured. People were being thrown across deck each time we hit.'' Vice Adm. Roger F. Bacon, an officer in tactical command of the launching who was aboard the Nashville, a Navy ship at the scene, said the Greenpeace had been repeatedly warned by radio that she had violated a 5,000-yard security radius around the submarine. He said the ship was warned that she would be forcibly removed. ''Freedom of speach and freedom of the seas,'' Admiral Bacon said in a written statement, ''do not equate to freedom to obstruct the legitimate activities of the U.S. Government through dangerous actions by protesters.'' The run-in virtually overshadowed the launching itself, which was hailed as an important success by the Navy. Previously, while 16 land-based launchings of the Trident 2 had succeeded, at least two of six undersea launchings had failed. The $26.5 million, 44-foot missile, the Navy's biggest, is designed to carry eight nuclear warheads. In August, Navy officials acknowledged that the Trident 2's design had not taken into account the effect of water jets on the missile as well as the strong pressure as it hurtled through the water. Navy officials said today that they had since made five design changes and that the successful launching showed they had been effective. Navy Tows 2 Rafts When the Navy ships set out from Cape Canaveral about dawn, the Greenpeace was waiting 20 miles offshore. The group is protesting the United States' refusal to negotiate with the Soviet Union on a reduction of sea-based nuclear missiles. At 6:50 A.M., when the submarine seemed ready to submerge, the Greenpeace moved closer and deployed two motorized rafts, one holding five protesters and the other news

306707_5

After Skirmish With Protesters, Navy Tests Missile

Greenpeace vessels approached the same submarine, the Tennessee, and successfully blocked the test launching of a Trident 2. Protesters managed to place an anti nuclear banner on the sub, and the Navy could not move them out of the area. Over the years, Greenpeace demonstrators in rafts have become common at launchings of nuclear submarines. In January, a Greenpeace vessel and a Japanese whaling ship collided. And in March, Greenpeace vessels surrounded a British aircraft carrier in the harbor of Hamburg, West Germany. In July 1985, the Rainbow Warrior, a Greenpeace ship, was sunk off Auckland, New Zealand, after explosives were attached to her hull. One crew member, a photographer, was killed. The French Government, a frequent target of Greenpeace's protests, eventually admitted that its secret service had carried out the operation. Legal Issues Are Murky Ms. Fagan said Greenpeace would consider suing the United States Government for damages in today's incident. The cost of the damage had not been determined by this evening. Experts on martime law said the issue was cloudy. Lloyd Cutler, a prominent Washington lawyer who has represented Greenpeace in the past, said that it is likely that a United States Navy vessel in international waters can legally use force to back up a warning against vessels registered in the United States. But because the Greenpeace is registered in the Netherlands, he said, the Navy's jurisdiction is in doubt. W. Thaddeus Miller, the managing partner at Burlingham Underwood & Lord, a Manhattan firm that specializes in maritime law, said that under the rules of a 1958 international convention signed in 1961 by the United States, a warship could not board a merchant ship unless it was of the same nationality as the warship or there was a possibility that it was involved in piracy or the slave trade. The definition of ''board'' is vague. As for the paying of damages, Mr. Miller said that warships have immunity from liability, although the United States waives that immunity and pays when its ships are at fault in, say, a collision. But when the Government does not want to pay on the basis of public policy, he added, the Federal courts have sometimes refrained from interfering. Legal experts said that any suit resulting from today's confrontation would have to be filed in United States courts. Under international agreement, they are filed in the country of the vessel being sued.

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U S West In Budapest Phone Deal

LEAD: U S West Inc., one of the nation's seven regional Bell telephone companies, said yesterday that it had signed an agreement with Hungary to build a mobile cellular telephone system in Budapest. U S West Inc., one of the nation's seven regional Bell telephone companies, said yesterday that it had signed an agreement with Hungary to build a mobile cellular telephone system in Budapest. The Hungarian cellular system will be the first such telephone network to be constructed in Eastern Europe. Because of the shortage of telephones in the nation, Hungarians are expected to use cellular telephones for basic home service, as well as mobile communications. For Hungary and the other Eastern European countries, which have antiquated telephone systems, it will be faster and cheaper for the Government to deliver telephone service by cellular networks than it would be to rebuild the nation's entire telephone infrastructure. At First, Only Budapest A cellular telephone network transmits calls on radio waves to small receiving antennas, called ''cell'' sites, that relay the calls to local phone systems. The system to be built in Hungary, which is viewed as an alternative until the country can develop its infrastructure, will transmit calls from cellular phone to cellular phone and through the existing land-based telephone network. The system, which is scheduled to go into operation in the first quarter of 1991, will initially provide cellular communications to Budapest's 2.1 million residents. Eventually, the system will serve all of Hungary, which has 10.6 million citizens. Hungary currently has 6.8 telephone lines for every 100 people, according to The World's Telephones, a statistical compilation produced by the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. By comparison, the United States has 48.1 lines for every 100 people. Demand for telephone service in Hungary exceeds supply by 300,000 to 500,000 lines, industry analysts said. U S West, based in Denver, said that under the agreement it would own and operate 49 percent of the cellular network and that Magyar Posta, the Hungarian postal, telegraph and telephone organization, would retain the rest. Because the Hungarian cellular telephone system will rely on sophisticated computer software, U S West needs the approval of the 16-nation Coordinating Committee for Strategic Exports, or Cocom, to build the network. Cocom limits the transfer of technology from Western countries to the Eastern bloc. 'A Prime Place' Dick Callahan, president of U S West Diversified Group, said he was

306793_0

Hotter, Drier Amazon Seen in Forest Study

LEAD: CONVERTING all of the Amazon's tropical forests to pastureland would reduce rainfall there by 20 percent and make the region substantially hotter, a British study has found. CONVERTING all of the Amazon's tropical forests to pastureland would reduce rainfall there by 20 percent and make the region substantially hotter, a British study has found. In a computer simulation, the scientists examined what would happen if forests and savannas were converted to pasture over the whole Amazon basin. Farmers are doing just that in parts of the region, which contains half of the world's tropical forests. The three-year simulation study, published in a recent issue of the journal Nature, was done by scientists in England's Meteorological Office and Department of the Environment. Half the rainfall in the Amazon basin is believed to consist of water that evaporates from the forests. Evaporation is lessened when the trees are cut. This not only reduces rainfall, but because evaporation draws heat from the land, cooling the earth, it also makes the surface warmer. Previous studies had suggested that deforestation reduced evaporation and made the surface warmer, but did not establish any clear indication of reduced rainfall. The study's authors say that the conclusions are tentative, and that more extensive ground-based observations in Amazonia would make the simulation more realistic. But, they wrote in Nature, the results ''indicate that deforestation can cause significant local climatic perturbations.'' SCIENCE WATCH

312939_0

Philosophers Hang Out The Shingle

LEAD: Following the example of psychotherapists, Dutch philosophers are opening private practices and charging clients up to $50 an hour to discuss ideas. Following the example of psychotherapists, Dutch philosophers are opening private practices and charging clients up to $50 an hour to discuss ideas. ''There's a new generation of philosophers who want to take part in society, not just work in an ivory tower,'' said Ad Hoogendijk, who in 1987 became one of the first Dutch philosophers to set up practice. ''We are making use of philosophical tradition to exchange thoughts with clients over whatever subject they want.'' Mr. Hoogendijk has been joined by a dozen others who talk with clients about subjects from the meaning of life to a possible career change. Unlike some psychologists and psychiatrists, practicing philosophers do not try to probe deep into the past of the individual to understand childhood-ingrained, subconscious behavior and then suggest modifications. 'Very Basic Questions' Rather, they try to apply the wisdom of their discipline to help people see their problems from a new perspective. ''I try to help people answer very basic questions like: 'Who are you?' 'What do you want?' '' Mr. Hoogendijk said in an interview. ''It's a kind of re-orientation to structure their desires. I don't try and fit a person into a pre-existing theory but take what they say about themselves at face value and try to act as a midwife to let them articulate what they have inside.'' He said that about 80 percent of his clients are at some major emotional crossroads: businessmen worried about approaching retirement, women upset when their grown children leave home and youths unsure what to study at college. He usually meets a client four or five times. Faced with a depressed client, he tries to offer some perspective in discussions about the high value modern culture places on happiness and how thinkers in the past have put a high value on melancholia. From Great Minds ''There is a famous saying that Plato and Aristotle said it all, and it's true,'' he said. But his reading of Spinoza, Marcuse, Karl Marx and Hannah Arendt have also informed his counseling, he said. One of his colleagues, Eite Veening, said he began his practice in the northern city of Groningen in 1987 because he was disturbed by ''how much sloppy thinking there was around.'' He said he was not interested in

312977_0

5 Acquitted in Carrier Protest

LEAD: Five members of Greenpeace, an anti-nuclear group, have been acquitted of mischief by a judge who ruled that the anchoring of a United States Navy vessel, capable of carrying nuclear weapons, off Vancouver was an invitation to protest. The provincial court judge, Wallace Craig, said on Thursday that they were right to protest and that Canadians had been too passive in the past. Five members of Greenpeace, an anti-nuclear group, have been acquitted of mischief by a judge who ruled that the anchoring of a United States Navy vessel, capable of carrying nuclear weapons, off Vancouver was an invitation to protest. The provincial court judge, Wallace Craig, said on Thursday that they were right to protest and that Canadians had been too passive in the past. The five spray-painted peace symbols and the international radiation warning symbol on the aircraft carrier Independence.

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Bridgeport's Hot Trash

A relatively new plant in Bridgeport, Conn., makes clear that resource recovery has a strong future. How best to reduce the solid waste that is burying the nation? The windy debates have produced two choices: recycling and ''resource recovery,'' or incineration to produce electric power. A relatively new plant in Bridgeport, Conn., makes clear that resource recovery has a strong future. Environmentalists generally press recycling as the best means to eliminate waste without more landfills and dumps. And recycling certainly has an essential role as part of an overall solid waste management program. But it can be wasteful of time and energy without commercial demand for the salvaged materials. Thus the continued reliance on resource recovery. But this approach increasingly faces public opposition. Outmoded resource recovery plants, which cannot produce heat of more than 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit, have drawn complaints about smoke and odors, and their residual ash contains toxins that may ooze out in dumps and pollute ground water. These dangers can be reduced, as is shown by the $275 million Bridgeport plant and its new technology of burning. The plant uses the combustible elements in trash, primarily paper and plastics, to incinerate it all more efficiently at over 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit. The high heat and advanced smokestack filtering protect air quality. Heavy metals fuse with other materials so that toxins aren't easily leached out by water after disposal. The plant, one of 14 of similar design in operation or under construction throughout the country, processes 2,250 tons of refuse daily from 14 Connecticut townships. It reduces the volume by 90 percent and satisfies 10 percent of Bridgeport's demand for electric power. State monitors confirm the lack of pollution. The overall solid waste plan for the Bridgeport area also includes recycling. Glass, aluminum cans and some other easily found recyclables are removed from trash either in the originating towns or at seven intermediate transfer stations. More extensive recycling awaits technology for efficient separation of other materials. Washington wants to require that recycling reduce each city's solid waste by 25 percent in weight by 1992. But the new recycling industry still depends on unpromising market forces, and as yet primitive separation methods. The stroke of a pen won't resolve those issues. New combustion technology that turns trash into useful energy without harmful side effects alters the terms of the debate. It merits attention in Washington and municipalities around the nation.

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Rio Journal; Autos Cry for Alcohol; France Will Do Its Part

environmentalists blocked an effort to ease the shortage with the 22 percent alcohol content of gasoline sold in the city. Scientists said the widespread use of sugar-cane alcohol had cut air pollution in Brazil's largest city. With environmental threats largely averted and American and European alcohol shipments not expected until late January, Brazil has settled down to a full-blown energy crisis. Taxi fleets have started to glide to a halt, as many as two-thirds of Rio's service stations have closed their alcohol pumps, and last Tuesday a 400-car alcohol line blocked traffic on the Rio-Sao Paulo highway. Converter's Phones Are Busy ''I get 200 telephone calls a day, compared with 20 calls six months ago,'' said Affonso Carapenticow, manager of Retifica Recamavo, an auto repair shop that specializes in converting alcohol engines into gasoline engines. ''Listen, I drove from Sao Paulo the day after Christmas,'' he said, referring to a 300-mile drive. ''In the last half of the trip, all the alcohol pumps were closed.'' Used car dealers have started charging a 20 percent premium for gasoline cars. ''When they hear my car's alcohol, they hang up the phone,'' said a young man here who has placed a classified ad in a local newspaper. Brazil's automobile manufacturers have changed their lines to produce 80 percent gasoline cars and 20 percent alcohol cars - a virtual reversal of last year's proportion. Manufacturers are also preparing conversion kits to sell to owners. In Rio, with a 40 percent shortfall expected in alcohol supplies in January, taxi drivers are lobbying for permission to convert their cars to bottled cooking gas. Prices Being Raised To ease shortages, the Government is considering raising alcohol prices, a measure supported by the World Bank, which calculates that alcohol subisidies cost the Government $2.5 billion a year. Indeed, low producer prices are at the heart of the shortage. In recent years, alcohol consumption grew 10 percent a year, while land under sugar-cane cultivation shrank 4 percent a year. While drivers wait in line this summer, alternatively blaming Government planners and environmentalists, Mr. Carapenticow says he will have no complaints. His alcohol-motor conversion business has been so busy that a Brazilian auto parts supplier this week awarded him a free summer vacation in the Bahamas. ''The telex said, 'Just bring shorts and sunglasses,' '' he said during a brief moment on Thursday when his five desk telephones stopped ringing.

305849_0

Christians in the Soviet Union

LEAD: About half the Soviet Union's 286 million people profess a religious affiliation. In addition to the groups cited below, there are 40 million to 50 million Muslims, 1.8 million to 2 million Jews and 665,000 Buddhists. Figures for adherents are Western estimates. RUSSIAN ORTHODOX: 50-60 million adherents About half the Soviet Union's 286 million people profess a religious affiliation. In addition to the groups cited below, there are 40 million to 50 million Muslims, 1.8 million to 2 million Jews and 665,000 Buddhists. Figures for adherents are Western estimates. RUSSIAN ORTHODOX: 50-60 million adherents The largest of the self-governing Eastern Rite Christian groups descended from the ancient church of Constantinople and recognizing the primacy of the Ecumenical Patriarch there. The division between these churches and the Catholic Church headed by the Pope is usually dated to 1054, involving differences over the Trinity, church governance, clerical celibacy and liturgical practice. A number of traditionalist, pietist or charismatic Orthodox groups have rejected the church's leadership; some are recognized by the Government as distinct religious bodies, others exist illegally. ROMAN CATHOLIC: 10 million adherents About 4 million Latin Rite Catholics are found primarily in the Baltic areas christianized in the medieval period. The Vatican has been able to name bishops in Lithuania, Latvia and, last month, in Byelorussia, to lead these Catholics. Eastern Rite Catholics, existing primarily in the Western Ukraine, maintain the Eastern liturgy and other practices common to Orthodoxy. Influenced by Poland, but resisting its Western or Latin rite, they began professing obedience to the papcy after the Union of Brest in 1596. In 1946, this church, known as the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, was annexed to the Orthodox Church and its independent leadership suppressed. An estimated 6 million adherents, 4-5 million in the Ukraine, have continued to maintain an underground church. ARMENIAN APOSTOLIC: 4 million adherents GEORGIAN ORTHODOX: 3 million adherents Two churches of the Eastern tradition, the earliest established in the third or fourth centuries in what is now Soviet territory. EVANGELIGAL LUTHERAN: 1.2-15. million adherents Followers are primarily in the Baltic, especially Estonia and Latvia. OTHER There are at least 1 million other Protestants, but figures vary widely and distinguish between approximately 500,000 ''members'' and the larger number of ''adherents'' including children and other believers not baptised as adults. Between 250,000 and 300,000 members, mostly Baptists, are linked to the All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists, recognized by

307458_0

Priest Tells of His Role In Nevada Bomb Tests

LEAD: As an Episcopal priest, Bob Nelson prays that no one will ever use what he helps to make in his day job. As an Episcopal priest, Bob Nelson prays that no one will ever use what he helps to make in his day job. While other priests may lead protests against nuclear weapons, Mr. Nelson leads the teams that explode those weapons deep underground at the Nevada Test Site. It is clearly contradictory, he said, being ''the only priest I know who fires nuclear weapons.'' Almost every day, he added, it forces him to reconcile his occupation and his calling. ''There are no right or wrong answers,'' he said. ''I would like to be in a situation where there are no nuclear weapons. But I would also like a situation where we maintain the system of freedom and justice we have in our country.'' Mr. Nelson, who is 48 years old, is the deputy manager of Nevada operations for the Energy Department. He began his career in the Navy on the staff of Adm. Hyman Rickover, who was a force in nuclear development. Newcomer to the Clergy Mr. Nelson is a lifelong Episcopalian, but a newcomer to the clergy in the church, which has not taken a position on the issue of continued nuclear testing. ''The way God works, he just doesn't follow the rules at all,'' said Mr. Nelson, who has two children. ''With my family, work and other commitments, I thought becoming a priest was something that just couldn't happen.'' Mr. Nelson was nominated into the priesthood by the congregation at All Saints Episcopal Church under a canon allowing elevation of parishioners to priests in remote parishes. He was ordained two years ago. He takes pains to separate his role as a priest from his job, in which he has given the final approval to detonate more than 30 nuclear devices. But he also believes his experience in the weapons program has given him insight into the everyday world that is useful in his role as a priest. ''I deal with a lot of real world things here that perhaps the clergy who have been clergy for their whole careers don't see,'' he said. Meets Foes of Testing Mr. Nelson does not shy away from defending his beliefs on continued nuclear testing: He is often asked to go before anti-nuclear groups and explain the Government's position that

307420_0

Protest Ends on Indian Ocean Isle

LEAD: Soldiers used tear gas and clubs today to disperse 1,000 high school students protesting a coup in which the island nation's president was killed, witnesses said. Soldiers used tear gas and clubs today to disperse 1,000 high school students protesting a coup in which the island nation's president was killed, witnesses said. The mercenary-led presidential guard, which is thought to be in control of the islands, later ordered 10 foreign journalists to leave the Indian Ocean country and confined 5 others to their hotel. The students, crying, ''Assassins! Assassins!'' marched from the French Embassy to the beach, where they were confronted by members of the presidential guard founded by a French mercenary, Bob Denard. Students Reportedly Beaten The guardsmen, led by French and Belgian mercenaries, were backed by vehicles equipped with heavy machine-guns. Many students jumped into the water when the soldiers arrived, and others fled down side streets. Most later regrouped before the Ministry of the Interior in the city center, where dozens of guardsmen launched tear-gas grenades and charged the demonstrators with clubs. Witnesses said several students were beaten and that guardsmen patrolled working-class areas of the city throughout the day, dispersing smaller gatherings with tear gas and clubs. The film and notebooks of several photographers and reporters were seized as they covered the demonstration in the archipelago, located between Mozambique and Madagascar. French Aid Is Cut Off The violence came as France cut off its annual aid of $18 million to the Comoro Republic following the death of President Ahmed Abdallah Abderemane during the coup on Nov. 26. The Foreign Ministry said the aid included direct assistance as well as 150 technical and 13 military advisers. French Government officials said that the aid will not be renewed until Mr. Denard leaves the islands. Diplomats have said that President Abderemane died in an attack carried out or directed by Mr. Denard, commander of the 500-man guard. Mr. Denard, 60, has denied involvement in the President's death. France, the islands' former colonial power, has sent a military transport helicopter to the French-administered island of Mayotte to help in evacuating French citizens from the Comoro Islands if necessary. About 1,600 French citizens are registered with the embassy in Moroni.

307537_3

Many Wrongly Losing U.S. Payments

from the program's rolls should have received payments. Agency officials said that they would not vouch for the statistical accuracy of the study, but that it defined a major problem on which action was required. The study said it had identified two significant problems in the suspension process ''that are cause for concern by the agency.'' ''In a very high percentage of cases, field officers suspend benefits without allowing recipients the required amount of time to respond to come-in letters or requests for information,'' the study said. ''In many cases involving recipients who are of advanced age or who have a language barrier or impairment that might make it difficult to comply with agency requests, field officers suspend benefits without first making the follow-up telephone or personal contact required by the Program Operations Manual System.'' The study concluded that ''there seems to be a consensus that the problems are related to heavy workloads.'' In addition, ''the desire to prevent overpayments'' was also a factor in the high incidence of removals, the researchers reported. Reinstatement Took Months The agency studied the cases of 1,500 recipients, picked at random, who had been denied payments in December 1986 and May 1987. The resulting study of 1,293 people denied payments found that 1,091 had been incorrectly suspended from the rolls. Two-thirds were eventually reinstated, but some had to wait six months or longer. The directive said agency officials must personally consult those who are 75 or older and those who suffer a severe mental or physical handicap or are homeless before payments are suspended. For many of the recipients, the payments constituted their sole income, and their removal from the program resulted in extreme hardship. The study noted that 24.6 percent of those removed from the rolls were mentally impaired, and 33.1 percent were of advanced age. An additional 13 percent were blind, 4 percent were deaf and 12 percent had a language barrier. Correction: December 9, 1989, Saturday, Late Edition - Final Because of an editing error, an article and a headline yesterday about the Social Security Administration referred incorrectly in some editions to a Government assistance program from which people were suspended. It was the Supplemental Security Income Program, covering poor people who are aged, blind or disabled; the people were not suspended from the Social Security program. (The error also occurred in the front-page ''Inside'' listing and in a picture caption.)

311013_1

Personal Health

be pursued to determine whether this sometimes devastating problem can be prevented. The Condition Cerebral palsy is really a group of conditions involving varying degrees of nerve and muscle dysfunction that results from damage to the central nervous system. Though the damage is usually incurred before birth, cerebral palsy can sometimes follow an injury to a child's still-developing brain through an accident, child abuse or lead poisoning. Characteristics of cerebral palsy can include spasms, excessive or insufficient muscle tone, involuntary movements or an impaired gait. Children may also suffer seizures; abnormal sensations or perceptions; impaired sight, hearing or speech, or behavioral problems. While most people with cerebral palsy are of normal intelligence, some show signs of mental retardation. The condition is not hereditary, communicable, progressive or curable. While it gets no worse with time, it can sometimes get better. Some children who are mildly affected in infancy seem to outgrow their disabilities by school age. Others can be helped to minimize their limitations through special training and therapy. The United Cerebral Palsy Associations estimate that 500,000 to 700,000 children and adults in the United States show one or more symptoms. Each year 3,000 newborns and 500 preschool children who sustain brain injuries are added to that list. Possible Causes Pediatricians and obstetricians have been baffled by the fact that despite dramatic improvements in recent decades in the care of pregnant women, fetuses and newborns, there has been no apparent decline in a baby's risk of being born with cerebral palsy. This is true even in areas where nearly every fetus is monitored to detect interference with the oxygen or blood supply or related difficulties in labor and delivery. At the same time, some known pregnancy-related causes of cerebral palsy have been brought under control through vaccines. Among them are rubella infections and incompatibility of the Rh blood type. Despite these improvements in care, cerebral palsy continues to occur at a rate of 2 to 3 in every 1,000 live births. (Similar rates prevail in other developed countries.) As a result, researchers are looking again for possible causes. Several studies involved more than 50,000 babies whose mothers participated in the Collaborative Perinatal Project, a federally sponsored study at 12 medical centers that charted the babies from early fetal life to the age of 7. The babies were born between 1959 and 1966, before fetal monitoring was widely used; 189 of the

310928_1

Orange Juice Prices Climb On Fear of a Florida Freeze

3.05 cents higher, with the contract for delivery in January up 2 cents, at $1.3445 a pound. Freezing temperatures are almost certain to reach Florida's citrus region this weekend as one of the most powerful cold-air masses of the decade moves lumbers down from Canada, said Jon Davis, a meteorologist who tracks the effect of the weather on commodities for Shearson Lehman Hutton Inc. Some Damage Expected ''This air mass is so strong that even the fringe of it has potential to cause some damage across the citrus belt,'' Mr. Davis said. ''Now it's just a matter of how much damage.'' The coldest temperatures, ranging from the lower 20's in the northern reaches of the fruit region to the lower 30's in the south, are expected tomorrow night and Saturday night, Mr. Davis said. With temperatures that cold for an extended period, he said, trees could be damaged as well as fruit, and that could affect production for years. Sugar futures prices plunged on the Coffee, Sugar and Cocoa Exchange in New York as traders reacted to a Brazilian court ruling that could result in a rapid movement of supplies out of Brazil. A Superior Court on Tuesday overturned the Brazilian Government's decision to withhold sugar export licenses from three trade houses in an effort to divert sugar to the nation's fuel alcohol program. Sugar futures finished 0.32 cent to 1.14 cents lower, with January at 12.76 cents a pound. Coffee futures prices made strong gains in New York on concerns about Central American shipments. The fears were prompted in part by the United States military action in Panama. Coffee futures settled 1.12 cents to 2.13 cents higher, with March at 78.14 cents a pound. The military action in Panama also helped lift precious metals futures on New York's Commodity Exchange. Gold futures settled $1.40 to $1.70 higher, with December at $413.60 an ounce; silver was 1.8 cents to 2.6 cents higher, with December at $5.448 an ounce. Energy futures finished mixed after initially surging on the Panama news. But heating oil for near-term delivery continued its dramatic rally, rising for the 15th of the last 16 sessions on weather-driven worries about tightening supplies. West Texas Intermediate crude oil settled 7 cents to 10 cents lower, with February at $21.21 a barrel; heating oil was 0.59 cent lower to 0.75 cent higher, with January at 75.76 cents a gallon. FUTURES/OPTIONS

310505_0

Retread a Tire to Keep It Out of the Dump

LEAD: To the Editor: To the Editor: Your Nov. 24 article about the Environmental Protection Agency's efforts to promote recycling by proposing reductions in the amount of garbage that incinerator operators may burn did not mention the E.P.A.'s recent endorsement of retreaded tires. Because worn tires are practically indestructible, they create a nightmare for landfills with their nasty habit of rising to the surface after having been buried. Like zombies, these tires are creating havoc for the recycling community. But there is a partial solution, and that's retreading. Retreaded tires are safe, and they offer the same handling characteristics as comparable new tires, but at a far lower price. Millions of retreaded tires are in use by every commercial airline in the world, school buses, municipal buses, police and emergency vehicles, truckers, taxis and motorists. Indeed, your newspaper is delivered by trucks using retreaded tires. Although retreads don't eliminate the problem of scrap tire disposal, because all tires eventually wear out, they help put off the problem. Retreading is truly recycling! Motorists should be encouraged to buy and use retreads. HARVEY BRODSKY Managing Director, Tire Retread Information Bureau Carmel, Calif., Nov. 27, 1989

310460_0

Daedalus Enterprises Inc reports earnings for Year to July 31

LEAD: *3*** COMPANY REPORTS ** *3* Daedalus Enterprises Inc (OTC) Year to July 31 1989 1988 Revenue 1,604,000 1,613,000 Net inc 254,000 439,000 The company said the reduction in net earnings is attributable primarily to increases in research and development and the exhaustion of all tax loss and credit carryforwards which contributed approximately $150,000 to the net earnings of the period ended Oct. *3*** COMPANY REPORTS ** *3* Daedalus Enterprises Inc (OTC) Year to July 31 1989 1988 Revenue 1,604,000 1,613,000 Net inc 254,000 439,000 The company said the reduction in net earnings is attributable primarily to increases in research and development and the exhaustion of all tax loss and credit carryforwards which contributed approximately $150,000 to the net earnings of the period ended Oct. 31, 1988.

308739_0

French Honor an Abbot the Church Dislikes

LEAD: After an exhausting calendar of events, France's bicentennial celebrations ended appropriately today in an argument over history, with the Roman Catholic Church having the last word that the French Revolution was perhaps not such a good thing after all. After an exhausting calendar of events, France's bicentennial celebrations ended appropriately today in an argument over history, with the Roman Catholic Church having the last word that the French Revolution was perhaps not such a good thing after all. The dispute focused on the Government's decision to honor Abbot Gregoire, a priest who embraced the egalitarian principles of the 1789 Revolution, despite its strong anti-clericalism, by burying his ashes in the Pantheon alongside other heroes of the French Republic. While President Francois Mitterrand and the Cabinet presided over the lavish nationally televised ceremony today, no official representative of the nation's Catholic hierarchy was present for an occasion that was seen as using the 18th century to send 20th-century messages. From the point of view of the Socialist Government, Abbot Gregoire's merits were that he was an outspoken defender of the rights of blacks, slaves, Protestants and Jews - qualities that it believes worth emphasizing at a time that France is witnessing a resurgence of racial and religious intolerance. The island of Goree, off Dakar, Senegal, one of the first important slaving ports, was represented here today by women carrying a huge banner along the avenue leading up to the Pantheon. Jacques Stewart, president of the French Protestant Federation, and the Grand Rabbi of France, Joseph Sitruk, also took part in the ceremony. But within the church, the Abbot is principally remembered for backing a revolution in which thousands of priests were slain and for promoting the independence of the French Catholic Church from the Vatican in Rome. When he died in 1831, he was paid homage by French intellectuals but was buried without the last sacraments of the church. To France's Catholic hierarchy, today's ceremony at the Pantheon also had contemporary significance because, at a time of internal tension within the church around the world, France is honoring a monk who supposedly encouraged a church split. Made a Conscious Choice ''No one can doubt Abbot Gregoire's commitment to democracy and religious freedom,'' Le Monde wrote in a front-page article today that reflected the interest stirred by the issue, ''but it is also true that, forced to choose between loyalty to

308877_0

Fishing Boat Dodges Gunfire and Canadian Navy

LEAD: It is not unusual for Canadians and Americans to feud over fishing rights. Nor is it unusual for Canadian patrol boats to chase American vessels back to their own territorial waters. It is not unusual for Canadians and Americans to feud over fishing rights. Nor is it unusual for Canadian patrol boats to chase American vessels back to their own territorial waters. But it is extremely rare for a Canadian Navy destroyer to fire at an American fishing boat, and even more unlikely that a fishing boat would strike a destroyer in the middle of a chase over the open sea. That is what happened, Canadian and American authorities said, in a daylong confrontation on Monday between the Concordia, a 114-foot scalloper out of Fairhaven, Mass., and the Saguenay, a 366-foot destroyer with a crew of 210. No one was injured, and no charges have been filed, although officials in Canada and the United States said investigations are continuing. On Canadian Side of a Line The incident began as the scalloper was about 130 miles due east of Cape Cod, said a Coast Guard spokesman, Seaman Steve Aitkins. The Canadians said the boat had crossed a line established by the World Court in 1984 through the Georges Bank, an area favored by commercial fishermen. ''The Canadians said the Concordia was seen fishing two and a half miles over the line,'' Mr. Aitkins said. The fishing boat then headed back toward Cape Cod. A Canadian military plane was dispatched to request that the Concordia stop so officials from the Department of Oceans and Fisheries could inspect its catch. The Concordia kept going, said Carl Goodwin, the chief of regional surveillance operations of the fisheries department in Halifax. ''Then we proceeded to intercept the vessel with a destroyer,'' Mr. Goodwin said. ''We don't normally use destroyers out there, but the crews of our own fisheries boats have been on strike since the middle of November.'' 'Jumping Up and Down' The destroyer Saguenay, equipped with a helipad and two 3-inch guns, pulled alongside the Concordia, which has a crew of 11. With flags, radio messages, loudspeakers and ''a bit of jumping up and down,'' the fishing boat was asked to stop, said Major Walter Chipchase, a spokesman for the Canadian Department of National Defense. ''The Concordia did not wish to stop,'' he said, ''and it carried on. At some point during what

308775_0

College Graduates Facing More Money and Fewer Jobs

LEAD: College graduates next spring will earn more money but find fewer job opportunities, a survey of United States employers indicates. College graduates next spring will earn more money but find fewer job opportunities, a survey of United States employers indicates. Hiring will be down 13.3 percent compared to last year, according to the 19th annual survey by the University of Michigan's Career Development and Placement Services office. The average starting salary for a graduate with a bachelor's degree will be $25,256, up 3.3 percent from a year ago. The expected starting salary for those with master's degrees in business administration will be $39,840, a 3.1 percent increase. Generally starting salaries will be $33,740 for master's degree graduates, up 3.3 percent, and $37,111 for graduates with doctoral degrees, a 2.4 percent increase. As in recent years, engineering majors will get the highest starting salaries for new college graduates, with chemical engineering leading the way at $33,380. Mechanical engineering ranks second at $32,256, while electrical engineering is at $32,107, followed by computer science at $31,389 and industrial engineering at $30,557. Lowest Starting Salaries The lowest starting salaries will be for graduates in human ecology-home economics, $18,157; journalism, $18,255; natural resources, $18,840; retailing, $18,909, and advertising, $19,662. The survey released Sunday was based on responses from 479 employers in business, industry, government and educational institutions. Patrick Scheetz, who directed the study, said reasons for the drop in planned hiring included limited growth in new business; mergers and buyouts; increased global competition, and slow turnover of current employees. Industries that are expected to have large increases in hiring include public utilities, up 29.4 percent; metal products, up 24.2 percent; petroleum, 22.1 percent; construction and building materials manufacturing, 19.3 percent; and printing, publishing and informational services, 13.7 percent. Those expected to have decreases included automotive and mechanical equipment, down 58 percent; electronics, 24.5 percent; government administration, 20.9 percent; aerospace, 20 percent; the military, 16.8 percent; and diversified conglomerates, 13.7 percent. The survey also found that the greatest job opportunities are in the Southwest. Next best is the Northeast, followed by the Southeast, North-Central, South-Central and Northwest states. In addition it found that employers requiring drug testing of new college graduates rose to 47 percent of those surveyed, up from 32 percent last year and 27 percent the year before. Testing for alcohol was required by 25 percent of those surveyed, up from 14 percent.

307142_2

St. George and the Dragon

It used the Yellow River as a metaphor to suggest that Chinese culture was stagnant and needed to be refreshed from abroad. An official called the series ''a propaganda coup for bourgeois liberalization.'' The police hunt for political ''subversives'' has not abated. A recent directive called for fresh efforts to arrest ''scum'' who supported the democracy movement last spring. The Economist of London reported recently that captured leaders of the democracy movement are in Qincheng Prison, north of Beijing. They are held in solitary confinement and given one meal of steamed cornbread a day. Among the latest imprisoned is Liu Xiaobo, a literary critic who was one of the hunger strikers in Tiananmen Square. In economics, a meeting of the Communist Party Central Committee last month called for a return to centralized planning. A secret document whose theme has become known signaled retreat from the main points of Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms allowing regional and private initiative. The Government announced last month that it had forced 2.2 million private enterprises out of business and closed more than a million industrial collectives in rural areas. These are among the principal examples of non-state business ventures. Most of the 40,000 Chinese students now at universities in the United States do not want to go back to a totalitarian China. The vetoed legislation, introduced by Representative Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, would have relieved them for four years of the usual rule that they must go home when their studies end. President Bush said he would do what was needed to protect the Chinese students without Congressional action. But he has not really done so. He authorized extension of their visas - but only if they registered on a list that the Chinese Government could see. Because he served in China 15 years ago, Mr. Bush may have strong feelings about the need to maintain relations with the regime. But abandoning human rights standards that are supported by virtually all Americans is hardly a basis for a healthy relationship. It looks more like cringing. Do we really care less about inhuman treatment of Chinese human beings than of Czechs or Russians? For the President of the United States to draw such a distinction sends a terrible message. An effective human rights policy must try to be universal, telling the world that we hold all governments to a standard of decency. ABROAD AT HOME

307143_1

The Truth Won't Out

and a half period. We've got two holes in the side of the hull to show it and plenty of videotape. What happened out there was a very belligerent and premeditated and repeated series of attacks against our ship. It was very clear from watching the Navy earlier in the week, they had planned to do something along these lines and - Pauley: Waiting to do something along these lines. They were going to do something along the lines of testing a Trident 2, right? Shallhorn: They were going to disable our ship. It was very clear from the outset yesterday morning that was their goal. They began to ram our ship even before we were able to get out inflatable boats into the water and had tried to do that while we launched the boat. Pauley: You spotted a monitoring ship in port, and a submarine and you followed it, assuming that they were going to try to complete that performance evaluation, and it was your objective to disrupt it, correct? Shallhorn: Yeah. We were out there on a peaceful protest of the Trident 2 missile. Pauley: You maintain that you had the legal right to be there? Shallhorn: Of course, we do. It's international waters. The Navy has absolutely no right to cordon off large areas of the sea. Pauley: Well, let's get the Navy's side of the story. The commander on scene during Monday's Trident missile launch was Navy Vice Admiral Roger Bacon. What is your version? Did you ram with the intent of disabling the Greenpeace? Vice Admiral Roger Bacon: We had a very successful Trident 2 launch to further our ability to maintain strategic deterrence in this country. It is a very successful program. In any test program we have had a mechanical problem and this latest launch was our solution to it with some great engineering to do a successful launch. Pauley: That's a story for another day. We were talking about the Greenpeace incident. Bacon: As far as the shouldering, the Greenpeace was warned repeatedly by myself and through notice to airmen, notice to mariners, to remain clear of the submarine. Pauley: The notices - Bacon: - 5,000 yards. Pauley: I don't want to seem rude and abrupt, but it's important that you clarify. The notice to mariners is Navy policy for clearing an area where a test firing will be launched. How

307149_1

Grain and Soybeans Climb On Prospects of Export Rise

on the Chicago Board of Trade, with buying spurred by news that the Department of Agriculture plans to have a million metric tons of wheat shipped to China under the department's Export Enhancement Program. Under the program, private exporters can sell United States commodities at reduced prices to meet foreign competition in selected overseas markets and then collect free Government surpluses of grain or other commodities as bonuses, or subsidies. Shipment to Soviets Expected ''There is speculation that the Soviet Union will be next'' to benefit from the program, said Ted Mao, an analyst with Shearson Lehman Hutton Inc. in New York. United States and Soviet negotiators are trying to work out a new long-term grain agreement. The current accord expires next year. Corn futures were higher because of speculative demand resulting from the strong surge in wheat prices, Mr. Mao said. Soybeans also drew support for that reason and also because sales by farmers had slowed. Analysts said prices were held back by a lack of export business and news that Argentine farmers are enjoying adequate soil moisture and are moving ahead with soybean planting. Wheat settled 2 1/4 cents to 6 cents higher, with the contract for delivery in December at $4.08 1/2 a bushel; corn was 1 1/4 cents to 2 1/4 cents higher, with December at $2.36 a bushel; oats were 3/4 cents to 1 1/4 cents lower, with December at $1.43 1/2 a bushel, and soybeans were 2 1/4 cents to 5 3/4 cents higher, with January at $5.79 1/4 a bushel. Sugar futures climbed dramatically on the Coffee, Sugar and Cocoa Exchange in New York as traders reacted to news that a Brazilian judge had banned the import of methanol to alleviate a shortage in fuel alcohol. The ban could divert sugar cane earmarked for export to the domestic fuel-alcohol industry, analysts said. Brazil's four million automobiles operate on a mixture of methanol, ethanol and gasoline. Brazil is committed to export about 640,000 metric tons of sugar, and the importation of methanol freed sugar cane for foreign markets. That could now change, analysts said. Sugar was 0.31 cent to 0.77 cent higher, with January at 14 cents a pound. Energy futures rose on the New York Mercantile Exchange, helped by strength in heating oil prices. West Texas Intermediate crude oil was 10 cents to 13 cents higher, with January at $20.47 a barrel. FUTURES/OPTIONS

307216_2

Bonn Expected to Award Cellular Contract

million potential customers. Share Price Rises Shares of Pacific Telesis rose 25 cents, to $47.75, on the New York Stock Exchange yesterday in response to news reports about the license. In an effort to modernize outdated telephone systems, European nations have been opening sectors of their telecommunications markets to foreign competition. U S West Inc., the regional phone company based in Denver, said on Monday that it had signed an agreement with Hungary to build a cellular telephone system in Budapest that will be used for basic home service, as well as mobile operations. A cellular network transmits calls on radio waves to small receiving antennas, called cell sites, that relay the calls to local phone systems. In West Germany, where the basic telephone service is highly developed, the cellular system will be used for car telephones and other mobile communications. Using Digital Technology The new West German system will contain digital technology that is expected to provide at least five times the capacity of the current analog cellular system and do so at a lower cost for each call. The current Bundespost system, which has about 130,000 subscribers, has nearly reached its capacity and it frequently disconnects callers, industry analysts said. The Bundespost is planning to convert the system to digital technology. The digital system, which transmits voice and information in computer language, is much more efficient and less prone to distortion than the analog system, which sends voice and data on basic sound waves. The West German cellular license is perhaps the most highly valued in Europe. It covers 61 million ''pops,'' an industry term that refers to the number of potential subscribers. The number of pops is determined by multiplying the population of an area by the percentage ownership that a company has in that market. Joel Gross, a telephone analyst with the Donaldson, Lufkin, & Jenrette Securities Corporation, estimated that the German franchise would evenutally add about $5 a share to Pacific Telesis earnings but that the cellular operation would not be profitable for three to four years. Lee Cox, group vice president of diversified companies at Pacific Telesis, said: ''We have received no official confirmation from the ministry that our consortium has won.'' Mr. Cox declined to comment on how much the consortium would spend to construct the system, but analysts put the capital costs at between $500 million and $1 billion during a five-year

308971_0

Disincentive to Study

LEAD: To the Editor: To the Editor: Under the revised Federal income tax reform act of 1987, graduate student income from grants or fellowships is taxed as regular income. After college, I chose the quick earning potential of industry. But several years later, I felt strongly enough about furthering my education to return to school full time to pursue a doctoral degree in materials science and engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology. Tax reform only added insult to the injury of giving up a salary in excess of $35,000 a year for a graduate student's stipend that may amount to $13,000 this year. Does the Government believe I made that sacrifice as a tax dodge? This is but one reason there are few American graduate students and why we are failing to maintain technological competitiveness. MAX KLEIN Hoboken, N.J., Nov. 21, 1989

312131_0

California Town Seeks Way to Harass Bears

LEAD: Some residents of this remote gold-mining village are calling for a hunt to thin an aggressive population of hungry black bears that are searching out food at the local dump and in people's trash and freezers. Some residents of this remote gold-mining village are calling for a hunt to thin an aggressive population of hungry black bears that are searching out food at the local dump and in people's trash and freezers. But state wildlife officials say a better solution is to bear-proof the Sierra City dump, harass the food foragers and pass an emergency ordinance making it unlawful to feed the bears. California's bear hunt was suspended this season by a court ruling in a suit over a state environmental impact study. And Gary Kendall, a state game warden, said reopening the hunt was out of the question this year. Nevada Lewis, the Sierra County supervisor who represents this village of 250 people in northeastern California, wants the State Department of Fish and Game to allow a special hunt. In the meantime, the state should trap and remove five or six aggressive bears, Ms. Lewis said. But state officials refuse to do anything until Sierra County workers bear-proof the open garbage bin at the edge of Sierra City. The fresh garbage has given bears easy access to food, and people who take children and guests to see them have reduced the bears' wariness of humans, wildlife officials say. The bears have become increasingly aggressive this fall, climbing backyard apple trees, entering sheds and exploring porches for food. Roy Beer caught a 500-pound bear that followed his wife onto their porch one morning last week. The next night Tal Johnson was knocked down by a bear making a getaway as he walked from his driveway onto his porch.

312199_1

Computer Mail Gaining a Market

of computer communications. It will be possible, for example, to append spoken voice notes to standard text messages and documents. And commercial services are exploring selling data in response to electronic mail requests. Companies that have switched to electronic mail say the systems speed communications by avoiding telephone tag and ''flatten'' organizations by permitting anyone to communicate regardless of rank. Advocates of electronic mail cite studies showing that it encourages workers at different levels of a company to communicate informally, cutting through layers of corporate bureaucracy, more than does the telephone or paper mail. A middle-level manager is more likely to send a message to the chief executive over the computer than to telephone or place a note in the office mail. As a result, in many corporations electronic mail is becoming a significant alternative to the fax machine, the telephone and to what electronic mail advocates like to call snail mail, or paper mail. ''The growth in computer mail systems within companies is just exploding,'' said Eric Arnum, editor of Electronic Mail and Micro Systems, a computer industry newsletter based in Forest Hills, Queens. That growth is certain to accelerate in the early 1990's, computer experts say. Linking Systems Electronic mail systems available to the general public but used mostly by businesses - like Western Union's Easylink, U S Sprint's Telemail, MCI Mail and A.T.& T. Mail - have recently dropped their initial resistance to connecting to one another through electronic gateways. And private, intracompany electronic mail is flourishing, spawned by a growing recognition that computerized mail systems that permit transferring everything from brief messages to entire documents can transform the way a company works. On the horizon is a new generation of electronic mail software applications that are seen as the best candidates for creating the kind of desktop computer boom brought by the spreadsheet in the 1980's. Earlier this month, for example, the Lotus Development Corporation, based in Cambridge, Mass., introduced a program called Notes that is intended to expand the function of electronic mail. Notes permits users to categorize and view all of their computerized documents and messages by specific criteria that can be easily changed. Notes, which is being marketed to large corporations with hundreds or thousands of employees, also permits workers at widely separate locations to undertake a project by sharing documents. The Notes program is an example of a new software category called

312263_0

Rhinestone Streets

LEAD: Holiday lights sparkle from store windows, fire escapes and cornices these days, and drivers on an increasing number of New York streets are likely to find points of light shining up from the pavement as well. Holiday lights sparkle from store windows, fire escapes and cornices these days, and drivers on an increasing number of New York streets are likely to find points of light shining up from the pavement as well. The sparkling streets are those paved since 1987, when the Department of Transportation began mixing glass with asphalt. This ''glassphalt'' amounts to a small triumph for recycling. Bottles from the city's solid waste stream are crushed and substituted for gravel at city asphalt plants. Use of recycled glass saves the city half a million dollars each year, and that is only part of the benefit. Glass used in paving a single crosstown block of Manhattan would fill 10.7 garbage trucks - that means 10.7 fewer loads to consume the increasingly precious space in dwindling landfills. Then there is the visual benefit. As tires erase the surface tar, they reveal polished bits of glass that dance when struck by light. New York may never be a city whose streets are paved with gold. For now, however, rhinestones are good enough. TOPICS OF THE TIMES

312610_5

RUMANIANS MOVING TO ABOLISH WORST OF REPRESSIVE ERA

in the new Government, which will serve until elections in April. ''We have a program, but we need tranquillity,'' he said. From its makeshift headquarters at the Foreign Ministry, the Government has been issuing a stream of decrees this week. The army has been put in charge of the Securitate, the security force many of whose members remained loyal to Mr. Ceausescu. Harsh residence laws that restricted mobility have been dropped, and the Government has promised to pay back to its citizens money taken out of their paychecks for ''economic development'' in recent years. Since 1966, Rumania has practically banned abortions, first for women with less than four children and later for those with less than five. The law, drawn to promote population growth in this country of 23 million, was hated by most women here, some of whom resorted to dangerous self-induced abortions. Because the law also penalized doctors who treated women who had performed abortions on themselves, hospitals often turned away patients or treated them under a different guise. ''It was the most horrible law,'' a young Rumanian woman said. ''Even pregnant women did not want to be checked, which meant a lot of people who needed care were frightened to get it.'' Abortion is a primary means of birth control throughout Eastern Europe. Also halted was a hated modernization program that had razed villages and destroyed old buildings in Rumania. In its place, a program has been created to preserve national monuments, and a call has been issued for historians to write ''the true history of the country.'' Another measure adopted today resurrected the Rumanian Society of Philosophy, an 80-year-old institution that had been dissolved under Communist rule. Feeding Rumanians First But for the population, the most visible changes have come from swift measures taken to ease the harshness of life under Mr. Ceausescu. Food saved for export will be used at home. And today in Bucharest, crates with Cyrillic lettering filled with chickens headed for the Soviet Union showed up at local stores, along with oranges and lemons. Rationing was immediately lifted after Mr. Ceausescu's ouster last Friday, and Rumanians did not wait for instructions to turn up the heat in their apartments, celebrating the end of a painful austerity program. Today, the Government announced ''emergency measures to strike at the lingering threat from members of the Securitate, who until Tuesday were waging urban guerrilla warfare

312631_2

MANAGUA ECONOMY HINGES ON PANAMA

States. With large American-style supermarkets and associated services that range from gourmet food shops to one-hour film processing, the diplotienda system is estimated to generate more than $100 million a year in sales. That sum breaks down to about $30 for every Nicaraguan citizen - roughly one full month's pay for the average Nicaraguan worker. The system has been a vital source of hard currency for the Sandinista Government, and has provided an important, controlled means of satisfying consumer demand for high-quality goods that cannot be produced locally. Government economists estimate that as much as 80 percent of the diplotienda system's inventory is purchased directly from Panama, and the country has no ready means of replacing that supply. Pro-Government economists argue that Nicaragua, if it is willing to pay higher costs, could develop new supply routes through Guatemala, Mexico or South America within a matter of months. But they acknowledge that the delays involved would exhaust current inventories, which are believed to be sufficient only through late January. They say that a resulting shortfall could pose a serious political problem for the Government in the February elections, which are expected to hinge largely on economic issues. Foreign experts point out that any restrictions on Nicaraguan trade with Panama could have serious repercussions for any government ministries and quasi-official enterprises, many of which have developed their own wholly owned Panamanian subsidiaries to procure badly needed American goods and technology. A strict enforcement of trade sanctions against Nicaragua could also prevent Copa, the Panamanian passenger airline, from stopping in Managua on its daily shuttle among Central American capitals, depriving Nicaraguans of their most important remaining means of regional air transportation. ---- Sandinista Warning MANAGUA, Nicaragua, Dec. 27 - In an unusually harsh radio message, the Ministry of Defense warned today that, if the United States were to invade Nicaraguan territory, Sandinista security forces would execute all Nicaraguan ''traitors'' who encouraged the American action. ''At the beginning of the Yankee intervention,'' the Defense Ministry declared, military and police units would ''carry out plans for the neutralization, trial and execution of all the most recalcitrant, traitorous elements that openly or covertly have incited the Yankee intervention.'' The message, read as a special announcement over national radio, was repeated twice without pause for emphasis. It appeared to underscore the Government's mounting alarm and frustration over the American invasion of Panama, and it provoked new concern

312584_2

Excerpts From Bush's Panama News Conference

Vatican. We've made clear our preference, and that is to bring the man to trial and subsequently to justice. Q. Is the Vatican being wrongheaded in not turning him over immediately? What do you think the legal issues are? A. Now, how would you like it if people were negotiating and talking and then somebody jumped up and said they were wrongheaded, especially at this time of year, especially since it's the Vatican? Q. . . . You just said, when asked about Panama taking him, you said that's not the way it's leaning, as if it's leaning in some direction. Where is it leaning? And secondly, is the Vatican -- A. Well, I can't help you on it. Q. If the Vatican decides it will be a third country, will we do anything to stop that? A. Well, it's too hypothetical. And where it's leaning - I hope it's leaning for his being returned to the United States. But again, I think that the question that was asked about the officials in Panama have to very much be on our mind, and we will obviously want to see him extradited to the United States, and that may determine where he ends up. . . . Disclosures by Noriega Q. Do you fear that Mr. Noriega might disclose any C.I.A. information that could embarrass you or the Government? A. No. Q. Nothing whatsoever? A. I don't think so. I think that's history and I think that that main thing is that he should be tried and brought to justice, and we are pursuing that course with no fear of that. You know, you may get into some release of certain confidential documents, that he may try to blind side the whole justice process, but the system works so I wouldn't worry about that. . . . Release of Documents Q. Would you open up any documents that he might request so that there'd be no question as there has been in other cases? A. There would be enough to see that he's given a totally fair trial. . . . Concern in Latin America Q. How are you going to handle concerns by Latin American countries that the United States shouldn't have even gone in? A. Well, I think that's going to require . . . a lot of diplomatic effort and a lot of it on my part. And

307960_0

PORTS IN A STORM

LEAD: DO YOU KNOW THE BISHOP OF Norwich? No reason why you should, actually, but his eminence was a 19th-century man of the cloth much given, we are told, to garrulity, especially at table. His name comes down to us not so much for what he did, which was talk too much, but for what he didn't, which was pass the Port. DO YOU KNOW THE BISHOP OF Norwich? No reason why you should, actually, but his eminence was a 19th-century man of the cloth much given, we are told, to garrulity, especially at table. His name comes down to us not so much for what he did, which was talk too much, but for what he didn't, which was pass the Port. Port, more than Champagne or even corn whisky, is a potion steeped in tradition and garlanded with old myths. One of the hoariest of those traditions is the custom of passing the bottle or decanter around the table. In case you didn't know, Port goes from right to left, clockwise. The bishop, so the story goes, would be so involved in his discourse that the flagon would sit, forgotten, before him. Forgotten by him but not by his auditors. To actually demand the bottle was considered uncouth; so they would gaze longingly at it while the convivial cleric maundered on. Thus, the custom arose that when the Port rested too long in front of some unheeding raconteur, another diner would lean toward him and murmur: ''I say, do you know the Bishop of Norwich?'' An English story about the English wine. Not an English wine but the English wine, even though far more Frenchmen than Englishmen drink it. What the English did was invent it. And produce it. Port comes from Portugal and, indeed, some of it is made by the Portuguese. But Cockburn, Croft, Dow, Graham, Osborne, Robertson, Sandeman, Taylor, Warre - these are names we think of when we think of Port. The English had been trading in Portugal before the Norman conquest. Portuguese wines were known in England at least as early as the 16th century. Port, like Sherry and other fortified wines, is made by adding brandy or neutral spirits to still-fermenting wine. The brandy stops the fermentation, and the unfermented sugar makes the resulting product sweet. Wines were first fortified to preserve them during long ocean voyages. Later, in the 17th and

307835_2

What's That I Hear? Far Too Much

huge radios used by teen-agers. Yes, the police will come if called, but the teen-agers are back the next day, and it's a losing battle. At the college where I taught for 20 years, it was the custom to stage live rock concerts in the main hall, in the middle of the school day. These were supposed to be confined to the ''meeting hour'' but usually spilled over into class time. No place on campus, not even the library, was free from the noise. Eventually the concerts were moved to weekend evenings, when there was some choice about exposure, but not before legal action was threatened and the State Commissioner of Higher Education intervened. The school cafeteria has smoking and nonsmoking areas, but no area without a speaker pouring blasting music from the college rock station. I've visited enough other schools and colleges to know that this kind of noise-saturated environment is fairly standard. Recent technology has added some ingenious gadgetry to the general racket. You might find yourself sitting next to ''total-body'' music; one company makes a jacket fully wired with a stereo system for those who don't care to carry their noise. For about $20 there's a machine, ironically supposed to relieve tension, that mounts on an automobile dashboard and, at the press of a button, sends the sound of rocket blasts or machine-gun fire into the roadway. Sooner or later, another driver may be frightened into causing a fatal accident. The pool lifeguard who muffles his ears with headphones won't be able to hear a child's cry for help. The most frustrating noise is that which invades one's home. Although most communities have laws against music so loud it comes through your walls, it's hard to get these laws enforced. Those who complain know that they may risk slashed tires or a poisoned dog. And I know people who leave their own homes whenever possible, to escape the young folks' stereo. Although it's well known that exposure to very loud music causes hearing loss, tinnitus, and other problems, the damage that noise does is not sudden or dramatic, but insidious and cumulative - irreversible. A young woman was so maddened by the constant ear-ringing that she tried to kill herself. When she was revived, her first words were, ''I just need a little peace and quiet.'' So do I. Turn it down - please. NEW JERSEY OPINION

308063_1

Water Scarcity Is Found to Be Mounting Problem

lagging development, Ms. Postel said. Irrigated Land Peaked in 1978 As a result, she said, irrigated areas in the world are now growing at about half the rate of the population. Irrigated land peaked in 1978 at 1.18 acres per person worldwide, but has since fallen about 6 percent, she said. ''As world population grew from 1.6 billion to more than 5 billion over the last 90 years,'' she said, ''irrigation became a cornerstone of global food security. The higher yields farmers could get with controllable water supplies proved vital to feeding the millions added to our numbers each year. ''Today one-third of the global harvest comes from the 17 percent of the world's cropland that is irrigated.'' She said that in several regions, the demand for water was fast approaching the limits of resources. ''Many areas could enter a period of chronic shortages during the 90's, including northern China, virtually all of northern Africa, pockets of India, Mexico, much of the Middle East and parts of the western United States,'' Ms. Postel wrote. ''Where scarcities loom,'' she said, ''cities and farms are beginning to compete for available water; when supplies tighten, farmers typically lose out.'' Ms. Postel, a specialist in geology and environmental management, is a vice president at the Worldwatch Institute and has written or helped to write several of its previous environmental studies, including two reports on world water resources. Variety of Steps Urged The new study was endorsed today by another expert who saw it in draft form, Philip Micklin, a professor of geography at Western Michigan University and a specialist in Soviet water resources. He said Ms. Postel's work ''demonstrated that use is running up against the limits of supply, and that's something we certainly need to be concerned about.'' Ms. Postel urges that a variety of steps be taken, including increased efficiency of irrigation systems, greater emphasis on soil conservation, reforestation and stepped-up research into creating strains of crops that are more salt-tolerant and drought-resistant. But she added: ''Crucial as they are, these measures are but stopgaps. Any hope for balancing the water budgets of many countries with rapidly growing populations hinges as much on slowing birth rates as it does on improving water productivity.'' Ms. Postel cited examples of water problems and misuse of resources in many countries, including the United States and the Soviet Union. In this country, she noted, roughly a

307813_1

New Directory for County Students

and making decisions,'' Dr. Collarini said. ''There are quality services for young people in Westchester and the next step is to make sure that the young people who need them know where to go for help.'' Dr. Collarini pointed out that, while resource directories exist for local areas, this was the first youth directory ever prepared on a countywide level. Saying that the purpose was not to ''reinvent the wheel,'' Dr. Collarini turned to Family Information and Referral Service Teams, with its extensive referral system, for help in researching and writing the directory. But before completing the project, representatives of the service met six times with the student members of the Youth Council, who were appointed last January. This was the first youth council ever appointed in Westchester and this directory was its first project. ''Part of the process was that the kids decided what was important to their peers,'' Dr. Collarini said. ''Drugs were an important issue. Pregnancy was important. But they also wanted to know about juice bars and what recreation activities are available.'' Eleven Topics in Directory The 20 members of the Youth Council represented 13 schools around Westchester and were chosen to represent a cross-section of young people in the county. ''The majority of these kids are college bound,'' Dr. Collarini continued. ''Many were interested in Scholastic Aptitude Test preparatory services. But on the other hand, some kids said, 'What about high school dropouts?' So we included Graduate Equivalency Diploma programs.'' The directory is divided into 11 topics, including suicide, bereavement, education, employment opportunities and health. Each topic has an introduction and the names and addresses of organizations that deal with that particular problem. So, for example, the topic of abuse has the following introduction: ''According to the family research, about a third of American families experience domestic violence, and more than 1.6 million children are abused each year by their parents.'' The section then goes on to give the Rape Crisis Helpline number and brief descriptions of four organizations that help abused children, such as the Child Protective Services and the Northern Westchester Shelter. ''It was important for each section to have an introduction,'' said Valerie Swan, program administrator at the Westchester Youth Bureau. ''These kids wanted that so parents wouldn't question why certain programs were included in here.'' The directory cost $45,000 to produce. The County Youth Bureau and the New York State Division

307799_5

A Woman Blessed With the Gift of Compassion

over the years. ''I took them out of jails, off the streets and out of the arms of strangers,'' she said. ''We always tried to make room in our lives.'' In 1974, after serving as a minister for 20 years, she was ordained as one of the first female Pentecostal bishops in Connecticut. (In the Pentecostal, which has 3.7 million members, church, ministers and bishops are ordained regionally.) Despite her pastoral experience and her record as a community activist, many local clergymen rejected the ordination, arguing that the Bible never specified that women could be bishops. ''You could also argue that the there isn't anywhere in the Bible that says a woman can't be a bishop,'' said Bishop Wheeler, who is accustomed to defending her title. ''In other words, God is gender blind.'' Mr. Colfield of Immanuel Baptist recalled when she was elected the president of the Hill-Dwight Ministerial Alliance, the first woman in that post, in the late 1970's. The coalition of clergymen had been trying for months to get Government to build a large cooperative housing project. 'A New Place to Live ''After Rosetta was elected, several members quit because she was a woman,'' Mr. Colfield said. ''Others protested that the housing project would never get off the ground with her in charge. Then at the first meeting she stood up and raised the H.U.D. application papers over her head and shouted, 'Whether I do it with you or without you, I'm going to see that 72 families are given a new place to live!' and she did.'' Five years later, Bishop Wheeler, along with another Pentecostal minister, acquired the Government money to build another 20 duplexes two blocks from her church. The homes were completed in 1983. In 1987, Bishop Wheeler received the Humanitarian Award from the New England International Christians for Unity and Social Action; the award was accompanied by letters of congratulations from President Reagan and Senator Lowell P. Weicker Jr. She stores her plaques from the ceremony along with dozens of other service awards in a large cardboard box. These days Bishop Wheeler spends much of her time trying to raise money for the Haitian orphanage sponsored by her church. One of her fund raisers is a banquet held every spring to honor women in their 80's who have served as foster mothers or have dedicated time to other areas of community service. This

307822_0

Those Unique Students, The 'Average' Ones

LEAD: DO you sometimes wonder why television and print media remind us again and again about the needs of gifted or handicapped children with scarcely a mention about the needs of most children: our average children? DO you sometimes wonder why television and print media remind us again and again about the needs of gifted or handicapped children with scarcely a mention about the needs of most children: our average children? Despite how tight money may be in a state or Federal office charged with dispensing funds for educational programs, money always seems to be found to initiate or expand programs designed for children with special needs. Our society rightfully recognizes that children with exceptional academic qualities, as well as children with mental or physical handicapping conditions, are deserving of special program designed to meet their needs. But what about our average children? Federal law requires that all children with handicapping conditions be given educational services ''in the least restrictive environment.'' Such services often result in great cost to the taxpayer, but we provide services because an enlightened public recognizes the need to provide these ''special'' children with every opportunity to develop their fullest potential to become productive members of our society. Federal law also requires that children be screened for potential giftedness, and hardly an education department exists that does not place some aid in the kitty for districts trying to meet the needs of these special children. I have no problem with laws and funding that target special handicapped or gifted children as being in need of special attention. There isn't a school or district around that fails to highlight the accomplishments of its most special students, those winning the academic, athletic, music and fine arts accolades, as well as those overcoming their handicaps to merit success in various ways. Are these children really special and really deserving of all the attention they receive? Yes. Of course they are. These special students are sometimes referred to as square pegs because they don't fit neatly into their precast round holes that our society has prepared for them. Sometimes these square pegs seem to mess up our plans, and we push here and pull there to round their edges and make them fit. Heaven forbid that we should ever routinely envision the need to preplace some square holes in our society master board. It seems that we need to be

307949_0

Lose Your Bag, Sir? And Other Stories

LEAD: TALES of what the Government calls ''mishandled'' luggage are legion: Try any dinner table. To give you an idea of the pool you are dipping into, in September, 226,303 travelers complained to United States airlines about their luggage: misdelivered, rifled, crushed, burned, emptied or never seen again. TALES of what the Government calls ''mishandled'' luggage are legion: Try any dinner table. To give you an idea of the pool you are dipping into, in September, 226,303 travelers complained to United States airlines about their luggage: misdelivered, rifled, crushed, burned, emptied or never seen again. Here's one with quite a spin on it: It could ultimately eliminate check-in at curbside at the airport, or it could be the opening gun in renewed efforts to remove the rules that limit awards when luggage is lost on international flights. The episode involves two suitcases that vanished between the 34th Street Heliport in New York and Heathrow Airport in London. The kernel of the incipient revolution lies in the occupation of the owners: they are lawyers. Stanley S. Arkin and his partner, Alfred Ferrer 3d, went to the heliport last Feb. 21 to travel by New York Helicopter to Kennedy Airport to catch British Airways Flight 176 to London. They checked one bag each with the helicopter company, which said that it weighed them to be sure that they were under 70 pounds each, the allowance for free baggage set by British Airways. The passengers were given baggage checks but the weight of the bags was not noted on them. When the New Yorkers landed in London, their bags were not there. New York Helicopter; Ogden-Allied Services Corporation, a maintenance company at Kennedy Airport, and British Airways tried to trace the bags. According to the account given in the decision in the Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court, the bags got to Kennedy at 7:40 P.M. but were not delivered to British Airways until 6:10 A.M. Feb. 22, when the line's baggage room was shut. That was the last report of the bags. After it became clear that the bags were not recoverable, Mr. Arkin and Mr. Ferrer sued the helicopter company, the service company and the airline for $11,000, saying that the bags contained custom-made suits and wedding-gift cuff links. The companies replied that this amount was over the limit set by the Warsaw Convention, an agreement incorporated into

308039_3

Now the Recyclable Trash Is Overwhelming New York

very far behind the game on developing demand for products made from recycled materials,'' said Stephen Gallagher of the Environmental Action Coalition. ''As far as the actual collections go, they're collecting to the capacity they can process right now. They need to have 10 or 15 more plants than they have in operation, and it's going to take a long time to get those built.'' Mr. Sexton acknowledged that the city has a long way to go. ''American industry has been seduced into excessive reliance on virgin materials and doesn't know how to use scrap,'' he said. Government can do its part, too, he said, which is why his own stationery is 30 percent recycled paper. But letterheads are not enough, even in a bureaucracy that churns out as many memos as New York's. The city's recycling law allows the city to pay 9 percent more for other recycled products than for comparable nonrecycled items. Mr. Sexton says the city has paid the premium for paper towels and file cards. In trash disposal, what was, will be again. Recycling and reusing more discarded material would mark a return to pre-World War II ways, including packaging with less plastic. Mr. Sexton has been experimenting with glass recycling. Scrap dealers shun ''mixed glass'' -glass that was not separated by color before it was crushed for recycling. But the city is making a market for tons of mixed glass that it collects every day by having highway crews substitute mixed glass for gravel. The result is something called ''glassphalt,'' a sparkly surface that has been used in the recent repaving of West Street in lower Manhattan. ''I'm thrilled,'' Mr. Sexton said, ''even though we're earning zero revenue, it's 25 percent cheaper than gravel.'' GLEANING A CITY'S DISCARDS The mandatory New York City recycling law requires enough recycling to reduce garbage going into incinerators and the Fresh Kills landfill by at least 25 percent by 1994. Amount collected is the daily average daily tonnage from July to September 1989; some nonrecyclable trash is not listed. The law's goal also includes producing less waste and increasing the return of beverage containers under the existing bottle bill. Refuse *2*Recycling goals (by 1994) collected *2*(tons per day) Residential 11,800 1,703 (newspaper, glass metals, magazines, corrugated carboard) 9 (Leaves, yard waste) Appliances, other 300 639 (wood, metal) bulky items Vacant lot cleanups 500 189 (screened dirt) City agencies

313203_4

ART GALLERY VIEW: Egyptian Art Is Alive and Well in the West

you would live forever. ''In childhood we were told we were mortal, and I wouldn't accept it, or couldn't figure it out,'' she continued. ''Art was a way of dealing with death, or with the death of each moment. My sculpture has something to do with the Egyptian idea of the Ka - the belief that there was another self that came into being with your birth, that existed within you all your life, and after death it lived forever but it needed a place to dwell in. In some sense I am trying to enable my Ka to dwell in my work.'' Artists who think seriously about Egyptian art do so alone. Since her visit to Egypt in 1981, Rockburne has probably been more studiously involved than any other living artist with the way Egyptian art works. When asked if she discussed it with anyone, she replied: ''I have tried to talk to anybody who would listen, and they realize that I'm completely involved, but the attitude is - isn't that interesting, you're so passionate about this. Although other artists recognize that Egypt is great art, they're sort of looking on you as if this is kind of cute. But I'm not being cute.'' Where there is an intense involvement with Egyptian art, there is likely to be a search for something basic or elemental. For example, in the midst of this decade's tireless and tiresome attack on the notion of originality, certain artists find in Egypt some viable sense of origins. For Brandt, Egypt is the birthplace of style. For Nancy Graves, whose recent paintings include images of pharaohs, time calendars and snakes, Egypt and the ancient Near East remain very much the cradle of civilization. Graves is not the only contemporary artist - Anthony Caro and Rockburne are others - whose recent work has included references to both ancient Egypt and ancient Greece. ''Normally we begin and end with Greece,'' Graves says. ''Egypt is considered to be more related to Middle and Far Eastern civilization, but in point of fact many of the major Greek thinkers, scientists and philosophers went to Egypt and grow out of Egyptian civilization,'' she says, expressing a controversial new belief in the non-Western beginnings of Greek thought. Rockburne believes that Egyptian art may be where Cubist space originated. Looking at a reproduction of a bas-relief from the temple of Ramses III, she

313396_2

Threatened Northwest Flight Lands Safely

can cause this panic.'' The airline chose not to cancel the flight but took extra security measures for it and all of its flights between Europe and the United States. Northwest offered to book ticket holders on another flight - even on a competing airline - without any penalty. Northwest and the Federal Aviation Administration declined to say exactly what extra security measures were taken for the flight. ''It would have been the safest airplane in the world to fly,'' said John Leyden, a spokesman for the aviation agency. Still, at least one passenger was seen nervously clutching a good-luck charm before boarding the flight in Paris. Security measures at De Gaulle Airport included bomb-sniffing dogs, the use of sophisticated color X-ray machines and hand-searching to check each piece of luggage. At the airport in Detroit, the plane parked half a mile from the gate and passengers were taken to the terminal by bus. The British news agency Reuters said the Swedish newspaper, citing security sources, quoted an anonymous caller as saying that the action was planned as revenge for the life sentences given two Palestinians in Sweden last week for bomb attacks in three European cities, including a 1985 bombing of a Northwest office in Copenhagen. Northwest, saying it was acting on the advice of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, would not disclose where the call was received or any other details. Each year, the airlines receive about 400 anonymous threats, but few are aimed at international flights and even fewer are as specific as the one against Flight 51, said Robert Buckhorn, an F.A.A. spokesman. Airlines have notified ticket holders in the past of bomb threats, but never as publicly or with as much advance notice as Northwest had. Northwest's move was applauded by families of the victims of the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 a year ago over Lockerbie, Scotland, in which 270 people died. The families have criticized the airlines and the Government for not warning ticket holders of a threat against the flight. Two weeks before the crash of the Pan Am flight on Dec. 21, 1988, the United States Embassy in Finland was warned by a telephone caller that a bomb attack might be carried out against a Pan Am flight over Frankfurt. The United States Government then notified airlines, airports and embassies in Europe, but passengers received no word of the threat.

307672_3

Upheaval in the East; Castro Says He'll Resist Changes Like Those Sweeping Soviet Bloc

United States and the Soviet Union will translate into changes in the military status quo in Europe that would increase Washington's ability to impose its own views elsewhere, including the Caribbean. He also remains firmly committed to the principle of ''proletarian internationalism,'' a justification for intervention abroad that he fears is on the wane elsewhere. Soviet-Cuban Meeting According to reports from Managua, the Soviet Ambassador there met with Nicaraguan and Cuban officials on Nov. 28, just days after Mr. Bush had blamed the Soviet Union for supplying arms to Mr. Castro that eventually ended up in the hands of rebels in El Salvador. ''We are hearing that he really read them the riot act,'' said a European diplomat based in the Nicaraguan capital. The official Cuban news agency Prensa Latina reported on Thursday that American forces at Guantanamo Bay Naval Station had fired twice on Cuban sentries outside, calling the incident ''serious and of unpredictable consequences.'' Today, a Pentagon spokesman denied the charge, saying ''no weapons or rounds ever crossed the fence line.'' In his address, Mr. Castro justified the prohibition in Cuba of some Soviet publications, such as Sputnik and Moscow News. He said the measure was necessary because such publications were ''filled with venom against the U.S.S.R. itself and against socialism'' and have ''demanded the cessation of just and equitable commercial relations between the U.S.S.R. and Cuba.'' Since the early 1960's the Soviet Union has heavily subsidized the Cuban economy through such measures as the purchase of Cuban sugar at prices well above market levels and the sale at bargain rates of petroleum, some of which Cuba then resells to gain hard currency. Those subsidies, amounting to as much as $5 billion a year, have increasingly been questioned by Soviet officials as part of the economic restructuring that is under way. 'Negative Economic Consequences' ''From the crisis that has emerged in the socialist camp, we can only expect negative economic consequences for our country,'' Mr. Castro said. Just hours before Mr. Castro's appearance at the war commemoration ceremonies, during which he was accompanied by President Jose Eduardo dos Santos of Angola, the Cuban Government for the first time announced casualty figures for the more than 400,000 soldiers and ''technical advisers'' it has sent to fight in Africa over the last 15 years. According to official statements, 2,289 Cubans have died abroad, more than 2,000 of them in Angola.

307689_3

Soviets Seek U.S. Venture

and makes a public stock offering or is bought by another company. Sierra Ventures is putting up $1.85 million for a 50 percent share. The founders and employees will own the rest of the company. Transgene will also lend the Soviet institute up to $500,000 over five years for research. That amount will be paid back if the technology is successful enough to earn sufficient royalties. To handle royalty payments and licensing, a joint venture would be set up in which Transgene would own 51 percent and the protein institute 49 percent. Transgene is working on a new way to produce proteins, which include enzymes, hormones and virtually all other substances made by the body. Its technology could be an alternative to the genetic engineering now used to produce proteins like insulin, growth hormone and interferon that are sold as drugs. An Expensive Process Genetic engineers mass-produce proteins by implanting the gene for production of that protein into bacteria or mammalian cells, which are then made to multiply. The cells are eventually killed and the protein of interest must be extracted from all the other proteins the cells produce, a costly process. ''You have to find the one protein you want out of hundreds or thousands,'' said K. P. Wong, a professor of chemistry at California State University in Fresno and a founder of Transgene. The two other founders have not yet been identified; they are biochemists who work for large food and drug companies and have not yet told their employers about Transgene. Transgene will try to make artificial cells by putting ribosomes - the part of a cell that actually manufactures proteins - in a special vessel along with amino acids, the basic building blocks of proteins. The gene coding for only one protein would be inserted into the vessel, and the ribosomes would assemble the amino acids into that one protein. While such artificial cells, known technically as cell-free translation systems, have been the subject of research for many years, it has been difficult to get them to work for more than a few minutes or produce more than tiny quantities of the desired protein, Professor Wong said. But the researchers at the Institute for Protein Research have a way to overcome these problems, he said. Transgene plans first to make protein-synthesizing machines that could be used by biotechnology researchers to produce small quantities of needed proteins

306223_0

Battle on Paving a Utah Trail Highlights a Clash of Cultures

LEAD: These are lean days in this depressed southern Utah town of 652 people. The mining and lumber industries have fallen on hard times and the trickle of summer tourists has dwindled to almost nothing. These are lean days in this depressed southern Utah town of 652 people. The mining and lumber industries have fallen on hard times and the trickle of summer tourists has dwindled to almost nothing. Things would be much better, the local people say, if only they could pave the Burr Trail, a rutted, sandy dirt road to the east that cuts 66 miles through some of the most spectacular country in America. Paving the road, they say, could make Escalante the western gateway for Californians visiting the Capitol Reef National Park and the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. But the proposal has stirred a bitter fight emblematic of the clash of cultures and ideals in the mountain states, where some see stunning beauty that should be preserved, and others see a harsh land that humans must tame to survive. Bumping down the Burr Trail is like driving through a gallery of Georgia O'Keeffe paintings. The road cuts through deep, cool canyons between 800-foot walls of red sandstone, over dusty benches and buttes and then over the Waterpocket Fold in Capitol Reef, a dramatic uplift in which strata of rock lie at 45-degree angles. Opponent to Paving Road ''In most other states this would be a national park,'' said Terri Martin, regional representative of the National Parks and Conservation Association, one of four environmental groups waging a dogged legal battle against Garfield County's proposal to pave the road all the way to Lake Powell. County leaders like Louise Liston, a county commissioner, say paving would open a ''grand circle'' for tourists, linking Grand Canyon, Zion, Bryce Canyon and Capitol Reef National Parks and Glen Canyon. ''A lot of older people don't enjoy driving dirt roads,'' said Mrs. Liston, adding that it is difficult to provide services to the remote eastern part of the county because the Burr Trail is the only direct access. Environmentalists say paving would damage the remote area abutting the road, much of which is under Federal study for designation as protected wilderness. The dirt road ''provides a different medium for enjoying the land and air and sounds,'' said Susan Tixer, who, with her husband, Brant Calkin, runs the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.

306105_6

Fishing for Shrimp in Flanders

ride their wading horses back and forth parallel to the shoreline. The seagulls that circle in gluttonous admiration above the booty of shrimp accumulating in the nets are merely an amusing annoyance and seldom descend. But surfboards with sails are a menace to these equestrian fishermen; Roland Vanbillemont told how horrible it was to have three such wind-surfers knock him and his horse down into the water. Each fisherman periodically interrupts his dragging to empty his nets into the baskets slung over his horse. Earlier in this century, boys with mules would be hired to take these baskets home, where the shrimp would be boiled and cleaned as quickly as possible. Since the first shrimp to reach the fish market would fetch the highest prices, each fisherman wanted his catch to be en route even before he got home. It is said that gray shrimp taste best with the lingering flavor of seaweed and sea saltwater, when eaten still warm after just having been boiled. Salt is added to cold water, which is brought up to a boil. At Oostduinkerke's National Fishery Museum (filled with models of old-fashioned clipper ships and modern high-tech fishing rigs), Marcel Vermoote, a retired fisherman, explained, referring to beer, that ''although the fishermen are buddies between the pints, they are rivals on the beach.'' Into the fog these cantankerous fishermen plunge, and partly from the wet depths of their imaginations, some tall tales are born. The number of pounds caught might get increased between the weighing and the boiling - and most often in the telling. But some hefty adventures really have befallen these men of the sea. Henri Durant recalled that he was once lost in the fog. While trying to follow a bell and siren that are usually sounded to give boats and fishermen a clear landmark on a fog-shrouded shore, he got farther from the beach, so that his horse was sometimes swimming with him astride. Since objects tend to look bigger in a fog, his wagon, waiting on a nearby sandbar, looked like a boat. But after six hours, he was finally able to clamber back onto the beach. VISITORS to Oostduinkerke can enjoy the local shrimp at take-out stands along the main street and the boardwalk: one-fifth of a pound for $2.50. Outside of Oostduinkerke, Belgium is chockablock with good seafood restaurants that also boast excellent gray shrimp from the

306279_5

U.S. Adds Spy Satellites Despite Easing Tensions

12 at any given time. On Thursday, the Martin Marietta Corporation, maker of the 20-story Titan 4 rocket, which lofts the nation's biggest spy satellites, announced that it had won a $1.6 billion Air Force contract to build 18 more of the giant launchers, with an option for 8 more. The Government is considering other moves to augment the planned expansion. One is shifting the financially ailing Landsat photographic satellites from civilian operation to the Pentagon. The two satellites, which were almost turned off early this year for lack of money, were given a temporary reprieve when the Bush Administration found $9.4 million to keep them operating for six months. But their long-term fate remains murky. The military has given the craft a formal declaration of ''mission essential,'' meaning it must have them, said a Congressional aide. The satellites' cameras survey wide areas rather than focus on details. Civilians use them for things like crop forecasting, and the military apparently uses them for wide-area surveillance. Several members of Congress, including George E. Brown Jr. of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Science Committee, have objected to transferring the Landsats to the military, saying the system must stay in civilian hands. The military also wants to build its own multibillion-dollar wide-area surveillance system, but Congress recently put that idea on hold. If approved, the first of those spacecraft might fly in 1996 and grow into a constellation of up to a dozen satellites. Small Enough to Be Held in Arms So too, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a Federal installation in California, is conducting research on tiny spy satellites that could be lofted by the dozen or hundreds. They would consist of very small computers and cameras equipped with super-wide-angle lens and would be small enough for a person to hold. While critics object to the satellite buildup, proponents say it is essential, and not only for arms control. ''If we're going to reduce our military budgets, we need to use our forces more effectively,'' said Senator Boren. Other proponents note that the Soviet Union sends photographic satellites into orbit at a rate of some 30 a year. These are far less capable than American satellites and are shorter-lived, but experts say that this year the Soviets are continuing to launch them in large numbers despite a sharp slowdown in the overall rate that Soviet rockets are soaring into space.

305929_0

WESTCHESTER GUIDE

LEAD: HURDY-GURDY MAN HURDY-GURDY MAN ''A Medieval Christmas'' is the title of the first special program ever held for children at Caramoor in Katonah. The 45-minute entertainment features Donald Heller, the hurdy-gurdy man, at 2 and 4 P.M. Saturday. Mr. Heller, dressed in a gaudy striped coat and feathered hat, tells what he calls ''heroic and courtly tales from the Middle Ages,'' including ''Le Chanson de Roland,'' while performing a few informal dance steps and playing antique holiday music on a hurdy-gurdy, a krumhorn and a gemshorn flute. He is one of the few contemporary masters of the hurdy-gurdy - once the minstrel's instrument, and he specializes in performing at schools in Europe and Asia as well as North America. The stringed hurdy-gurdy dates from the 11th century and while it sounds something like bagpipes, and is carried and played a bit like an accordion, it is essentially a mechanical violin. Some of the 15th- and 16th- century music in Mr. Heller's repertoire is by the French troubadors Macabru, Le Moines d'Arras and Pierre Attinat. The Caramoor House Museum - decorated for the holidays - and the gift shop will be open to ticket holders from 1 to 4 P.M. and refreshments are included in the price of admission, which is $6 for adults and $3 for children. Richard Westenberg's Musica Sacra chorus will perform Christmas music from many centuries at 4 and 6 P.M. next Sunday, with part of the program allocated to a sing-along. The group has appeared at Carnegie Hall, Alice Tully Hall and Avery Fisher Hall and sold out its first engagement at Caramoor last year. Tickets are $10 and include access to the museum and gift shop from 3 to 6 P.M. Call 232-5035 for information or reservations. VIEWS OF DEATH ''Life After Death: Past and Present Views'' will be discussed in a three-hour workshop at Wainwright House in Rye beginning at 2 P.M. Saturday. Dr. Robert A. McDermott, chairman of the philosophy department at Baruch College, will present several dominant theories in Asia and the West, after which the floor will be open for questions and discussion. The possibility of life after death will be approached from the Christian tradition of judgment and consignment to Heaven or Hell; the concept of Karma, or rebirth, prevalent in Hinduism, Buddhism, the so-called Greek mystery religions and other Asian cultures; and the Western naturalistic belief that the

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On the Scaffolds, a Delicate Labor in the Duomo

anchored onto the scaffolding supports that Brunelleschi himself had inserted during the construction of the cupola. When the building was completed, he dismantled his own bridge but left the supports, presumably to allow future access to the dome. ''Some people claimed that by inserting the base of our scaffolding into Brunelleschi's bridge supports and sealing them with stucco we had interrupted the thermal flow of the cupola and caused the lesions to widen,'' Mr. Della Negra says. A vigorous debate was settled in 1987 when it was demonstrated that closing the bridge supports had no effect on the expansion and contraction of the cupola. At the time the self-supporting dome was built, many thought it would collapse. ''The faults are anything but new,'' Mr. Della Negra says. ''They are caused by the enormous weight of the structure, which we have estimated at 25,000 tons. We have written testimony of lesions in the dome from as early as 1639, just two centuries after its completion. And the faults mentioned in that document are the same faults which are visible today. The issue is not whether these lesions exist or not, but whether they are static or expanding, and whether we can intervene before the situation becomes critical.'' Since 1988 the movements of the cupola have been monitored by an ingenious system of sensors that can perceive vertical, horizontal and lateral shifts as slight as .04 millimeters and transmit the data to a central computer at the base of the church. This information is in turn relayed by modem to a larger computer at the department of engineering at the University of Florence. There researchers insert the latest findings into a mathematical model of the cupola, enabling them to visualize the effects of the movements on the entire structure and predict the eventual consequences. ''The system is, in a word, fantastic,'' Mr. Della Negra says. ''It registers daily, monthly and seasonal shifting. And it also keeps a record of the air, wall and exterior temperatures to better trace the source of the cupola's movements. At present, the data seem to confirm the hypothesis that the lesions are in a phase of expansion. But it is still far too early to draw any conclusions. We will need at least three years of monitoring before we can realistically assess the situation. And until that time, it is pointless to speculate on possible remedies.'' ART

306432_0

China Problems That Slow Economy Are Reflected in Lag for Port Project

LEAD: Perhaps the boldest single project envisioned during the last decade of China's economic restructuring was a plan to copy the success of Hong Kong, 300 miles to the northeast, here on southern China's Hainan Island. Perhaps the boldest single project envisioned during the last decade of China's economic restructuring was a plan to copy the success of Hong Kong, 300 miles to the northeast, here on southern China's Hainan Island. The Yangpu Port project, as it is known, came to symbolize the vaulting aspirations of Hainan, where a chunk of land was to be leased to a foreign company for a transformation into a duty-free port and a modern city of several hundred thousand people. The project was the centerpiece of a broad program to promote a market economy on Hainan. But Hainan's progress has been stalled, along with the Yangpu project. There are several reasons for the slowdown, but they seem to add up to the clearest example yet of how Beijing's political crackdown has spilled over into, and put a damper on, some areas of the nation's economy. Trend to Recentralization Foreign investment was supposed to make the difference here, but getting it depended on the central Government's willingness to allow Hainan unprecedented autonomy. Since the June crackdown, many foreigners say, Hainan's autonomy may be evaporating in the general trend toward a recentralization of authority. The Yangpu project has not yet been approved by Beijing and some officials say Premier Li Peng has rejected the idea that it become a free port. And while some foreign investors have come to take a look, they have been reluctant to put their money down. Worst of all for Hainan, three of the most widely known supporters of the province's bold plans - Communist Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang; his son, Zhao Erjun, a businessman, and Hainan's Governor, Liang Xiang - have all fallen from power in the last six months. The island still has an industrial growth rate of more than 10 percent while most of the mainland is suffering a drop in industrial output. But Hainan officials are coming to realize that it may be difficult to get the foreign investment the island province of 6.7 million people needs. ''The central Government gives us lots of policies, but it's short of money,'' said Jiang Wei, an economic planning official. ''So we depend on foreign investors. We have lots

309845_1

REFINED MODERNISM MAKES A SPLASH IN THE LAND OF GLITZ

making architecture, of course, but it is striking in this city, where most modern office buildings have been garish boxes. The C.A.A. building positively brims over with conservative good taste: in the context of Los Angeles, it is a Chanel suit among polyester jumpsuits, a BMW amid Hyundais, a Mont Blanc amid Bics. Only three stories high, the building is small indeed for the amount of attention that has been lavished upon it since its opening earlier this fall. But the reasons it has been so talked about are not mysterious: the combination of Mr. Pei as architect and Michael Ovitz, the chairman of the vastly successful talent agency C.A.A., as client represents at least as notable an intersection of architectural and entertainment-industry power as when Michael Eisner, chairman of Walt Disney Company, hired Michael Graves to design his new headquarters in Burbank. Creative Artists, a relative upstart that has become an overwhelming force in Hollywood in the last few years, has made much of a style that is clearly different from much of Hollywood; there are more neckties in evidence here than in most entertainment businesses, and no gold chains or pinky rings. Mr. Ovitz was determined that the new building project an image of solidity, stability and strength, and it is perhaps no accident that he chose an architect whose work, by today's standards, might be considered conservative. His decision was not unlike that of Jules Stein, founder of the entertainment conglomerate MCA, who in 1940 built an earnest Georgian building in Beverly Hills to send the same message, that Hollywood was a place of refinement. The C.A.A. building's square footage makes it virtually the same size as the other most talked-about building in Los Angeles these days, the bloated, French Provincial-cum-Georgian house being built for the producer Aaron Spelling in Holmby Hills. These two buildings make an amusing comparison, given how forthrightly each attempts to use architecture as a means of establishing a certain identity. But of course all architecture is an effort at image-making on some level or another, and the real test of quality is not merely how well the architect pulls this off, but what else is on his agenda. And by that standard, the C.A.A. building is in another category altogether from the overblown Spelling house and the old MCA building (now occupied by Litton Industries). For it is a structure of vastly

309604_0

Clergy and Fire Marshal Agree on Use of Candles

LEAD: COMMON sense will be the standard for the use of candles in worship services this Christmas season to avoid clashes with local fire marshals, the Christian Conference of Connecticut and the state fire marshal have agreed. COMMON sense will be the standard for the use of candles in worship services this Christmas season to avoid clashes with local fire marshals, the Christian Conference of Connecticut and the state fire marshal have agreed. ''Prudence, common sense and discussion will make it possible to continue church use of candles by people without transgressing the law,'' the conference said in a statement being sent to 2,500 churches in the state. Adam Berluti, a spokesman for the state fire marshal, said local fire marshals would not go out looking for violations as long as churches exercised common sense toward fire safety concerns. During past Easter and Christmas holidays, confrontations have occurred in some towns when fire marshals banned ceremonies in which worshipers held lit candles in their hands. Ban on Open Flames in Public The state fire code bars open flames at public assemblies. An exception is made for candles used in ceremonies and liturgies with certain restrictions, Mr. Berluti said. ''The controlling question comes down to clergy who are holding candlelighting services should consider the density of the group and immediate risk of personal injury,'' he said. The Archbishop for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Hartford, John F. Whealon, representing the Christian Conference, and officials of the State Department of Public Safety met to work out the guidelines, said the Rev. Stephen J. Sidorak Jr., the executive director of the conference. Mr. Sidorak said the clergy felt that some town fire marshals have been overzealous in their enforcement of the fire code in the past several years. ''I don't know how many calls I've gotten from clergy saying they don't care what the law is, they are going to have candles,'' Mr. Sidorak said. He said he hoped the guidelines would defuse the issue.

309688_0

Fixing the Schools Is Not Enough

LEAD: PLANS to reform our schools tend to overlook the fact that about half of our youngsters grow up in families that are not viable from an educational viewpoint. Frequent divorces, a bewildering rotation of boyfriends and parents who come home from work exhausted both physically and mentally, have left many homes with a tremendous parenting deficit. PLANS to reform our schools tend to overlook the fact that about half of our youngsters grow up in families that are not viable from an educational viewpoint. Frequent divorces, a bewildering rotation of boyfriends and parents who come home from work exhausted both physically and mentally, have left many homes with a tremendous parenting deficit. Instead of providing a stable home environment and the kind of close, loving supervision good character formation requires, many child care facilities, grannies, and baby sitters simply insure that children will stay out of harm's way. As a result, personality traits essential for the acquisition of specific skills like math, English and various vocational skills are often lacking. Children come to school without self-discipline and they cannot defer gratification. Nor can they concentrate or mobilize themselves to the tasks at hand. Many studies find students deficient in math or English skills. This does not concern such advanced matters as whether students can craft a powerful essay or analyze a calculus problem. At issue is the ability to do arithmetic and write clear memos. Close examination of what is required points in one direction: the elementary knowledge involved can be taught quickly becasue it entails rather simple rules. The rest is self-discipline and adhering to the rules without jumping to conclusions. Character formation has traditionally been viewed as a family matter, while the various commissions studying our nation's educational needs see schools as their purview. Also, cognitive deficiencies in areas like reading comprehension are more readily measured and less controversial than character defects, like the inability to delay gratification or concentrate on tasks. Mainstream psychology also has been highly cognitive in its outlook. Since the 1960's, it has tended to deal with skills rather than personalities. Still, studies lend support to the thesis that one needs to prepare the vessel before it can be loaded with skills and specific knowledge. One of the best bodies of data regarding character formation was collected by James Coleman and his colleagues at the University of Chicago. The data show that children

309681_5

Help for the Big Holiday Spenders

automobile, a home improvement or a boat) and you want decreasing-term life insurance to cover the outstanding debt, think twice about buying the coverage through the lender. A commercial bank, acting as a middleman, charges a sizable commission to provide insurance tied to a loan and you would do better by buying such a policy on your own. For a 36-year-old male nonsmoker, a five-year $25,000 decreasing-term policy bought through a bank costs about $679. But a policy bought directly from an insurer would cost less than $400. * If you have several credit cards, each with an annual fee, eliminate all but one and save. If you are worried that the single card won't provide enough credit, call your bank and ask for an increase in your limit. If you have been paying on time, you probably will get it. Taxes. Time is money. And your accountant's time is calculated at $50 to $300 an hour - whether the time is spent interpreting tax nuances or sorting through piles of your receipts. So before you visit your accountant at tax time, do your homework by categorizing and adding all the necessary receipts. * There is a perfectly legitimate way to update your wardrobe and let the Internal Revenue Service share the cost. Go through your closets and donate your unwanted garments to a charity, making sure to get a receipt that can be used to substantiate a tax deduction. THE charity won't estimate the value of the contribution, but if the garments are in good condition, figure about 15 percent of the original price. Donating clothing that originally cost you $1,500 can reduce your taxable income by $225; if you are in the 28 percent bracket, that means a savings of $63. Travel. Your automobile club membership may give you a lot more than towing services or help changing a flat tire. Many clubs offer discounts of from 5 to 15 percent for hotels, theme parks and tourist attractions. * Several European countries - including Britain, France, Italy and West Germany - impose a value-added tax, or VAT, on many purchases. But that tax - as high as 23 percent - is dropped if the buyer is not a resident of the country where the goods are sold. Because it requires a bit of paperwork, few clerks will offer the refund - so you have to ask. PERSONAL FINANCE

309606_1

Holiday Gift Baskets That Promote Peace

understanding and address issues like hunger and homelessness. In particular, the organization urges the passage of legislation allocating the equivalent of 1 percent of the United States defense budget for projects that foster peace. For Each Continent Ms. Dyer and Ms. Shirely said they researched 1 Percent for Peace, considered it to be worthwhile, and decided to contribute 7 percent of their income from the baskets - 1 percent for each continent - to the organization. ''It makes the baskets much more meaningful for us,'' Ms. Dyer said. The two women advertise their baskets with brochures that describe 1 Percent for Peace and that list baskets tailored to more than 16 countries. Also listed is the United World Basket, which has items representing several countries. After filling the baskets, they top each one with a little bank shaped like a globe (''You can save your pennies for peace,'' said Ms. Dyer) and a bright ribbon proclaiming ''Peace on Earth.'' Ceramic dove ornaments adorn the baskets, and literature on the 1 Percent for Peace organization, as well as pins or bumper stickers, are tucked in. So are globe-shaped yo-yos. Besides baking appropriate fare (including Russian tea cakes and Irish ginger cakes) to pack in the baskets, the women have found books (including folk tale collections) and small items appropriate for different countries: national flags, English lemon curd, Dutch chocolate, various teas and coffees, and more. ''For Ireland, we have peat incense,'' Ms. Dyer noted. She said that she and Ms. Shirley aimed for ''things that would strike a chord in people who come from, or have visited, a particular country - things that would make them remember.'' 'A Lot of Research' ''We've really done a lot of research on the countries,'' Ms. Shirley said. The two have shopped by mail and on foot for the items, and they have fulfilled all requests, including those for baskets representing countries other than the ones listed on their brochures. They recently searched for ways to fill a Peruvian basket and were pleased to find a recipe for Peruvian cookies. ''We actually do any country,'' Ms. Dyer said. The two noted that baskets representing Germany, Russia, Poland, China, England, Ireland and the Caribbean have proved popular. ''But so far, nobody's ordered an American basket,'' said Ms. Dyer, pointing out that people were thus missing out on fare like Hawaiian macadamia nuts, Alaskan crackers and jams

309852_0

Gifts, From Wipers to a Rolls

LEAD: IF that Christmas stocking feels a bit thin and spindly this year, it may be because the world's largest supplier of windshield wipers has had its way with Santa. IF that Christmas stocking feels a bit thin and spindly this year, it may be because the world's largest supplier of windshield wipers has had its way with Santa. Trico Products Corporation, in the person of its spokeswoman, Mary Wilson, admits that the idea sounds silly, but Wilson has been pushing the company's five styles of blades as perfect stocking stuffers. Most people forget to change their blades, she says, and the new pair can be used right away or stored in the car for emergencies. The latest look in wipers is the airfoil, which increases contact with the windshield, particularly at highway speed. Then there is the winter blade, encased in a rubber ''glove'' to keep snow from jamming its moving parts. A third blade is the Unimax, which is disposable. It is relatively inexpensive and is meant for people who want to throw away the whole wiper instead of replacing the element. Trico also offers a series of blades for imported cars, and a ''tubular blade,'' which is a traditional wiper to fit most domestic vehicles. And yes, the idea is silly. What might make a less frivolous (albeit useful) gift is Quickwheel, a really nifty invention from a Connecticut company. It looks sort of like an industrial-strength tricycle, and it serves to get a driver off the road when a tire goes flat. When that happens, you simply take Quickwheel out of the trunk, put it in front of the offending wheel and drive the car up a little ramp onto the cradle. The steel and fiberglass carriage works on front or rear wheels, and it will get you safely to a repair shop. It is available from some auto and tire dealers and through the Hammacher Schlemmer and Sharper Image catalogues. The thing comes in two sizes for small and large cars, and it costs about $180. A less mechanical but equally neat gift for drivers comes from Rabbit Systems Inc. The high-tech gadget is an auto alarm that won't be ignored and won't wake up the neighborhood. It is a ''self-defense'' system for a car that is designed to keep would-be thieves out of the vehicle's interior. The system uses what Rabbit calls infrasonic technology,

309624_0

Legislators Nearing Deadline on Budget

LEAD: COUNTY legislators grappling with a proposed $1 billion budget for 1990, Westchester's largest, face what may be a large and hostile crowd tomorrow night at the Board of Legislator's last public hearing. Final action on the spending plan is expected a few days later. Those likely to fill the lawmaker's eighth-floor chamber at 7:30 P.M. COUNTY legislators grappling with a proposed $1 billion budget for 1990, Westchester's largest, face what may be a large and hostile crowd tomorrow night at the Board of Legislator's last public hearing. Final action on the spending plan is expected a few days later. Those likely to fill the lawmaker's eighth-floor chamber at 7:30 P.M. - individual taxpayers, representatives of community organizations and elected officials - are expected to relay the frustration and indignation they have expressed indirectly in recent weeks over the 18 percent to 52 percent county tax increases contained in the proposed budget. Talk of Hiring an Analyst County legislators who are struggling to trim the budget have faced constituent anger over proposed tax increases before, but never on this year's scale. Some of the lawmakers are describing it as a ''taxpayer revolt'' that developed slowly and expanded broadly, even helping to generate proposed changes in the Board's approval process. One is an apparent bipartisan effort to impose major modifications not only in the budget being analyzed but in the process of its creation. There is talk among some legislators of hiring a budget analyst to track the county's spending and income throughout the year. The county lawmakers, for their part, have been interviewing commissioners and other department heads for two-and-a-half weeks to find ''soft'' spots, where cuts can be made, but without significant success. Some of the legislators now favor rejecting the plan entirely or returning it to County Executive Andrew P. O'Rourke with instructions to cut it by a specific amount. Mr. O'Rourke described any such action as ''spineless'' and evidence that they ''don't know what their job is and don't know where to cut.'' The legislators have responded by noting that the County Executive has months to draft a budget, while the lawmakers have only six weeks and limited information to assess, amend and approve the two-inch-high document. Mr. O'Rourke introduced his 1990 spending plan in mid-November, as specified by law, acknowledging that it would cause an increase in taxes, but without saying by how much. He argued,

309662_0

Church Seeks to Raise the Human to the Divine

LEAD: To the Editor: To the Editor: One would have thought that someone who, presumably, once possessed all the faculties normally attributed to a Roman Catholic priest would see the church as something distinct from, if not more important than, secular political institutions. One would also have thought that analogies between Communist oppression and Christian orthodoxy were beyond the pale of both reason and taste. James Carroll (''Catholicism With a Human Face,'' Op-Ed, Dec. 1), unfortunately proves such thinking only to be presumption. Although Catholics may occasionally find the teaching of the hierarchy dubious or, more often, just plain difficult, it is outrageous for Mr. Carroll to suggest that the laity is victimized by ecclesiastical repression. His petitions, which incidentally do not enjoy the universal support he suggests, have clearly been heard by this peripatetic Pope, but to Mr. Carroll's distress have not found complete favor. It seems curious, however, that the consequences in both Latin America and Eastern Europe of John Paul's crusade for human dignity should not provide some satisfaction. Certainly the church has been instrumental in the decline of totalitarian society during the last decade. The ordination of women is an altogether different controversy. That a woman's religious vocation does not include the priesthood indicates not a lesser value, but an acknowledgment of distinct identity. Justice in the church (or even in the courts) would be poorly served if we ignored the reality of sexual differentiation. That reality corresponds to different roles in the mission of the church, which is in sum to propagate the gospels and the salvation they proclaim. One must ask, then, whether or not the salvation of women depends on their ordination? Or are the sacraments any less effective because men offer them? Both questions can be answered only in the negative if the life of Christ is instructive. It is doubtful, moreover, that a church that proclaims the living God would not reflect His choice in its ministers, particularly when they are so essential in Catholic life. Finally, I think Catholicism with a human face is a dubious objective. It is right and good that the church prefers to raise the human up into the divine. JOHN J. GALLAGHER JR. Trenton, Dec. 5, 1989

309856_8

Birding in Mexico's South

pack horses made as they grazed close to our tents. We are able to feel some optimism about the future of El Triunfo, because some of the local people are deeply committed to saving its rich forest. El Triunfo has been declared a natural reserve by the state of Chiapas. A state agency, the Institute of Natural History, administers it, with support from Fundamat, a foundation named for the great local ornithologist Miguel Alvarez del Toro. A very impressive young Institute biologist, Maria de Lourdes Avila-Hernandez, better known as Lulu, helped explain cloud forest ecology to us after dinner one night. In the forest, by day, she could call up the quetzals by whistling a good imitation of their haunting cries. Two young wardens, Ismael and Rafael, who grew up in the region, were visibly proud to show us their forest. They are aided by Fernando Gonzales-Garcia, who earned his M.A. in biology with three years' study of the horned guan. He was the first to find its nest. SOME of the local coffee growers are aware how much they need the rivers whose pureness depends on uneroded forest land on El Triunfo. But the growing local population must eat, and they can not stop cutting and burning the forest without alternate ways to make a living. Steps are being taken, with the assistance of groups like Conservation International, to help the Institute of Natural History and Fundamat become the supplier of local guide services and simple accommodations that would permit more people to visit El Triunfo without degrading this fragile wilderness. The villagers are often good nature guides already. The village that supplied us with pack horses and guides, Colonia Guadeloupe, is populated by the descendants of one patriarch, Don Rodrigo, who could no longer walk with us, but whose sons and nephews, the bearers of splendid classical names like Marco Tulio, Aristides and Filadelfo, knew the birds and animals very well. We left our bird guide with one of them, Edilberto Araveta Sanchez, after we learned what a skillful naturalist he is. When we heard an unfamiliar call from an unseen bird in the forest, Edilberto pointed to a picture in the book - and was proven right when we finally got a look at the mysterious caller, a motmot. Villagers like these already receive much of their annual cash income from Victor Emanuel's tour each March. Ecological

309973_1

Raising Money Tops Colleges' Agenda for 90's

the increasing expense of buying equipment and supporting faculty members doing advanced research. ''Our entire society now must make do with more limited resources,'' Dr. Gray said. ''For higher education, that means sharpened competition for students, faculty and dollars at all levels.'' That has made getting private dollars ''absolutely essential to the quality of management in higher education,'' says George A. Brakeley 3d, former chairman of the American Association of Fund Raising Counsel. The reason, Mr. Brakeley and others knowledgeable about higher education declare, is rooted in the growing pressure the changed American economy has put on these institutions to cut costs, streamline management, raise new capital and produce a better ''product'' - that is, improve their educational quality. Among the growing pressures on colleges and universities are these: * Rising costs for salaries and benefits of faculty and staff (the average salary for a full professor at a four-year college is $50,420 for the 1988-89 school year, according to the American Association of University Professors), for building upkeep and for services and financial aid to students. * Growing public concern over tuition increases, as evidenced by a current Justice Department investigation of some colleges' tuition-setting practices. * The extraordinary diversity, in terms of race, ethnicity and age, of undergraduates, and the costs of serving these more diverse students, some of whom need significant remedial help. * New developments in scholarship, such as the increasing collaboration of faculty in different disciplines in combined research projects, which not only tend to be far more expensive but have disrupted many traditional practices. The 'Typical' Student Changes Higher education has undergone tremendous change during the 1980's. For the first time, more than half of the nation's undergraduates, now 11 million strong, entered college as adults, not teen-agers. Also, numerous studies show that increasing numbers of undergraduates are taking longer to gain their degrees and attend more than one college. In addition, a recent study predicted that, barring a two-thirds increase in the number of new Ph.D.'s, colleges and universities will face a big shortage of faculty members in the early 1990's. In response, the larger public and private universities are more aggressively hunting for private money. The University of Miami in Florida and Ohio State University are each among the handful now trying to raise more than $400 million. Even the University of Pennsylvania's gigantic effort will not break new ground. It is

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TRAVEL ADVISORY

guide contains listings for more than 100 museums in North America, with address, telephone number, admission, hours, exhibits for 1990, highlights of the permanent collection, tours, facilities for the handicapped and restaurants. There is a section on traveling exhibitions, and notes on the architecture and history of the buildings themselves. ''The 1990 Traveler's Guide to Museum Exhibitions'' published by Museum Guide Publications in Washington, is on sale in bookstores and museum shops for $9.95. Is America's appetite for comedy greater than ever? One publishing company thinks so and has brought out a 1990 edition of ''The Traveler's Guidebook to Comedy Clubs,'' listing and describing 450 clubs in cities and towns and college communities from New York to Hawaii and across Canada. The spiral-bound folder with 82 photocopied pages also contains a few one-liners but no pictures. It costs $14.95 plus $1.50 for postage from The Comedy Press, Post Office Box 41, 51 Macdougal Street, New York, N.Y. 10012. Pisa: Leaning On the Tower A recommendation that the Leaning Tower of Pisa be closed for restoration has been made to the Italian Parliament by the Government's Public Works Department. Experts recently expressed alarm about decay in the 180-foot tower, which attracts 800,000 tourists a year. But local officials say the monument is in no immediate danger. ''The tower is extremely sensitive to winds and earth tremors; in some places the stonework is so damaged it shows signs of breaking off,'' a panel of scientists and technicians warned. ''Letting tourists in takes no account of the dangers.'' However, Giuseppe Toniolo, who heads Opera Primaziale, the private institution managing the tower, said: ''The closure is unjustified because the situation of the tower has not worsened recently and because conservation work can be initiated without banning tourists.'' The tilt has been increasing by an average 0.047 inches a year since measurements began in 1918, and the tower is now nearly 16.5 feet off the perpendicular. But it has always remained open to tourists. Visitors pay about $3 each to scale the 294 steps to the top. Completed in 1360, the tower began leaning immediately, experts believe, because it was built on sinking soil. The Government has allotted funds for the conservation and strengthening of the tower but engineers have been stumped on how to save the building. Folk wisdom differs; according to a popular Italian song, the tower ''leans, leans, but never comes down.''

309965_1

OPENLY GAY PRIEST ORDAINED IN JERSEY

said, ''I expected them to be there.'' Mr. Williams's ordination had been vigorously opposed by a group of six bishops, who argued that it violated Scripture and a 1979 church resolution against ordaining ''practicing homosexuals.'' Mr. Williams, 34 years old, has lived with a male companion for the last four years and since June has headed a special ministry for gay and lesbian parishioners at All Saints. The companion, James Skelly, 39, a hospital administrator and member of the All Saints choir, figured prominently in yesterday's ceremony as one of several presenters of the candidate for priesthood and as a litanist. Bishop Spong, 58, one of the church's most controversial leaders, has enraged conservatives in the past by urging the church to give its blessing to homosexual and other unmarried couples. In a letter to Episcopal bishops this month, he said that with Mr. Williams's ordination, ''the Episcopal Church has taken a step into honesty and into integrity.'' Yesterday, before the ordination, Bishop Spong said: ''Christian moral standards have changed quite dramatically. We had slavery in a Christian nation. We had oppressed women. I think that our world is more Christlike when it's open to all of God's children.'' 'Gay Priests in Every Diocese' Then he said: ''We believe that the Church needs to be honest. We have gay priests in every diocese.'' The group of opposing bishops, the Episcopal Synod of America, is a minority among 119 active diocese bishops nationwide. But the group says it represents many traditionalists within the church. The Synod was organized last June around objections to what it considers deviations from traditional Christian teachings, including the ordination of women. The Synod's protesting bishops argue that the ordination of a sexually active unmarried person violates a resolution passed in 1979 by the governing body of the Episcopal Church, the General Convention, which rejects non-celibate gay people and non-celibate single heterosexuals as priests. A lay representative of the Synod, Elaine Sullivan, a member of St. Anthony of Padua Episcopal Church in Hackensack, N.J., formally objected to the ordination when Bishop Spong asked during the ceremony if anyone knew of ''any impediment or crime because of which we should not proceed.'' A second Episcopalian, Ted Arnheiter, 64, of St. Mary's Episcopal Church in Tuxedo Park, N.Y., also spoke up against it, calling homosexuality ''a degenerate activity.'' A Question of Sexuality Mr. Williams's priesthood underscores an issue mainstream

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Brazil's New Chief Raises Doubts on Amazon

a five-year term, Mr. Collor, who takes office on March 15, is to set the direction for Brazil in the 1990's. Brazil's top environmental official, Fernando Cesar Mesquita, has cited Mr. Collor's close alliance with Amazonian businessmen as a potential obstacle to action on limiting the burning of the rain forest and on demarcating Indian reserves. A Collor administration would be ''a horror'' on environmental issues, predicted Mr. Mesquita, who is president of the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources. Mr. Mesquita, who supported Mr. da Silva, admitted that neither candidate ''showed real interest in environmental issues.'' Mr. Collor's rare statements on the Amazon issue frequently take on a nationalist hue. U.N. 'Pollution Tax' ''I think everyone of us, every country, should clean up his own house,'' Mr. Collor said Friday in his first press conference as president-elect. ''Brazil can't be put in the defendant's dock as the cause of today's environmental problems.'' Mr. Collor repeated his only major environmental proposal to date, an international ''pollution tax'' to be levied by the United Nations. During a tour of Europe last summer, Mr. Collor did not get a sympathetic reception for the idea from European heads of state. Several environmentalists interviewed here believe the tax is doomed to failure and will prove to be a waste of political capital. But Mr. Collor, a former businessman and state governor, may help Brazil's environmental movement in a different way: encouraging innovative forms of financing. The President-elect has said he wants to channel the widespread world interest in the Amazon into more funding for public and private conservation projects in Brazil. Helio Setti, Mr. Collor's environmental adviser, has said that the new government will study the possibility of converting portions of Brazil's foreign debt into funding for environmental uses. Under conversions performed in Ecuador and Bolivia, foreign environmental groups bought debt titles on the secondary market. They then agreed to cancel those dollar obligations in return for government funding in local currencies for local nature projects. Behind on Debt Brazil's departing President, Jose Sarney, has rejected such arrangements as interference in Brazil's sovereignty. When he takes office, Mr. Collor is to inherit about $5 billion of arrears on Brazil's $110-billion foreign debt. He has shown eagerness to reduce the nation's debt burden as part of a wider program restore the high economic growth rates that Brazil enjoyed in the 1960's and 1970's.

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Call Sugar Complaints Just Sour Grapes

LEAD: To the Editor: To the Editor: In ''Uncle Sugar, Uncle Milk'' (editorial, Dec. 12), you uncritically accept candy industry complaints about sugar policy. What's worse, you assume that candy manufacturers are reliable spokesmen for consumer concerns. You state that United States candy makers pay twice the world price for the sugar and corn sweeteners in candy canes. In fact, the corn syrup used is selling at less than the world price of sugar. A more serious error is the assertion that jacked-up sugar prices cost United States consumers $3 billion a year. That assumes lower sugar costs get passed through to consumers. Most sugar is consumed in processed foods. In a typical candy bar the sugar costs just over a penny. If sugar were free, would manufacturers sell candy bars for 44 cents? Processors like the candy companies typically do not pass along savings on sweeteners to the consumer - a fact readily demonstrated in Department of Agriculture statistics. In 1980, there was no sugar program and consumers paid 43 cents a pound for sugar. Today, consumers pay about 40 cents a pound. If sugar prices had simply kept pace with inflation, the price would be more than 61 cents a pound. But major sugar-using processors, among the most profitable companies and industries in the United States, are beefing about sugar prices. Where's the beef? ROBERT C. LIEBENOW President, Corn Refiners Association Washington, Dec. 12, 1989