STAR ROLE: You think most of your water comes from somewhere else? In Anaheim, 75% comes from underground wells -- and the threat of their contamination through improper dumping is growing. The city's new program to increase awareness of this danger: "Anaheim EarthStar." . . . . Says its environmental expert John Hills: "We wanted to get the word star in there to let people know they can be heroes in protecting our ground water." . . . . The educational campaign is aimed at local businesses.

LAST LAUGH: The new Super Kmart Center in La Habra got off to a shaky start, with protesters angry that it might hurt local small businesses. But the store has gained some bragging rights: It's leading Kmarts nationwide in retail sales, says the Troy, Mich., headquarters. . . . Especially delighted is City Manager Lee Risner, in the face of numerous business closures in recent years. Says Risner: "It says we're a very good business town."

PREVIEW EVENT? Mater Dei High basketball coach Gary McKnight has attended the NCAA Final Four the past 12 years. Maybe this year it's coming to him? . . . Today's John Wooden Classic (C1) at The Pond of Anaheim features four of the nation's top-ranked college basketball teams: Massachusetts (No. 1) vs. Kansas (7), followed by UCLA (5) vs. Kentucky (3). . . . "It's like having the Final Four in Orange County," says McKnight, who plans to attend. "We've not had teams like this play here ever before."

EARLY AWE: McKnight is one reason that Mater Dei is not just a football school. His basketball team is ranked second in the nation in Sporting News magazine's preseason poll. This week's national poll of sportswriters has the Monarchs ranked third. . . . They've won 100 of their last 105 games, were 33-1 last year, and may be even better this year, thanks to sophomore sensation Schea Cotton. Sporting News ranks him third-best sophomore in the country.

The post-election flurry of Democratic leaders naming friends to high-paying state boards and commissions is expected to continue next week with the appointment of retiring state Sen. David A. Roberti to a $97,000-a-year government job.

Roberti, forced out by term limits and defeated in a bid to prolong his political career by running for state treasurer, would become at least the fourth person with close ties to leaders in the Senate or Assembly to be given a high-salaried post since the Nov. 8 election. Roberti's state salary would nearly double.

Sources told The Times on Friday that the Senate Rules Committee, which Roberti headed for a record 14 years as senate president pro tem, will meet in a closed-door session early next week to approve his appointment to the Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board. The board rules on appeals, usually brought by workers against employers, who say they have been unfairly denied unemployment insurance benefits.

"I anticipate it will happen," Roberti said when contacted Friday.

Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco), whose long tenure is expected to end with the Republican takeover of the Assembly, put the post-election process in motion by handing out appointments to a girlfriend, a former law firm associate and the spouse of a retiring Democratic legislator.

While the current wave of appointments has brought the issue renewed attention, the awarding of plum jobs to ousted incumbents and their friends is viewed around the Capitol as an old practice of both Democrats and Republicans. Less clear, however, is how the patronage tradition will go over with voters who proclaimed loudly last month that they are tired of politics as usual.

Senate leader Bill Lockyer (D-Hayward), who succeeded Roberti as president pro tem, said he supports Roberti's appointment and considers it justified. "He has had a distinguished career of public service," Lockyer said. "We'd like to capture his skills and energy."

Long service in the Legislature "should not be a barrier to continued service in appropriate positions," Lockyer said. "This is a working job, a full-time position."

However, political scientist Bruce Cain of UC Berkeley's Institute of Governmental Studies said many commissions have always been treated as patronage plums and produce little valuable work for the taxpayers.

"If a retiring politician wants the job, you have to wonder whether there is a lot of work involved," Cain said. "The real question is whether we ought to have the commissions and whether they should be a full-time, salaried job."

The more important issue, Cain said, is whether the high-paying governmental commissions, originally envisioned as insulating regulators from political influence, should be re-examined and possibly abandoned.

"I've never been under the illusion that these things were anything other than political appointments," Cain said. "If they are going to be appointed by the governor and the Legislature, then we've got to accept that they are going to be appointed on political grounds."

Roberti would replace Debra E. Berg on the appeals board. She is the wife of longtime Roberti assistant Clifford Berg, the $120,000-a-year executive officer of the Senate Rules Committee, one of the highest-paid employees in state government.

Clifford Berg is expected to leave the Senate payroll soon and become a lobbyist. Sources said Lockyer will appoint a longtime member of his staff, Greg Schmidt, to replace Berg.

The Speaker of the Assembly and the Senate's Rules Committee share with the governor the authority to make appointments to several powerful and high-paying boards and commissions.

These include the Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board, the Integrated Waste Management Board and the California Medical Assistance Commission.

Roberti, 55, who has held a part-time teaching position at USC in recent months, is reported to have negotiated with a number of potential private employers. He is an attorney, but has spent most of his adult life in the Legislature.

Sources who asked not to be identified said a key reason that former legislators get appointments is that they usually receive a higher salary. The $52,000-a-year pay for legislators will rise to $72,000 next week. This translates into higher pension benefits when the former legislator permanently retires from the public payroll.

In the spring, Roberti narrowly beat back an expensive recall election led by pro-gun activists in his San Fernando Valley district. With his political funds virtually depleted, he was defeated in the June Democratic primary for state treasurer by Phil Angelides, who in turn lost to Republican Matt Fong.

Roberti is not the only former legislator in line for a possible appointment. State Sen. Dan McCorquodale (D-Modesto), a veteran legislator who lost his reelection bid, has made inquiries about appointment to a potential vacancy on the Integrated Waste Management Board, sources said. The $95,400-a-year slot is held by Wesley Chesbro, an environmentalist and pioneer recycler.

Lockyer said he understood that McCorquodale was interested in the trash board, but added: "He hasn't talked to me directly." McCorquodale was active in the passage of California's "bottle bill" and other recycling legislation. Lockyer said he also had "heard good things about Chesbro."

Lockyer said the appointment to the trash board will be dealt with by the Rules Committee later in the month.

Bosnian Serbs stepped up the pressure for a U.N. retreat from the Balkan conflict Friday by rocketing the presidency building in Sarajevo while the U.N. mission chief and the commander for Bosnian-based troops were inside.

Two Sega missiles fired from Serbian-held territory crashed into the stately red-brick building shortly after U.N. Protection Force chief Yasushi Akashi and British Lt. Gen. Michael Rose had entered for talks with Bosnian government leaders, mission spokeswoman Claire Grimes said.

"Akashi and Rose were in the building at the time but well away from the point of impact," Grimes said of the midday assault.

The incident underscored the eroded authority of the U.N. mission in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where Serbian rebels have detained about 400 peacekeepers as human shields against NATO air strikes as they press attacks on U.N.-designated "safe areas." And it came amid conflicting reports that the U.N. mission had called off enforcement of the "no-fly" zone over Bosnia as part of an effort to find a way to persuade the Serbs to resume negotiations.

"As far as the missiles hitting the building, it seems they (Serbs) had information. We're not saying they were directly targeting Akashi and Rose, but the implication is very strong," said one shaken U.N. official at mission headquarters here.

The official, who requested anonymity, said the U.N. hierarchy is "frustrated as hell," and that the apparent provocation against two of the top U.N. officials in the Balkans had intensified already widespread talk about withdrawing the Bosnia-based peacekeepers.

In addition to taking peacekeepers captive, gunmen loyal to Bosnian Serb nationalist leader Radovan Karadzic have been blocking the movement of supplies to thousands of other encircled U.N. forces, as well as humanitarian aid bound for nearly 2 million Bosnian civilians.

Akashi, who was spending the night at Serbian rebel headquarters, was quoted by a Reuters journalist in Pale as announcing that he had secured a promise from Karadzic to release all hostage peacekeepers.

However, mission headquarters had not been informed of the reported agreement as of late Friday night, U.N. spokesman Paul Risley said, adding that it would be unlikely any of the captive troops would be released before daybreak.

Both Bosnian and Croatian Serbs kept up their attacks on the Bihac pocket, with small-arms fighting having moved "very, very close" to the city's hospital, Grimes said.

The U.N. mission has been engaged in a hostile standoff with the heavily armed Serbs since a series of ineffectual NATO air strikes prompted the rebels to grab peacekeepers as "insurance" against further shows of force to deter attacks on Bihac and other havens.

In an apparent attempt to wheedle the defiant Serbs off the battlefields and back to negotiations, a U.N. spokesman in Sarajevo announced that the mission had called off NATO enforcement of the "no-fly" zone imposed over Bosnia.

Timothy Hewlett, the U.N. military spokesman in Sarajevo, told journalists that the flyovers had been stopped for "a cooling-off period," to create a better atmosphere for peace talks in hopes the Serbs would take part.

NATO officials hotly denied that they had ceased their air patrols, but U.N. spokesmen at the headquarters here and in Sarajevo indicated that the enforcement had at least been reduced.

"If you were in Sarajevo, you couldn't help but notice that there hasn't been a single overflight for several days," one U.N. official here said, drawing a distinction between "our formal position and reality."

In Washington, a senior military official flatly denied that NATO had cut back its enforcement flights, but he conceded that allied warplanes were now flying "smarter" -- that is, using electronic jamming and flying at higher altitudes -- to guard against Serbian missiles.

Despite the apparent U.N. attempt to ease NATO pressure on the Serbs and a conciliatory visit by Rose and Akashi to rebel headquarters in Pale, 10 miles east of Sarajevo, Bosnian Serb offensives and harassment of peacekeepers continued.

U.N. officials reported that Karadzic was no longer even replying to their daily requests to move fuel, food and other supplies to any of the 24,000 peacekeepers in Bosnia.

At the United Nations late Friday, Russia vetoed a Security Council resolution aimed at stopping the Yugoslav republics of Serbia and Montenegro from sending fuel supplies that reportedly are powering the Serbs' offensive in northern Bosnia. It was the first council veto in a year and a half, and the first on the Bosnian war.

Russia, a traditional Serbian ally, said it vetoed the resolution because it would unfairly tighten sanctions against Serbia.

Tensions between rebel Serbs and Croats in this country have escalated in recent days, with artillery exchanges and small-arms fire reported along a 100-mile arc of their front line.

The Croatian government and leaders of the Serbian rebel faction occupying one-third of Croatia signed a token agreement to restore some road and utility links, as well as an oil pipeline to the Adriatic Sea.

But even the brokers of the deal on mutually advantageous economic cooperation conceded that prospects for a breakthrough toward resolution of the overall Serb-Croat conflict were grim.

Croatian army units were reported to be firing across a U.N.-patrolled buffer zone near the Adriatic coast, and the signatory for the Serbian rebel side, Borislav Mikulic, immediately declared that the utility restoration should not be seen as rebel acceptance of rule by Croatia.

"The Krajina will never be part of Croatia," Mikulic, the rebels' self-styled prime minister, told journalists after signing the economic cooperation pact on behalf of those living in the Croatian territory Serbian occupiers call the independent Republic of Serbian Krajina.

Of greatest concern to the U.N. mission and the international community is the Krajina Serbs' use of the occupied territory to stage attacks across an international border into the Bihac pocket.

Peter Galbraith, the U.S. ambassador to Croatia, and his mediation partner, Russian Ambassador Leonid V. Kerestidyants, warned Mikulic against continued involvement of Krajina Serbs in the assault on Bihac, one of six U.N.-designated "safe havens" in Bosnia.

"This risks a wider war that could have terrible consequences for them," Galbraith said.

Asked about the Sarajevo report that NATO pilots had been asked to "stand down" in "no-fly" enforcement over Bosnia, Galbraith insisted that NATO planes were still active, but he conceded that the alliance pilots had to "change some patterns because of the (surface-to-air missile) threat."

Karadzic gunmen have positioned surface-to-air batteries around Bihac and Sarajevo airport to intimidate NATO fliers, who are prohibited from bombing the missile sites even though the missiles could be used to shoot them down. U.N. officials fear that such action would invite retaliation against the hostage peacekeepers.

The senior military official did not say where the Serbian nationalists had obtained the missiles or why NATO forces -- which previously had enjoyed unchallenged air superiority over Bosnia and authority to fire at missile-radar installations -- had allowed the rebels to put them in place.

Bosnian Serb rebels on Friday morning released 70 of the nearly 500 U.N. troops they had grabbed as shields against further NATO air strikes. But about 400 remained captives, and thousands of others are deployed to Serb-encircled enclaves, such as Sarajevo, where they could easily be seized by the rebels.

Times staff writer Art Pine contributed to this report from Washington.

Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss, who for three years ran a notorious ring of high-priced, short-skirted prostitutes for Los Angeles glitterati, was convicted Friday on three counts of pandering that could send her to prison for more than eight years.

The jury deadlocked on two other pandering counts and acquitted Fleiss of a cocaine charge.

The seven-man, five-woman panel spent four days deliberating in Los Angeles Superior Court before reaching a verdict in the steamy, high-profile case that has titillated the nation and rekindled the age-old debate about whether prostitution should be considered a crime.

Fleiss, 28, who was arrested in an elaborate 1993 police sting, was visibly shaken, dropping her head down on the table when the guilty verdict was announced. Because pandering carries a mandatory minimum sentence, she faces imprisonment of between three years and 8 years, 8 months.

"I'm still in shock. My heart has never beaten so fast," Fleiss, the daughter of prominent pediatrician Dr. Paul Fleiss, said in a telephone interview later from his Santa Monica condominium, where she took refuge after posting $75,000 bond.

"I heard them say guilty on the first count, and then I just couldn't hear anymore. I just went blank. . . . My father was crying -- he said, 'Be strong and think of something positive,' but I can't even think."

Judge Judith L. Champagne set a preliminary hearing on sentencing for Jan. 20, but no firm sentencing date was set.

Fleiss sat grim-faced through the court proceedings, sighing at one point, throwing her head back at another. Her father -- with whom she faces a federal court trial in January on related charges of money laundering and tax evasion -- hung his head and wept in the first row of the courtroom seats.

The verdicts came after four days of contentious, back-and-forth deliberations that was occasionally halted by a forewoman who blew on a whistle to keep order.

Because some jurors were apparently unaware of the penalties required by state law, they appeared stunned -- and in some cases remorseful -- Friday when reporters informed them that Fleiss must serve at least three years in state prison.

"Oh no, that's way too much," said forewoman Sheila Mitrowski, a 48-year-old phone company clerical worker from Bell Gardens. "You've got kids out on the streets dealing drugs, for crying out loud, and they get probation."

Mitrowski said half the jurors, including herself, wanted to acquit Fleiss when deliberations began. However, "we went right by the law," she said. "We haggled about it for four days."

Juror Nancy Reyes seemed on the verge of tears upon learning that Fleiss faced prison.

"I don't think she should go to jail for it," said Reyes, 24, a Monterey Park secretary. "I just don't think it's fair that she has to do time for something like this. It's upsetting. . . . Hey, she didn't kill anybody."

Prosecutor Alan Carter said the mandatory sentence is appropriate because panderers -- the legal term for madams and pimps who procure prostitutes for clients -- capitalize on the weakness of prostitutes.

"People who go into the prostitution business are usually pretty sad souls, and they're exploited by panderers," he said.

Carter added that the verdict "demonstrates how wrong people have been" about the ability of juries to reach rational decisions.

Fleiss' mother, schoolteacher Elissa Fleiss, said she was flabbergasted.

"There's something flawed about people who can't decide about the guilt or innocence of admitted parent-killers and people shown on camera smashing the head of someone else, and (who) then find Heidi guilty," she said, referring to the Menendez slayings and the beating of trucker Reginald O. Denny during the 1992 riots.

"I just don't believe the good of society has been served by putting Heidi in jail," Elissa Fleiss said.

A grand jury indicted Fleiss in September, 1993, after a complex, multi-agency undercover sting operation in which the key player was a Beverly Hills detective posing as a Hawaiian businessman. Her arrest shook Hollywood, which instantly began to buzz with rumors -- never publicly verified -- that her clientele included entertainment industry figures.

In a lavish Beverly Hills hotel suite, hidden cameras filmed the activities of four women dispatched by Fleiss to entertain four police officers posing as Japanese businessmen celebrating a deal.

To buttress the case, police also had taped the phone conversations between Fleiss and Beverly Hills Detective Sammy Lee that led to the two fateful assignations with prostitutes on two consecutive evenings. In those conversations, Lee explained to Fleiss that he wanted one woman to arrive June 8, and four the next evening when his colleagues arrived. He also asked Fleiss to provide a small quantity of cocaine for the second evening -- a request that she said would be "no problem," according to tapes.

Samantha Burdette, a Colorado-born model, arrived on schedule June 8, and returned the next night with three other women and a small quantity of cocaine. After more than an hour of conversation -- with the undercover officers speaking gibberish that they hoped would pass for Japanese -- the four women did a striptease with only their own humming for accompaniment as about 20 officers watched from the next room via the surveillance camera. As the last of the four got down to her underwear, police stormed in and placed them all under arrest.

Prosecutors contended that Fleiss willingly procured women and drugs, knowing it is against the law. But defense lawyers argued that she had been entrapped by overzealous vice cops -- in legal terms, induced to commit an act that never would have occurred had not the police set events in motion.

*

As deliberations progressed, several jurors who first leaned toward acquittal on the grounds of entrapment began to pull back, Mitrowski said. They eventually decided that only in the case of Burdette had police gone too far and manipulated her.

The key, Mitrowski said, was the fact that Burdette was summoned to the hotel by the "customers" twice. The police could have arrested her on her first visit, the forewoman said. "With Samantha, they didn't get her on anything but what they had set up themselves."

Police have contended that they needed a second night of evidence to strengthen their case.

Another juror, a West Los Angeles woman who spoke on condition of anonymity, said she and some other panelists felt that Fleiss had been entrapped on all counts, but could not find adequate evidence to persuade the rest of the jury.

Consequently, she said, the jurors were forced to bargain with each other in order to reach a verdict and avoid a painful deadlock.

Her aim, the juror said, was simply to make sure that Fleiss was not convicted on the cocaine charge, which she believed to be the most serious.

"You have to give a little and take a little. We didn't want to come up with a hung jury," she said.

Judges routinely instruct jurors to avoid such bargaining. They are instructed to decide each count strictly on its merits.

Fleiss lawyer Anthony Brooklier had already planned to appeal the conviction on the grounds that mandatory pandering sentences constitute cruel and unusual punishment. After hearing news accounts of what he described as jurors "horse-trading" their votes on various charges, Brooklier said he will add the claim of jury misconduct to his appeal.

Ironically, Brooklier mused, had jurors gone the other way -- convicted Fleiss on the cocaine charge and acquitted her of pandering -- she would have been eligible for probation.

Fleiss, too, said she was stunned at some jurors' intentions.

"I heard some of them talking afterward (on TV), and I couldn't believe it," she said sadly. "They thought they were doing me a favor" by convicting her of pandering rather than the drug charge. "They thought I'd just get a ticket or something."

Juror Reyes said she believed that police were "definitely overbearing" in pursuing Fleiss. Referring to testimony that a smoke detector went off in the room where police were monitoring surveillance cameras as Burdette disrobed June 8 for undercover vice cop Lee, Reyes said derisively: "They were probably all smoking and getting off on the video they were watching."

But other jurors said they felt that justice was served. Juror Darryl Kitagawa said he did not believe that the police had acted inappropriately or induced Fleiss to commit a crime.

"I felt there was no evidence of entrapment on any of the pandering charges," said Kitagawa, a 42-year-old Department of Water and Power illustrator who lives in Los Angeles.

Several jurors said they fought frequently during agonizing deliberations.

"We played the video and audiotapes. We played them and played them," said juror Maria Campos, 38, a hospital receptionist from Northeast Los Angeles. "There were a lot of arguments. We were arguing constantly."

Jurors revealed that little was said during deliberations about the identities of Fleiss' clients, who -- according to Fleiss, her prostitutes and undercover surveillance tapes -- included several well-known Hollywood producers, rock stars, foreign diplomats and international businessmen. The names of these customers have not been made public; Judge Champagne ruled out possible disclosure in court early in the proceedings.

Fleiss, a high school dropout, said she got her start working as an assistant for onetime Beverly Hills madam Elizabeth Adams. She said she was Adams' assistant, not a "working girl." However, according to a search warrant affidavit, Fleiss was "Elizabeth Adams' No. 1 'girl' until she broke off . . . to start her own prostitution business."

Fleiss maintained her own business for three years before running afoul of police, according to police surveillance tapes of her phone conversations. It was hardly a clandestine operation. There were wild parties, including a bash for Mick Jagger that trashed Fleiss' house. There was almost constant club-hopping arm in arm with one celebrity or another.

It was a time of giddy days and gallivanting nights that abruptly ended in the police sting operation.

In the months before Fleiss' trial for pandering, her problems grew.

She was arrested in September after drug tests -- a term of her probation -- indicated that she had used stimulants and depressants. As a result of those tests, she was assigned to a Pasadena-based drug rehabilitation program, where she spent two months. As a condition of her release from the program, she undergoes drug tests five days a week.

In federal court, Fleiss and her father were charged in August with money laundering, bank fraud and conspiracy to hide her income from her prostitution ring. Daughter and father have pleaded not guilty to those charges. That trial, scheduled for January, may well unveil the identities of Fleiss' clients because many reportedly wrote checks to her from personal accounts.

Fleiss hinted after her arrest that she might publicly name her clients. Later -- after legal proceedings began -- she simply expressed frustration that she could be punished while the men go free.

On Friday, however, she was more concerned with her own predicament.

"I don't care about anything but what's happening right now," she said. "Even if the guys were going down too, that wouldn't help me, would it?"

Times staff writer Bob Pool contributed to this story.

More on Heidi Fleiss

* Articles from the Times archives recount the media hoopla, the rumors in Tinseltown and the life and fast times of the "madam to the stars."

Details on Times electronic services, A5 The Verdicts

List of verdicts by count announced Friday in the Heidi Fleiss pandering trial:

1. Procuring for prostitution Samantha Burdette on the night of June 8, 1993. Deadlocked

2. Procuring for prostitution Samantha Burdette on the night of June 9, 1993. Deadlocked

3. Procuring for prostitution Brandi McClain on the night of June 9, 1993. Guilty

4. Procuring for prostitution Kimberly Burch on the night of June 9, 1993. Guilty

5. Procuring for prostitution Peggy Schinke on the night of June 9, 1993. Guilty

6. Sale or transportation of a controlled substance, cocaine, on the night of June 9, 1993. Not guilty

President Clinton met privately Friday for the first time with the new Republican leaders of Congress, as well as with a delegation of top Democrats, and found that both groups could pose problems for him.

Incoming Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) and House Speaker-designate Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) sounded a note of cooperation after the meeting. But they left little doubt that they -- like many Democrats -- expect policy initiatives to be spawned under the Capitol dome, not at the White House.

Gingrich declared that "we had a very positive and very encouraging conversation about the general direction of American policy." But he added: "We agreed in principle about areas where we disagreed."

If the Republicans seemed confident, many Democratic lawmakers and aides said in private that they see a White House that appears divided and uncertain in the aftermath of the Nov. 8 elections. The GOP took control of both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years in midterm balloting.

*

Over the last few days, some Capitol Hill Democrats have indicated that they are increasingly disturbed because they believe that the White House is misinterpreting last month's election and failing to develop a legislative strategy to rebuild their party.

Their dismay was reflected in comments after Democratic leaders met with the President on Friday. Sen. Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), the new Senate minority leader, talked about how "excited" Democrats are about their "opportunities." But he also suggested that there will be more distance between Democrats on the Hill and those at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

"Obviously, we are going to have to develop our own agenda when we have to," Daschle said as he and other House and Senate Democrats left the White House. "And we will be articulating that in the coming weeks with greater specificity. Obviously, to the extent possible, we want to work with them (the White House)," he added.

"We had a frank discussion about the election," the new House minority whip, David E. Bonior (D-Mich.), said.

Other Democrats have been even more blunt.

After Democratic legislators who lost their seats met with Clinton earlier this week, several warned their former colleagues that they thought key members of the White House staff were in a state of denial.

"To be candid with you," said Rep. Lynn Schenk, who represents a San Diego district but was defeated in November, "I believe the President got the message but his closest advisers have not. . . . White House people who understand the problems across the country don't have the access to Clinton. Those that do (have access) don't have a feel for the country's mood, so he's not getting the message."

Similarly, a recent meeting between state party officials and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Harold M. Ickes in Florida "got really ugly," according to one senior Administration official.

"A lot of us up on the Hill have gotten the feeling that they don't have any strategy for how to win back the Senate or the House," said one top Senate Democratic aide. "When we have met with them (in the White House), all they have is a list of bills they want to push. That's not a strategy."

"The feeling we have is that they are down looking at polls trying to figure out what to think," said the top aide to another leading Democrat. "What they ought to be doing is saying to themselves: 'What are the things that we really care about and will define who we are and where we stand.' "

Rep. Vic Fazio (D-West Sacramento), the newly elected chairman of the Democratic House Conference -- in an interview before meeting with the President -- said one problem is that "the battle continues inside the White House" over how to interpret the elections. "There is a good deal of ferment there still."

But while many Democrats have criticized the White House for failing to respond to the election results, others said that they think Clinton is a political liability for them that no amount of tinkering can fix. As he walked into the meeting with defeated candidates, one unseated lawmaker whispered to a colleague: "What do you say to the guy who lost your congressional seat?"

The White House, however, said that finger-pointing is counterproductive.

"It's unfortunate that these comments are being made," a White House spokeswoman said. "If you look back at the November election you could blame a lot of people. But that doesn't get you anywhere."

Clinton has acknowledged since the election "that the American public wants something to be done," she said, and is focused on delivering improvement for working Americans.

"It's very important that we learn from this election," Sen. John B. Breaux (D-La.) said in an interview. "Defeats are only important if you don't learn from them."

In health care, Breaux said, "the White House targeted the 15% of Americans who didn't have health insurance and said to them: 'We're going to make your lives a lot better.' Republicans went out to the 85% of those who already had insurance and said: 'If this plan passes, you're going to lose. They're going to take from you to give to them.'

"So we tried to make a majority out of 15% of people. Republicans are trying to create a majority for their position by talking to the 85% of people who had health insurance. And I assure you that their task was a lot easier than ours."

The battle over the direction of the Democratic Party is made more complicated because of the differences between the Senate, which has more moderate Democrats who want the party to move to the center, and the House, which has become more liberal because many of the defeated Democrats were moderates representing conservative to moderate districts, leaving a House minority that largely represents solidly liberal districts.

The Clinton Administration on Friday announced that it would prohibit federal funding for creating human embryos solely for research purposes.

The announcement came on the same day that a National Institutes of Health panel endorsed guidelines that would have allowed funding for such research.

"I do not believe that federal funds should be used to support the creation of human embryos for research purposes," Clinton said, "and I have directed that NIH not allocate any resources for such research."

The decision does not constitute a ban on human embryo research, nor does it prohibit federal funding for research on "spare" human embryos fertilized for possible implantation in patients of in-vitro fertilization clinics.

It applies only to a guideline proposed by an NIH-appointed committee that scientists be allowed, under very special circumstances, to create human embryos specifically for research purposes. That recommendation was the most controversial of a set of proposed guidelines submitted to the NIH in September.

Human embryo research involves studies of the earliest weeks of development of the growing organism, beginning with the fertilization of an egg. It offers the promise of medical benefits such as insight into the processes of fertilization, better treatment for infertility, a clearer understanding of birth defects and improved contraceptive methods.

The developing organism is called a fetus after the end of the eighth week of development. Fetal tissue research -- science that examines how tissues develop later in a pregnancy -- had been prohibited from receiving federal funds during the George Bush Administration; Clinton relaxed that ban upon taking office. Fetal tissue research was not addressed in the recommended embryo research guidelines.

Friday's announcement by the White House constitutes a significant shift in Administration policy. The Clinton Administration had initiated efforts to renew federal funding for human embryo research after an unofficial moratorium during the two previous Republican administrations.

Federal funding for human embryo research was cut off in 1980 when the charter expired for the sole agency that could fund the research. Legislation passed in 1993 made it possible to fund the research once more, and in early 1994, NIH Director Harold E. Varmus appointed the Human Embryo Research Panel to recommend guidelines for reviewing the applications that were already coming in.

Varmus refused to comment on Friday's announcement by the White House. Patricia King, co-chair of the research panel and a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, said: "I don't think that what the President did has as much to do with the merits of embryo research as politics."

King, who as a panel member had expressed reservations about the creation of embryos solely for research, added: "The important thing is that the work gets started -- because it has so much promise."

A senior Administration official said Clinton decided several days ago he would not allow funding for creation of human embryos for research. White House officials staunchly denied that the decision was driven by the Republican sweep in the midterm elections or by the likelihood that the GOP would attack Clinton as a pro-abortion liberal if he allowed such funding.

"He said and he believes that this area raises very profound questions," said William A. Galston, deputy assistant to the President for domestic policy. "It is very, very important that we not transgress ethical boundaries -- even in the name of very great scientific and medical possibilities."

Friday, the high-level NIH Advisory Committee to the Director had voted to accept the controversial report by its Human Embryo Research Panel. The panel had engaged in an arduous nine-month effort to draw boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable forms of research for the government to fund. Panelists received some 50,000 pieces of mail, much of it opposing the research.

In an unprecedented settlement decried by consumer activists, the U.S. government agreed Friday to drop a recall investigation of 5 million General Motors pickup trucks in exchange for a $51-million contribution from the company for safety programs.

Transportation Secretary Federico Pena said he would abandon his earlier ruling that GM's 1973-87 C/K pickup trucks had a safety defect because the agreement would avoid costly litigation and enhance safety programs that could immediately save lives.

"This settlement is a common sense outcome and a victory for safety," Pena said at a news conference in Washington.

But consumer groups, which prompted the government's safety investigation of the vehicles in 1992, harshly criticized the agreement as "unprincipled and irresponsible."

"A multibillion-dollar conglomerate has essentially bought the government's silence for a pittance," said Joan Claybrook, president of Public Citizen and a former administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration under President Jimmy Carter.

She said her group and the Center for Auto Safety, another consumer advocacy group, is considering challenging the agreement in court on behalf of crash victims and their families.

Pena's announcement was a surprising twist in an increasingly bitter and emotional battle over the pickups' safety that began in 1992. It came just four days before a NHTSA public meeting on a potential recall, which could have been the largest and most expensive in the nation's history. The meeting was canceled.

On Oct. 17, Pena made an initial ruling that GM pickups were defective and presented an "unreasonable risk" to consumers because their design made them more susceptible to fires in side-impact collisions. The vehicle's fuel tanks are mounted on the side outside the protective frame.

GM has adamantly maintained that the C/K pickups, sold under Chevrolet and GMC nameplates, are safe and meet all federal safety standards, including those for side-impact collisions. The pickups also have a better overall safety record than most passenger cars, company and government officials said.

"Our position has never wavered that these trucks are not unsafe and do not pose an unreasonable risk to owners who continue to operate them," said GM spokesman Ed Lechtzin.

A recall could have cost GM more than $1 billion, and the company had vowed to fight the case to the U.S. Supreme Court if necessary.

Pena said the settlement was the best option presented to him. If a recall was ordered, the matter would have gone to court and the vehicles would have remained on the road until the case was resolved in five to seven years, he said. If the case was closed, the public would have gotten no benefit.

"Given the options, I decided this kind of agreement was most in the best interest of the public," Pena said.

Pena termed the settlement unique, and safety experts said there has been no other case in which federal regulators had agreed to vacate a recall investigation in return for a corporate donation and cooperation in unrelated safety activities.

The agreement, which was signed by Pena and GM Chief Executive John F. Smith, requires the auto maker to contribute $51 million to a variety of programs identified by NHTSA. The contribution can be in the form of money, facilities or labor, but must be new expenditures not already budgeted by GM.

The agreement calls for GM to cooperate in developing stronger federal side-impact collision standards for fuel systems. The current standard requires gas tanks to withstand a 20 m.p.h. crash. The government would like the threshold doubled to 40 m.p.h. to better mirror real-world conditions.

The auto maker also will help fund a government fire safety research laboratory, contribute to research for burn and trauma victims, crash tests dummies and drunk-driving, and expend $8 million for child-safety seats for low-income families.

"These programs will save hundreds of lives and prevent thousands of injuries," said Pena.

In making his initial determination of defect, Pena said 150 people had died in fiery collisions in the C/K pickups and 32 more would die in subsequent years. He said GM had made a design decision placing "sales over safety." Although the company altered the design in 1988, placing the gas tank within the body frame, Pena said there was evidence that GM knew of the problem in the early 1970s.

Pena's initial recall decision came under fire in recent weeks when it was revealed that it was made against the recommendation of NHTSA's technical staff.

Charles Gauthier, former director of NHTSA's office of defect investigation, said the staff found the C/K pickups do have a greater risk of fire-related fatalities when compared to other similar trucks -- but not an "unreasonable risk" when compared to all cars and trucks.

"We recommended that the defect investigation be closed," said Gauthier, who recently retired after 21 years with NHTSA. He added that the staff then was taken out of the loop and the decision was placed in the hands of political appointees.

The Big Three and foreign auto makers complained about the initial recall decision in letters to President Clinton, asking him to intervene. Pena said that he advised the Administration of Friday's settlement but had no other contact with the White House regarding the decision.

NHTSA began an investigation in December, 1992, shortly after the "Dateline NBC" news program aired a critical show that purported to show GM pickups erupting into flames when hit in the side. But GM proved that NBC rigged the crash tests and the network retracted the story.

In early 1993, the company was rocked when a Georgia jury awarded $105 million to the parents of 17-year-old Shannon Moseley, who died when his C/K pickup burst into flames after being hit in the side. An appeals court overturned the decision in June and sent it back to the lower court for retrial.

GM faces more than 50 product-liability cases involving fire-related deaths and injuries in C/K pickups. It feared that the Dec. 6 public meeting would have provided a podium for trial lawyers to parade burn victims before the public. Claybrook said the victims still plan their own news conference in Washington on Monday.

B.J. Kincade, who heads a victims' recall group, characterized the settlement as a corporate payoff that "amounts to nothing more than a sentence of death" to drivers of these trucks. Case Dates to 1972

The following is a chronology of key events in the dispute between General Motors Corp. and the U.S. Department of Transportation over the safety of GM's full-sized pickup trucks.

1972: GM begins production of the C/K pickup truck, with the fuel tanks located outside the vehicle's frame rails.

February, 1992: GM settles a lawsuit with the family of a 61-year-old GM worker who died in a fire in a 1987 pickup truck.

November, 1992: NBC's "Dateline" broadcasts a report on GM pickup trucks that featured a "simulated crash" of a GM truck. The truck burst into flames. GM claims the explosion was rigged. NBC later apologizes for the report.

December, 1992: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration formerly begins an investigation into GM trucks equipped with the so-called side-saddle fuel tanks.

February, 1993: An Atlanta jury orders GM to pay $105.2 million to the parents of 17-year-old Shannon Moseley, who died in a 1989 crash. The verdict is later thrown out on appeal. The Moseleys are appealing the decision.

April, 1993: NHTSA asks GM to recall the vehicles and launches an engineering analysis.

October, 1993: GM enters into a class-action settlement with full-sized pickup truck owners. The settlement offers owners $1,000 in coupons toward the purchase of a new GM truck to compensate customers who claimed negative publicity had hurt their vehicles' resale values.

October, 1994: Department of Transportation schedules a public hearing for Dec. 6 to collect additional information on the defects.

Dec. 2, 1994: Under a settlement agreement, GM pledges to spend $51.36 million to set up an auto safety fund.

The national economy kept surging during November, adding a surprisingly hefty 350,000 jobs and cutting the unemployment rate to 5.6%, the lowest level in more than four years and down from 5.8% in October, the U.S. Labor Department reported Friday.

But California's jobless level remained unchanged at 7.7%, providing testimony that the state's wobbly recovery still trails far behind the robust national expansion. In Los Angeles County, in fact, the jobless rate rose to 8%, up from 7.8% the month before.

Nationally, "you couldn't ask for a better economy than we have right now," said Ed Yardeni, chief economist for C. J. Lawrence in New York.

Friday's reports reflected a rare combination of big employment gains and flat wages -- suggesting that inflation still poses no immediate threat to the economy, even if it comes at the expense of individual workers who had hoped for bigger pay raises.

That outlook on inflation -- and two other government reports Friday showing declines in the index of leading economic indicators and in factory orders -- bolstered Wall Street by easing concerns about the likelihood of the economy overheating. The Dow Jones industrial average rose 44.75, to 3,745.62, and the price of 30-year Treasury bonds was up more than one point, reducing the interest rate yield to 7.9% from 8.01% Thursday.

All the same, economists predicted that the Federal Reserve, worried about the potential for future inflation, will boost interest rates again when its policy-makers next meet later this month. And that, the analysts say, will give the long-suffering California economy yet another obstacle to overcome.

"It's very good news that the United States is booming for Christmas, but it means that there will be interest rate increases at a time when California is still lagging behind," said Larry Kimbell, director of the UCLA Business Forecasting Project.

Some economists contended that the nation's economic expansion still hasn't reached its peak, citing this week's report of rising consumer confidence, along with the latest employment data and other upbeat news.

"The economy obviously has more momentum than we thought," said Robert Barr, deputy chief economist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. "It's a healthy economy and one we don't think is too strong, or is going out of control."

In a satellite address from the White House to a meeting of the National League of Cities in Minneapolis, President Clinton said Friday's employment reports demonstrated the economy's "strong success in building good jobs for Americans."

Clinton noted that the economy has generated 5.2 million new jobs during his presidency. Meanwhile, the surge of 350,000 jobs during November was significantly higher than the monthly average of 273,000 jobs generated this year.

Yardeni, however, maintained that the collapse of Clinton's health care reform proposals and the major Republican election victories last month have spurred businesses to increase their hiring.

The collapse of health care reform, he said, "eliminates a lot of uncertainties hanging over the heads of business planners," while the Republican gains provide assurance that Washington will be friendlier to business.

While employment grew last month in both construction and manufacturing, those industries were overshadowed by the services sector of the economy, where pay tends to be lower. The economy is "getting a lot of part-time and low-paid jobs," said Markley Roberts, the AFL-CIO assistant director of economic research.

"We're always happy to see an improvement in the economy, but the whole story doesn't appear in those numbers," he said.

Roberts and other skeptics point to a long-running squeeze on family incomes. And in November, average hourly earnings were $11.22, down from $11.24.

The U.S. jobless rate of 5.6% last month was the lowest since August, 1990, when it stood at the same level.

California's jobless rate, at 7.7%, was the worst among the 11 big states whose figures were reported Friday, while North Carolina's level, 4.1%, was the best. If California's figures had not been included, the nation's jobless rate would have been 5.3%, reflecting how much healthier the economy is in the rest of the country.

If there was any good news for California, it was that the state's jobless rate in November remained at its lowest level for the year, and well below the 9% mark where it rested in July.

In addition, according to the monthly survey of employer payrolls, the state's employment total inched up by 3,200 to 11.9 million. That was up 6,000 from November, 1993 -- the first time in four years that California posted a year-over-year job increase.

Moreover, some California economists believe that the monthly employment reports are missing what appears to be a modest recovery under way in the state. Ted Gibson, principal economist for the State Department of Finance, said withholding tax revenues suggest that employment in California actually has grown at a rate of about 15,000 to 20,000 jobs a month all year.

Analysts also pointed to indications that the holiday shopping season got off to a very strong start in Southern California.

In Los Angeles County, even with a rise in the jobless rate to 8% in November, unemployment stayed down from levels that hovered around 10% at midyear. Still, that improvement could reflect seasonal hiring rather than any strengthening of the underlying economy, said Vincent M. Canales, labor market analyst with the California Employment Development Department.

In fact, Canales said the latest Los Angeles County figures -- which, unlike the federal and state figures, are not adjusted for seasonal trends -- were disappointing in that "you would expect to see some improvement this time of year" in employment.

November's 8% county jobless rate was based on a survey putting the number of unemployed at 355,000, up 6,000 from the month before, while employment fell to 4.083 million, down 38,000 from October's level.

Rosenblatt reported from Washington and Silverstein from Los Angeles. Jobless Rates

These are U.S. and California unemployment rates, in percentages, over the last year: 03,07,06,08 U.S. Calif. Nov. 5.6 7.7 Oct. 5.8 7.7 Sept. 5.9 8.3 Aug. 6.1 8.9 July 6.1 9 June 6.0 8.3 May 6.0 8.3 April 6.4 9.6 March 6.5 8.6 Feb. 6.5 9.0 Jan. 6.7% 10.1 Dec. 6.4 8.7 Nov. 6.5 8.6

Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss, who ran a notorious ring of high-priced, short-skirted prostitutes for Los Angeles glitterati, was convicted Friday on pandering charges that carry a prison sentence of up to nearly nine years.

The seven-man, five-woman jury spent four days deliberating in Los Angeles Superior Court before reaching a verdict in the steamy case that titillated the nation and rekindled the age-old debate about whether prostitution should be considered a crime.

After back-and-forth shifts of opinion -- and some misgivings after they delivered their verdicts -- the jury convicted Fleiss, 28, the daughter of a prominent pediatrician, on three counts of pandering. It deadlocked on the other two counts and found her not guilty on one count of supplying cocaine to an undercover police officer.

Judge Judith L. Champagne set a preliminary hearing on sentencing for Jan. 20, but no firm sentencing date was set.

Fleiss dropped her head to the table when the second "guilty" verdict rang through the courtroom and sat slumped for a few moments. Then, as the third and final "guilty" was announced, she raised her head and slammed her hand on the table.

*

She sat grim-faced through the rest of the court proceedings, sighing at one point, throwing her head back at another. Her father, Paul Fleiss -- with whom she faces a federal court trial in January on related charges of money laundering and tax evasion -- hung his head in the first row of the courtroom seats.

A grand jury indicted Heidi Fleiss in September, 1993, after a complex, multi-agency sting operation. Her arrest shook Hollywood, which instantly began to buzz with rumors -- never publicly verified -- that her clientele included entertainment industry figures.

The key player in the sting operation was Sammy Lee, a Beverly Hills police officer who posed as Hawaiian millionaire Niko Akai to catch Fleiss supplying prostitutes.

Prosecutor Alan Carter said the verdict "demonstrates how wrong people have been about juries. There's been a lot of jury bashing," but this case's panel came to a reasonable verdict, Carter said.

However, the jury forewoman, Sheila Mitrowski, a 48-year-old phone company clerical worker from Bell Gardens, revealed that there had been a struggle to reach unanimous decisions.

When deliberations began Tuesday after a six-day trial, she said, the jury was split evenly on Fleiss' guilt. Mitrowski said she, along with three other women and two men, initially believed that Fleiss should be acquitted.

Eventually, she said, jurors decided that they could not entirely accept the reasoning of Fleiss' attorney Anthony Brooklier, who contended that his client had been entrapped by police.

But Mitrowski was stunned after the verdict was announced when a reporter told her that Fleiss' conviction carries mandatory prison time -- at least three years.

"Oh no, that's way too much," she said. "You've got kids out on the streets dealing drugs, for crying out loud, and they get probation."

The possibility that Fleiss' clients might be unveiled in her trial thrust the high school dropout into the national spotlight, transforming her virtually overnight into a celebrity, fare for tabloids as well as highbrow magazines. One senior Columbia Pictures executive even issued a statement at the time of her arrest denying that his name was in Fleiss' black book.

There are several versions of how Fleiss became a madam.

By her own telling, she established herself after working as an assistant for onetime Beverly Hills madam Elizabeth Adams. Fleiss maintained that she was Adams' assistant, not a "working girl." But according to a search warrant affidavit, Fleiss was "Elizabeth Adams' No. 1 'girl' until she broke off . . . to start her own prostitution business."

However, Adams (known as Madam Alex) has a different account, as does Fleiss' ex-beau, Hungarian director Ivan Nagy.

Nagy said he told Madam Alex about his new girlfriend, and was shocked when she replied that Fleiss worked for her.

Fleiss maintained her own business for two years before running afoul of police, according to police surveillance tapes of her phone conversations. It was hardly a clandestine operation. There were wild parties, including a bash for Mick Jagger that trashed Fleiss' house. There was almost constant club-hopping arm in arm with one celebrity or another.

It was a time of giddy days and gallivanting nights that abruptly ended when the 1993 undercover sting operation at a lavish Beverly Hills hotel suite resulted in Fleiss' arrest. There, hidden cameras recorded the activities of four women dispatched by Fleiss to entertain four police officers posing as Japanese businessmen celebrating a deal.

To buttress the case, police also had taped the phone conversations between Fleiss and Beverly Hills Detective Lee that led up to the two fateful assignations with prostitutes on two consecutive evenings. In those conversations, Lee explained to Fleiss that he wanted one woman to arrive June 8, and four women the next evening when his colleagues arrived. He also asked Fleiss to provide a small quantity of cocaine for the second evening -- a request that she said would be "no problem," according to tapes.

*

The video as well as the audiotapes were played for the jury. The videotape captured the four women accepting $1,500 in $100 dollar bills, discussing which sexual acts they were prepared to perform and engaging in small talk as the officers pretended to speak Japanese. The four women also partially disrobed as they danced, hummed and clapped -- a signal that summoned about 20 officers for the arrest.

The tapes proved to be the cornerstone of the case. "There really is no dispute about what the facts are," prosecutor Carter told the jury in his closing argument.

But the controversy in court centered on how to interpret those tapes. Carter used them to characterize Fleiss as a shrewd businesswoman, eager to peddle her wares. Defense attorney Brooklier and co-counsel Donald Marks painted a completely different picture.

With the same tapes, they sought to portray Fleiss as the victim of overzealous police who entrapped her, inducing her to commit a crime that she would not have done on her own. They also tried to downplay the gravity of pandering, pointing out that prostitution is legal in Nevada and saying that the male customers are not prosecuted equally for their part in such crimes in Los Angeles.

Brooklier and Carter had squared off on a similar case three years ago, when Brooklier defended Adams on charges that she used her Sunset Strip house to pimp and pander, and tried to enlist an undercover policewoman into the prostitution ring. Adams received probation instead of jail time because police testified that she was an informant. Carter was the prosecutor in that case.

In the months before Fleiss' trial for pandering, her problems grew. She was arrested in September after drug tests -- a term of her probation -- indicated that she had used stimulants and depressants. As a result of those tests, she was assigned to a Pasadena-based drug rehabilitation program, where she spent two months. As a condition of her release from the program, she undergoes drug tests five days a week.

In federal court, Fleiss and her father were charged in August with money laundering, bank fraud and conspiracy to hide her income from her prostitution ring. Daughter and father have pleaded not guilty to those charges. That trial, scheduled for January, may well unveil the identities of Fleiss' clients because many reportedly wrote checks to her from personal accounts.

After the jury convicted Fleiss, prosecutor Carter said that because of her pending federal trial and a past bail violation, she should be remanded immediately into custody or released on bail as high as $500,000.

Judge Champagne instead set bail at $75,000, which Fleiss posted.

The district attorney's office has not made a decision on whether to retry Fleiss on the two deadlocked counts, spokeswoman Suzanne Childs said. The Verdicts

List of verdicts by count announced Friday in the Heidi Fleiss pandering trial:

1. Procuring for prostitution Samantha Burdette on the night of June 8, 1993. Deadlocked

2. Procuring for prostitution Samantha Burdette on the night of June 9, 1993. Deadlocked

3. Procuring for prostitution Brandi McClain on the night of June 9, 1993. Guilty

4. Procuring for prostitution Kimberly Burch on the night of June 9, 1993. Guilty

5. Procuring for prostitution Peggy Schinke on the night of June 9, 1993. Guilty

6. Sale or transportation of a controlled substance, cocaine, on the night of June 9, 1993. Not guilty

Just west of this quiet farming community -- a continent away from the stark, black wall in Washington that commemorates Americans killed in Vietnam -- are three weedy and rocky fields that are host to an equally chilling, if less dignified, memorial to the same war.

The fields, part of the sprawling Fallbrook Naval Weapons Station, contain an enduring symbol of that divisive conflict: more than 35,000 canisters filled with 23 million pounds of napalm, a deadly brew of benzene, gasoline and polystyrene plastic that turns into a flaming syrupy mass when ignited by white phosphorus.

Twenty years have passed since the fall of Saigon, but the best and brightest have yet to find a way to dispose of the Vietnam War's final cache of liquid fire.

Like chemical combatants ready for inspection, the cigar-shaped, olive drab canisters are arranged in neat rows with military precision, each 15-foot-long canister encased in its own open-sided wood crate, row after row, acre after acre, exposed for two decades to the wind and sun and rain.

An eerie stillness envelops the napalm fields of Fallbrook, broken only by the muffled sounds of heavy artillery being used miles away by the Marines training at Camp Pendleton.

Some of the napalm canisters are still stamped with the manufacturer's 30-day warranty attesting to the contents' killing power. A few are leaking a gooey residue. Those that cannot be patched are taken to a toxic dump in Arkansas.

The specter of napalm bombs being dropped by American jets once aroused passionate debate, but the fate of this forgotten stockpile has now become a low-key battle of attrition, a bureaucratic mix of environmental concerns, budgetary restraints and governmental red tape.

The residents of Fallbrook, a rural and politically conservative community in northern San Diego County, have learned to live with the napalm -- which is said to be non-flammable without its detonators -- and with the occasional promise that there is light at the end of the hazardous waste tunnel.

Technicians and environmentalists, mindful that benzene is a carcinogen and that the crates are soaked with a toxic wood preserver, periodically check for leakage and air pollution. But mostly the canisters just serve as a staging area for jack rabbits, rattlesnakes and field rats.

In a few weeks the Navy will officially launch its fourth attempt to win its war against the napalm, this time by paying a company to extract it from the aluminum canisters and send it by rail across the country for use as fuel in high-temperature kilns at cement plants.

"This time we think we have a better handle on it," said Richard Williamson, spokesman for the Naval Ordnance Center, Pacific Division, headquartered in Seal Beach, and point man for the napalm project.

The process, if it works, could take five years or more and cost $12 million to $18 million. Throw in the cost of cleaning up the three fields where the napalm has been stored, and the price tag jumps to more than $24 million.

After keeping the press at bay for years, the Navy has decided to try to rehabilitate the weapon's image by allowing journalists to visit the napalm fields. Fallbrook residents have been offered tours.

"We're trying to demystify napalm," Williamson said.

*

Perhaps more than any other word associated with the Vietnam conflict, napalm came to define the sides in a bitter national -- and international -- debate.

In 1972 and 1974, the United Nations General Assembly passed resolutions condemning the use of napalm and other incendiary weapons. The United States and the Soviet Union, which had supplied napalm to the North Vietnamese for their flamethrowers, abstained.

In movies, books and poems, napalm has repeatedly entered into the cultural, intellectual and political discourse.

The debate over whether the Americans would have used the new, more lethal napalm against a Caucasian enemy hiding among Caucasian civilians is one of the irresolvable issues of Vietnam. In her Pulitzer Prize-winning book "Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam," Frances Fitzgerald wrote:

"In Europe (during World War II), the Americans rejected the use of chemical warfare, but in Vietnam they used napalm, phosphorus, tear gas, and various kinds of defoliants as a general practice and in such quantities as to render certain parts of the country uninhabitable."

One of the most searing images of the war was a 1972 picture by an Associated Press photographer that showed Vietnamese children, including a naked 9-year-old girl, running in terror after their village had accidentally been struck by napalm.

In Francis Ford Coppola's film "Apocalypse Now" -- seen as a polemic against the war -- the substance is a malevolent character in its own right. The war-loving Lt. Col. Kilgore, played by Robert Duvall, delivers the famous line, "I love the smell of napalm in the morning."

Even movies and books that take no overt position on the morality or the politics of the war have included napalm scenes as a shorthand method of evoking the carnage and confusion of battle.

In this year's hit movie "Forrest Gump," the simpleton hero played by Tom Hanks finds himself in Vietnam and acting bravely when his unit is caught in a napalm strike.

In the novel by Winston Groom, Gump says: "At dawn they call in a napalm airplane, but it drop the (stuff) damn near right on top of us. Our own fellers be all singed an burnt up -- come runnin out into the open, eyes big as biscuits, everybody cussing an sweating an scared, woods set on fire, damn near put the rain out!"

Despite its horrific image among many Americans, troops in the field said napalm saved innumerable American lives by repelling advances by the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army.

Scholar Guenter Lewy, in his book "America in Vietnam," argued that anti-war activists overstated their claims.

"The impression created by critics of the war that many thousands of villagers and children were burnt by napalm is undoubtedly false," said Lewy, who based his book on millions of pages of secret military documents.

Still, Lewy also doubted military assertions that napalm and other incendiary weapons were used with surgical precision and only as a last resort. In truth, commanders enjoyed wide latitude to call for air strikes on civilians when they believed that the enemy was hiding among them, he concluded.

"The rather free use of napalm and attacks upon fortified hamlets with artillery and air strikes can be criticized on humanitarian grounds, and, moreover, were often counterproductive," Lewy wrote.

Whatever the truth about the number of civilian casualties from napalm, it cannot be denied that its use became a rallying point for those opposed to the war.

In one of the angriest of his anti-war poems, Allen Ginsberg wrote: "Under the world there's pain, fractured thighs, napalm burning in black hair, phosphorous eating elbows to the bone."

Demonstrators besieged Dow Chemical Co., which made much of the napalm used in the war. Dowrecruiters were chased off several college campuses.

In the Wall Street Journal, Dow President Ted Doan tried to answer charges that Dow, in making napalm, was acting as immorally as the German industrialists who had supplied the ovens for the Nazi concentration camps:

"We reject the validity of comparing our present form of government with Hitler's Nazi Germany. In our mind our government is still representative of and responsive to the will of the people. . . . We plan to continue making napalm because we feel that so long as the United States is sending men to war, it is unthinkable that we would not supply the materials they need."

Napalm was invented by chemists from Harvard University and the Army Chemical Warfare Service for use in flamethrowers carried by U.S. troops in World War II. The name comes from its chemical constituents, napthene and palmitate.

By 1965, the Air Force had developed a new formula for napalm to increase its range and destructive power. The old napalm had merely thrown out a column of quickly extinguished flame.

The new napalm used in Vietnam, which could be spread by flamethrowers or dropped from jets, spread out quickly, stuck to surfaces -- trees, bamboo huts, clothing, skin -- and continued burning.

Once armed with phosphorus ignition fuses at either end, the 500-pound canisters were strapped beneath Navy and Air Force jets, most frequently to be dropped at low levels for accuracy. The napalm fire reached temperatures of 5,000 degrees, so hot it sucked out all the air in its path.

Today, the United States has eliminated napalm from its arsenal.

*

In 1978 the Air Force declared the Fallbrook napalm to be surplus and ordered it demilitarized. But three stratagems by the Navy and environmental agencies in the intervening years to have it carted off and buried or recycled for civilian uses have failed for economic or regulatory reasons.

"It doesn't scare me anymore," said Jennifer Gaggero, who can see some of the canisters on the horizon from the back of the Good Earth nursery she runs with her parents. "I used to be worried about lightning striking it, but you can only worry about something for so long and then you have to stop."

Navy and civilian officials insist that for all its fiery legacy, the napalm poses no danger to Fallbrook and that only the ultra hot temperatures induced by burning white phosphorus can ignite napalm. Even the heat of a blowtorch would not be sufficient to ignite the stored napalm, officials say.

"It's an unusual problem, but it doesn't present any immediate health hazards to anyone," said Rich Varenchik, spokesman for the state Department of Toxic Substance Control. "We could give them a deadline to have the stuff out but we're not inclined to do that."

The latest attempt to rid the community of the napalm hopes to capitalize on the mistakes of the past.

The first three attempts -- by Barstow Truck in 1982, Bud's Oil from Phoenix in 1983, and Palm Enterprises from Monrovia in 1992 -- ran into money trouble, got mired in regulations or otherwise failed to meet the Navy's satisfaction. The abandoned and rusting remains of the removal machinery devised by Palm Enterprises still litter one of the fields.

This time, the Navy hopes to hire Battelle Memorial Institute of Richland, Wash., which has a proven record of working on hazardous materials and high-technology matters for the Department of Energy.

The firm will be asked to build a facility at the Fallbrook base to extract the napalm from the aluminum canisters -- like toothpaste being squeezed from giant tubes, Williamson said -- without exposing any of it to the air.

The plan is to extract the napalm into railroad tanker cars, smelt the aluminum for scrap, and chop up and detoxify the wooden crates to be made into particle board.

In this round, there may be less interagency wrangling over the disposal.

Previously, the federal and state Environmental Protection Agencies have been involved with the napalm issue. So have San Diego County water quality and air pollution agencies. At one point, the federal EPA became concerned that the napalm canisters were disturbing the nests of the Stephen's kangaroo rat, an endangered species.

The Navy is taking the position that local permits are not needed because the effort is being carried out under an executive order to clean up toxic sites at military bases as quickly as possible. The local pollution control agency disagrees, but so far has just engaged in a polite volley of letters.

Officials from the weapons station, which is on Ammunition Way, plan a public hearing next month in Fallbrook to brief the public on the latest disposal plan.

Charley Wolk, a civic leader, avocado grower and retired Marine lieutenant colonel who ordered napalm strikes during Vietnam, does not figure that Fallbrook residents will show much interest. The community, Wolk said, has a heavy contingent of retired military personnel who know that defused napalm is not combustible.

"Nobody who has lived in Fallbrook for very long is afraid of napalm," he said. "You could roll those canisters down the main street and you wouldn't scare anybody." Napalm Fields

Three fields in the Fallbrook Naval Weapons Station contain 35,000 canisters filled with 23 million pounds of napalm from the Vietnam War. The Navy hopes to finally dispose of them in the next five years.

The problems at Orange County's investment fund drew mounting concern and scrutiny Friday as investors, members of Congress, federal regulators and credit monitors assessed the full implications of a stunning $1.5-billion plunge in the value of the fund's holdings.

While county leaders continued to call for calm, four top investors in the troubled county-managed fund moved to oversee future dealings on behalf of 185 cities and special districts that had pooled their money for investment purposes.

A major Wall Street credit rating agency signaled that it may lower the ratings of Orange County bond issues, an action that could make it more costly for cities and agencies to borrow money.

In other action Friday:

* The Securities and Exchange Commission launched an informal inquiry into the situation.

* The new chairman of the Senate Banking Committee announced that congressional hearings will investigate whether limits should be placed on the use of public monies in the complex financial instruments that have helped drive down the value of Orange County's previously high-flying fund.

* An Orange County assemblyman said he will introduce legislation in Sacramento on Monday to curb the risky investment strategies used by Treasurer-Tax Collector Robert L. Citron, who continued to face calls for his resignation. Citron remained locked in his office; sheriff's deputies ordered reporters away from his door.

* Nervous investors -- who directly or through mutual funds own tax-exempt municipal bondssold by Orange County or related agencies -- flooded phone lines of large funds such as the Franklin-Templeton Group of Funds in San Mateo.

County treasury officials still were reeling from their explosive disclosure Thursday that risky investment maneuvers had combined with sharply rising interest rates to produce losses equivalent to 20% of the money invested by various government agencies. On Friday, they visited with their major bond underwriters.

"I'm not going to make any dire predictions," said County Administrative Officer Ernie Schneider, who has hired an outside investment adviser to assess the potential damages. "I think we're telling people the straight situation. We're not trying to hide it from anyone. We're just laying it out."

Although no agencies had pulled out of the fund Friday, some city officials with money in the portfolio say they now wish they had withdrawn earlier this year, when interest rates began rising and it was becoming apparent that the fund's bets were wrong.

"In 20-20 hindsight, I should have done more, but the pool looked good," said David Dixon, the city manager of Orange, who said he realized when he took the job in March that the city had too much money in the fund. He earlier pulled $7 million of Orange's $31-million investment out of the fund.

"I was the new guy in the county and was told not to rock the boat," Dixon said.

SEC officials would not be specific about the nature of their inquiry.

"In general, we look for a lack of disclosure from whoever is marketing the securities to a government entity or a lack of disclosure from the government entity to its bondholders," said commissioner Richard Roberts. "I don't know too much about the Orange County situation, but my current concern is that state and local governments are using too many volatile financial instruments."

At issue is the county's massive use of leverage, or money borrowed short-term, to buy long-term bonds in a bet that interest rates would decline this year. As rates instead have rocketed, the fund's portfolio has tumbled in value.

In addition, the county's holdings of $8.5 billion in "derivatives" -- investments that typically involve more complex bets on the direction of interest rates -- have sparked renewed criticism of the often volatile hybrid securities, which have caused losses for myriad other investors nationwide this year.

Although the county's investment strategy produced above-average returns for its investors while interest rates were falling from 1990 through 1993, national financial experts question whether investors had a clear understanding of the risk that Citron was taking with their money.

"I've been in contact with folks who had invested in Orange County and asked them if they knew the risks and they'd always say, 'I don't know if it's good or bad, but (Citron) has always impressed me,' " said Jeff Spies, treasurer of St. Petersburg, Fla. "The lack of understanding had always bothered me."

A measure of how dire Orange County's situation has become is reflected in how rapidly the fund's cash holdings have dwindled in the past month. At the end of October, the assistant treasurer told an investor that the county had $2 billion in liquid assets. By Friday, the cash on hand was down to $350 million.

One reason investors in the pool may not be too worried about its cash flow situation, however, is that the county is about to get a tremendous infusion of capital: Property tax bills are due as of Dec. 10. Homeowners are required to forward 50% of their taxes this month. Citron reported in September that full-year receipts total more than $2.1 billion.

County officials have insisted that even though the portfolio's paper loss now amounts to 20% of the funds clients have invested, there will be little, if any, real loss if investors stay put, allowing the fund's bonds to mature at full value over the next few years.

Under a worst-case scenario, if cities, school districts and other investors withdraw their money, the resulting losses would hurt municipal coffers across Orange County and could stop road and sewer projects.

Based on Orange County's experience, the incoming chairman of the Senate Banking Committee said he will conduct hearings on municipal finance.

"Congress and the regulators have already focused attention on derivatives activities due to losses suffered by corporations, investment funds and government entities," said Sen. Alfonse D'Amato (R-N.Y.). "Today's loss will most certainly lead to increased scrutiny by . . . Congress."

In California, Assemblyman Curt Pringle (R-Garden Grove) said he planned to introduce a bill when the Legislature convenes Monday to help thwart such a crisis in the future. Pringle said he began crafting the legislation in June with the help of John Moorlach, the accountant who predicted Orange County's current problem but was defeated by Citron in the race for treasurer in June.

The measure will propose a series of technical changes in state law to reduce the risks that investment managers can take with taxpayer dollars. It also aims to ensure that local governments have a better idea of the true value of their investments and the risks they are taking.

The four major investors in the pool said Friday they want to review the independent findings of the county's investment adviser and help plan financial strategy for the future.

The Orange County Transportation Authority, the Transportation Corridor Agencies (which is building the state's first toll roads), the Orange County Sanitation Districts and the Irvine Ranch Water District have agreed to form a review committee. Together, they have more than $2 billion in the fund.

On Friday, Citron pulled the blinds of his office and worked the phone in an attempt to ease the investors' fears. His second-in-command met with brokers in Los Angeles.

State Assemblyman Mickey Conroy (R-Orange) and State Sen. John Lewis (R-Orange) have called for Citron's resignation.

Prices of some Orange County bonds dropped slightly Friday, about $5 per $1,000 face value, amid concerns that county investment losses could harm bond issues. But bond traders and managers of tax-exempt mutual funds said that virtually no Orange County bonds were offered for sale on Friday anyway, on the expectation that no one would buy them.

After the county's announcement Thursday, large mutual funds and brokers worked to alleviate investors' fears. Merrill Lynch, which has extended $2 billion in credit to the county for securities purchases, held a telephone conference with more than 30 holders of bonds issued by the county and its cities to assure them that the paper is solid.

Representatives from two credit rating agencies -- Moody's Investors Services and Standard & Poor's Ratings Group -- recently met with Orange County officials and expressed their concerns about the county's financial stability.

Times staff writers Debora Vrana, Gebe Martinez, Michael Hiltzik, Tom Petruno, Eric Bailey and Ross Kerber contributed to this story.

More on Derivatives: * Reprints of a Times article explaining the complex transactions known as derivatives are available from Times on Demand. Call 808-8463 and press *8630. Select option 1. Order Item No. 2810. $2.95. What Went Wrong

The Orange County investment fund's crisis was brought on by the same strategy that enhanced Treasurer-Tax Collector Robert L. Citron's returns in recent years: the use of borrowed money to bet on falling interest rates.

LEVERAGE: Using loans from brokerages, the fund has borrowed a massive $12.9 billion on top of the $7.7 billion invested by client. Virtually all of the money has been invested in bonds.

RATES TURN: As interest rates have soared this year, the fund's borrowing costs have jumped while the value of its bonds has tumbled. That has squeezed the fund's earnings and caused its overall porfolio value to drop.

LOSSES?: So far, the fund's losses are only on paper. But if it is forced to sell its bonds before they mature, the losses would become real. They would have to be shared by the government agencies whose money the fund manages and, potentially, by taxpayers.

WHAT'S AHEAD: The fund's challenge now is to pay off its loans as its investments mature. But a further rise in interest rates or demands for cash by its government investors could hamstring efforts to work out the problems. Fund Performance

For years, Citron's fund has dramatically outgunned similar government investment pools, including one managed for local agencies by the California Treasurer's Office. But in recent months, their results have begun to converge.

Sources: Orange County Treasurer; Investment Division, California Treasurer's Office

As many as 10,000 Cubans detained in camps at U.S. military bases in Cuba and Panama will be considered for parole into the United States on humanitarian grounds, the Clinton Administration announced Friday.

In reversing a policy against granting asylum to Cubans who fled their homeland on makeshift rafts last summer, the Administration has bowed to mounting pressure from the exile community here to end the indefinite tent city internment of children and their immediate families.

"This government has always shown it has a big heart," said Miami city manager Cesar Odio, who heads a coalition of Cuban American groups that has lobbied for the refugees' release. "And those people were never going to stay in those camps."

In a statement, U.S. Atty. Gen. Janet Reno said that only children and their immediate relatives would be considered for parole and that all must have "full financial sponsorship" in the United States.

There are about 3,000 children under the age of 17 in the camps in Panama and at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay on Cuba's Southeast coast.

Doris Meissner, who heads the federal Immigration and Naturalization Service, told a Washington press conference Friday that she could not estimate the number of Cubans who might qualify for parole as "extraordinary hardship cases." She added that living in the barren tent city encampments does not constitute a hardship.

But Cuban American leaders in Miami expressed confidence that all minors would be paroled and that, including their relatives, between 8,000 and 10,000 Cubans would start to arrive here within days.

The announcement from Washington had been expected for weeks. It came after a meeting in the capital Thursday between Michael Skol, deputy assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, and representatives of Miami Cuban American groups, who offered assurance that sponsors for all the refugees had been lined up.

"They will not be a burden to the taxpayers of the United States," said Odio.

Of more than 32,000 Cuban rafters picked up at sea and held in the detention camps, only about 500 have been admitted to the United States. Most of those are unaccompanied minors, the elderly, or persons with severe medical problems. All were granted humanitarian parole.

About 23,000 Cubans are being held at Guantanamo, while about 9,000 others are in Panama. Fewer than 200 have been repatriated to Cuba.

Although denied automatic entry to this country since August, any Cuban who does enter the country will still benefit from the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966, which allows for permanent residency after one year.

The release of all children and their immediate families will leave about 20,000 Cubans in the detention camps, most of them single men and women. Privately, most Cuban American leaders here expect that these Cubans, too, eventually will be permitted to come to the United States, perhaps by qualifying for one of 20,000 visas that the Administration has agreed to make available.

But Odio said that those who remain in the camps will have to wait. "They are another chapter in this long history; we have to be patient," he said.

"One of the goals is to see we don't have another rafters' crisis."

No timetable was given for bringing the Cuban children and their families to the United States, although Odio said that "once organized, there will be two to three flights a week." Most of the refugees are expected to stay in South Florida, although as many as 30% could be resettled in other Cuban communities in New Jersey, New York and California.

When Clinton slammed the door on the rafters on Aug. 19 as a way of stopping the chaotic exodus, most Cuban Americans in Miami supported the move as a tough response to Cuban President Fidel Castro. But the anguish provoked in the Cuban community here by the sight of relatives and fellow Cubans behind barbed wire quickly turned into intense pressure on the Administration.

The cost of resettling up to 10,000 people has been estimated at $15 million. The Cuban American National Foundation and other groups said that they have pledges for as much as half that amount now.

If necessary, several airlines have offered special charter flights to bring the refugees to Miami and private schools have said that they would provide scholarships to emigre children to relieve pressure on the public school system.

Times staff writer Robert L. Jackson contributed to this story from Washington.

When clashes broke out last month between Islamic militants and Palestinian police in the turbulent Gaza Strip, many feared the seeds of anarchy and -- most feared of all -- the outbreak of Palestinian civil war.

Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, moved quickly to quell the violence and establish a shaky cease-fire with the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas.

But days later, Palestinian fighting erupted in this southern Lebanese port city, home to Lebanon's largest and most turbulent Palestinian refugee camp, Ein al Hilwa. It had disturbing echoes of the violence in Gaza and a message for those who believed that Arafat's self-rule authority would bring peace to the Palestinians.

It has not.

The 60,000 Palestinians who call Ein al Hilwa's narrow streets and cramped housing home have little stake in the Palestinian Authority miles away in Gaza and the West Bank town of Jericho. Most have no hope of returning to their Palestinian villages in Israel and the territories.

Yet their factions closely mirror the Palestinian groups now struggling for supremacy in Gaza.

And the recent violence that broke out in Lebanon against Arafat's Fatah loyalists and Islamic rebels opposed to the peace with Israel was a clear sign that Syria is prepared to exercise its muscle among Palestinians in Lebanon to score points in the peace process, many analysts say.

Syria, whose 40,000 troops in Lebanon make it the only real power broker in the small, war-ravaged nation, seemed to be sending a signal of its own when anti-Arafat rebels in Ein al Hilwa ordered Arafat's Fatah loyalists out of the area once and for all, diplomatic sources said.

Although Syria has no troops in southern Lebanon, it is Damascus that calls the shots with the Lebanese army forces that surrounded Ein al Hilwa; it is Damascus that hosts the bulk of the Palestinian opposition to Arafat.

"This fighting had one very prominent signature: Hafez al Assad (the Syrian president)," said one Middle Eastern diplomat in Egypt. "He is a very smart man, and he demonstrated to everyone that he still holds the Palestinian card."

The intra-Palestinian fighting in Lebanon coincided with a concerted media attack against Israel in Damascus this week as public despair over Syrian-Israeli peace talks heated up on the eve of an expected visit to the region by Secretary of State Warren Christopher.

"It goes without saying that the current Israeli position will never help the secretary of state to achieve anything that might mend the flaw that has afflicted the peace process or to scatter the climate of frustration that shrouds the process," Al-Thawra, the Syrian government-run daily, said Thursday.

Ein al Hilwa has been the unhappy scene of intra-Palestinian fighting for years, most notably between pro-Arafat Fatah loyalists and the dissident, violent Abu Nidal faction. But serious trouble started brewing after the September, 1993, signing of the peace accord between Israel and the PLO. Mounir Makdah, Arafat's erstwhile Fatah forces commander in Lebanon, then broke away -- in opposition to the accord -- and formed his own opposition force.

He has allied himself with the Shiite Muslim group Hezbollah, and his political outlook closely mirrors that of Hamas in Gaza.

Thus, there was a sense of deja vu to the clashes in Ein al Hilwa, which pitted Fatah loyalists against dissidents led by Makdah. Muslim fundamentalists from Islamic Jihad, Hamas and other Syrian-backed dissidents sided with Makdah in the fighting, which left 10 dead and at least 25 others wounded.

Makdah, in an interview, said it is no wonder that Palestinians in Lebanon are disillusioned with the peace agreement Arafat signed with Israel. "There are 4 million Palestinians outside Palestine. Arafat's signing left most of them without a solution," he said.

Loyalty to Arafat persists, despite opposition to the peace treaty, he said, because of the $450,000 a month in aid the PLO dispatches to Ein al Hilwa. "Their stomachs support Arafat," Makdah said of Fatah loyalists.

Times special correspondent Raschka was recently on assignment in Sidon, and staff writer Murphy reported from Cairo.

While American voters have been agonizing over which political course will give them the best government in the 1990s, the question posed here has taken a pecuniary turn: How much should an able politician be paid?

The debate was provoked by a government proposal to link salaries of top officials directly to incomes of the highest-paid executives in private industry. While many Singaporeans accept some form of linkage, there was shock at the size of the pay packages being considered.

Tiny Singapore, with a population of only 3 million, already pays its prime minister $797,000 a year, nearly four times what President Clinton earns. A top Cabinet minister earns $535,000 a year, compared to $148,000 for his counterparts in the United States.

The contrast is even more dramatic with Singapore's Asian neighbors. President Fidel V. Ramos of the Philippines, for example, has to get by on pay of $1,036 a year.

Singaporean Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong appealed for public support of his proposal, saying the increase should be seen in the perspective of Singapore's recent economic success.

Goh said the total cost of salaries for top political appointees is $15 million, which he described as "small beer" when compared to Singapore's $60-billion-a-year economy. He suggested Singaporeans weigh that "against the cost to you of having an incompetent and corrupt government."

Singapore's bureaucracy is regarded as one of the least corrupt in Asia, which the government attributes to its policy of paying salaries competitive with the private sector. Last year, all civil servants received an end-of-the-year bonus of 3 1/2 months' pay as a reward for the country's sterling economic performance.

Under the government's new plan, minister salaries will be set by averaging incomes of the four highest-paid executives in six industries: banking, accounting, engineering, law, manufacturing and multinational firms. In 1992, the average salary taken from tax returns worked out to $845,000. Ministers will have their salary "benchmarked" at one-third less than the private industry average.

"This figure will be a visible demonstration of the sacrifice involved in becoming a minister," said a government White Paper on the pay proposal.

But a number of Singaporeans seemed unconvinced that ministers are suffering.

Ow Chin Hock, head of the government's Feedback Unit, a kind of informal polling group that the government uses to gauge reaction to public issues, told Parliament that initial reaction to the pay proposals was "highly negative."

"Singapore is a small place. People know the salaries of some of the ministers before they entered public service," Ow said. "If their previous salaries were lower than what they earn now, it is very difficult to persuade these people that the ministers are making a financial sacrifice."

The outpouring of criticism for a government policy is rare in Singapore, where a single party has ruled since 1959. In the last election, the ruling party's majority dropped to 61% of the vote, but opposition parties won only four of the 81 seats in Parliament.

The pay debate highlights the extraordinary transformation that has taken place in Singapore in the last 30 years. Per capita income is now $16,000 a year, more than in New Zealand and Spain.

It was left to Lee Kuan Yew, a senior minister in the government and the father of modern Singapore, to have the last word. He said ministers made a difference to Singaporeans' lives, and citizens should not begrudge them salaries they deserve.

The proposal was adopted by a 61-6 parliamentary vote. Goh promised that an independent panel will scrutinize the private sector figures and the prime minister's pay annually to ensure they are in line. He said the government will try the formula for five years before it is reviewed. How Much Is Too Much?

In Singapore, a controversy has erupted over just how much top officials should be paid. The government wants their salaries to be roughly linked to those paid in private industry. But critics note that such a plan would make leaders of this small nation among the world's best compensated.

How base salaries compare: 03,15,29,22 Country President or prime minister Top Cabinet minister Singapore $797,000 $535,000 United States $200,000 $148,000 Japan $356,537 $260,141 Australia $242,797 $160,678 Philippines $1,036 $840 Source: Singapore White paper on Pay; Japanese, Australian and Philippines governments.

No one is quite sure how long the man sat in the patio chair in his darkened basement.

When a gas meter reader finally found him Thursday, he was still comfortably dressed in a woolly blue and white sweater, sweat pants and slippers.Except that his head was missing.

The seated, skeletal remains were so decomposed that the skull had apparently toppled away, police said.

Authorities tentatively identified the body Friday as that of Long Lu Lee, 69, a mechanical engineer.

When Lee died -- and how -- remained a mystery. A woman who investigators believe was Lee's wife, Thuc Khoanh Lu, 62, was providing few answers, authorities said.

Lu told police she had not seen her husband for several months. But police could not find a missing-person report, said Sgt. Edward Caro, a police spokesman.

The results of an autopsy Friday were inconclusive and doctors will conduct more tests.

Brooklyn Union Gas Co. had been trying, unsuccessfully, to read the meter at the home in the borough of Queens for more than a year, said spokesman Ed Yutkowitz.

Armed with a court order, a meter reader went to the home along with a city marshal and a locksmith.

Lu tried to discourage them from going into the basement, Caro said.

They pushed their way through a huge, sticky cobweb and found the headless skeleton sitting in the white plastic chair near a boiler, Caro said.

Lee's wallet was found in a pants pocket, his head under the chair.

Most of the 608 passengers aboard the Cebu City were sleeping when a freighter slammed into the ferry Friday in Manila Bay.Half an hour later the ferry sank -- a three-foot hole in its lower deck.

At least 34 people drowned. More than 100 were still missing.

Ships in the area plucked 451 people from the sea, many coated with the diesel oil disgorged as the ferry sank.

The government of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin is suffering through a midterm crisis with its push for peace with the Arabs stalling, its ministers bickering publicly and its prospects for reelection increasingly uncertain.

Doubts about the self-government agreement that Israel signed last year with the Palestine Liberation Organization have spread through the Cabinet and the leadership of the ruling Labor Party as radical terrorism has increased, and many are suggesting that the accord be renegotiated.

Prospects for peace with Syria, the key to ending the Arab-Israeli conflict, diminish day by day, and Rabin is now warning that the two countries have less than a year left before Israel heads into its next elections and thus will be unable to make the compromises necessary for a deal.

With their 1992 election pledge of "peace with security" a virtual taunt now, Labor Party ministers are quarreling over the government's course in the peace negotiations, and Rabin has scheduled two full Cabinet meetings, on Sunday and Wednesday, to discuss Israel's next steps in the talks.

"We have two years left before the next Knesset (parliamentary) elections, and if we were wrong in rushing to implement the peace moves we should say so without shame," Labor Party Secretary General Nissim Zvili said this week, acknowledging the widespread disappointment with the search for peace.

"The public is not ready to participate in the risks the government is ready to take in order to advance peace," Zvili added, saying that Rabin would now be guided by the desire of Labor's supporters for "stability," meaning an end to devastating terrorist attacks by Palestinian radicals opposed to the agreement with Israel.

"These voters gave the peace process a chance," Zvili continued, "but the breakthrough with the PLO is facing difficulties that the government cannot answer."

Rabin himself was described in the influential newspaper Haaretz on Friday by political commentator Uzi Benziman as having concluded that he will have to abandon negotiations with the PLO and look for another way to proceed in which Israeli security can be assured.

Although primarily a result of the problems in the peace negotiations, the growing malaise reflects a deeper sense within the Cabinet and Labor Party as well as the country that, however narrow a mandate Rabin won in the 1992 elections, he should have done more with it.

"Were the elections held this month, we would be turned out, no question about it," one minister said this week. "People are angry that the peace process is not final and complete, but rather flawed at this moment. . . .

"At the same time, we can't tell them how much better off they are now, not with inflation at 15%, not with bank interest rates up to 19%, not with the stock market down and not with the price of tomatoes so high that many families cannot afford what for us is virtually a staple. Unemployment is down, it's true, but more people are below the poverty line."

Nahum Barnea, the veteran political commentator of Yediot Aharonot, the country's biggest newspaper, argues that this is all part of the midterm crisis that for more than two decades has hit virtually every Israeli government about two years after it comes to power and as it looks two years ahead to the next elections.

With the current government, however, the crisis -- more a crisis of confidence than anything else -- jeopardizes efforts to settle the Middle East conflict through peace treaties between the Jewish state and its Arab neighbors.

"This midterm panic stems from the feeling that Rabin no longer navigates," the liberal Haaretz said in an editorial this week. "The ups and downs in the negotiations with Syria and the absences of a clear government position are one example. . . .

"There is a feeling that after a period of achievements the peace process is stuck. But experience shows it is wrong to examine the chances for peace on the basis of public opinion. The leadership's role is to give people confidence, not to whimper. . . . Rabin should not succumb to defeatism. Interrupting the peace process won't help him win the elections."

The blame for all this is itself bitterly debated within the government and Labor Party, tearing away at the cohesion that Rabin needs for the crucial decisions ahead in Israel's search for peace.

So consuming has the Cabinet's squabbling become that Haaretz commentator Yoel Marcus described the Rabin government as "at daggers drawn and likely to collapse at any moment."

Another political correspondent compared the infighting to a personal financial scandal that brought down Rabin's last government in 1977.

Shimon Sheves, Rabin's top aide, has angered a number of ministers with his blunt criticism of their performance. They, in turn, have mounted a campaign against Sheves, with the housing and finance ministers reportedly telling their staffs not to cooperate with him.

In the latest developments, Zvili denounced Sheves, accusing him of "sliding into personal quarrels and animosities that can only hurt Labor's cause."

Rabin, defending Sheves at the last Cabinet meeting on Sunday, scolded several ministers and reduced Labor Minister Ora Namir to tears, thus bringing the weekly ministerial session to an abrupt end. Hagai Meirom, a Labor Party leader in the Knesset, then rebuked Rabin for his "loss of self-control."

"The rivalry (between the ministers and Sheves) is about power, access to Rabin, about getting credit and about honor," Barnea wrote Friday in Yediot Aharonot, adding that "the relationship between Sheves and his ego is like the relationship between an alcoholic and the bottle."

But there were serious doubts about Rabin's ability to end the feuding, to reassert his leadership and to stay the difficult course on which he has set his government.

Some Rabin advisers described the 72-year-old prime minister as "very upset" by the tough problems he is facing, particularly in the peace talks, and were expressing doubts about how he would manage.

Toward the end of the week, Rabin launched an attempt to pull the government out of its "midlife crisis," scheduling the two Cabinet meetings, mobilizing his loyalists in the Labor Party's central committee and urging upon Israeli editors a "balanced assessment."

"People are griping about nonsense," Rabin told the central committee, declaring that his government was not getting credit for economic improvements and that patience was required for the ups and downs of peacemaking. "Things are far better than they might seem. . . . How bad can the situation be when so many cars are jamming the roads? No sooner do you build new roads than they are jammed. Is this an indication of a low standard of living?"

Avraham Shohat, the finance minister, similarly urged the party to emphasize the government's economic achievements to counter pessimism over negotiations with the Palestinians and Syria.

"Things are far better than they are made out to be," Shohat declared, "and there is no justification for this foul mood that is gripping us. We have every reason to be proud."

As the scorched Achille Lauro sank Friday into the Indian Ocean, a surviving passenger blamed the crew for dropping inflatable rafts on top of a crowded lifeboat, injuring one man who later died.

The victim was one of two elderly passengers who died as a result of the fire on the Italian luxury liner.The 979 passengers and crew who survived were headed for three African and Middle Eastern ports aboard 10 rescue vessels. They abandoned the blazing ship Wednesday.

The Achille Lauro once sailed around the world in 80 days. But it was best-known for a 1985 hijacking by Palestinian terrorists, who killed an elderly Jewish American passenger.

According to passenger Geoffrey Wall, interviewed Friday by Britain's Sky TV, one man was injured when crew members released inflatable rafts onto the lifeboat, which held about 35 people.

Wall said people gave the injured man mouth-to-mouth resuscitation before a rescue ship arrived about four hours later. "Unfortunately, he died," Wall said.

It was not immediately clear if the man died because of the injuries.

Lebanon's billionaire prime minister, Rafik Hariri, confirmed Friday that he is abandoning his massive plan for reconstruction of the war-torn nation and stepping down amid widespread charges of corruption and political standoffs that have deadlocked his government.

The 51-year-old prime minister, who built a real estate fortune in Saudi Arabia, Europe and the United States and was considered by many the main hope for rebuilding Lebanon, stormed out of an acrimonious Cabinet meeting Thursday night and said he was quitting after two frustrating years as premier.

"God willing, Lebanon will move forward, and a bunch of gamblers and arrogant people will not be able to halt the course of development and reconstruction . . . whether we are in power or not," Hariri said Friday afternoon. "It is imperative that a government of institutions evolve in Lebanon, rather than a government of outlaws who join the system."

Hariri is scheduled to meet with Syrian officials this weekend in what some observers said could be a last-ditch move to persuade him to remain in his post.

Syria, with its 40,000 troops in Lebanon, is the nation's major powerbroker and has backed Hariri since he took over the prime ministry in October, 1992.

No prime minister or head of government in Lebanon can serve without the blessing of Damascus, and Hariri has voiced strong public and policy support for Syria even as he sought to rebuild the nation enough to eventually regain its independence.

The crisis was only the most recent to have rocked Hariri's government as he sought to launch a 10-year, $12-billion reconstruction program to drag Lebanon out of the ruins of more than a decade of civil war and lure home to Beirut Lebanese citizens and their billions of dollars in assets abroad.

Last May, Hariri locked himself in his residence for a full week in a power standoff with his partners in government. He was frustrated in his bid to reshuffle his Cabinet and reform the civil service administration by opposition from other powerful figures in the government, including President Elias Hrawi and National Assembly Speaker Nabih Berri.

The latest crisis appeared to be triggered by a standoff with labor unions and an array of corruption allegations that have rocked the government over the last two weeks.

The arrest last week of Parliament member Yahya Shamas on charges of drug trafficking was followed by Shamas' implicating other officials and their relatives, including Hrawi's son. An opposition deputy accused several politicians of taking kickbacks for votes or favors.

The accusations may have been turned against Hariri himself during Thursday night's Cabinet session, when Housing Minister Mahmoud abu Hamdan is said to have alleged that Hariri would personally benefit from a $60-million real estate deal proposed for the historic St. Georges Hotel site on the Beirut seafront.

Hariri, with landholdings all over the world and one of the world's 100 richest men, has frequently been charged with seeking to benefit from the reconstruction of downtown Beirut. He has invested millions of his own money in Lebanese real estate and media holdings but has separated himself from the company undertaking the massive downtown redevelopment project.

His defenders point out that Hariri is one of the few Lebanese who is too rich to try to make money from his political position.

Also feeding the government crisis was a standoff with the labor unions, which rejected a 20% pay raise decreed by the government Thursday and held out for an 80% hike to keep pace with inflation. The unions staged a one-day strike earlier in the week and threatened to step up their protests next week.

Hariri's resignation, even if it is rescinded, reflects growing frustration on the part of many Lebanese officials with the 1989 Taif agreement that ended Lebanon's civil war and established the current system of government under which power is supposed to be shared equally by the country's Sunni Muslim, Shiite Muslim and Christian factions.

Some officials said Hariri's resignation was triggered mainly by irreconcilable differences with ministers close to Berri. "How can Hariri rule with Berri always against him?" an unnamed Cabinet source told Reuters news agency.

Times special correspondent Raschka reported from Beirut, staff writer Murphy from Cairo.

A planned American commemorative stamp, declaring that atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki "hastened" the end of World War II, is an "affront to the feelings of the Japanese people," Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama declared Friday night.

"We must make Japan's thinking known to the United States in an appropriate way," the Socialist leader told reporters.

The stamp, to be issued by the U.S. Postal Service next year as one of a series to commemorate the 50th anniversary of World War II's end, depicts an atomic bomb mushroom cloud and carries a caption reading, "Atomic bombs hasten the war's end, August, 1945."

The flare-up marked the second acrimonious dispute that has erupted over the upcoming anniversary.

Plans by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington to display the Enola Gay, the B-29 aircraft that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, and artifacts of the bomb's effects in Hiroshima and Nagasaki stirred protests from American veterans groups and the U.S. Congress.

They complained that depictions of the suffering caused by the devices' use distorted the historical backdrop of the bombings. In the wake of the protests, the Smithsonian agreed to remove part of the displays showing the devastation caused by the bombs.

Earlier this month, U.S. Ambassador Walter F. Mondale warned of impending emotional trouble over commemorations of the end of World War II that are being planned in both countries. "Here we are 50 years after the war, and we still cannot agree on the facts of what happened," Mondale said.

Americans generally believe that the bombs -- which killed about 140,000 of Hiroshima's 340,000 residents and 70,000 of Nagasaki's 270,000 in 1945 -- saved hundreds of thousands of American troops who might have been forced to have staged a ground invasion of the Japanese mainland.

But the Japanese believe that the civilian toll and the survivors' distress over radiation illnesses even decades later made the attacks inhuman and unjustifiable.

Murayama made his statement after Foreign Minister Yohei Kono, Chief Cabinet Secretary Kozo Igarashi and leaders of organizations of survivors of atomic bombs dropped in Hiroshima Aug. 6, 1945, and Nagasaki Aug. 9, 1945, all condemned the stamp as an attempt to justify the bombings.

"It is disagreeable to see such a stamp in view of the special feeling of the Japanese people," Kono said.

Igarashi noted that "more than 300,000 people (including those who died after 1945) were killed, and even now there are those who are suffering atomic bomb illnesses. We want (the United States to realize) that pain exists deep in the hearts of the Japanese people."

One official who tried to avoid criticizing the stamp was forced to retract his remark.

Terusuke Terada, the Foreign Ministry's spokesman, initially said the timing of Japan's surrender nine days after the Hiroshima bomb lent credence to the "way of thinking" that the bombs did hasten Japan's surrender.

In withdrawing his remark, Terada said only that he wanted "to avoid historical judgments at this stage."

In Washington, the Postal Service replied to Japanese criticism of the planned stamp, saying a citizens' advisory committee had studied the issue carefully.

"With regard to the specific stamp in question, we would be remiss in omitting such a watershed and historically critical event as the use of the atomic bomb," agency spokesman Robin Wright said. ". . . Our purpose is to provide a comprehensive history of the events of World War II, and we are not making a value judgment on any of those events."

Times staff writer Jim Mann in Washington contributed to this report.

Twelve times, Nationalist Party gubernatorial candidate James Soong tried to restart his speech before an animated crowd assembled at a soccer stadium here in west central Taiwan.

Twelve times, supporters of Democratic Progressive Party opponent Chen Ting-nan shouted him down, chanting "traitor" and "Taiwanese vote for Taiwanese."

Riot police, arranged three rows deep on the stadium floor, watched nervously as the political drama unfolded Monday night. What was supposed to be the country's first election for a national office -- provincial governor of Taiwan -- was evolving into a referendum on what constitutes nationhood on this prosperous, crowded island of 21 million people.

Soong, 52, a Mandarin-dialect speaker born in mainland China, represents the longtime ruling elite of "mainlanders" driven to the island from China when Nationalist forces were defeated by the Communists in 1949.

Chen, also 52, a Taiwanese-dialect speaker born on Taiwan, stands for the aspirations of the island's long-oppressed majority of Taiwanese natives.

Their political collision at the Changhua soccer stadium demonstrated clearly the vitality of the emerging Taiwanese democracy. But it also revealed what some believe is a dangerous trend in nationalist, ethnocentric politics that could drive Taiwan into a confrontation with mainland China.

No other country in Asia has made more progress in developing democratic institutions in recent years than has the Republic of China on Taiwan. After decades of martial law and one-party rule, Taiwan since 1989 has exploded into a passionate political arena and role model for Asia.

In the last year alone, the country has gone to the polls five times, culminating in today's hotly contested vote for governor and mayor of the country's two biggest cities, Taipei and Kaohsiung. Lively political rallies have dominated island life for weeks. A national presidential election is set for 1996.

The problem, say some worried Asian specialists, is that this sudden epidemic of democratic debate has pushed the previously taboo subject of national independence to the forefront of the political scene. In Taiwan, they argue, democracy is becoming too much of a good thing.

"There is no question that Taiwan is responding to domestic political pressures that are creating strong impulses to try and muscle out greater political room for itself," said a senior Western diplomat in Beijing, where Taiwan's electoral politics are monitored in minute detail. "It is equally clear that a major breakthrough in that area would risk a confrontation or a crisis in the Taiwan Strait of unpredictable scale."

That is not a true picture, countered a Western observer in Taipei, where risk of a military confrontation is generally downplayed in the foreign community.

"This is a conservative, middle-class voting population," the observer said. "The last thing they want to do is rattle Beijing's cages. The last thing they want to do is come out for independence. These are practical people."

At the root of the independence debate is the principle of "one China."

Since 1949, both the mainland Communists and ruling Nationalists on Taiwan have publicly maintained the fiction of "one China" that includes both the mainland and the prosperous little island.

Except for a handful of old-timers, however, most people here long ago abandoned the dream of recapturing the mainland.

Meanwhile, tiny Taiwan has emerged as one of the world's great trading states, the world's 14th-largest economy and the biggest holder of foreign reserves, with more than $80 billion in its treasury. The average annual income exceeds $10,000 -- more than 10 times that of neighboring China.

Economically, at least, Taiwan had become a de facto independent state. All it lacked was diplomatic recognition, a national flag and a seat in international bodies. But as the current political campaign has shown, such issues have proven a powerful and irresistible tool for politicians in all camps.

"The question for Taiwan," said a Western diplomat in Beijing worried about the recent rise of the Taiwan independence movement, "is what it really wants. There are two aspects of independence. One is flags, anthems, membership in the U.N. and all that. The other is having complete control of your own affairs and maybe not having all those little symbols."

Even local elections are affected by the debate. All three of the country's three major parties have learned how to use the issue to their advantage or, conversely, to the detriment of their foes.

In the governor's race, for example, candidate Soong has been damaged by his party's official -- if half-hearted -- support for eventual unification with the Chinese mainland. Opinion polls show that most Taiwanese citizens oppose the idea of rejoining the mainland.

Meanwhile, in the important Taipei mayor's race, Democratic Progressive Party candidate Chen Shui-bian saw his 10-point lead in the polls evaporate under attack from an opponent, New Party candidate Jaw Shao-kang. Jaw won points by charging that Chen's pro-independence stance would lead Taiwan into a bloody military confrontation with the mainland.

The increasing polarization of Taiwan politics along linguistic and ethnic lines was evident again Friday, the eve of the elections.

At Taipei Municipal Stadium, 50,000 supporters of Jaw waved Republic of China (Taiwan) flags and yellow pennants emblazoned with the party's slogan: "In Chaotic Times, the Best Choice." All speeches were in the Mandarin dialect, official language of the Chinese mainland.

Three miles east at the China Trade Center, an even larger Democratic Progressive Party crowd rallied in a parking lot for their candidate, Chen. At this meeting, however, only the Taiwanese dialect was spoken.

In Thursday editions of most leading Chinese-language newspapers, supporters of the Nationalist Party, known here as the Kuomintang, or KMT, took out half-page ads with apocalyptic warnings of the island's future under the Democratic Progressive Party: "Communist China would use military forces against Taiwan, bringing endless disaster upon us. . . . Companies would move out, there would be huge capital flight, foreign investment would dry up, the stock and property values would crash."

In the Taipei mayor's race, the New Party tactic of exploiting a common fear of mainland military intervention effectively shifted attention from Chen's popular promise to clean up Taipei, plagued by pollution and some of Asia's most nightmarish traffic. The attack only intensified appeals from Chen's supporters for Taiwan's independence.

Once again, the issue of independence for Taiwan dominated the political agenda. Used either offensively or defensively, the independence issue has proved to be an effective hot button for the incipient Taiwanese democracy.

One reason generally cited for the popularity of President Lee Teng-hui, for example, is his high-profile push for a Taiwanese seat in the United Nations.

But it is precisely such actions, responding to democratically induced pressures, say critics, that may be pushing Taiwan into conflict with its big neighbor to the west.

On many occasions, including the recent meeting in Jakarta between President Clinton and mainland Chinese leader Jiang Zemin, China has stated that it will act militarily against Taiwan if the island declares independence.

Pro-independence leaders here say the Chinese are posturing.

"If the mainland attacks Taiwan," Hsieh Ru-an, 45, a high school sports instructor who was one of those in the Changhua stadium crowd, said confidently, "the international community will support Taiwan. As long as everyone supports democracy, they will all condemn China."

But others, including some senior U.S. officials, claim that the Chinese threat to invade should be taken seriously, particularly if aging, ailing Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping dies and China becomes embroiled in a political succession battle.

"We worry about a power struggle in China," said Antonio Chiang, editor of a magazine called Journalist. "It seems that every time there is a problem, they ring a bell. The bell is always Taiwan."

On the eve of the 10th anniversary of the Union Carbide gas tragedy, activists Friday angrily accused local authorities of detaining people by the thousands to torpedo their plans for giant protest rallies.

"They didn't want a big crowd here," asserted Abdul Jabbar, a leader of a group of victims of the 1984 gas leak.

In the last several days, Jabbar claimed, 11,000 people were arrested here and at other locales across central India's Madhya Pradesh state to prevent them from congregating in Bhopal.

Another activist, a leader of impoverished and illiterate tribes people whose homes and livelihoods are menaced by a controversial dam under construction, said thousands were turned back.

"They were prevented from coming here because the government was afraid," the activist said.

Madhya Pradesh Home Secretary Vijay Singh confirmed that some arrests had taken place in the eastern districts of the state, India's most vast.

But he denied that they were linked to the marches and demonstrations called to commemorate the Dec. 2-3, 1984, leak in Bhopal of deadly methyl isocyanate.

"It was a drive by the railways to check ticketless passengers," Singh maintained.

In the last three days, 1,500 passengers who were trying to travel for free on trains were pulled off and fined, said Singh, the state's highest-ranking civil servant charged with maintaining law and order.

"There's no question of a political motive," he said.

Jabbar and other organizers of the Bhopal anniversary protests conjectured that the government of Chief Minister Digvijay Singh may have been frightened by the slaughter that followed a Nov. 23 street rally in the neighboring state of Maharashtra.

In Nagpur, where the Maharashtra state assembly was meeting, a police charge on a protest by poor, uneducated tribes people demanding preferential job quotas touched off a deadly stampede in which 114 people were trampled to death.

"They are worried about the violence problem," Jabbar said. "So they want to keep people away."

Jabbar's Bhopal Gas Affected Women's Industrial Organization has proclaimed the anniversary of the Union Carbide accident a national day of shame to protest the government's failure to prosecute those responsible and its laxity and slowness in compensating and aiding victims.

Although Union Carbide Corp. and India agreed in 1989 on a $470-million compensation payment by the U.S.-based multinational, only one Bhopal resident in six who claims to have suffered ill health because of the gas has had his case settled.

The exact death toll taken by the toxic cloud that seeped from the now-closed pesticide plant is disputed and extremely controversial, but Madhya Pradesh officials say 4,000 people perished in the accident's immediate aftermath.

As a tacit admission of how tardy officials have been in handing out compensation awards and ensuring medical care and employment to survivors, Madhya Pradesh's assembly on Friday reaffirmed by unanimous vote its commitment to faster action.

That was not enough for Babulal Gaur of the opposition Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, the former head of the ministry created to provide relief and rehabilitation to gas victims.

Gaur accused the central government of indifference to the plight of the more than 600,000 Bhopalis who claim that their health was harmed by the poisonous vapor. He said every city resident should receive compensation.

It is true that the main events in Bhopal are not supposed to occur until today, but a unified show of strength by several groups of protesters on Friday was a decidedly anemic affair. Only about 1,500 people took part from the Bhopal women's group, organizations representing Madhya Pradesh's tribes and opponents of the giant and controversial Narmada dam.

Under a brilliant afternoon sun, the marchers ended up on a traffic circle dominated by a garlanded statue of India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.

Survivors of the Bhopal tragedy and foes of the Narmada dam sat together on the asphalt and chanted "Death to Union Carbide!" and slogans against the huge dam in neighboring Gujarat, which if completed will inundate the homes of about 200,000 people, half of them tribal peoples.

The dam is being built to harness the Narmada River, India's fifth largest, for irrigation and hydroelectric power generation and drinking water.

Unable to agree on any new measures, five of the world's most powerful nations Friday fell back on a months-old plan to end the war in Bosnia that has already been rejected by Serbian forces.

After an apparently acrimonious four-hour meeting, the foreign ministers of the United States, Britain, France, Russia and Germany -- known collectively as the Contact Group -- could agree only to reiterate the peace plan they advanced in July as a take-it-or-leave-it ultimatum to the warring factions.

Unlike in July, however, there were no suggestions of punishment for any faction that refused to go along. After the Bosnian Serbs rejected the earlier plan, the Contact Group failed to carry through its threat to repeal the arms embargo against the under-equipped Bosnian army or to impose other sanctions.

This time, U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher said, the five nations considered but rejected suggestions to increase the use of air power to try to force the Serbs to agree to peace.

"What we seek here is peace, not a reign of terror which would result from carpet bombing," Christopher said.

He added that U.S. military officials doubt that bombing would have a major impact on the war.

At the same time, the five nations could not agree on any new provision to sweeten the appeal of the plan to the Bosnian Serbs.

Russian Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev pressed for holding out the prospect of an eventual confederation between the Bosnian Serbs and the government of Serbia. But U.S. officials said Christopher "beat back" explicit language on the subject, agreeing only that Bosnian parties can negotiate "constitutional arrangements" acceptable to all.

Throughout the meeting, Russia suggested concessions to the Bosnian Serbs and the government of Serbia. But they were rejected.

Although the meeting fell short of expectations, Christopher said, "The combined pressure of five nations is a significant force to bring to bear."

The Muslim-led Bosnian government, the Bosnian Croat faction, the government of Croatia and the government of Serbia have all accepted the plan, which calls for partition of Bosnia with a federation of the government and the Bosnian Croats getting 51% of the land, and 49% going to the Serbs, who now hold more than 70% of the territory.

Although there was no change in the basic proposal, the powers appeared to place all their hope on what they termed "a reinvigorated diplomatic effort" that has already begun.

Charles Redman, once Washington's Balkan trouble-shooter and now U.S. ambassador to Germany, is already in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, for meetings with Bosnian government officials.

British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd and French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said they will visit Belgrade on Sunday to urge Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic to exert increasing pressure on the Bosnian Serbs, the faction that he trained and armed.

U.S. officials said Redman was selected to go to Sarajevo because he had developed a good rapport with Bosnian government officials.

In a formal communique issued after their meeting, the ministers appeared to dampen speculation that the 24,000 U.N. peacekeepers now deployed in Bosnia-Herzegovina might soon be withdrawn.

They called the U.N. mission one of "great importance" and added: "It should continue provided that the risks do not become unacceptable."

France, Britain and Russia have sizable contingents of troops in the U.N. force.

Kozyrev called for relaxation of economic sanctions against the government of Serbia to reward Milosevic for accepting the plan.

The Russian foreign minister predicted that gradually the world would agree to reward Serbia, although a U.S.-led effort rejected that step, at least for now.

The foreign ministers appeared to have few answers when asked repeatedly at a news conference why they believed a plan already rejected by the Bosnian Serbs might now somehow gain acceptance.

"The road will be very difficult," Christopher admitted. "But we don't see any other road to take."

Added a clearly agitated Juppe: "If we'd allowed failure to put us off, we'd never achieve anything. We shall keep trying and keep trying."

It was a perfect diplomatic ambush.

Russian Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev had said his country was ready to agree to a long-awaited working arrangement with NATO, and he wanted a high-profile ceremony -- a brief formal exchange of documents in front of the cameras, lots of cameras.

And so Thursday evening, with NATO's smiling, unsuspecting leadership right where he wanted it in front of the cameras, Kozyrev unleashed his trap: Instead of handshakes and backslaps, he declared that he could not agree to the working plan. NATO's decision to begin immediate preparations for eastward expansion, he said, had raised new problems.

While the blindside attack won Kozyrev points among hard-line conservatives in Moscow wary of alliance intentions, it was also an effective Russian strike at an alliance weak point -- deep divisions over the wisdom of rapid expansion.

What Kozyrev saw and zeroed in on was just one of a growing number of internal differences that have begun to strike at the heart of the 44-year-old North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which remains the key institution linking the United States and Europe.

A two-day meeting of NATO foreign ministers that ended here late Friday may have managed a facade of unity, but it did little to resolve differences on fundamental issues, some of which could haunt the alliance for years to come.

Certainly, dispute is no stranger to NATO, an alliance of 16 free-thinking democracies.

The Jimmy Carter Administration's proposal of the late 1970s to develop a neutron bomb that would destroy life but not property briefly drove a wedge through the alliance, while German resistance in the late 1980s to American pressure to develop a new short-range nuclear missile also cooled transatlantic ties briefly.

But today NATO is especially vulnerable to internal tension. For the first time, the alliance has no visible external threat to keep it together. For the first time, it is unsure of its own role.

The crucial job of secretary general, whose role is to find and build consensus among the 16, is held by a capable diplomat, but one inexperienced in military affairs.

On Bosnia, alliance harmony got a hefty assist from a last-minute shift in Washington that brought the Clinton Administration into line with the Europeans' plan to offer Bosnian Serbs important concessions in return for agreeing to a preliminary peace formula.

"The crisis in Bosnia is about Bosnia, not about NATO," was a refrain recited on cue by alliance Secretary General Willy Claes and members of nearly every delegation present.

However, the underlying divisions on how to deal with the conflict itself still remain.

Comments earlier this week by Sen. Bob Dole (R.-Kan.) denigrating the French and British for faintheartedness in Bosnia, and his pledge to push the new Congress for greater use of NATO air power and a lifting of the internationally imposed arms embargo against the Bosnian government, have also not been forgotten.

"If British and French forces die in the next couple of weeks, there will be a tendency in Britain and France to blame the United States for this," said Patrick Glynn, an expert on the Balkans at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank.

Other analysts believe that NATO's decision on eastward expansion carries more serious long-term implications for alliance unity.

While all 16 members officially welcomed the first concrete step toward enlargement, doubts pervade Western Europe.

"The alliance is overextending itself" with expansion, warned Heinrich Vogel, director of the Institute of International and East European Studies in Cologne, Germany. "It's nice wording on expansion, but there's little thought given to it. They are releasing an additional Pandora's box."

Some Europeans worry that the Clinton Administration, thinking that it may be a one-term phenomenon, has set a target of completing the initial expansion by 1996, a pace the Europeans see as dangerously fast.

They want to delay any NATO expansion beyond late 1996, when a review of the European Union's treaty on political and economic union is scheduled.

"It takes more time to think through the implications, the assumptions for this kind of a step," Vogel added. "The assumptions on NATO expansion depend on the potential development of Russia, and there's no agreement on that. Some see it as a basket case, others as a neo-imperialist power."

There is also concern in Europe that rapid NATO expansion could provoke Russia, which, as Kozyrev's performance underscored, remains deeply suspicious of its old enemy.

Kozyrev's hard-line stance in Brussels met with approval in Moscow, where lawmakers and opinion leaders have warned that expanding NATO membership to the former Warsaw Pact nations would have disastrous consequences for Russia's relations with the West.

NATO in the last year has embraced 23 nations, mostly former Soviet-bloc countries, in an adjunct organization called the Partnership for Peace.

"The train of European history has started off in the wrong direction, and a crash is unavoidable," said defense analyst Alexander A. Konovalov of Moscow's U.S.A. and Canada Institute.

Despite NATO efforts to reassure Russia that any expansion of the alliance east poses no threat, Moscow will view any enlargement of NATO as an unfriendly act that would polarize Europe and isolate Russia behind "a new Berlin Wall," Konovalov said.

Moreover, Konovalov said, "nobody can explain seriously why NATO should enlarge if Russia is not the enemy."

As the alliance begins its preliminary work on expansion, some Western experts are asking the same question.

As President Ernesto Zedillo settled into Day One of his six-year term Friday, an open letter appeared in an influential newspaper demanding the immediate dismissal of the man Zedillo had just appointed mayor of this capital city.

Three of the newspaper's journalists had been injured, along with dozens of anti-government protesters, when riot police attacked a stone-throwing mob hours after Zedillo's inauguration Thursday. The workers union of the daily Jornada said in the letter that it deplores the "contradictory images" of "provocation and repression" at a time when Zedillo is promising a presidency of "tolerance, unity and transparency."

"Less than 24 hours after having taken power, (Mexico City) Mayor Oscar Espinoza Villareal broke the presidential promise of negotiation and tolerance," the union declared. "Therefore, we demand his immediate dismissal."

The swift condemnation of a police action that the government justified as self-defense by a riot squad that had endured nearly an hour of stoning illustrated the immediacy, and depth, of the challenges facing Mexico's 63rd president.

At a time of great expectations and high popularity ratings for Zedillo, there were other examples in the Mexican capital and countryside.

The young criminal lawyer whom Zedillo appointed from the opposition to serve as his attorney general -- and point man for the creation of an independent and honest judiciary -- defined one of the new administration's biggest challenges. Antonio Lozano declared at his own swearing-in ceremony that the powerful law enforcement institution he is inheriting "is in a serious credibility crisis, which no one can hide."

In the embattled southern state of Chiapas, tensions continued to mount as a statewide network of indigenous organizations threatened massive civil disobedience next week if the governor-elect from Zedillo's ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party tries to take office.

And in isolated incidents nationwide Friday, it was clear that the violent street crime and narcotics trafficking that Zedillo had denounced as among the greatest threats to Mexico's national security appeared to continue unabated.

Police in the southern state of Oaxaca reported that unidentified gunmen attacked a religious procession on a pilgrimage, killing three. The motive was unknown. In the western state of Michoacan, 15 family members opened fire on another family, killing five, in what police said was a feud. And in Chiapas, security guards for a private rancher battled militant farm workers who returned with arms after the guards expelled them from the land as squatters.

But as new, independent polls showed the new president starting off with the support of nearly 60% of the Mexican people, he and his Cabinet ministers also began the hard task of forging solutions that Zedillo, in his inaugural speech, had cautioned will take time.

After diplomatic sessions at Los Pinos presidential estate Friday with Latin American presidents and prime ministers, Zedillo met with Mexico's top bankers and business leaders.

As a study disclosed that just 61% of all students complete elementary school, new Education Ministry staff members began laying the groundwork for plans to fulfill Zedillo's promise of full secondary education for all Mexicans.

And Zedillo's new secretaries of agriculture, land reform and finance also started looking for ways to, as Zedillo phrased it, "break the vicious circle of ignorance, unemployment and poverty in which many Mexicans are trapped."

After a medical struggle that enthralled Canada, doctors said Friday that they have saved the life of Quebec separatist leader Lucien Bouchard from a virulent, muscle-destroying bacteria that had forced the amputation of his left leg.

"He's not out of the woods, but nearly out of the woods," Dr. Patrick D'Amico said of Bouchard, the opposition leader in the Canadian Parliament and widely regarded as the country's most compelling advocate of Quebec independence.

The infection was described as under control and responding to antibiotics.

Citing an 80% mortality rate from necrotizing myositis, the muscle-harming manifestation of the streptococcus A bacterium, D'Amico and other members of the medical team that worked on Bouchard called his survival "almost a miracle."

They said Bouchard, who turns 56 this month, could be out of Montreal's Saint Luc Hospital in three to four weeks and then would face about four months of physical therapy and rehabilitation.

The doctors said Bouchard had undergone three surgeries since Tuesday, two on his leg that included the amputation and another in his abdomen and chest area.

Bouchard's brush with death and expected absence from the political scene triggered immediate speculation about the future of the Quebec independence movement.

Bouchard shares leadership of the movement with Jacques Parizeau, the recently elected premier of Quebec. The two men were expected to reveal their strategy next week for winning a province-wide referendum on independence to be held next year. Bouchard and Parizeau were to be co-captains of the campaign in favor of a "yes" vote.

Jean-Marc Leger, a top Quebec pollster, said Bouchard remains the most popular politician in the province, with appeal to a broad demographic of French-speaking voters and to more moderate factions wary of Parizeau's intense nationalism.

A Leger poll released Monday showed 45.7% of Quebec voters in favor of independence -- or sovereignty, as it is most often described here -- and 54.3% backing continued union with Canada.

Max Nemni, a political science professor at Laval University in Quebec City and an expert in Quebec nationalism, said the courage and determination attributed to Bouchard by his doctors Friday could give a significant emotional boost to separatism.

There are parallels to the political lift that then-President Ronald Reagan received after he survived an assassination attempt in March, 1981, Nemni added.

"To a certain extent (in an election campaign), images are more important than actions or words," Nemni said. "Sympathy is going to pour over Mr. Bouchard for quite some time for his bravery, etc. So I think that this will be a plus for the sovereigntists. . . . When you're dealing with nationalism, emotions are extremely important."

One veteran separatist strategist made a similar observation. "It's going to be like Rocky," the strategist said, requesting anonymity.

But Jeremy Webber, a law professor at McGill University in Montreal who also analyzes Quebec politics, disagreed.

"I don't think that the sympathy for Mr. Bouchard would translate into a 'yes' vote for the referendum. It's much too serious an issue for that," he said.

Bouchard was admitted to the hospital Tuesday with what was then described as phlebitis, an inflammation of the blood vessels in the leg. Canadians were stunned Thursday night by a terse announcement that Bouchard's left leg had been amputated and that he was in serious but stable condition.

Overnight it leaked out from friends and associates that Bouchard was suffering from necrotizing myositis and that he was fighting for his life.

Reporters camped on the sidewalk in front of the hospital. "Canada A.M.," a morning television program, flew co-anchor Keith Morrison from Toronto to Montreal and broadcast live from the hospital entrance Friday morning.

Expressions of sympathy crossed all political boundaries. A single yellow rose was left on Bouchard's desk in the House of Commons. The doctors' noon press conference was telecast live across Canada.

Former CIA Director Stansfield Turner stunned a conference of dozens of current and former agency analysts Friday with a blunt critique of the CIA's effectiveness -- and his own -- during his term in office.

Although not listed on the program, Turner stole the spotlight when he told the audience the agency had shortchanged President Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s.

Turner said the CIA "didn't do well" in foreseeing the downfall of the Shah of Iran or the collapse of the Soviet Union and had consistently failed to serve the President in its handling of its primary analytical product, the lengthy documents known as National Intelligence Estimates.

These reports were not inaccurate or misleading, Turner said, but were simply "irrelevant" to the President in making policy. "If anyone is to blame, it is I," he said.

Robert M. Gates, who served as CIA chief under President George Bush, disagreed sharply with Turner, saying the intelligence agency's reports on the Soviet Union "underpinned the entire arms control process" through the presidencies of both parties. "You could not negotiate with the Russians without the NIE," Gates said in an interview, adding the Senate would not have ratified arms control treaties without assurances the CIA could verify Soviet compliance.

Besides Turner, other critics said the agency's reports were too long, too biased or flat wrong. But they all welcomed the release at the conference of the latest batch of CIA documents from the Cold War years.

The conference, sponsored by the CIA and Harvard University, is devoted to evaluating how the agency performed in its most critical role -- assessing Soviet weapons and plans.

Prosecutors on Friday dropped their case against a former day-care teacher who served five years in prison before her conviction on charges of molesting 19 youngsters was overturned.

The move ended a nearly 10-year ordeal for Margaret Kelly Michaels, who was accused of engaging in sex games with children ages 3 to 5.

Michaels, 32, was convicted in 1988 of 115 counts of sexual abuse.

An appeals court overturned her conviction. And the New Jersey Supreme Court later harshly criticized the "coercive and highly suggestive" methods used by investigators in interviewing the children. The high court's ruling said the evidence may be unreliable.

On Friday, Superior Court Judge Joseph A. Falcone dismissed the charges at the request of prosecutors, who told the judge that some witnesses are now unavailable and that some children and parents refuse to participate in new legal proceedings.

At a news conference, Michaels told reporters that she was "greatly relieved to have this terrible nightmare over with," but she added that her reputation had been irreparably harmed.

The sex games were alleged to have taken place at a Maplewood, N.J., day-care center during the 1984-85 school year.

An outbreak of yellow fever has killed at least 300 people, the News Agency of Nigeria reported Friday.

The national agency said the outbreak began two weeks ago in eastern Imo state. State officials reportedly sent more than $1,000 to local administrators to buy vaccines, but doctors in the area said none had arrived, it said.

In a highly unusual move, President Clinton injected himself into the scientific process Friday night by announcing that his Administration would prohibit the use of federal money to create human embryos solely for research purposes.

"I do not believe that federal funds should be used to support the creation of human embryos for research purposes," Clinton said, "and I have directed that NIH not allocate any resources for such research."

The ban applies only to the most controversial question involved in embryo research: Whether to allow the creation of such embryos for research purposes only. Notably, his action did not address the larger question of the use of federal money for any human embryo research, leaving the door open for possible government approval of wide-scale research on the thousands of already existing and unused embryos now in storage as a result of in-vitro fertilization.

Nevertheless, his decision -- coming on the same day that a federal advisory panel to the National Institutes of Health recommended permitting the creation of research embryos under some circumstances -- almost certainly will send a disturbing message to a research community that has grown increasingly troubled in recent years over what it views as political intrusion into the scientific process.

Research on embryos has generated growing ethical concerns because it deals with creating and manipulating human life.

Many scientists believe that studying the human embryo, which after one week of growth constitutes a cluster of cells no bigger than the period at the end of this sentence, could yield infinite knowledge about some of nature's worst medical scourges, including genetic diseases, infertility and cancer.

But the work has been condemned by abortion foes and others who view it as the destruction of human life, and have vowed to fight any efforts to conduct such research.

In many ways, the Clinton ruling was reminiscent of the moratorium during the Ronald Reagan and George Bush administrations on research using human fetal tissue, which met with similar opposition. Paradoxically, Clinton lifted that ban with great fanfare in 1993 during his first few days in office.

Researchers also have been critical of the growing involvement of Congress and other federal officials in pursuing their own investigations into questions of scientific fraud and abuse.

At least one member of the NIH advisory panel, Patricia King, a law professor at Georgetown University who served as the committee's co-chair, bluntly dismissed Clinton's action as having more to do with "politics" than the "merits of embryo research."

The action marked the second apparent concession Clinton has made to conservatives since the Nov. 8 election. On Thursday, Clinton unveiled plans to increase defense spending, in part to head off a GOP push.

But the White House denied that the decision was influenced by the election results.

"The election had nothing to do with this decision," White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers said Friday after the announcement. "The President simply believes this (funding) is not right."

The advisory panel, which presented its findings to NIH Director Harold E. Varmus earlier Friday, endorsed human embryo research generally, but proposed only two specific circumstances under which embryos could be created for research reasons: "when the research by its very nature cannot otherwise be validly conducted," and when a "compelling" case can be made that it is necessary "for the validity of a study that is potentially of outstanding scientific and therapeutic value."

Varmus was expected to study the panel's findings and decide soon whether to accept them. Clinton's action, in effect, circumvented that process.

Varmus could not be reached for comment Friday. NIH sources, however, indicating they were taken completely by surprise by the White House action, said it took several hours to sort through and understand exactly what the directive meant.

The sources said they concluded that "it probably should be narrowly interpreted," meaning that the NIH would likely still consider "all the other avenues of important research" not addressed by Clinton's decision.

The panel, in endorsing the field of human embryo research, said it holds significant promise for medical advances, but proposed a strict framework for its conduct.

The recommendations apply only to research conducted on human embryos that are created outside the uterus, that is, embryos produced in a laboratory by mixing sperm and egg.

The panel said that research should be limited "to the shortest time possible."

A political committee headed by Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), the next House Speaker, asked a federal judge Friday to dismiss an attempt by regulators to have the group declared in violation of election law.

The committee, GOPAC, denied that it tried to solicit money for federal candidates in 1989, an action that could have forced it to publicly disclose contributors.

U.S. District Judge Louis Oberdorfer took the motion to dismiss under advisement.

The Federal Election Commission filed suit to force GOPAC to pay a fine and be declared in violation for not registering as a political action committee. GOPAC, in earlier negotiations, had refused to admit a violation and to pay a $150,000 fine -- a figure that could be several times larger if the FEC wins the court case.

The court arguments focused on a 1989 GOPAC letter from Gingrich, then as now the House Republican whip and general chairman of GOPAC.

The 1989 letter asked potential donors for money to protest congressional mail costs in a Democratic-run Congress and gerrymandering of House districts by state legislatures.

But the letter also expressed the goal of building a House GOP majority in 1992, an objective reached in November's elections.

Firebrand free speech activist Mario Savio, who rallied hundreds of UC Berkeley students during the 1960s Free Speech Movement, returned to campus Friday to encourage opposition to Proposition 187.

Standing on the steps of the main administration building Savio addressed a crowd of more than 800 gathered to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement.He called on the audience to practice and support civil disobedience if the initiative receives court approval.

Proposition 187, overwhelmingly passed by California voters in November, denies public health and educational services to illegal immigrants.

"This is American know-nothing fascist," Savio said. "We need to stop it.

"Find out how this law impinges directly on every class of people: on students, on workers, on teachers," Savio said.

His remarks were met with enthusiastic applause.

Veterans of the Free Speech Movement, which led the university to repeal restrictions on political speeches, have come from around the country to participate in rallies, panel discussions on current political issues and in more lighthearted celebrations for five days ending Sunday.

Los Angeles City Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg and Jack Weinberg, head of the Berkeley chapter of Racial Equality in 1964 and now a Greenpeace International official, also were among those attending.

While the Assembly convenes Monday to the high drama of a partisan power struggle, one of the first orders of business in the Senate is expected to be uncontested: the renaming of the Simi Valley Freeway for former President Ronald Reagan.

A Senate resolution to post the ailing ex-president's name on the 118 Freeway from San Fernando to Ventura County is expected to win easy approval, said Senate President Pro Tem Bill Lockyer (D-Hayward), the measure's main author.

"I think it's appropriate to acknowledge Ronald Reagan's contribution as a private citizen, as governor and as president," the Senate leader said Friday. "And naming a freeway after him is one of the ways that those honors get bestowed."

The action follows a brief skirmish between the California Department of Transportation and Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sylmar), who as chairman of the Assembly Transportation Committee said he opposes naming freeways for living people.

"I'd prefer the policy of naming freeways in honor of people who have died," he said. "I have nothing against Ronald Reagan, but where do you draw the line?"

Suggesting that Caltrans was trying to rush the freeway renaming, Katz sent a letter to the department Sept. 12 warning it against moving forward without first obtaining Senate approval.

Caltrans spokesman Jim Drago said the assemblyman's request for assurances amounted to "much ado about nothing."

"He voiced the concern," Drago said. "But the fact of the matter is this is going through the normal process anyway."

Caltrans estimates the cost of installing signs to designate the 118 as the Ronald Reagan Freeway at about $4,000.

Heidi Fleiss is but the newest twist on the oldest profession. The alleged Hollywood madam -- who is charged with five counts of pandering and one narcotics charge -- faces a maximum of 11 years in prison; other punishments have ranged from probation to prison terms to less conventional penalties. Here are a few recent examples:

NAME: Karen Wilkening ("Rolodex Madam")

CASE: Wilkening's arrest for running a high-priced call-girl ring set San Diego atwitter with talk of the identities of her male clients, contained in her so-called "Rolodex 500." Wilkening also testified in Dallas that Don R. Dixon, head of a failed savings and loan, had used thrift funds to stage lavish parties at his San Diego beach house.

VERDICT: Wilkening served two years of a 44-month sentence after pleading guilty in 1989 to one count of pandering and one count of obstructing justice.

COMMENT: Wilkening told reporters that her first activities after being freed in May, 1991, would be visits to a salad bar and the Pacific Ocean. She was picked up at California Rehabilitation Center at Norco by a friend in a limousine. They were last seen heading for the coast.

NAME: Elizabeth Adams ("Beverly Hills Madam")

CASE: Charged with using her Sunset Strip house for pandering, Adams was arrested after she tried to enlist an undercover policewoman in her prostitution ring.

VERDICT: After pleading guilty to one felony count of "sale of person for immoral purposes," Adams was put on probation in October, 1991. Police testified that she was a valuable informant.

COMMENT: Police said Adams provided "pillow talk," or crucial information, about murder suspects, terrorists, drug traffickers and fugitive financier Robert Vesco.

NAME: Marlene Baldwin

CASE: Baldwin, a San Francisco woman, was convicted of running a bordello in July, 1980.

VERDICT: She was sentenced to 90 days in a convent. The order, Convent of the Good Shepherd, was established 300 years ago in France to help wayward women.

COMMENT: "It's not unlike what Hamlet said to Ophelia -- 'Get thee to a nunnery,' " said defense attorney Art Groza.

NAME: Sydney Biddle Barrows (the "Mayflower Madam")

CASE: Accused of running a million-dollar call-girl ring, Barrows' arrest made headlines in New York papers. Barrows, a descendant of two Mayflower pilgrims, was kicked out of the city's Social Register.

VERDICT: Barrows pleaded guilty in July, 1985, to a misdemeanor charge of promoting prostitution in New York. She paid a $5,000 fine.

COMMENT: When her case was over, Barrows told The Washington Post that she had become a madam because she didn't have a graduate degree. "With all those women out there with MBAs, you can't get a job for $40,000 or $50,000." NORA ZAMICHOW

The 28-year-old guardian and godmother of a 2-year-old boy will be arraigned Monday on charges that she beat the toddler to death and stuffed his body into a living room ottoman, police said Friday.

Rialto Police Sgt. Chris Sullivan said officers found the body Thursday after concluding that Betty Ann Mills' story that little Marcus Anthony Jackson had simply wandered off "just didn't make sense."

After arresting Mills, a counselor at a home for boys in Yucaipa, officers also arrested her roommate, Kimberly Ann Cole. Cole, 35, will be arraigned Monday on charges that she was an accessory to the crime.

Residents of the tidy San Bernardino County neighborhood where the crime took place expressed shock and disbelief Friday.

"On Monday, the Mills lady came up to me and said, 'Have you seen my little boy? I have reported to police that he is missing,' " Daniel Zamorano, a neighbor, said. "I thought she was sincere."

Another neighbor, who asked not to be identified, said the suspects seemed like "such nice ladies."

"It's a shame," said Gilbert Perez, a friend of the dead child's father. "That little boy was adorable."

Sullivan said that because the child's father was a transient and his mother "was between houses and felt she could not care for him," legal custody of the boy had been awarded to Mills. Neighbors said the boy and his 8-year-old half brother had been living with Mills and Cole for about a year.

The 2-year-old's father, Bobby Jackson, who is separated from the child's mother, Marcella Jackson, said they had chosen Mills and Cole to care for the children because they all were "good friends."

Bobby Jackson said that even though he once caught Mills using illegal drugs, he "paid it no attention. I mean, I was living in her house, and she was nice to the kids."

The father said that later, however, he found his son in dirty diapers and with cuts on his neck. Jackson said that when he argued with Mills about her treatment of the child, she called police and he was ordered to leave the property.

Jackson said he pleaded with his wife "to get the kids out of there," but to no avail.

Marcella Jackson would not comment on how her son came to be in Mills' custody. She refused to answer any questions and would only say that Mills "pretended in front of us real good. We never thought she would do this to Marcus."

Police said they believe that Mills beat the child to death about a week ago, crammed his body into a plastic bag and stuffed it through a tear in the bottom of the upholstered ottoman. The tear was sealed with duct tape, detectives said.

On Monday, Sullivan said, Mills called police and reported the child missing. To her surprise, he said, she and Cole were arrested on suspicion of child endangerment.

"There were inconsistencies in their stories," he said. "The boy was supposed to have wandered off, but the door had a deadbolt that locked from the inside, and the boy couldn't have unlocked that. (Mills) kept saying that he wasn't in the house. We finally realized that is where he had to be."

Armed with a search warrant, officers returned to the home, where they found the body.

Sullivan said he believes Mills and Cole hid the body in the ottoman because they did not expect to be arrested when they reported the child missing.

"I think they felt that after cursory checks, we would leave and they'd have a chance to dispose of him," the sergeant said.

USAir is adding two steps to its preflight refueling procedures after reports that nine of its planes had left airport gates with insufficient fuel aboard, a company spokesman said Friday.

The airline is now instructing its gate agents to orally confer with the cockpit crew on how much fuel is aboard before the flight is turned over to the flight crew and the plane's door is shut, said spokesman Richard Weintraub.

In addition, Weintraub said, the pilot or first officer will confirm the amount of fuel in pounds as the final step while the plane is on the tarmac before it pulls onto the runway for takeoff, Weintraub said.

The two new checks are being added to two already existing checkoffs made by USAir flight crews. "This is just a redundancy, frankly, to assure those in the public who might have any lingering doubts about the integrity of the fuel checks," he said.

Three weeks ago, the New York Times reported that nine USAir flights had left their gates with insufficient fuel aboard during a 16-month period and one had to make an emergency landing.

Congressional budget experts say the White House underestimated the price of its original welfare reform plan by miscalculating demand for child care from single mothers who would be required to work.

The Congressional Budget Office said the White House also overstated the savings it expected to wring from several federal programs to finance its reforms.

Although the Administration has not decided whether to push its welfare plan when Republicans take over Congress, Friday's study is significant because it documents the high price of changing the welfare system to encourage work.

The White House estimated the cost of its plan, which would push increasing numbers of women into work and training programs, at $9.3 billion over five years. The CBO put the cost at $11.8 billion and said much of the difference was due to higher child-care costs.

The budget office also said that the Administration could expect to save only $6.9 billion -- not the $9.3 billion it expected -- through a variety of spending cuts, including restrictions on aid to immigrants, drug addicts and wealthy farmers.

Former minister Paul Hill on Friday received the maximum sentence of two life terms in prison for violating the new federal clinic-protection law in the shotgun slayings of an abortion doctor and his bodyguard.

Next week, a judge will decide whether Hill should get the electric chair on state murder charges in the slayings.

Hill, 40, of Pensacola, is the first person prosecuted under the federal law against using violence or otherwise interfering with those entering abortion clinics.

The life-without-parole sentences will run concurrently.

Hill, a former Presbyterian minister, killed Dr. John Bayard Britton, 69, and his volunteer bodyguard, retired Air Force Lt. Col. James Barrett, 74. Barrett's wife, 69-year-old June Barrett, was wounded in the attack July 29.

Hill asked U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson to view a videotape of an ultrasound taken of a woman's body during an abortion, which Hill said would illustrate his motivation for the murders.

Vinson responded that he was not sure that would be relevant to the sentence, but encouraged Hill to speak.

"The rationale, your honor, is simply I was trying to prevent Dr. Britton from killing the 30 people he was going to kill that day," Hill said.

Vinson said he did not doubt Hill's sincerity about believing he had a higher motive, but added: "God does not look with favor on the taking of any human life."

Hill, who was wearing a faded green jail jumpsuit, blue slippers and ankle shackles, seemed calm throughout the proceedings, which lasted just under one hour.

Hill also received 10 years under the new law for shooting June Barrett and five years for a weapons violation. He was ordered to pay June Barrett $480 for medical expenses and counseling and $1,815 for her husband's funeral expenses.

The state jury that convicted Hill a month ago recommended the death penalty, but Circuit Judge Frank Bell is not bound by the recommendation at sentencing on Tuesday.

Hill said he has no plans to appeal either sentence and hopes his death will inspire "faithful men to take up arms in defense of the unborn."

"There's no question that the more apparent an injustice is, the more likely people are going to be to rise up to stop that injustice," Hill said in a telephone interview with Reuters from the Escambia County jail.

He said he believes that it might motivate others to follow him if he is sent to death in the electric chair. "There's a real possibility it could be a partially motivating factor to do as I have done."

They came as waves of refugees fleeing warfare, most anticipating a short stay until the violence subsided. But eventually, the vast majority settled down and adapted to life in the United States, abandoning hopes of ever moving back to their ravaged homeland.

On Friday, though, as word spread that the Clinton Administration had decided to end a special status accorded to tens of thousands of expatriate El Salvadorans, the prospect of a forced return became alarmingly real, despite official assurances to the contrary. A sense of confusion and betrayal was evident in the Pico-Union/Westlake barrio that is Los Angeles' bustling Central American heartland.

"Going back now is difficult to contemplate," said Martin Granados, father of nine children, six born in El Salvador and three born here. "Life for our family is in this country now. I work here, my children are learning English. . . . We'll try to do everything we can to stay."

With an uneasy peace prevailing in El Salvador -- and with a U.S. public apparently opposed to offering special treatment to immigrants -- the Clinton Administration concluded Friday that it was time to end the Salvadorans' "Deferred Enforced Departure" protection, the latest incarnation of a program that had allowed many Salvadorans to remain in the United States legally since 1991. As a result, 90,000 to 187,000 Salvadorans -- authorities could provide no more precise estimate -- will find their legal status terminated Dec. 31.

Uncertainty among expatriates is most intense in Greater Los Angeles, home to the nation's largest Salvadoran community, numbering perhaps 500,000. Many now fear forced repatriations -- though experts say that is extremely unlikely and officials went out of their way Friday to allay such concerns, stressing the gradual nature of any change.

"There will be no immediate, large-scale deportations," Immigration and Naturalization Service Commissioner Doris Meissner told a Washington news conference Friday. "We don't expect anything to happen abruptly."

*

In fact, while allowing Salvadorans' status to lapse Dec. 31, the Administration also agreed to extend work permits of affected Salvadorans for nine months. That provides a cushion until Sept. 30 for those currently possessing working papers. And other legal protections are likely to extend for years afterward.

In the already tense, post-Proposition 187 climate of California, however, Salvadorans who learned to be wary of officialdom back home were not dismissing the possibility that there one day could be large-scale roundups and deportations. Most arrived here as illegal immigrants by crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, many after leaving their homeland under threat and dodging police and immigration agents.

Today, few relish the prospect of reverting to the shadow life of the undocumented, particularly with the increasing difficulty of finding work without papers. But even fewer seem willing to return to a nation still reeling economically, socially and politically from the aftereffects of a long civil war that many believe was prolonged by massive U.S. aid to the Salvadoran government -- assistance prompted by Cold War geopolitical concerns that seem distant today.

"What future would I have now in El Salvador?" asked Cristina Melendez, a mother of two who stopped by Friday at the offices of El Rescate, the Central American social service organization in Pico-Union.

Melendez has two U.S.-born children, a 2-year-old son and a 1-year-old daughter, and has no intention of ever taking them to El Salvador. "I don't want my children to suffer as I did," said Melendez, 23, who works at a Fullerton paper products factory.

Less certain about what she would do was Maria Navarrete, also a mother of two young children, who said she would consider going back if she did not succeed in having her working papers extended beyond next September.

"I'll return if I have to, if there's no other alternative," said Navarrete, a single mother who earns $6 an hour as a machine operator. "But it would be a much more difficult life for my children."

Most Salvadorans in the United States, experts say, will probably file political asylum claims, applications that can drag on for years. With time, Salvadorans who fled to Los Angeles, Houston, Washington and other centers during the 1980s -- when one-fifth or more of the Central American nation's people are believed to have left -- have become less of a refugee population seeking to return home than an established immigrant community unwilling to go back.

*

Many, like the Granados family of Los Angeles, sold their properties back home and sent for their families, often paying so-called coyotes thousands of dollars to smuggle children and spouses on the perilous journey through Mexico and across the U.S. border. The Granadoses' nine children are together with their parents now, and the father -- a former farmer who now toils in a carpet factory -- says he doesn't have a clue as to where they would even live in today's El Salvador.

The same uncertainty exists among refugees' relatives in El Salvador, where annual remittances from expatriates in the United States and elsewhere are thought to top $1 billion, propping up the nation's sagging economy. Salvadoran officials acknowledge being ill-prepared to cope with the return of huge numbers of expatriates.

Salvadoran President Armando Calderon Sol, who discussed the issue with Vice President Al Gore in Mexico City, said he received assurances that there will be no massive deportations. "And we must be clear about that because many Salvadorans, here and in the United States, were full of anxiety and uncertainty," the president said after returning to San Salvador.

Despite the Dec. 31 deadline, hard-won legal protections will continue to shield affected Salvadorans.

All those whose status expires later this month are eligible for special consideration when filing asylum claims under the terms of the 1990 settlement of a landmark court case alleging that U.S. officials discriminated against asylum-seekers from U.S.-supported regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala.

*

Indeed, social service organizations working with Salvadorans and other immigrants are gearing up for a deluge of new asylum applications from those whose status is due to lapse. While it is difficult to win political asylum under U.S. law -- fewer than one in 10 Salvadorans were granted asylum even while the civil war was raging -- activists say it is crucial that Salvadorans file in order to prolong the process and possibly gain permanent residence status at a future date.

"Right now we're trying to win time," said Juan Carlos Cristales, who is coordinating asylum applications at El Rescate, taking statements from scores of applicants about their fears of returning home.

Eventually, many in the asylum pipeline may be able to win "suspension" of deportation. That is granted to some illegal immigrants who have been in the United States at least seven years, have shown good moral character and can demonstrate considerable hardship if returned to their homelands.

At the Central American Resource Center, the other major Pico-Union social service outlet, leaders urged Salvadorans on Friday not to panic but to file expeditiously for political asylum.

"We're disappointed today, but we still have a space to look in the future for a long-term solution," said Roberto Lovato, the center's executive director.

Times staff writers Tracy Wilkinson in El Salvador and Robert Jackson in Washington contributed to this report.

Thirty-four years of culinary hegemony is expected to end soon at Los Angeles International Airport, as officials plan to transfer restaurant operations from a single concessionaire to an eclectic mix of operators headlined by Wolfgang Puck, McDonald's and the Disney Co.

Among the proposed innovations is the transformation of the airport's landmark Theme Building into a "Space Age cafe," of Disney design which would offer food created by some of the city's finest restaurants.

If an evaluation panel's recommendations are approved Tuesday by the Airport Commission, about 40% of the food service at the airport will be taken from long-time operator Host International Inc. and placed in the hands of seven restaurants or partnerships.

City officials are so sure that the commission will approve the proposal that they have already scheduled a news conference, before the vote, to introduce the partners in the food plan.

The gastronomic revolution for the airport's 46 million annual passengers is supposed to be completed in early 1996, with some outlets opening sooner. Previous timelines for the project, however, have proved overly optimistic.

Mayor Richard Riordan's appointees on the Airport Commission have pledged to make the nation's fourth-busiest passenger airport more accommodating to passengers.

They also said they want to maximize profits and would not institute a price limit on food, as the airport staff had proposed. John Wayne Airport in Orange County and other airports have such price controls.

The Riordan team projects that, once all new leases for the airport's restaurants and bars are final, the minimum annual rent should at least double, to $10 million annually.

An eight-month search focused on adding pizazz to airport fare that has been dominated by boxed sandwiches, vending machine pizzas and steamed hot dogs.

A panel of airport employees and commissioners sought proposals with a distinctly Southern California flair and those that reflected Los Angeles' cultural diversity.

*

The most unusual proposal, though, is the L.A. Encounter Restaurant, which would extend the Theme Building's spaceship design to its interior, complete with waiters in space garb, interactive displays, holograms and other high-tech entertainment.

Disney Imagineering would design the restaurant; the food operation would be in the hands of CA One Services, which has food operations at 37 other airports. The food service firm, in turn, would contract with some of the city's best-known restaurants to provide their signature creations for the "L.A. Encounter" menu.

The Theme Building's perennial problem in attracting visitors to its isolated location would be attacked by shuttling patrons to and from the restaurant in a space probe-style van, perhaps with a driver wearing a space alien costume.

"L.A. Encounter" would provide a "campy and fun" greeting for visitors and a destination even for locals who would not otherwise be at the airport, predicted lawyer Lisa Specht, who is helping to put the deal together.

"It's phenomenal. It's the kind of thing you look at and say 'Wow!' " said Airport Commission President Ted Stein, who has guided the remaking of the food concessions.

Elsewhere in the airport, the Daily Grill chain would bring its menu of American fare to a soon-to-be-expanded mezzanine in the Tom Bradley International Terminal. The restaurant would seat 283.

The other half of the international mezzanine would be devoted to foreign foods -- Mexican, Japanese and Chinese. Elsewhere in the terminal, the Chatsworth-based Rhino Chasers micro-brewery would expand into the bar business, offering obscure beer brands in surfing safari surroundings.

*

Puck would expand his Wolfgang Puck's Express concept, now at a handful of locations, at Terminal 2. The restaurant would serve gourmet pizzas and salads in the mode of Spago, one of the celebrity chef's signature restaurants.

The plan also calls for five McDonald's outlets and for new coffee and Haagen Dazs ice cream shops. The striking success of a Starbuck's coffee outlet in Terminal 5 has triggered plans for even more designer coffee businesses -- possibly including coffee pushcarts in all terminals.

A general operator remains to be chosen for most of the remaining restaurant and bar space at the airport. Host International is a candidate to operate those 23 facilities.

What would be done with the projected new earnings at the airport remains in doubt. Riordan continues to hold on to his hope that airport revenue can be diverted to the city's general fund, perhaps to help hire more police officers. But so far, federal law has prohibited transfer of airport revenue to activities outside of the airport.

Charging that the Los Angeles City Fire Department is plagued by racism and discrimination, the organization representing African American firefighters called Friday for the mayor to appoint a black fire commissioner and for department officials to implement reforms in the 3,100-member force.

"(The Fire Department) remains for a vast majority of our members a very hostile, closed organization where systems, safeguards and procedures have been put in place and which serve to perpetuate a sexist and racist environment," said Capt. Kwame Cooper, director of the 225-member Los Angeles Stentorians.

Flanked by more than 50 firefighters and supporters, Cooper spoke at a news conference called to voice support for the findings in a controversial city audit released last month. The scathing study concluded that white males dominate top posts and that women and minorities have been harassed and given unfair evaluations by supervisors, all in an effort to run them off the force.

"Finally, the daily reality and struggle and discrimination which exists in this department has been documented as a widespread problem," Cooper said, standing in front of an old stucco building south of Downtown that once was one of two all-black firehouses before the department was integrated in 1955.

The group pledged to work with the Fire Department but threatened legal action if progress is not made.

The harsh criticism by the Stentorians adds to the growing controversy engulfing the department. The City Council's Personnel Committee plans to investigate the force and has scheduled two hearings this month, which are certain to generate more heat on the department and its chief, Donald O. Manning.

Manning has dismissed the Personnel Department's audit as a "hatchet job" based on unscientific methodology and the grumblings of a few anonymous firefighters and embittered former employees.

Assistant Chief Dean E. Cathey, a department spokesman, denied Friday that racism and discrimination are a widespread problem.

"With 3,100 firefighters, it would be unrealistic to assume that everyone is going to get along," Cathey said. "But (it) is a far stretch to say that this department is plagued by racism and sexism."

He said the department has done more to ensure a harassment-free workplace than any other agency in the city. Cathey added that the department is well on its way toward implementing reforms.

The centerpiece of that effort is a $2-million proposal by Manning to create a 17-person human resources bureau that would have recruiting teams, affirmative action officers and officials who would mentor women and minorities to help improve their promotion rates.

A department task force working to develop that proposal includes members of the Stentorians, Cathey noted, as well as women, Latinos and representatives of the 3,000-member firefighters union.

The task force was lauded Friday by Fire Commission President Elizabeth Lowe as a big step in the right direction. "I feel confident that this team will produce a plan to satisfy all the issues that have been raised," Lowe said.

At the news conference, civil rights attorney Melanie E. Lomax, the Stentorian's legal adviser, called on Mayor Richard Riordan to fill an upcoming vacancy on the Fire Commission with an African American. When Riordan took office last year, Lomax said, he replaced the five-member board, leaving it without a black representative for the first time in 20 years.

A Riordan spokeswoman said Friday that the mayor would select a new commissioner based on qualifications, not race or ethnicity.

Lomax, pointing to the audit's findings, said there was a clear pattern of harassment and discrimination in the Fire Department's promotions process.

The audit said the department has made significant gains in its entry-level hiring, but it found that white males make up 95% of the top 20 officials. "Ninety-five percent white male speaks for itself," Lomax said.

Throwing yet another wrench into the timing of the O.J. Simpson murder trial, a federal judge on Friday declined to intervene in a squabble between two jurists by refusing to overturn an order that requires one of Simpson's lawyers to begin a New York trial next week.

In a sharply worded ruling, U.S. District Judge Kevin Thomas Duffy accused lawyers Peter J. Neufeld, a DNA expert, of putting off work for his New York client once he was presented with the more glamorous Simpson case. Duffy also had harsh words for Superior Court Judge Lance A. Ito, who ordered Neufeld to appear for a hearing on DNA evidence in the Simpson case but whose order Duffy said did not appear to be drafted with "full knowledge of all the facts."

*

Although Simpson's lawyers said they would continue to contest the requirement that Neufeld appear in the New York case, at least for now the decision threatens to force a long postponement of a DNA hearing scheduled to begin Dec. 12. Simpson's attorneys have said they cannot go forward with the DNA hearing without Neufeld, and the New York case could last more than a month.

Other matters could be addressed during the interim, but any long postponement of the DNA hearing would push back opening statements as well. That would conflict with Simpson's oft-repeated desire to get his trial under way as soon as possible and increase the hardship on jurors, who are being required to avoid most news media while they await the beginning of their duties.

*

Simpson is charged with killing his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and Ronald Lyle Goldman, but he has pleaded not guilty and has vigorously declared his innocence.

The conflict over Neufeld's responsibilities began Monday, when New York Supreme Court Judge Harold J. Rothwax ordered the lawyer to be ready for trial next week in a case in which he represents Pedro Gil, a man accused of killing a New York police officer. After a shouting match between Neufeld and the judge, Rothwax warned the attorney that he would be jailed if he failed to appear as ordered.

Simpson's attorneys then complained to Judge Ito, who issued an order of his own, demanding that Neufeld appear in Los Angeles on Dec. 12 for the scheduled start of a much-anticipated hearing on the admissibility of DNA test results in the Simpson case. That order set up a conflict between the two judges, but Rothwax refused to yield, instead charging that Ito was interfering in his case.

Faced with the threat that Neufeld could be jailed if he failed to appear for the New York case, his attorneys filed a request for a restraining order Friday. They argued that Simpson's right to effective assistance of counsel would be infringed if Neufeld is not allowed to travel to California.

*

In his brief, veteran civil rights lawyer William Kunstler wrote that if Neufeld were forced to obey Rothwax's order, Simpson would "be denied the indispensable services of Mr. Neufeld in the forensic hearings commencing on Dec. 12, 1994, the outcome of which is crucial to his defense of the extremely serious charges pending against him."

Kunstler filed that brief Friday, but it was denied within hours as Duffy, in New York, issued a wry, three-page order that took aim at a number of the participants in the Simpson case.

Duffy noted that defendants are entitled to competent lawyers but not necessarily to a particular lawyer of their choice. As a result, he said, he could not find that Simpson would be stripped of effective counsel by Neufeld's absence unless he was prepared to rule that the rest of Simpson's small army of highly regarded attorneys was incapable of representing him.

"For Simpson to have standing to raise any issue as to 'due process' in this court would necessitate a finding that Robert L. Shapiro Esq. of the California Bar and his entire defense team . . . are incompetent -- a finding I am unwilling to make, at least at this time," Duffy wrote.

In his order, Duffy also blasted Neufeld, suggesting that the lawyer was forgoing his responsibilities to his New York client in order to pursue the higher-profile Simpson case.

"Mr. Neufeld's position in the Gil case is no different than that of any other lawyer who undertakes the defense of a criminal case and then finds a more interesting and lucrative matter presented," said Duffy.

Of Ito's handling of the matter, Duffy added: "I cannot believe that Judge Ito's order was issued with full knowledge of all the facts. It is hard for me to believe that Judge Ito would hold that there are no California lawyers capable or competent to understand, present or refute scientific evidence, including DNA evidence."

Legal experts were generally unsurprised that Duffy declined to act in the case. Jonathan Varat, a UCLA law professor, said federal courts are not allowed to intervene in pending state court matters except in extraordinary circumstances. Conflicts such as the one that has arisen between Ito and Rothwax generally are resolved informally, but so far neither jurist has been willing to yield.

*

Kunstler, the latest legal luminary to sign up with the Simpson team, said he would return to an appellate court in New York next week to continue fighting Rothwax's order.

"We're going to keep it up," Kunstler said. "My office never gives up."

At the same time, Shapiro said he wants to take the weekend to consider the defense team's options if Neufeld is not available for several weeks. Ito said he would take the matter up Monday.

As the battle over Neufeld flared on both coasts, the judge and lawyers in the Simpson case continued to plod ahead with jury selection, netting three more possible alternate jurors by the end of Friday's session. That brings the total number of prospective alternates to 41, just five short of the number Ito hopes to have when the attorneys begin exercising peremptory challenges.

Among the candidates cleared for possible service Friday was a 39-year-old postal employee who called himself a "regular guy" and who at first expressed some confusion about the legal standard that requires prosecutors to prove a defendant's guilt but does not require a defendant to prove his innocence. That issue has proved a stumbling block for many of the prospective panelists.

But after Ito and Simpson attorney Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. explained the concept to the man Friday, he said he understood.

"He's presumed to be innocent," Cochran said. "You have any problem with that?"

"No problem at all," the man said, pledging to weigh the evidence in the case impartially and to disregard the bits and pieces he had picked up from the media.

Two other jury candidates cleared questioning Friday. One is a 27-year-old travel clerk and student who expressed misgivings about having to miss some classes. But that woman said she could rearrange her schedule, and she was asked to return next week for consideration as an alternate.

Likewise, a 53-year-old South-Central woman was allowed to remain on the panel after saying she had only limited exposure to the case, in part because she favors television soap operas over newspapers. The alternate jury candidates are to return Wednesday.

The Simpson Case: * For a complete package of stories on the O.J. Simpson trial, including the jury questionnaire, recent news articles and profiles of key figures in the case, sign on to the TimesLink on-line service and "jump" to keyword "Simpson."

Details on Times electronic services, A5

A civic center can often mirror a city's soul, reflecting its present fortunes and its highest aspirations.

In San Francisco, you step outside City Hall and see the ornate old War Memorial Opera House, the Museum of Modern Art and shining Davies Hall, a glass-walled cathedral to the arts. The concert hall fairly glows with sophistication and urbanity -- a vision of all San Francisco's best feelings about itself.

In Los Angeles, you step outside City Hall and see government offices, the high-rises of Bunker Hill and one notably vacant lot, strewn with brush, piles of concrete rubble and mismatched trees. The empty parcel, surrounded by a sagging cyclone fence, rubs like a burr in a city already chafing with self-doubt.

It has been nearly 20 years since the property at 1st Street and Broadway was laid bare -- stripped of the old state office building that had been deemed unsafe after the Sylmar earthquake.

Now, the last, best plan for refurbishing the land is in danger of falling by the wayside and the city is without a suitable welcome mat at its own front door.

The government officials who oversee the property are threatening to cut off a seven-year agreement with developer Raffi Cohen, who has failed to carry out a plan to build twin office towers, fronted by an expansive plaza, shopping arcade, fountain and trees.

Thursday was the deadline for Cohen to start the project or relinquish his option to develop the land, which is owned jointly by the state, county and city. Until the last minute -- and even after it passed -- Cohen was scrambling to modify his lease agreement, trying to buy time so that his dream development could go ahead.

A backhoe and a tractor rumbled over the property in the waning days of Cohen's lease -- turning the old steps of the state building to rubble. Underground, crews began to tear asbestos out of the long-closed parking garage.

Those who have followed the property's fortunes for years said the hurried groundbreaking was a desperate attempt by Cohen to preserve his development rights. But a construction manager said that the eleventh-hour demolition was a sincere attempt to begin the project that is to be called First Civic Center.

Cohen won't talk about it. County officials who manage the property are also close-mouthed, although they are expected to decide its fate as early as next week.

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In its time, the plan for 1st and Broadway had offered Los Angeles as much flash as cash. Architectural critics praised the verve of its design -- twin office towers shouldering a glass pyramidal "head" and a wide plaza dotted with kiosks offering food and drink. Government money managers salivated at the prospect of $2.5 billion in rent that they were to collect over 66 years.

But the plans were dependent on finding tenants to fill 600,000 square feet of offices and, when the Downtown rental market turned sour, so did plans for L.A.'s new welcome mat to the world.

One partner backed out of the deal not long after it was set. Then Cohen defaulted on the $125,000 monthly rent he paid to control the property. Construction schedules were set back. Now, with tenants still lacking, Cohen's current partner, Melvin Simon, reportedly wants out of the deal.

Cohen has already poured $5.5 million in rent into the property and he owes about $1 million more, plus other expenses. All he will have to show for that investment, if his lease is not extended, is about $3.5 million he has collected from an adjacent parking lot.

Besides an extended lease, Cohen wants permission to begin construction of the plaza and a subterranean parking structure while postponing the office construction, said Dan Rosenfeld, who manages the state of California's properties. "A plaza in front of City Hall is worth something, but how long can we give him a hunting license for something else that might not be there?" Rosenfeld asked.

Something must be done, he said, or the empty lot will remain "like a gaping hole where a tooth has been ripped away."

Mayor Richard Riordan calls it ugly and says that the end of the Cohen deal might open the door for a new arrangement to create "a broad open plaza with huge trees." He holds out high hopes for the old city core, noting that the Union Rescue Mission is moving out, that the dilapidated police headquarters will probably be rebuilt, and that as many as 5,000 state workers are scheduled to move into new offices Downtown.

*

Harry Pregerson, a U.S. Court of Appeals judge and a lifelong Los Angeles resident, said he cringes every time he passes 1st and Broadway. He has quietly tried to promote the opening of a center for cultural understanding, a place where ethnic, racial and religious groups could come together. Pregerson would like the center named for "two models of tolerance" -- Rodney G. King and Reginald O. Denny.

But for now there is just the old, graffiti-marked concrete bunker that was once the foundation of the state office building, and an abandoned gas pump.

The rusted chain-link fence surrounds a graveyard of old political placards. Through the years, the only semblance of progress was the addition -- after each election -- of a new list of politicians to the billboards that loomed over the site.

Now even the billboards have been knocked down. What will happen next, nobody is quite sure.

A team of biologists hired by water districts caught 40 rare steelhead trout in Santa Paula and Matilija creeks this week as part of a last-minute study to influence whether the oceangoing fish will soon be protected as an endangered species.

Using an electric fishing rig similar to a stun gun, the biologists also captured a bucketful of steelhead in the Ventura River. But these fish were not killed. Instead researchers clipped a portion of a fin on each fish for genetic analysis and then let them go.

Meanwhile, environmental activists have protested the capture of steelhead in Ventura County streams and dozens of fish farther north, contending that the research duplicates earlier efforts and is pushing the species closer to extinction.

"It certainly has the potential of studying these fish to death," said Jim Edmondson, executive director of California Trout Inc. "How many fish do we need to kill before we answer the question if this species qualifies as endangered?"

Federal researchers are doing their own study on the fish, aimed at determining whether the Southern California steelhead is a genetically distinct species that needs protection under the Endangered Species Act.

*

Water suppliers maintain they want only to help the federal government make the right decision, particularly because steps to protect an endangered species could limit how much water they can siphon from streams and rivers to supply cities and agriculture.

"Our motive here really is to make sure that any decision is based on the best scientific data available," said Jennifer Persike-Becker, a spokeswoman for the Assn. of California Water Agencies.

"We want to protect species, but we also want to protect water supplies in California," she said.

The last-minute study, dubbed Operation Steelhead, initially spawned a series of skirmishes over state Department of Fish and Game permits to kill as many as 200 fish in 11 streams in California.

At one point last month, two Fish and Game officials staked out the road to Matilija Creek after headquarters alerted them that water agency biologists might try to capture more of the remnant trout than their permits allowed.

The biologists never showed, instead agreeing to postpone casting electric rods into the water until state Fish and Game officials determined which creeks could stand to lose another 20 fish to research.

Ultimately, the department gave permission to kill up to 140 fish in seven streams. It also granted approval to catch, clip the fins and release steelhead in four other streams.

"We didn't issue those permits until me and my supervisors were convinced that they would not harm the steelhead populations," said Dennis McEwan, a steelhead specialist with the state Fish and Game Department in Sacramento.

California Trout continues to protest the permits, citing that the National Marine Fisheries Service received permission to capture 110 steelhead for its genetic studies to determine whether to propose adding the fish to the endangered species list. The fisheries service will announce its decision Feb. 16.

Among other inquiries, both studies are trying to determine whether the steelhead in Southern California can be considered genetically distinct from its Northern California cousin.

Such a finding would make the fish a strong candidate for the endangered list. "I would be hard-pressed to find a group of steelhead who are more endangered than this one," McEwan said.

Jean Baldrige, a biologist coordinating the study of Southern California steelhead for the water agencies, said her study should complement rather than duplicate the work done by the fisheries service.

She said the fish collected in streams should fill gaps in information developed in the federal study. "The National Marine Fisheries Service has limited staff and limited dollars to dig up all of this information," Baldrige said. "Our work is to supplement their data."

Baldrige said her crews have been careful not to harm the steelhead populations. For example, she said, they decided not to take any fish from Coyote Creek above the Ventura River because they could not find the 20 needed for a representative sample.

She said she has been surprised at the commotion over permits issued to her research crews. "We've been taking 20 fish out of a stream where anglers could take five fish a day all year-round," she said. "You have to ask, 'Why is it such a big deal?' "

The Ventura and Santa Clara rivers once supported thousands of steelhead, as did many rivers from northern Mexico to Alaska. But steelhead no long exist in Northern Mexico, or San Diego and Orange counties.

*

They are limited to small populations in four streams in Southern California -- the Santa Clara and Ventura rivers in Ventura County, Malibu Creek in Los Angeles County and the Santa Ynez River in Santa Barbara County -- and their tributaries.

Like the salmon, steelhead are born in freshwater. They look identical to rainbow trout and remain in freshwater streams for one to three years before swimming to sea for a similar period. Once in the ocean, they take on a different color and their lower jaws become more pronounced.

As adults, they return to their natal streams to spawn. Then they either return to the sea, or die, worn out from the upstream battle.

Irma Lopez kept reminding herself that Dec. 2 was a day like any other. But as the anniversary neared of the macabre shooting rampage at an Oxnard unemployment office that left five people dead and four wounded, the surreal memories rushed back, and she wanted time to stop.

"Our friends that lost their lives, I don't think we'll ever forget them," said a tearful Lopez, who was seriously wounded during the massacre one year ago. " . . . They were the most wonderful people you can imagine."

Survivors, friends and relatives of those killed during Ventura County's bloodiest shooting spree gathered Friday for several memorials honoring the public servants lost in the tragedy.

Outside the Ventura County Government Center Friday morning, about 75 people listened to Lopez and other speakers as the Board of Supervisors held a ceremony at a commemorative rose garden planted so the mass murders will never be forgotten.

About noon at the Santa Clara Cemetery in Oxnard, about 100 police officers and relatives of slain Detective James O'Brien met to recount his heroism and honor the anniversary of his death. Bagpipers played the mournful "Danny Boy," a U.S. Marine Corps honor guard gave a 21-gun salute, and a large wreath was placed next to the fallen policeman's grave.

"We'll never forget him," said Mary O'Brien, standing beside her brother's grave. "Hopefully everybody else won't."

About 100 of O'Brien's friends and family members also held a candlelight vigil on Victoria Avenue Friday night at the roadside where the detective was gunned down.

"It gives us a chance to finalize our feelings and bring this to a conclusion," said Assistant Police Chief Stan Myers. The vigil was organized by the Oxnard Police Wives Assn.

*

Each person placed a green and red ribbon on a 10-foot-tall Christmas tree. A note with the message, "A cop's cop, but a friends' friend," was attached to a nearby pole that bears O'Brien's name.

The tragedy unfolded last Dec. 2, when unemployed computer engineer Alan Winterbourne burst into the state Employment Development Department office in Oxnard and began indiscriminately shooting people, apparently frustrated after years of looking for work.

He gunned down unemployment workers Phillip Villegas and Anna Velasco and Richard Bateman, a rehabilitation counselor with the Assn. for Retarded Citizens visiting the office that day. Four other people were seriously wounded, including employee Lopez, who was shot in the back while desperately rushing to escape.

Winterbourne later shot and killed O'Brien before dying amid a fusillade of police gunfire as he attempted to enter another unemployment office in Ventura.

The massacre lasted only 13 minutes. Yet for the survivors and the relatives of those who were killed, the sorrow and trauma will last forever.

"I thought it was some kind of sick joke that my wife was supposed to be in the emergency room," said Oxnard Mayor Manuel Lopez, husband of Irma Lopez, during the rose garden dedication. "But it wasn't a sick joke, and it was a horrible day for all of us."

Many of those who lived through the tragedy said Friday that the anniversary brought back painful emotions they had hoped to put away.

"It has always been in the back of our minds," said Villegas' mother, Nellie, at the rose garden ceremony. "This is reviving everything."

Oxnard Police Chaplain Larry Modugno said that many officers, reminded of the blood bath of a year ago, have consulted with him in recent days, trying to make sense of what occurred.

"As we get to this anniversary, it brings back a lot of painful memories for the officers," Modugno said at the cemetery. "It's very difficult for officers to think about the loss of another officer, and the taking of a life, even if it is Alan Winterbourne."

*

Others said the show of support for O'Brien and the other victims of the shooting spree lifted their spirits.

"Now that I'm here this has left me with some good memories," Mary O'Brien said. "I'll always remember the support we received."

Carol Hartnett, Bateman's daughter, said she had not brought her young children to her father's funeral a year ago because she thought it would have traumatized them. But the rose garden ceremony was something they could handle, she said.

"I think this was a more appropriate thing for them to experience," Hartnett said, after walking the children through the rose garden to a plaque honoring the victims of the shooting. "I'm happy with this."

As he sat in a wheelchair and talked about his miraculous recovery, the Rev. Gerald Buxton made it clear he is not angry that the man accused of maiming him walks free today.

But he is not happy about it, either.

"Justice needs to be served," said Buxton, who has spent the last four months at St. John's Regional Medical Center in Oxnard recuperating from a debilitating accident.

On Aug. 6, the 62-year-old Pentecostal pastor was struck by a pickup truck and thrown 90 feet as he tended to his disabled 1974 Toyota Landcruiser on Oxnard Boulevard. Dozens of bones were broken, and doctors did not expect him to live.

Police arrested David Estey, 28, of Thousand Oaks on suspicion of felony drunk driving. A blood test showed Estey was legally drunk and had methamphetamine in his system, Deputy Dist. Atty. Don Grant said. But Estey has not been charged with any crime because prosecutors have twice sent the case back to police for further investigation.

"I have no animosity in my heart or hatred for him," Buxton said. "But he needs to pay the dues I'm paying."

Those dues include a $500,000 medical bill that Buxton's insurance will not cover. He belongs to a consortium of pastors who share medical costs. But the pastors' agreement does not include traffic accidents, Buxton said.

"If this bill were $20,000 or $30,000 I'd worry a lot more," said Buxton's wife, Shirley. "But a half million dollars is just too unreal."

Shirley Buxton said she and her husband have applied for assistance from several governmental agencies.

The Buxtons have received no help from Estey, who was uninsured. Nor is the couple satisfied with what has been done to prosecute him.

"It's frustrating," she said. "It makes all of this much harder."

Prosecutors said the case was returned to Oxnard police for more investigation shortly after the accident. The police report was resubmitted to the district attorney Wednesday after the Buxtons were questioned again about the accident.

But it was rejected a second time Thursday and sent back to police, prosecutor Grant said. "It's just not ready for filing," he said.

*

Grant said he wants to file felony charges against Estey, but cannot do so until the police reconstruct the accident scene and establish where Buxton was standing when he was hit.

Oxnard Police OfficeW. Lumas said Buxton's injuries played a large role in delaying the investigation. Because he was on a ventilator and had tubes in his throat, Buxton was unable to speak for nearly three months.

"His information is very critical to the case," Lumas said. "We need to figure out where he was standing in the roadway."

But the delay has frustrated the Buxtons further.

"I just don't understand what difference it makes where my husband was standing," Shirley Buxton said. "(Estey) was drunk."

Buxton's vehicle was stalled in the slow lane of Oxnard Boulevard when he was struck. Grant said it is possible Buxton is partly liable in the accident, depending on where he was in the road when hit. But Buxton said he does not remember where he was standing, and no one witnessed the accident.

Estey refused to comment on the case.

Through the entire ordeal, Buxton has amazed his doctors with his positive attitude. Doctors said Buxton should have been killed in the accident. Instead, he now hopes to walk again and plans to leave the hospital before Christmas.

"The accident didn't affect my mind," Buxton said. "God preserved my mind. That's a miracle."

He said he hopes to be back in his pulpit and before his 200 parishioners in Rialto next year. "He has a tremendous faith and a positive attitude, and I think that's why he has come as far as he has come," said George Yu, the physician who treated Buxton in the emergency room.

"Everything was broken," Yu said. "He was bleeding profusely."

He was not breathing either when Lorraine Heter rushed to Buxton's crumpled body moments after the accident. Heter was across the street when, she said, she heard the tell-tale sound of metal crushing metal.

"I looked up and saw the reverend about four feet off the ground," she said.

*

For the next two months, nearly every day brought a new life-threatening crisis as Buxton remained in the intensive-care unit. He was paralyzed below the neck and internal organ-after-internal organ had problems, Yu said.

"There were all kinds of nasty things," Yu said. "He should have died several times."

Now the Buxtons are awaiting a Dec. 23 hospital release.

"I'm looking forward to leading a normal life again," Shirley Buxton said. Like her husband, she said her religious faith and positive attitude have buoyed her through the tragedy.

Because of the couple's spirit, Yu said he will not charge for his work over the past four months.

"This guy is now a friend of mine," Yu said. "This is the least I can do for him."

Alarmed by the death rate along a dangerous stretch of California 126, city and county leaders Friday faced off against the state Department of Transportation over whether installing concrete center dividers would ease the problem.

Officials from throughout the county have endorsed a proposal to place the barriers along perilous sections of the roadway.

But Caltrans flatly rejected the plan at Friday's meeting of the Ventura County Transportation Commission, telling the panel that although barriers would prevent head-on collisions, they would increase other types of accidents.

Over the past five years, there have been 1,168 accidents and 29 people have died along the winding stretch between Ventura and the Los Angeles County line east of Fillmore.

But in a verbal report to the commission, Caltrans spokesman Steve Leung said the dividers would create a new set of traffic hazards.

"The barriers would stop vehicles from crossing over" into oncoming traffic, but "the blunt ends of the barriers would create a dangerous object for people to hit," Leung said. "If someone can come up with the facts and prove to us that concrete barriers are the best solution, we are ready and willing to discuss it."

The commission reacted angrily to the report, saying it is up to Caltrans to provide information about the feasibility of installing barriers and accusing the agency of stubbornly resisting their plea without giving it full consideration.

"Nothing you have shown us today convinces us" that barriers would not reduce the fatality rate, said Commissioner David Smith, who also serves as a Camarillo city councilman. "I don't believe that you have the information that says if we put barriers in it will be worse. I'm not convinced."

Leung suggested a list of alternatives to the barriers, among them posting signs along the roadway cautioning motorists to drive carefully, stepping up efforts to have drivers turn on their headlights during the day and increasing law enforcement to nab speeders and drunk drivers.

Leung reminded the commission that road-widening projects are scheduled for the next several years on two narrow, accident-prone strips of the highway. He recommended that a task force be formed to address the safety problem and suggested that the county consider eventually transforming the highway into a freeway because freeways are generally safer.

Commission Executive Director Ginger Gherardi bristled at Leung's suggestions, saying the role of the proposed task force was already being performed by the commission and that making California 126 a freeway would "heap a host of environmental problems" on the county, "not to mention funding."

Roger Campbell, a Fillmore city councilman who is spearheading the effort to install median barriers, harshly criticized Leung's report.

"It is really clear to us that you started out with the premise 'We're not going to do this,' " Campbell said. "I see a lot of conflict in what you're telling us. In fact, you're not giving (the commission) enough information to make a factual decision."

The commission directed Caltrans to research the matter more carefully and return with a beefed-up report in January.

Commissioners said they want Caltrans to tell them the type of accidents that occur when dividers are installed, whether the number of fatalities would fall if medians are installed and what sections of the highway would be conducive to barriers.

The most recent fatal crash on California 126 occurred in October, when two men were killed and three others injured in a head-on collision near Fish Hatchery Road.

On Thanksgiving Day in 1988, seven people died in a gruesome crash, including a family of five traveling from Orange County to visit friends in Santa Paula.

May we recommend the Emergency Room Special?Woodruff Community Hospital in Long Beach promises that anyone who shows up in its emergency room will see a physician within 20 minutes or there'll be no charge for the visit.

"People are busy and don't want to have to wait an hour or more like they would at a bigger hospital," reasoned Lisa Ciccanti, director of business development for the 96-bed facility.

Ciccanti said Woodruff, which handles about 15 to 25 ER cases a day, hasn't had to award any freebies for tardy service since instituting the policy in September.

The rival Memorial Medical Center of Long Beach has no plans for a counter ad campaign.

"We see nearly 50,000 patients a year in our ER, and we're one of the last remaining trauma centers in L.A. County," said spokesman Ron Yukelson. "So it would be counterproductive for us to market our emergency services."

We wonder, though, if some other hospital will attempt to one-up Woodruff on fast service. This being L.A., isn't a drive-through emergency room inevitable?

A name any life insurance agent would envy: A sign put out by one State Farm agent in Newhall caught the attention of Kevin Buck of Canyon Country. Buck, you may notice, cleverly worked his own reflection into his photo.

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The Form Down Under: Colin Dangaard of Malibu says that on a flight back from Australia on Qantas, passengers were told:

"Ladies and gentlemen, the immigration authorities are very serious about the information handed them, so please be careful when filling out the 'long form.' "

The passengers were warned that the form was confusing so they were advised to "start filling it out from the bottom and complete it in reverse. That way you will have a chance of ending up with the information on the right line."

Slap another bureaucrat on the barbie, mate.

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Give us a couple of weeks to think it over: Wolcott's stationery store on Spring Street advertises, "40% Off On All 1994 Calendars."

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Milestones in tattooing: The December issue of International Tattoo Art contains a feature on the late Lee Roy Minugh, a legend in the business for more than half a century in the L.A. area.

Minugh first set up shop in the back of a Downtown bookstore, attracting passersby with an outside sign that proclaimed: "Tattooing in the rear."

But he didn't achieve national renown until the 1950s, when he appeared on Steve Allen's popular TV show and decorated Allen's arm. "Four little black dots I think it was," Minugh later recalled. "Just so he could say he was tattooed."

It was quite a breakthrough -- though tattooists don't like to use that term. miscelLAny Hankook Elementary School, a Korean educational institution, is located in the Hancock Park area.

Two judges who are waging a legal fight to use anonymous juries in criminal trials lost the latest round this week when a state appeals court said they do not have the right to pursue the issue in court.

Philip K. Mautino and John David Lord, presiding judges of the Bellflower and Downey Municipal Courts, had asked the appeals court to overturn Superior Court rulings forbidding the use of anonymous juries in two cases.State law offers jurors anonymity once a trial is over, but Mautino and Lord believed that that protection is meaningless unless it is offered at the start. The public defender's office contends that blanket anonymity biases trials by creating the impression that defendants are to be feared.

The 2nd District Court of Appeal had agreed to hear arguments Dec. 21, but on Wednesday it dismissed both cases in a brief written ruling. The court wrote that Municipal Courts lack the legal standing to challenge Superior Court decisions. The role of the court, the justices said, is as a neutral party, not an entity with a "beneficial interest" in the outcome of the case.

Principal Deputy County Counsel Daniel E. McCoy, who represents both judges, said he will ask the California Supreme Court to grant a hearing.

Until recently, an underground walkway near E. P. Foster School in Ventura was a dingy concrete tunnel marked by the graffiti of neighborhood gangs. Light poured in from both ends, but not much else brightened the passageway.

"It used to be spooky, but now this is like walking through a little cartoon," said D'Anira, an Ojai muralist who uses only her first name.

The cartoon that D'Anira has helped create is an underwater seascape that contains elements from whimsical drawings done by a class of 28 fifth-graders at the school just off Ventura Avenue.

Using cans of latex paint, sponges and roller brushes, the students first painted a background of blues and greens, then began filling in the aquatic life.

Following the outlines drawn by D'Anira, they dabbed in jelly fish (without stingers), goldfish, turtles and a large gray whale. In between, they painted wavy green plants and orange coral.

Ten-year-old Angela Waites said her favorite part of the project is "painting stuff and seeing how it comes out."

Angela, who walks through the tunnel beneath Ventura Avenue every day, said the paint has brightened the passage, making it easier to see.

D'Anira, who is studying to become a chiropractor, said she first learned about the tunnel when she lived in the Ventura Avenue area 12 years ago.

Although her three children, age 5, 10 and 12, now attend school in Ojai, D'Anira said she wanted to give something back to her old neighborhood.

"I wanted the children to know they can make a difference, that they can do things themselves," she said.

After proposing the project to E. P. Foster Principal Fred Rivera, she turned to the city for permission to paint the tunnel and received a $1,000 grant through a beautification project.

The project should be finished within the next few weeks. It will then be coated with a clear paint that will make it easier to clean off graffiti without damaging the mural. The tunnel is open during school hours. JULIE FIELDS

Getting a head start on their mission to reform public education, a group of newly elected conservative school trustees from across Ventura County will hold a panel discussion Tuesday.

The main topic of the round table, scheduled for 8 p.m. in the Casey Auditorium in downtown Moorpark, is the role of the Ventura County Board of Education and its relationship to local school boards.

But organizers said the discussion may also cover ideas for changing public education and their panelists' reasons for seeking office.

The panelists are Norm Walker, newly elected trustee of the Simi Valley Unified School District; Elaine McKearn, just elected to the Conejo Unified School District board; Mildred Lynch, who won reelection to the Conejo board; and Angela Miller and Marty Bates, who defeated incumbents to capture seats on the county school board.

With the election of Miller and Bates, the five-member county board has three trustees backed by conservative Christian organizations.

Bates and Miller were endorsed by the Southern California Christian Times, a conservative newspaper. And county school trustee Wendy Larner, elected in 1992, ran with the support of the Pro-Family Caucus of Ventura County.

"The makeup of the county school board has changed dramatically," said Matt Noah, president of the Moorpark chapter of the Republican Assembly and the event's moderator.

Even so, its clout remains limited. County school trustees work with the county superintendent to run 17 schools for disabled and troubled students. The board also approves the budget for programs to train county teachers.

But Noah said the panelists will discuss whether the county school board can exert more influence over local school districts in Ventura County. MAIA DAVIS

Saying that "a great deal of uncertainty" exists in immigrant communities because of the passage of Proposition 187, Los Angeles County Sheriff Sherman Block on Friday urged illegal immigrants to continue stepping forward if they are witnesses to or victims of crime.

Those who are victims or witnesses are in no danger of investigation for possible deportation, Block said at a news conference.

Living in the United States illegally remains a civil violation that is enforceable only by the federal Immigration and Naturalization Service, Block explained.

Proposition 187, which was overwhelmingly approved, does call for people who are arrested on other offenses and cannot prove their legal residency to be reported to immigration authorities. But that section of the initiative, and most others, are enjoined by state and federal courts.

The Sheriff's Department does make available to the INS the names of those arrested who say they were born outside the United States. "The procedures in place are the things we've been doing forever," Block said.

The sheriff said the one portion of Proposition 187 that has taken effect -- new state statutes against the manufacture and use of fraudulent citizenship documents -- will be enforced "on a uniform basis by all law enforcement agencies in this county."

Earlier this week, the county district attorney's office filed felony charges against five Huntington Park-area men accused of manufacturing fake papers.

A federal appeals panel in Pasadena refused Friday to block construction of a 4.7-mile stretch of a toll road that will cut through the environmentally sensitive Laguna Canyon.

The three-judge panel found that the Federal Highway Administration did not violate the National Environmental Policy Act simply because it failed to discuss every alternative to the road.

The environmental group Laguna Greenbelt sued the federal agency, claiming that it had inadequately studied the environmentally sensitive canyon before approving the route, a $1.1-billion roadway that will run 17 miles from San Juan Capistrano to Newport Beach.

In unanimously affirming U.S. District Judge Linda McLaughlin's pretrial ruling, the panel dissolved the lower court's order to temporarily halt construction.

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals panel also found that the highway administration's decision not to prepare a supplemental environmental impact statement after a wildfire swept through the canyon last year was not arbitrary or capricious.

A Willowbrook mother's left arm had to be amputated above the elbow after her 3-year-old son accidentally shot her with an assault rifle, a hospital spokeswoman said Friday.

Elvira Arzate, 30, was alert and in stable condition Friday at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center, according to Dr. Tessie Cleveland.

Arzate was shot in the arm Thursday by her son, Eliazar, when the boy grabbed an assault rifle he had found in the back of his father's car, said Angie McLaughlin, a Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department spokeswoman.

Eliazar Reyes, 29, was booked on suspicion of storing a weapon in an area accessible to children and held in lieu of $15,000 bail.

The toddler "has a toy assault rifle he plays with that is very similar to his father's real one, so he knew how to point the weapon and pull the trigger," McLaughlin said.

A veterans group has endorsed a greenbelt property as its preferred site for a veterans nursing home, possibly dooming Ventura's chances at securing the state project, Mayor Tom Buford said.

The 400-bed facility, which would be paid for with state and federal funds, could bring up to 400 jobs to Ventura, city officials said.

The city lost a bid for a nursing home in an earlier round of decisions by a state task force. Members of the state panel, upon hearing competing proposals from the city and a developer, said Ventura was too internally divided for the state to invest money in a facility there.

The city's proposal would have put the home on 22 acres in east Ventura, but a local Chumash group told the task force that they oppose building there because it is near a Chumash burial ground.

The other proposal was from local developer Rudy Contreras, who wanted to put the home on his land on Olivas Park Drive, just outside the city limits. The city opposes that site because it is zoned for agricultural use.

Local war veterans, who earlier backed the city's choice, voted 12 to 4 this week to support the Olivas Park site.

Al Sanderlin, the local post commander for the Veterans of Foreign Wars, said county veterans shied away from endorsing the city site in part because Chumash opposition made the location too controversial. He said the Contreras site, on the other hand, is in a safer area and closer to the ocean. CONSTANCE SOMMER

Ventura County's two congressmen have invited Navy Secretary John H. Dalton to tour the area's two Navy bases for a firsthand view of their importance to the nation's security and the local economy.

Reps.Elton Gallegly (R-Simi Valley) and Anthony C. Beilenson (D-Woodland Hills) sent a letter to Dalton earlier this week asking him to visit the Point Mugu and Port Hueneme bases early this month.

"Recent reports indicate that these facilities are being actively considered as part of the 1995 base closing process," the congressmen wrote in a Nov. 29 letter. "We feel very strongly that, before making a decision to place these bases on your list, a tour would be appropriate and useful."

A Navy spokesman said Dalton would have no immediate comment.

The congressmen also wrote that Southern California has suffered a disproportionate share of base closures and budget cuts in recent years.

"We urge you to visit these bases so that you can see firsthand the impact of further base closures to the already fragile economy in Southern California, which continues to lag behind other regions of the country in its economic recovery." KENNETH R. WEISS

It was hours before dawn Friday, but animal control officers were already assembled -- weary, but armed and game to do battle.

Many had managed just a few hours of sleep since Monday, frustrated in their efforts to hunt down a pack of dogs that had killed dozens of local sheep. By week's end, the trail had gone cold -- three of the dogs had eluded captors for days, blending into the desert darkness at night, hiding in the dense underbrush during the day.

"Why don't we just napalm them?" one official quipped early Friday. For the next seven hours, he and a posse of Los Angeles County animal control officers and local ranchers waited for a glimpse of the dogs that have been terrorizing livestock in this part of the north Antelope Valley.

By midmorning, they finally got a break. Two of the culprits were spotted with the help of airborne reconnaissance.

A fleet of all-terrain vehicles and trucks took up the chase through the desert near Rosamond, trailing the fleeing canines as they ran toward Kern County. Overhead, the plane kept track of the dogs, and the hunters believed they were finally at the end of the chase.

That turned out to be partially true: One of the marauding dogs was killed and another was captured, but the third -- a German shepherd-pit bull mix -- apparently escaped.

*

Before Friday's drama, the dogs had struck at least three times in a week. Stakeouts by ranch hands and animal control officers had failed to foil the dogs, who had slaughtered more than 30 lambs, worth thousands of dollars. By sundown Thursday, workers at Eugene Nebeker's ranch had begun patrolling the pens in trucks.

At 3:30 a.m. Friday, the animal control officers shuffled into their headquarters, just a few miles from the ranch. They hopped into trucks in teams of two and drove to surveillance points along the mostly dirt roads nearby.

To reach the sheep pens, the dogs would have to leave their desert camouflage and dart across the roads.

"It's just a waiting game," said Officer Michael Wilson of the county Department of Animal Care and Control.

As daylight came, officers and ranchers drove around trying, with little success, to flush out the dogs.

The hunt changed when Michael Lamb drove up in his pickup and asked, "Why wasn't I invited to this hunt?" Officer Leslie Troncale, Lamb's neighbor, smiled, saying, "He has a plane ."

A few minutes later, Lamb was airborne, radioing observations to the ground forces.

The hunters learned that the dogs had struck again near dawn -- at another ranch further north -- killing several goats. The chase moved toward the Kern County line, where the hunters met Kern County animal control officers who were also pursuing the dogs.

As if on cue, the group got word that a homeowner just north of the county line reported seeing three dogs running from her property, carrying a chicken. Dirt and tumbleweeds flew when the hunters sped off, crisscrossing riverbeds and ditches as the dogs scattered.

*

The smallest dog, a black terrier, was killed when it dashed in front of a pickup and was run over. Another, a tan German shepherd mix, dived into a drainpipe to hide, but the exit was blocked by officers, who crawled in, retrieved the whimpering dog and tossed it in the lockup. The third dog's escape left officers unsure about the likelihood of further attacks.

"It looks like we got his gang, but we didn't get the leader," Cramer said. The remaining dog, he said, "may or may not be active. Once they lose their pack, their psychology changes."

The hunters say they saw a collar on the fleeing dog. That was just what rancher Nebeker had expected. Last week his crews shot three other domestic dogs that had attacked his livestock. He was fuming that a pet owner's carelessness had cost him tens of thousands of dollars worth of livestock.

"About two-thirds of our business has come to a screeching halt," he said. "I'm just absolutely fed up with this situation, and I'm not going to rest until it's better controlled. The custom up here with too many people is just to let their dogs run free."

A Sylmar man who contended that he was a "sovereign citizen" with the right to drive without any governmental controls was sentenced Friday to six months in jail for driving without a license.

San Fernando Municipal Judge L. Jeffrey Wiatt imposed the maximum term for David Sanders, who was found guilty in a non-jury trial of driving without a license and driving an unregistered vehicle.

Wiatt imposed the maximum penalty after Sanders refused to accept probation on the grounds that he was a "sovereign citizen," not a "person," and therefore was not subject to the California Vehicle Code, Deputy City Atty. Norman Wegener said.

Wiatt ordered Sanders, 37, to begin serving the jail term immediately, and set bail at $15,000 after the defendant said he intended to appeal.

On the day Jerry Rubin died I called his home telephone number for comment from someone close to him.

No one answered, but his message machine clicked on and Rubin's voice exploded in my ear, full of the relentless energy that characterized his life.

"I'm back in town, and looking forward to talking to you and everything's great and I'll call you back and make your day fantastic!"

By the heat in his delivery, Rubin could turn the simplest phrase into a call to arms, and his telephone message was no exception. It said, Stand by , America , Jerry Rubin's comin' at you!

It was a voice on the brink of doing, a message from the soul of those who rebel and defy, whose clenched fists glorify the commandments of freedom that allow them to rage.

That's why I liked him.

Though later in his life he would slip into the warmer robes of affluence he once scorned, Rubin remained true, at least, to his insuppressible nature, defying even his own past and those old rebels who mocked his new standards.

And, at the end, he perished defying the most modest of regulations, traffic lights, in favor of dodging cars to cross a dangerous thoroughfare.

Struck by an automobile, he lay in the street like a fallen flag and died two weeks later, leaving us his voice and his memory to ponder.

*

I began writing about Rubin 25 years ago when he was a screaming Yippie. He and Abbie Hoffman had come to symbolize a time of fire in the streets and violence at the barricades of those who demanded a war's end.

Rubin's voice at the trial of the Chicago 7 still rings in history's ears, mocking the process, challenging the Establishment and daring authority to silence his rage.

He was, as a reporter put it long ago, a radical's radical who could never be silenced, the very epitome of those who shout defiance.

I met him last February in his $5,000-a-month high-rise condo, still a living superlative, the salesman's salesman, a network marketeer, hustling health powders instead of world peace . . . but with no less stridency than he displayed a quarter of a century before.

The meeting took place because I had written about another Jerry Rubin, the Venice peace activist, and the ex-Yippie Rubin had telephoned to demand clarification. The Venice Rubin, I had said, was out of work and needed money. The Yippie Rubin was incensed.

"They think it's me!" he said over the phone, in a voice that managed to be both pleading and uncompromising. "My landlord thinks I can't pay the rent! My girlfriends think I'm broke! You've got to clear this up!"

I knew it was a gimmick to get him back into print, but in gimmickry often dwells the stuff of ideas. I got the two Rubins together. Before the Venice Rubin could even sit, the Yippie Rubin fixed him with a stare that could melt steel and said, "I want you to work for me! I want every Jerry Rubin in America to work for me!"

*

The Venice Rubin sat quietly as his namesake, a man he deeply admired and was often mistaken for, paced the room, answered telephone calls, promised wealth and demanded that I heed every word he uttered.

He was, for that instant, the Rubin we all remembered; not a "people's capitalist" in pin-striped suit, but the bearded, wild-eyed, frizzy-haired kid in jeans whose rage and rhetoric helped end a war and bring down a President.

Watching Rubin last February was to watch the energy of social activism abruptly redirected, a transformation so total and miraculous it belied the very existence of the Yippie who had cursed what he was to become.

In his new persona, he loved America, hated drugs and believed that power belonged not so much to those who seized it as to those who could afford it. He understood the irony, and gave it the finger.

Even that was true to his character. He was defying every word he had once uttered, and the smoke of that defiance filled his penthouse that day we sat together, the Venice Rubin, the Yippie Rubin and me.

As I look back on it, I realize that Rubin, the eternal Yippie, was what he had always been, part hero and part hypocrite, and totally defiant of both elements of that nature.

At his best, he was a kid in the streets, burning flags and raising hell, and saying what had to be said in the context of his era. I would wish him now to rest in peace, but this wasn't the kind of peace he was seeking.

Instead I'll say to those who remember, raise a fist and bow your head. A rebel lies uneasy in his grave.

Santa Claus traded in Rudolph for a red convertible on Friday for Ventura's Holiday Artwalk, a self-led tour of art galleries in the city's downtown.

At least 3,000 people were expected to fill the city's streets, shops, galleries and eateries for the annual event, which was scheduled for 5 to 9 p.m., said Sonia Tower, director of Ventura's Office of Cultural Affairs.

Councilwoman Rosa Lee Measures waited at City Hall with her husband and 5-year-old grandson for a ride from Santa, who was cruising the downtown circuit. She remarked that it was mitten weather, even though the only snow was painted on glass storefronts or strewn in window displays.

The art walk is the fourth such event organized by the city. Besides Santa, the celebration featured a brass band, a belly dancer, a juggler, carolers and minstrels.

Aside from allowing people to gift-shop and admire artwork in a scattering of galleries, the art walk "creates a greater awareness of the beauty of our downtown," Measures said.

One gallery new to the event this year was at Turning Point Foundation on Thompson Boulevard. The foundation, which offers services to people with mental illness, exhibited works created during an 11-month city-funded project in which local artists, using art as therapy, worked with foundation clients.

Clyde Reynolds, executive director of the center, said much of the artwork was done in preparation for the annual holiday art show at Camarillo State Hospital next weekend.

This year's event also gave business people a chance to show their artistry with a Window Wonderland contest. City officials were to announce the contest winner at a reception Friday.

Many people paused to smile at Georgia Olivas-Madrid's fanciful display window. Olivas-Madrid, owner of the Ladies & Gentlemen resale boutique on Main Street, festooned a red Mexican wedding dress with her collection of Christmas ornaments and posted three illuminated choristers in front.

Katie Crawford, manager of Phantom Bookshop on Main, said it took two weeks to create her store's nostalgic display, which included an old-fashioned sleigh and horse, and a Christmas tree with a curtain of silver tinsel as a backdrop.

Tower said the next art walk, planned for March, will include a "java jump" that focuses on coffeehouse crawling. JAN STEVENS

A suspected Newbury Park methamphetamine dealer who was freed on bail this week for gun and drug charges was jailed again Friday on suspicion of threatening a witness, said a sheriff's deputy.

Gary Hazher, 32, and a friend, Jimmy Sewell, 22, of Northridge went to a police informant's house in Thousand Oaks on Friday morning and threatened to kill him for giving tips to police about Hazher, said Ventura County Sheriff's Sgt. Gary Pentis.Hazher and another man were arrested earlier this week on suspicion of drug dealing, gun possession, credit card fraud and phone-service theft.

The unnamed informant reported the threat to police at about 11:30 a.m. Friday, and Pentis happened to spot the pair driving through Thousand Oaks about an hour later, he said.

Pentis said he radioed from his undercover car for backup and kept an eye on the dark green Toyota pickup that Sewell and Hazher were riding in. A marked car joined the pursuit and pulled the truck over on the northbound Moorpark Freeway.

When Sewell stopped the truck at the Avenida de Los Arboles exit, the deputies ordered the men out at gunpoint and arrested them, Pentis said.

Pentis said Hazher and Sewell will each be charged with threatening a witness. Hazher also faces an additional charge of credit card forgery and Sewell faces a charge of possessing a stolen credit card voucher.

Bail was set at $262,500 for Hazher and $250,000 for Sewell, according to jail officials. MACK REED

Widening a large section of the Arroyo Simi Flood Control Channel in Moorpark would cause no significant environmental damage, and would actually increase the amount of wetlands in the area, according to a new county report.

The project calls for widening the channel and replacing a 16,000-foot section of its concrete lining to guard against floods, officials said.The improvements would enable this portion of the channel between Hitch Boulevard and Spring Road to withstand a 100-year storm.

The project, expected to cost $4 million to $6 million, would also help reduce annual maintenance costs along the channel, while at the same time protect against erosion of its banks, according to the project's environmental impact report.

Although construction work related to the improvement project would cause increased traffic, noise and pollution, the environmental report recommends steps that can be taken to reduce their impact on the surrounding area. Construction activities, for instance, would be limited to weekdays between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m.

The report found that the project would result in some benefits, primarily creation of an additional 11 acres of wetlands due to the widening of the channel, Deputy Public Works Director Alex Sheydayi said.

The Board of Supervisors will consider the environmental report Tuesday. CARLOS V. LOZANO

Using a felt-tipped pen and a computerized drawing, Simi Valley ninth-grader Alexandra Ianculescu created a star-patterned sketch that was selected this week as the 1995 Ventura County Science Fair poster.

"This is the first time I've won an award for art," the 14-year-old La Reina High School student said."At first I didn't believe it."

Alexandra's drawing, which started out as an extra-credit assignment in her biology class, will cover more than 1,000 posters that will be distributed to schools across Ventura County.

The science fair is presented by the county Superintendent of Schools Office and the Ventura County Economic Development Assn. It is open to students grades 6 to 12.

Alexandra's poster depicts eight stars that each represents a fair category: botany, chemistry, environment, math or computers, microbiology or medical science, physics, psychology or sociology, and zoology.

The science fair will take place April 25 to 27 at the Ventura County Fairgrounds. TRACY WILSON

A rich, searing new exhibit on World War II opens today at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library with the sleepy sounds of a ukulele.

Drifting from the burnished walnut grille of an old RCA radio there, this is how a Hawaiian broadcast must have sounded on the night of Dec. 6, 1941.

Then appear flickering home movies of the U.S. fleet exploding under Japanese bombs at Pearl Harbor, and the history of World War II unfolds across the gallery in an impressive display of photographs, weapons, artifacts and personal papers.

"World War II: Personal Accounts," collected by the Lyndon Johnson Presidential Library from the National Archives and a host of private lenders, is making its last stop on a national tour that closes at the Reagan library near Simi Valley on Feb. 28.

"If you've got no more than half an hour to see this, I guarantee you're going to be engaged on several levels," said Richard Norton Smith, director of the library.

There are models of battle machines, photographs of soldiers and sailors, and equipment used by those whom the war made famous.

Spotlights pick out a battered brass compass used by German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's silver pince-nez. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower's olive-drab jacket. Eva Braun's photo album. War correspondent Ernie Pyle's compact Corona typewriter.

Famous documents are on display: the declaration of war against Japan, Adolf Hitler's last Will and Political Testament, the actual papers of surrender signed in 1945 by German and Japanese commanders.

Here is the first draft of President Roosevelt's speech to Congress.

"Yesterday, December 7, 1941, a date which will live in world history . . . " he began, then scratched out the last two words, penciling in the word infamy .

Here are letters from the war's greatest commanders.

"There was one fine thing done when the tenth panzer attacked us," Army Gen. George S. Patton wrote to his wife from the North African campaign against Rommel's tanks. "One platoon of K Company eighteenth died to a man the last thing they were heard yelling was come on you hun bastards."

Here are the debris of battle -- a GI's shrapnel-torn helmet plucked from the sands at Normandy, and one of the perfectly round, glossy, ocher ceramic jars used as Japanese grenades.

And here are physical mementos of conquest -- a Japanese sword surrendered by the POW camp commandant at the River Kwai, a German Iron Cross medal, the wooden plug that airmen pulled to arm the atomic bomb over Nagasaki.

Throughout the gallery, loudspeakers play the national anthems of all the nations embroiled in World War II.

And lifelike plaster figures of Allied and Axis infantrymen stand frozen in the act of smoking a cigarette, draining a canteen, capturing a prisoner of war.

Most poignant of all, though, are the visions of war recorded in secret diaries and letters to the home front written by the warriors themselves.

"The larger-than-life figure is here, but mostly it's the GI's war," Smith said.

"Guards using horse whips & clubs especially on Sr. officers," wrote U.S. Army Col. Albert Svihra, recording the Bataan Death March on tissue-thin cigarette paper.

"Moved on to Balanga (129) for night's stop. Water allowed at Pilar only . . . Filipino civilians giving away food regardless of Jap threats. . . . In compound there merciless beatings."

Watching the carrier Lexington destroyed at the Battle of Midway, Navy fire controlman Clifford M. Dunn Jr. wrote: "It's getting quite dark now and the flames finally reach the planes on her stern that couldn't get off . . .

"Ammunition left in the guns along flight deck explodes and the tracers shoot up in the sky as if someone was still firing them -- She is now completely covered by flames and her hull is white hot, lighting up the sky & water for miles around."

Army Lt. Walter F. Commander wrote his wife from the Italian front: "I want to remain changeless for you, Dolly, but I can see the changes in myself even as the days pass. You get something twisted out of your insides by all of this filth & sewage. . . . Darling, hold me so close tonight. Never before have I had so much need of you."

And there are letters from Axis soldiers showing they were just as scared and determined as their Allied counterparts.

"The Russian had built a little bridge-head. . . . In a great counter-attack we threw him back across the river and took this island where we are lying now," wrote Kuno Schmitt, an Obergefreiter in the German army, in a letter to his sister from the front.

"There was a lot of action in the last few days and all my extra fat is gone," he wrote. "My beautiful dress uniform looks more depressing now. One must never lose faith in God even if things look real bad."

And there are hints of the patriotism and the will to live that propelled these men through the most wide-ranging war the world had ever seen.

In one display case lies a red scrap of cloth, all that was left of the U.S. flag that Col. Paul Delmont Bunker lowered and then burned upon the U.S. surrender at Corregidor.

Bunker sewed the swatch into his clothing. He later died of beriberi in a Japanese prison, but Cpl. Delbert Ausmus eventually got to present it to U.S. War Secretary Robert P. Patterson -- as Bunker had requested.

Describing the amphibious landing at Normandy, Army Lt. Col. Alfred F. Birra wrote his wife, Barbara, "Now it's our turn . . . The ramp is lowered and the Sgt. and I stepped off into four feet of water . . .

"We had about 500 yards of water to cross, we couldn't run cause the water was too deep, we couldn't crouch, we couldn't do anything except just what we did. Wade on into shore." FYI

"World War II: Personal Accounts" is on display from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. seven days a week through Feb. 28 at the Reagan library. Because they are fragile and sensitive to light, the Instruments of Surrender signed on V-E Day and V-J Day will be on display only between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. each day. Otherwise, protective lids bearing photographs of those documents are locked in place over them. Admission is $4 for adults, $2 for seniors and free for children under age 16. At the request of former President Reagan, all World War II veterans and their immediate families can enter the museum free during December.

The Synagogue Council of America, Judaism's sole interdenominational body, has apparently collapsed under the weight of financial shortfalls and internal differences after nearly 70 years of operation.

Although there has been no formal vote to disband the Synagogue Council, it is vacating its Manhattan offices this month. A plan to move the council's administrative headquarters temporarily to a Reform temple in White Plains, N.Y., was vetoed by Orthodox representatives.

"There don't seem to be enough people who are really interested in maintaining the organization," said Rabbi Haskel Lookstein, an Orthodox rabbi in Manhattan who has been the council's president for the last year.

"It doesn't have a natural constituency of lay people. Those of us who are volunteer leaders have tried very hard, but we can't keep afloat something that isn't sustained by the community," he said.

The council owes $200,000 in rent, catering bills and loans made by some of its constituent organizations, according to Rabbi Jerome Epstein, executive vice president of United Synagogue, the Conservative movement's congregational arm and one of six denominational agencies whose representatives comprise the council.

Since its founding in 1926, the Synagogue Council has been the only Jewish religious group in the nation in which the Orthodox, Conservative and Reform movements were represented. Members of those movements cooperate in other Jewish agencies, but those groups are secular in nature, not religious.

The council has had ongoing relationships with the National Conference of Catholic Bishops and the National Council of Churches, the umbrella body for 32 Protestant and Orthodox Christian denominations, and was one of the partners in the International Jewish Committee on Interreligious Consultations, which represents world Jewry in dealings with the Vatican.

Rabbi Mordechai Waxman, a past Synagogue Council president, said interfaith talks, particularly with the Vatican, could be slowed while attempts to form a new organization to take over for the council remain unsettled.

The new, as yet unnamed group, will likely not include Orthodox organizations, although individual Orthodox rabbis may be included.

One of the most controversial elements of the Synagogue Council's procedures -- and some say, the element that paralyzed it -- was the right of any one of its constituent groups to veto any proposal. Theological discussions were often stymied by hesitancy among Orthodox Jews to engage in such talks with non-Jews, and even with non-Orthodox Jews.

Non-Orthodox council members blamed the organization's demise on the Orthodox, and noted that even without Orthodox participation, the organization that replaces the council would still represent more than 80 percent of the organized American Jewish community.

Rabbi Mordechai Liebling, executive vice president of the Federation of Reconstructionist Congregations and Havurot, said "the Synagogue Council was an artificial organization because the Orthodox maintained a stranglehold over it, not allowing any substantive discussion and preventing any real interfaith dialogue."

But Rabbi Lookstein denied that the Orthodox caused the agency's collapse. He said interest waned on the part of all participants.

To pray or not to pray.

The debate over prayer in public schools presents what seem like two irreconcilable alternatives.

But a 1st Amendment scholar has proposed a third option that he believes can bring the bitter constitutional dilemma to a peaceable solution: teach about religion with textbooks, not piety.

"Most people neither wish to impose religion in the schools nor eliminate religion from the schools," said Charles Haynes, visiting professional scholar at the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University.

"They want programs that give religion an appropriate place while protecting everyone's freedom of conscience," he said.

Religion, Haynes said, is typically excluded from school curriculum because teachers and administrators fear running afoul of church-state separation or because they are not adequately prepared.

A new guidebook for public schools on teaching about religion -- published by the Freedom Forum center, a think tank on First Amendment issues -- suggests that schools make religion an academic subject, rather than a devotional exercise, and teach students about all religions, without denigrating or promoting one set of beliefs.

"Omission of facts about religion can give students the false impression that the religious life of humankind is insignificant or unimportant," the book states.

"Failure to understand even the basic symbols, practices and concepts of the various religions make much of history, literature, art and contemporary life unintelligible."

*

Haynes said some progress has been made to persuade publishers to include treatment of religion in textbooks, "but we're still a long way from home."

"We're over the hump," he said of texts.

"Now we need to go beyond the mention of religion -- that Martin Luther King was a Baptist minister -- to getting religion more fully treated."

While providing specific guidelines and a list of 29 "religious influences in American history" that teachers of history, literature and social studies courses can use, the guidebook also covers such areas as religious holidays in the public schools, students' rights to religious expression and the status of school prayer laws.

Haynes said that if schools would move toward inclusion of religion in learning, it could end some of the debate over prayer.

"The interest in a prayer amendment would evaporate if schools deal with religion where they can, rather than where they can't," Haynes said.

Jewish and conservative Christian leaders came together over a kosher lunch on Capitol Hill this week and agreed to a cease-fire in the escalating war of words they have waged since last spring's Anti-Defamation League report on the Christian right.

After five hours of dialogue behind closed doors, the leaders agreed that the angry rhetoric coming from both sides poses a greater threat to the nation's declining moral health than their differing social and political viewpoints.

Participants said they agreed to disagree, without maligning each other on such issues as school prayer and abortion, and to try to find values shared by both sides.

They also agreed to respect each other's right to participate in the political process.

"We established the line between differences and disdain," Phil Baum, national director of the American Jewish Congress, said after the meeting.

Forest Montgomery, counsel for the National Assn. of Evangelicals, said "our real concern is, and should be, what is happening to our culture. We can disagree without rancor."

More than 30 Christian and Jewish leaders attended what was billed as the first such large-scale gathering of its kind. Organizer Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, president of the Chicago-based International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, said the meeting was put together because of the "crisis situation that has been dividing the two communities."

"It was a very, very positive day," said the Rev. Jerry Falwell, the Liberty University chancellor and ex-Moral Majority leader. "It was a beginning of a beginning."

The ADL report released in June -- titled "The Religious Right: The Assault on Tolerance & Pluralism in America" -- accused evangelical and fundamentalist Christian leaders of using "a rhetoric of fear, suspicion and even hatred" in their quest for political power.

*

The report called the Christian right "exclusionist" and a threat to American democracy, pluralism and religious freedom. "At times," the report said, "their rhetoric reflects hostility to Jews and Jewish concerns."

The report drew immediate fire from Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition, singled out by the ADL as the Christian right's most influential organization. The Christian Coalition said the report was filled with fabrications and half-truths "reminiscent of the political style practiced by Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s."

Christian Coalition officials accused the ADL of using "reckless charges of anti-Semitism" for political reasons.

The charges and countercharges prompted a slew of articles in Jewish and Christian publications, and the rhetoric became increasingly heated as the November elections neared.

Many participants at this week's meeting said they were apprehensive about the session because of the growing tension between the two sides, but they were put at ease by the willingness of both sides to back away from confrontation.

ADL National Director Abraham Foxman and Christian Coalition Executive Director Ralph Reed attended this week's meeting, held in the Senate Hart Office Building.

Foxman said after the session that "the report stands." He acknowledged the "pain" it had caused conservative Christians, but said Jews also feel pain when they hear Christian right leaders call the United States "a Christian nation."

Foxman also said the ADL might not have issued the report had more open communication existed between the two communities -- such as that established in this week's meeting.

Reed said "in a general sense, the Christian Coalition remains dedicated to an ongoing dialogue with the Jewish community and finding areas of mutual concern . . . in a way that is respectful."

Reed called the ADL report "a painful and unfortunate episode in the history of Jewish-Christian dialogue. It is my hope such an episode will never be repeated."

Although the ADL report precipitated the round of verbal warfare between the two communities, meeting participants agreed that the issues separating them long predate the report.

"We came to this table with our baggage, with our historical pain, with our anxieties," said Eckstein. "This meeting was held against a background of 2,000 years of fratricide."

*

According to meeting participants, discussion ranged from the political issues of the day to the explanation of religious language. School prayer -- opposed almost across the board by most Jewish groups but favored by many conservative Christians -- was mentioned several times, Eckstein said, in discussions described by one participant as "testy."

The Rev. Richard Land, executive director of the Southern Baptist Convention's Christian Life Commission, said participants agreed that although "this nation is not a secular society," it was also "a society of religious pluralism" that allowed for disagreement on issues such as school prayer.

Blueprints for a new shopping mall and school campus on the hilly Seventh-day Adventist property in Newbury Park violate half a dozen development standards outlined in Thousand Oaks' General Plan.

The church's proposed project, which comes before the Planning Commission on Monday, requires massive grading that would seriously alter the topography of a sweeping site north of the Rancho Conejo Industrial Park, according to a city report released this week.

To develop the rugged terrain, engineers would have to fill canyons, slice ridges and build on steep hillsides. The huge earth-moving project would also destroy 68 acres of sage scrub and grassland, and intrude into 74 acres of wildlife habitat.

"The project is so large that it will have a major effect on the way this city develops," Planning Commissioner Irving Wasserman said.

Construction would affect 179 acres of the church's 458-acre Wendy Drive property and would cost about $100 million.

As proposed, the Adventist Church's project is inconsistent with city policies on ridgeline preservation and hillside construction, senior planner Larry Marquart wrote in a 17-page report to the Planning Commission.

The development would also break a longstanding city policy of drawing shoppers to two main commercial hubs: one at The Oaks mall and another in the Westlake neighborhood. With its Target store and 12-screen movie theater, the Adventist project would create a third retail center with regional draw.

If approved, Marquart wrote, the Adventist project "would involve major policy changes."

Adventist representatives, who have worked on their project for more than a decade, contend that every major policy change enacted for their development will help Thousand Oaks residents in the long run.

"When you look at the benefits our project will have overall and balance them against the so-called (negative) impacts, it comes out overwhelmingly positive for the community," architect Francisco Behr said.

As part of the development, the Adventist Church will sponsor $50 million worth of public-works improvements in Newbury Park. Their biggest project: reconfiguring the Wendy Drive interchange with the Ventura Freeway to speed traffic flow.

To make up for the destruction of grassland, the developer plans to build miles of new trails and dedicate 258 acres of canyon country to the Conejo Open Space Conservation Authority. The church would also hire biologists to transplant the most sensitive plants, like the endangered Blochman's dudleya, away from construction sites.

The extensive grading, Behr said, will actually improve the property's aesthetics by blending the new development into the existing hills. "We're very confident in this project," Behr said. "We know it's a good project."

The complicated project calls for a one-story mall, with 70% as much retail space as The Oaks.

The shopping mall would displace an eclectic collection of church buildings, including a faded school, senior citizen bungalows and a rambling equestrian center. Those facilities would be moved to the northern portion of the church's property on a hilly campus flecked with oak trees.

*

Much of that northern campus is now designated as "undevelopable," or zoned for low-density housing. The Adventist Church has asked the City Council to rezone the land to permit more intense development. After the Planning Commission issues its recommendations, the council will consider the project.

Because the Adventist proposal is so complex, two planning commissioners said they doubt they will finish deliberations in one evening. They are scheduled to start debate Monday at 7:30 and continue in special sessions on Dec. 8 and Dec. 15, if necessary.

The vote, when it finally comes, will be the last taken by the current group of planning commissioners. The terms of four out of the five commissioners expire this month.

Councilman-elect Andy Fox will select a new commissioner, and Councilwomen Judy Lazar and Elois Zeanah can either nominate new candidates or reappoint current commissioners. The fourth commissioner will be appointed by the person who takes the seat of departing Councilman Frank Schillo.

Although the new commissioners would presumably better represent the incoming council, Planning Commissioner Linda Parks said she believes the current group should vote on the Adventist project.

"There is so much technical information," she said. "It would be very hard for inexperienced commissioners (to follow). We would have to start way back at ground zero to explain everything."

Times correspondent Matthew Mosk contributed to this story.

In the coming days, choirs, carolers, organists and orchestras will fill the Southland with the melodies of the winter holidays. The following are some seasonal musical offerings:

* The premiere of "Rorate Coeli,"a choral piece by local composer Paul Gibson, will be given by the Schola Cantorum of St. Paul the Apostle Catholic Church at its annual Christmas concert at 8 p.m. Sunday at the church. Frank Brownsteadwill conduct the performance. The choral groups of Mt. St. Mary's College will also perform. The requested donation is $10 for senior citizens and students, $20 for families. 10750 Ohio Ave., Westwood. (310) 474-1527.

* Los Angeles Master Chorale music director Paul Salamunovich will conduct the St. Charles BorromeoChoir in its performance of Christmas carols at 3 p.m. Sunday at Corpus Christi Church in Pacific Palisades. Robert Hunter will be the accompanist. 15100 Sunset Blvd. Donations accepted. (310) 454-1328.

* Organist Scott Schlesingerand flutist Brian Logan will perform a program at 4 p.m. Sunday at Hollywood United Methodist Church. Free parking. A $6 donation is requested. 6817 Franklin Ave. (213) 874-2104.

* More than 150 voices, accompanied by a festival orchestra, will perform familiar carols and classics when St. John's Lutheran Church in Orange presents "The Sounds of Christmas" at 4 p.m. and 7 p.m. Sunday. William J. Heide conducts. Donations accepted. 185 S. Center St. (714) 288-4400.

* First Congregational Church of Los Angeles presents Lloyd Holzgrafin a program of organ music for the Christmas season at 4 p.m. Sunday. The mid-Wilshire church, which houses one of the largest pipe organs on the West Coast, will be decorated with evergreens for this annual event. Tickets are $10. 540 S. Commonwealth Ave. (213) 385-1341.

* The Los Angeles Yiddish Culture Club presents a Hanukkah concert at 7:30 tonight at the Institute of Jewish Education in Los Angeles. Liza Libovskywill sing Yiddish, Hebrew and Ladinosongs. Admission is $4. 8339 West 3rd St. (310) 275-8455.

* The Loyola Marymount University music department presents its annual Gala Christmas Choral Concert at 8 p.m. Wednesday and Friday in the university's Sacred Heart Chapel. The school's Consort Singers, Concert Choir and women's and men's choruses will perform seasonal works by Palestrina, Grancini, Buxtehude, Michael Haydn, Praetorius, Mendelssohn, Mathias and Stroope under the leadership of Mary C. Breden For ticket information, call (310) 338-5154 or (310) 338-7588.

* An old-fashioned sing-along and a performance of Christmas classics by the Santa Clarita Valley Concert Band will make up the program at 4 p.m. Sunday in the sanctuary of Panorama Presbyterian Church. Donations accepted. 14201 Roscoe Blvd., Panorama City. (818) 894-8316.

* Academy Award-winning director Delbert Mannand screen actress Christopher Norris will be the featured guest readers of the scriptural Christmas story at "A Christmas Celebration," a benefit concert by the Choral Society of Southern California and Beverly Hills Presbyterian Church's Chancel Choir and Orchestra at 8 p.m. Thursday at the church. Nick Strimplewill direct selections by Bruckner, Haydn, Wagenseil and Tchaikovsky, as well as works by contemporary composers. Tickets are $20 each or $35 per pair; proceeds go to local outreach programs. 505 N. Rodeo Drive. For reservations and information, call (310) 271-5194.

* A concert of children's choir music, titled "Three Wee Kings," will be presented at 5 p.m. Sunday at St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach. Donations will be accepted. Four performances by the church's 110-voice Sanctuary Choir and 30-piece orchestra will also be given at 8 p.m. Friday and Dec. 16 and at 4 p.m. Dec. 11 and 18. The music includes Ralph Vaughan William's "Fantasia on Christmas Carols" and "Fantasia on Greensleeves" and many other selections. There will be a sing-along of some carols. Tickets are $5, children $3. Tickets must be ordered in advance at (714) 574-2228.

* The New Horizon Singers and the Pacific Pops Orchestra, conducted by Sheldon Cohen, present "Peace on Earth," a holiday concert to benefit Angels Way Maternity Home, at 7:30 p.m. next Saturday at St. Bernardine of Siena Church. Admission is $12, senior citizens and children $10. 24410 Calvert St., Woodland Hills. (818) 865-9247.

* "A Holiday Celebration" in song and dance will be held at the University of Judaism's Gindi Auditorium at 8:30 p.m. next Saturday and at 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Dec. 11. It features the university's Concert Singers and the Keshet Chaim Dance Ensemble. Tova Morcosdirects Yiddish and other Jewish music; the dancers will perform classical Russian dances. For ticket information, call (310) 476-9777, Ext. 246.

DATES

* Judith Kates, a professor of comparative literature and co-editor of "Reading Ruth -- Contemporary Women Reclaim a Sacred Story," based upon the Book of Ruth, will address themes of marriage, children, infertility and widowhood at a brunch celebrating the fourth anniversary of "Women's Voices" at 10:30 a.m. Dec. 11, at Loews Santa Monica Beach Hotel. Also participating will be Rabbinic scholar and educator Rabbi Ruth Sohn Los Angeles City Councilwoman Laura Chick, psychologist Barbara Stephens and actress Bonnie Franklin. "Women's Voices," a project of the New Israel Fund, works to broaden awareness about women's issues in Israel. Reservations are required. For ticket prices, call (310) 559-9334.

* Rabbi Nachum Sauer director of the Institute of Advanced Talmudic Studies at Yeshiva of Los Angeles will be honored at the institution's fund-raising dinner at 7:30 p.m. next Saturday at Moshe Ganz Hall in Los Angeles. The guest speaker will be Jewish legal scholar Rabbi DovidCohen of Brooklyn. s For ticket information, call (310) 553-4478, Ext. 285.

* Mt. Hebron Baptist Church will have a holiday bazaar from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. next Saturday at the church, 10219 S. Western Ave., Los Angeles. (213) 757-2421.

The U.S. Postal Service has reversed a decision to stop producing its popular "Madonna and Child" stamp series in 1995.

Earlier this month, postal authorities said they would end a longstanding tradition of producing the popular Christmas religious stamp.Next year's lineup would, instead, include a stamp bearing the image of a "Victorian-era angel" and stamps featuring Santa Claus and children with holiday gifts.

But Postmaster General Marvin Runyon now says the Postal Service will produce the Madonna series after all.

"Because the Madonna and Child stamp has occupied such an important place in our stamp program for so many years and is so meaningful to so many Americans, I have asked the Citizens Stamp Advisory Committee to develop designs for a Madonna and Child stamp to be included in the 1995 program," Runyon said in a statement.

The reversal resulted, in part, from pressure by President Clinton, according to the Washington Post.

Clinton, who was out of the country when the Postal Service announced its initial decision to discontinue the Madonna stamp, was so upset that he instructed his staff to contact key congressional committees to protest the move, the newspaper said.

The Postal Service began the Madonna series in 1966 and has produced it every year since 1978.

Hoping to conserve costly drinking water, the Simi Valley City Council has endorsed a program that would use treated sewer water to hose down dusty trash.

The $1-million pilot program, to be paid for by the Calleguas Municipal Water District, is designed to cut down on the city's water consumption by recycling a tiny portion of the city's sewer water.

The system -- a series of pipelines, pumps and reservoirs -- should be pumping treated effluent to the Simi Valley Landfill in 18 months, said Don Kendall, Calleguas general manager.

After water disappears down Simi Valley toilets and sinks, it would be sent to a treatment plant, where it would be cleaned sufficiently for use at the dump without posing a health risk.

"Reclaimed water can save money, and it is a big factor in drought management," Kendall said. "There is a big incentive for all of us to use this."

On average, an individual household uses about half an acre-foot, or 163,000 gallons of water a year.

Reselling used water could eventually help cut down on water bills, which now run about $390 a year in Simi Valley for a four-person household.

Calleguas is working on a similar program in Hill Canyon in Thousand Oaks.

Another Calleguas project, designed in conjunction with the Las Virgenes Municipal Water District, is near completion. The system will process water from Oak Park and North Ranch.

Although a seemingly simple concept, proposals to reuse waste water have been deemed too costly until now, Councilman Bill Davis said.

"It's been on the city agenda for a long time, but as you can see, doing something like this isn't cheap," Davis said. "With the help from the (water) district, I think we'll finally see this happen."

Under the project, the district would sell about 250 acre-feet of treated waste water, or about 81.5 million gallons, each year to the city for distribution at the dump.

If successful, the project could lead to a $15-million system that would supply 4,774 acre-feet of reclaimed water a year, nearly half the effluent processed at the city's sewer plant.

Drinking water sells for more than $400 an acre-foot, while the treated waste water will cost an estimated $350 an acre-foot, Mayor Greg Stratton said.

Stratton praised the project, but said he wanted to ensure that if it is successful, the city reaps a share of the financial benefit.

"I think it's great that Calleguas is doing something for the residents of Simi Valley, and I want to encourage this," Stratton said. "But I also know that if this program expands, it is going to be up to the city to market it, and the city should get compensated for that."

Terrorism within the United States became a frightening reality with last year's bombing of the World Trade Center in New York. That incident was linked to individuals who had entered the country under questionable visa status. Now, as part of an intensified effort to curb terrorism, FBI Director Louis J. Freeh is calling for closing loopholes in U.S. immigration policies and practices, including the tightening of controls on student visas and sham marriages between U.S. citizens and foreigners.

Certainly terrorism is not necessarily a "foreign" activity, and aliens regardless of status should not be unlawfully harassed. But safeguards need to be considered to make the nation less vulnerable to terrorism.

According to a report by Times staff writer Ronald J. Ostrow, Freeh made the recommendations in response to the Justice Department's request for a review of immigration policies and practices in the wake of the New York bombing and a 1993 assault-rifle attack that killed five people outside CIA headquarters in Langley, Va.

Freeh proposed strengthening investigative powers against suspected "undesirable aliens," accelerating deportation appeal proceedings and limiting U.S. participation in a visa waiver pilot program under which 9.5 million foreigners entered the country in fiscal 1994.

Freeh said requests for asylum have become "one of the easiest ways to enter and remain" in the United States for those intent on engaging in illegal conduct. Current procedures call for only the posting of a small bond guaranteeing appearance at a future hearing or release on one's own recognizance. Too often, asylum-seeking aliens never show up for their hearings. Freeh advocated provisions for detention and deportation of those asylum seekers who skirt the law.

The two other categories of abuse are student visas and sham marriages. Students often do not abide by the terms of their study visas and marriages to American citizens are sometimes intended merely to gain legal residency.

The Justice Department is reviewing Freeh's recommendations.

The United States has long maintained a policy of being as open as possible. That has been a way of refreshing the nation. But abuse of national generosity to carry out ulterior motives, especially terrorism, is not to tolerated. Freeh's recommendations are directed toward taking preventive measures to weed out possible terrorists. The FBI director's ideas warrant thoughtful consideration; America must do a better job at warding off terrorism.

For years Orange County Treasurer-Tax Collector Robert L. Citron commendably earned comparatively high rates of return for the 180 agencies that had joined the investment pool he runs. The pool seeks returns of 7% to 9% through investments that are mostly in bonds. Although it doesn't aim for returns of 15% or 20% by buying wildly speculative stocks, there is risk -- and that became gut-wrenchingly clear this week when it was disclosed that the pool had suffered a paper loss of nearly $1.5 billon since January.

Those who played certainly knew the danger, that the greater the potential reward the greater the risk. The investment pool had been in place a long time and was very well known. None of the Orange County public agencies that participated can claim to have been caught by surprise. Nobody complained when the pool was reaping attractive returns.

EFFECT IS UNCERTAIN: It is still not clear what the overall financial impact of Citron's strategy will be for the long term. But the disclosure certainly should reinforce the message for investors of public funds everywhere that caution should be exercised before committing money to risky financial strategies.

Wisely, the cities, school districts, transit authorities and other agencies involved in the Orange County pool have not run for the exits in a panic. The county has made a smart move in seeking independent review of the portfolio, to study the potential damage and to recommend changes, if needed.

Part of the reason for the loss appeared to be Citron's investments in derivatives, which are financial contracts that derive their value from another asset, such as stocks, bonds or commodities. They have been used for years but have become more common recently. They are very volatile: In the age of computer investing, they can soar or plunge quickly.

Public agencies have special responsibilities when they handle the public's money. One is not to gamble foolishly; another is to earn the highest return prudently possible. If they err, it should be on the side of caution.

Late last year, many investment advisers were warning of likely increases in the interest rate by the Federal Reserve Board and counseling clients to take their money out of bond mutual funds. If Citron had concerns, the agencies that were his clients said, he did not announce them. The Federal Reserve began raising rates in February, sending bond prices down. Yet in May and June, before his reelection over an opponent who challenged the county's investment strategy, Citron insisted he was confident about the investments. One question that must be answered is whether he should have switched the portfolio mix and, if so, when.

SOME SAID NO, THANKS: Last April Citron released more than 700 pages of investment data, so the agencies entrusting their money to him were able to see where their investments had gone. After looking at the data, the treasurer and the City Council of San Juan Capistrano, not a member of the pool, decided the county investments were too speculative for their taste. So did Garden Grove.

Some cities and agencies did diversify. The City of Orange reduced its investment in the pool this year to about 20% of its assets. The Sanitation District of Orange County said it had about two-thirds of its investment portfolio in the Citron-managed pool. That would seem to be a gamble, even though the pool itself is diversified.

Orange County's loss, even though only on paper -- at least at this point -- should warn other public agencies of the dangers of taking on too much risk. Until everyone understands derivatives better, and they are better regulated, public agencies should approach such investments with extreme caution.

Immediately after last month's Thousand Oaks City Council election, the appointment of fourth-place finisher Mike Markey to fill Frank Schillo's vacated seat looked like a sure thing. There was talk of giving Markey the seat to mend fences between council members known for their contentiousness.

But Councilwoman Elois Zeanah, a key supporter of the fresh start, said Friday that she now supports holding an election instead.

"I'm trying to maintain an open mind," Zeanah said. "But I certainly do have a preference for a special election. I feel that residents deserve their right to directly elect the fifth council member."

Zeanah said that seeing the final election tally swayed her toward a special election. Markey placed fourth with 9,894 votes, while fifth-place finisher Lee Laxdal received 9,375 votes.

"I was initially leaning towards appointment when we were thinking that the final vote would end up giving Markey a clear plurality," she said. "There isn't that. There is just a mere fraction of a percentage point."

During the recent campaign, Zeanah ran against Markey, who was endorsed by her archrival, retiring Mayor Alex Fiore.

Councilwoman Judy Lazar and incoming Councilman Andy Fox, who both favor appointing Markey, said they believe holding a special election will cost residents both monetarily and politically.

"It would be six months before we could even have an election," Lazar said. "For a city to operate on a four-member council basis for six months is bad enough, but we would also be operating with a four-member Planning Commission as well."

"Certainly 500 votes is a pretty significant number," she added.

A fifth planning commissioner would be nominated by the fifth council member.

The estimated cost of a special election is $100,000, city officials said. Laxdal has sent a letter to council members saying he supports appointing Markey.

Fox said that a significant portion of the two years remaining in Schillo's term would be lost if a special election is required.

"It takes 30 days to certify an election, so that puts us in July," Fox said. "Then the council is off in August, so the first time the fifth person would serve in any meaningful capacity would be September."

But Zeanah said her understanding is that a special election could be held as soon as April.

"I know there is talk that this would hamstring the community," she said. "We've got some serious development issues coming before the council. I think the community deserves a five-member council as well, but it should be representative of the public."

City Atty. Mark Sellers said that an election probably could not be held before June.

"It has to be at least 90 days away," he said.

The issue will be discussed at a council meeting Dec. 13. Initially, the replacement of Schillo was not expected until early January, when he takes office as county supervisor. But Thursday, Schillo announced that he would resign the following Tuesday, prompting Lazar to propose a vote on the Markey appointment for the same day.

Zeanah and Councilwoman Jaime Zukowski protested, saying that meeting is dedicated to inaugurating the council's new member and saying farewell to old ones. So the discussion was delayed until the following week.

On either side of the issue, council members said they have heard only support for their positions.

"I've been hearing from the beginning that people prefer a special election," Zeanah said. "They stop me in public to tell me that."

Fox said he has yet to receive a phone call in favor of a special election.

"I'm convinced that this (appointing Markey) is what the majority of the people want to do," he said.

Zukowski did not return phone calls Friday, but has said earlier that she favors a special election.

*

If the council splits 2-2 on the issue, then a special election would be held.

Markey said he is disappointed at Zeanah's change of heart.

"Elois, she's the one that came out in the paper and said that she wanted to get a fresh start and start the new council on a positive note," Markey said. "Here she is changing her mind."

But he said he is ready to start campaigning again if necessary.

"I'll find out the 13th," he said. "And I'll announce that night and start campaigning right away. I've still got a campaign fund that is viable."

Meanwhile, Zeanah struck a somewhat conciliatory note, saying she plans to nominate Fox to serve as mayor pro tem during Tuesday's meeting.

"While Jaime represents the former council, Andy would represent the newcomers," she said. "I think it would be appropriate having a combination representing the new and the old on the council."

Perhaps the election upset will do good. Something was needed to blast the Democrats back to life.

PAUL DUCHON

Laguna Hills

William F. Buckley Jr. (Column Right, Nov. 27) must know that there are many who find requiring children in public school to say, "Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence on thee, and we beg thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our country," unacceptable if only because they are not sure there is a God, almighty or not, or that we are dependent on a God, or that a God listens to prayers, or that having listened can or does bless as begged (rather than, for example, doing the opposite or nothing at all), or that such blessings would have any effect, positive or negative -- leaving aside such questions as whether government's establishing such a set of religious beliefs is consistent with our traditional ideas of religious freedom or whether the child on a given day is favorably disposed toward fellow students, parents, teachers or country.

JOHN MAYS

Pacific Palisades

*

I was astounded by the speciousness of Buckley's arguments for school prayers.

In his first argument, Buckley argues that comparing school prayer to the establishment of a state religion is equivalent to comparing a valentine to a marriage contract, and yet, as he reminds us in his first paragraph, he is discussing a possible amendment to our Constitution -- a modification of the highest secular contract in the land -- no mere valentine.

In his second argument, after paying lip-service to the rights of the minority, he goes on to write "the majority should have the right to say something pleasant to God when school assembles in the morning," as if the opponents of school prayer were disputing the right of the majority to say prayers in the morning when they argue that the minority should not be forced to say prayers in school by a new law or amendment.

The problem with school prayer, though, is not just its impact on the minority. Passing a law that forces anyone to pray in school, whether that anyone is a believer or a nonbeliever, teaches exactly the opposite of what the law intends to teach. Rather than teaching that we are all beholden to a power higher than either ourselves or our government and that our lives must be guided not just by laws but by the dictates of our conscience, it teaches instead that the law can dictate the nature of our relationship to a higher power and the nature of our conscience.

Subordinating the religious to the secular, as mandatory school prayer would do, diminishes the majesty of both the religious and the secular.

THOMAS M. UDELL

Santa Monica

*

Before deciding the issue of school prayer, examine the results of our public schools with it and without it. Our schools experienced a continued improvement in academic scores and discipline problems were an exception until our Supreme Court decided to ban school prayer.

From that time, we have seen a steady decline in test results and student behavior. A coincidence? I doubt it, but the absence of prayer is only a symptom of a society that is experiencing steady moral decay. Placing prayer back into our schools isn't nearly as important as the statement that our society wants it there.

BONNIE O'NEIL

Newport Beach

*

So our representatives want to cut taxes yet increase military spending. They want to bring down big government yet enforce school prayer and restrict women from making choices about their own bodies. How stupid do they think we are?

By the way, I'd like to see Newt Gingrich try to keep a typical American classroom silent and reverent for a minute each day for a month!

MARGARET BAKER DAVIS

La Verne

In his article "Iran Is Ripe for a Peaceful Overture" (Commentary, Nov. 17), Gary Sick tries hard to pass off one of his threadbare theories under the new label of "lessons from North Korea." Several points are in order.

There is no need to recommend a policy of appeasing Khomeini's regime to the State Department, since the department has been pursuing this line for the past decade. Need I remind Sick of the Irangate debacle? It is no coincidence that Sick nominates Robert Pelletreau, assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, as best suited to open a dialogue with Iran.

Sick failed to mention his voluminous works about ferreting out a moderate mullah, only to be embarrassed each time when Hashemi Rafsanjani resurfaced at the top of the Iranian regime's network of international terrorism.

The problem has never been the U.S.' reluctance to hear about Iran's security concerns. The real problems are the mullahs' lack of interest and ability to change their domestic or foreign behavior, ruling out dialogue with the U.S., and the U.S.' dogged policy of accommodating Tehran. This approach has only encouraged Tehran to persist in its threats, aggression and terrorism.

In October the State Department's Near East Bureau, headed by Pelletreau, released a biased report about the People's Moujahedeen of Iran, contradicting a congressional mandate and public opinion, which strongly criticized it. The Tehran Times daily, which reflects Rafsanjani's views, praised the State Department report.

Five days later, Tehran brought out its Scud-B missiles for the first time since the Iran-Iraq War, firing off three from Kermanshah province, across the international border, at a moujahedeen base in Iraq. Three days later, Rafsanjani appeared in Kermanshah, and Iranian fighter jets bombed the bases of Iranian Kurds in Iraq's no-fly zone.

According to the Khomeini regime's representative to the United Nations, the missile attack was carried out in self-defense, to address "Iran's security concerns." Although there was no U.S. reaction to either violation, Sick's hypothesis did not pan out, and the mullahs called for President Clinton's death on Nov. 20.

Iran's ruling regime is engulfed in crises. The New York Times reported that inflation is fueling discontent (Nov. 20), and other U.S. media have reported major uprisings in the cities of Qazvin, Tabriz and Qa'emshahr.

What Iran is ripe for is change toward democracy, not overtures for friendly ties which will never materialize.

MASOUD BANISADR

U.S. Representative

National Council of Resistance of Iran

Washington

Regarding "Shock Wave Rips Through Compton Politics" (Nov. 20): This is just another example of what happens when the media select and appoint our "leaders."

It was the media that propelled Patricia Moore into the spotlight.It is the media that determine who to focus in on, and it appears to have nothing to do with accomplishments or contributions to society.

I'm sick and tired of media-made heroes and heroines; people who are given media attention and made to feel as "leaders" simply because the gatekeepers decide, arbitrarily, whom to provide coverage to. The headlines are misleading. The truth is that there are no "leaders," at least for me. And for sure, I'm beyond being shocked by such revelations as reported in this article.

ERCELL H. HOFFMAN

Compton

While we are always appreciative of Robert Scheer's support of our multi-agency labor law enforcement program, we feel he overlooked several important issues in his article ("Instead of 187: Enforcement of Labor Laws," Column Left, Nov. 20).

Scheer recognizes that the almost unrestricted flood of undocumented workers into California has left the state with significant labor law enforcement problems. He then chastises the governor for not using more state taxpayer dollars to rectify a problem created by the failure of the federal government to enforce the borders. His statement that "for the entire state, on a good day, there are only 16 inspectors to enforce the labor laws" implies that these are the only investigators the state has. In fact, the Division of Labor Standards Enforcement currently has 173 professional employees who are responsible for such investigations.

What Scheer does not mention is that the U.S. Department of Labor, which is the federal partner in our multi-agency enforcement effort, has the mandate to enforce the federal wage and hour laws in California. Unfortunately, it has only 62 employees (including investigators, management and clerical staff) in the entire state. Unlike the state, these same Department of Labor investigators have the mandate to check immigration status during investigations.

We would be happy to see increased enforcement in industries attracting undocumented workers, but feel it is time the federal government steps up to the plate and either increases its own enforcement of labor laws or provides funding for the state to do so.

VICTORIA L. BRADSHAW

State Labor Commissioner, San Francisco

*

Once when appraising a factory building, I observed that most of the workers appeared to be Latinos. During the appraisal the owner left me to go speak to a worker whom he addressed in Spanish. When he came back he said, "Any time you can hire $12 worth of work for $6 an hour it's good business." Perhaps anticipating my thoughts as to who these workers were displacing, he said, "Look, you either import the cheap labor or you'll end up exporting the job."

If what this businessman said is true, it's hard to see how these Latino workers are a liability to California.

ROBERT C. MASON

Simi Valley

While the Assembly reconvenes Monday to the high drama of a partisan power struggle, one of the first orders of business in the Senate will be renaming the Simi Valley Freeway after former President Ronald Reagan.

A Senate resolution to post the ailing ex-President's name on the 118 Freeway from San Fernando to Moorpark is expected to win easy approval, said Senate President Pro Tem Bill Lockyer (D-Hayward), the measure's main author.

"I think it's appropriate to acknowledge Ronald Reagan's contribution as a private citizen, as governor and as President," Lockyer said Friday. "And naming a freeway after him is one of the ways that those honors get bestowed."

The seemingly non-controversial proposal follows a brief skirmish between the California Department of Transportation and Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sylmar) who, as chairman of the Assembly Transportation Committee, opposes naming freeways for living people.

"I'd prefer the policy of naming freeways in honor of people who have died," Katz said. "I have nothing against Ronald Reagan, but where do you draw the line?"

Suggesting that Caltrans was trying to rush the freeway re-christening, Katz sent a letter to the department on Sept. 12, warning it against moving forward without first obtaining Senate approval. The Assembly had adopted its version of the Reagan resolution Aug. 31 but failed to get it to the Senate floor in time for a vote before adjournment.

Katz's concern and the tone of his letter -- in which he asked Caltrans to confirm that it " will not allow the posting of signs" before Senate approval -- left state transportation officials questioning the appropriateness of his objections.

Caltrans spokesman Jim Drago said the assemblyman's request for assurances amounted to "much ado about nothing."

"He voiced the concern," Drago said. "But the fact of the matter is this is going through the normal process anyway and going to the Senate for a vote."

As for breaking with tradition and naming a freeway after a living figure, William G. Brennan, deputy secretary of the state Business, Transportation and Housing Agency, said this is one case that warrants a departure -- particularly in light of Reagan's recent disclosure that he has entered the early stages of Alzheimer's disease.

"It's said that people have to wait until they die to be acknowledged or recognized for their achievements," Brennan said. "I just don't get offended about going out and naming a freeway after him now, while he can still enjoy it. I wish there was a bigger one and a longer one we could pick."

Caltrans estimates the cost of designating the 118 corridor as the Ronald Reagan Freeway at about $4,000. That should cover the price of erecting and maintaining new signs at each end of the freeway, Drago said.

Funding will come from private donations expected to be collected by a nonprofit entity set up by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley.

State Sen. Cathie Wright (R-Simi Valley), a co-author of the Senate resolution, said one benefit of renaming the freeway will be to remind people of the presidential library's location.

"It will give us the opportunity to highlight that the library is in Simi Valley," Wright said.

But Katz said a more appropriate decision would be to name California 23 for the former President, since that highway leads right to the library's driveway.

At one point, Katz said, it was suggested that the Pacific Coast Highway be named after Reagan, "but I couldn't see naming the state's most scenic coastal highway for a man who once said, 'When you've seen one redwood, you've seen them all.' "

Toscano, Aida C., 93, of Newbury Park, homemaker. Pierce Brothers Griffin Mortuary, Thousand Oaks.

Pierce College President Mary Lee, at the behest of a community group working to preserve the school's farm, has revised a tentative master plan for the school that would have encroached on the farm.

The plan, designed in part to bring in revenue to the financially strapped school, includes such commercial ventures as a golf range, farm museum and 300-seat domed theater that would also serve as a planetarium.

It also includes a discovery pavilion, where children and adults can get hands-on experience in science, and a 160- to 260-seat conference center.

When the original version of the plan was introduced, Margo Murman, president of the Coalition to Save the Farm, praised Lee's efforts to bring in more revenue.

But she also urged Lee to consolidate the plans onto a 160-acre tract on the main campus near the administration building, leaving the farm's 240 acres intact.

In the original version of the plan, the discovery pavilion, farm museum and planetarium would have been situated on farmland. Under the revised plan, they have been moved to a part of the campus away from the farm.

"We have made some changes based on input," said Lee, who has been meeting with community and school groups throughout the process.

Meanwhile, Murman has been named chairwoman of a newly created community advisory committee, formed to offer advice to the school on the master plan and other issues. The group has 18 members, including Shirley Blessing, a member of the Woodland Hills Homeowners Organization, and Evie Phillips of the Woodland Hills Chamber of Commerce.

The committee, which next meets Jan. 3, will review an updated version of the plan presented by Lee, said Murman.

The committee has asked Lee to provide more details in her plan, Murman said.

"It's very unclear as to how much space these buildings are going to take up and where the parking is going to be," Murman said. "All the buildings and things should be drawn to scale, and they are not."

Lee, who took over as president in April, has been under pressure to preserve the farm but also to alleviate the school's fiscal woes. Some say the farm is a waste of money because of low enrollment in the school's agricultural programs. That money would be better used for the school's basic academic programs, those critics say.

Blessing, whose organization has clashed in the past with school officials over land-use issues, said any plan should focus on improving education.

"We have to think about where we will be 25 years from now," she said. "You can't just think about the straits the college may be in financially today."

Gary Trent overcame a sluggish start Friday to score 25 points, including two that tied it at the buzzer and six in overtime, to lead No. 14 Ohio University to an 81-72 first-round win over UC Irvine in the Hawkeye Invitational.

Ohio (5-1) will play Pepperdine or host Iowa in tonight's championship.The Waves and Hawkeyes met later Friday in the other first-round contest.

Trent, held to four first-half points, scored on a layup to tie the score at 66-66 as the final horn sounded to force overtime.

Ford scored 15, Gus Johnson 12 and Jason Terry 11 for the Bobcats, who made nine of 10 free throws in the overtime to secure the win.

Raimonds Miglinieks scored 17, Chris Brown 13 and Khalid Channell 10 for Irvine (0-2), which squandered a 39-30 halftime edge but still led 66-62 on Brown's two free throws with 1:05 remaining in regulation.

A bucket by Trent made it 66-64 with 55 seconds left, and the Anteaters failed to ice the game when Miglinieks and Kevin Simmons each missed the front ends of one-and-one opportunities in the final 28 seconds.

I've played golf for 70 years and have always found the courses and people I've played with to be very interesting and enjoyable. However, heaven forbid I ever witness another Skins Game.

The four monkeys who were led around with rings in their noses by the promoters of last week's Skins Game should either donate all their winnings to charity or, along with the sponsors, join up and return that pockmarked, miserably called golf course to its original desert beauty.

BILL WHITEHEAD

Manhattan Beach

*

What more self-serving drivel than to watch four pampered millionaires playing for funny money, acting like they're playing a $20 Nassau or for "loser buys drinks" over a grueling format of nine holes per day, studded with patronizing, egocentric cameo interviews, and then sprinkled with Bighorn advertisements parading as golf commentary, viz., Vin Scully interviewing Jim Colbert, the resident pro?

This is sports? This is rubbish.

MICHAEL A. CHOLDENKO

Beverly Hills

The Genius was a lot smarter with Montana, Rice, et al.

MARK LARSON

Newport Beach

So Rogie Vachon posted bail for Bruce McNall. Owners! Be nice to your players -- you never know.

DAVID HOPELAIN

Santa Monica

Here's one USC basketball fan who was happy to see George Raveling go.George took over a promising program and proceeded to go 115-118, despite schedules full of Houston Baptists and Tennessee Martins. Other than a few bright spots courtesy of Harold Miner and an ability to beat UCLA, he accomplished virtually nothing.

There's no doubt he's a heck of a guy, but as a basketball coach he left a lot to be desired. I'm sure fans at Iowa and Washington State would agree.

ROB OSBORNE

Redondo Beach

It is Jan. 1 and 2, 1995, and the five major bowls are touting "Final Four" candidates. Bowl hysteria is at an all-time high.

Jan. 14-15: The first Final Four weekend. On Saturday, Penn State, Nebraska, Alabama and Florida State clash in the two most-watched college football games in history. The next day, Miami-Pittsburgh and Dallas-San Francisco in the NFL conference championship games round out the greatest sports weekend of the year.

Sunday, Jan. 22: The first college national championship in Pasadena.

Sunday, Jan. 29: The Super Bowl in Miami.

If only it were true.

RICK WALLACE

Malibu

*

To choose Notre Dame (6-4-1) for the Fiesta Bowl and USC (7-3-1) for the Cotton Bowl over Kansas State (9-2, with losses only to Nebraska and Colorado) is a travesty and proof that bowl committees are more interested in a team's name publicity than its ability.

DAN OLIVIER

Riviera, Ariz.

From a Southern California native living in Northern California:

Does anyone care about anything down there? Isn't anyone in politics or business interested in keeping the Rams in Anaheim? Does anyone recognize the psychological impact of a top-notch sporting franchise to the community? How long has it been since any team in Southern California won anything?

Does anyone see a correlation between the general breakdown of discipline and a lack of winning teams in Southern California? I don't blame the Rodney King fiasco on the Dodgers, Lakers or Rams, but didn't we used to have a collective pride in our community when things were going well with our sports teams.Maybe it was coincidence, but isn't it just possible that we could better identify with each other when Smokey Alston brought us another World Series championship and ditto for the Lakers? Weren't we happier when John Wooden was bringing us our annual NCAA championships and USC was going to the Rose Bowl just about every year?

Did we care more back then or is it just my imagination?

CHARLES O. MONTAGUE

San Ramon

What's wrong with the Rams? They admit they have had several good drafts in a row and have picked up some quality free agents. Yet, unlike the Steelers and Chargers, who are rebuilding winners, the Rams continue to flounder with lackadaisical play, repeatedly committing stupid blunders that lose games.

Who's to blame? In view of these facts, it must be the coaching.

JAMES J. BENNETT

Oxnard

At one point this fall, only the Democrats were having a tougher time than New York quarterbacks. Boomer Esiason and the Jets' offense rolled sevens instead of scoring them. Giants Coach Dan Reeves went back and forth and back again with Dave Brown and Kent Graham.

The quarterback topic sizzled on the sports talk shows and screamed across the back pages of the tabloids. The subject even ventured inside the New York Knicks' locker room, of all places.

Knicks guard Doc Rivers sized up the situation and came to a conclusion. Graham, Brown, Boomer ... the answer was all so simple. "The best quarterback in New York," Rivers said, "is Charlie Ward."

Charlie Ward. In a period of time when college football's most famous award is being handed to the wrong players for the wrong reasons, Ward was a deserving landslide winner last year. He pushed Florida State through a demanding schedule and to the national championship by playing bigger with each game.

Then he became the only non-military Heisman Trophy-winner to pass unselected through the NFL draft.

For the first autumn that he can remember, Ward isn't on a football team, although you can argue the Knicks come close enough. They selected him in the first round, they've invested nearly $5 million in Ward over the next five years, and they're counting on Ward being their point guard -- their quarterback -- of the future.

If all goes well in basketball, Ward will never play in the NFL. If that is what fate has in store for Ward, he will accept it, even if others can't. "I didn't know what I'd be doing after I finished college, to tell you the truth," Ward says, in a voice that's nothing more than a whispered mumble. "I knew I'd be involved in sports, because the Lord has blessed me with athletic talent. Whether I was headed to football or basketball, I couldn't control. I only knew I was going to make the best out of whatever situation I landed in. That was something I could control."

The bypassing of Ward is still being debated. There are theories and reasons and excuses, but the bottom line is this: When the mighty NFL scouting machine consumed all of the vitals about Ward and belched its verdict, Ward wasn't considered an attractive pro prospect.

Ward's agent, Eugene Parker, says three-fourths of the NFL expressed interest. Some were more serious than others. All were represented when Ward held a one-day workout. And every team, while impressed with Ward's mechanics, had reservations.

There was mention of his arm, the same limb that threw for 3,032 yards, 27 touchdowns and only four interceptions as a senior. There were whispers that Ward's arm wasn't strong enough, although you notice young NFL quarterbacks like Rick Mirer dumping off to running backs and throwing a lot of 10 yards-and-out passes these days.

The offensive set used at Florida State was questioned. When Ward became the starting quarterback in his junior year, he threw nine interceptions in his first three games. He didn't flourish, the pro scouts say, until the Seminoles switched from a pro-set offense to a shotgun formation with extra wide receivers. However, that system isn't obsolete in the NFL.

What about race? Ah, yes. Race. The days of exclusionary tactics against black quarterbacks seemingly are over. At least, that's the popularly held belief. Yet, former Dallas Cowboys coach Jimmy Johnson suspects the color of Ward's skin did play a part in his evaluation by NFL teams.

"There's still a stigma that blacks ... can't figure out sophisticated pro-style offenses," Johnson says. "It's a tragedy that Charlie Ward wasn't drafted. And don't give me that bull about how he was thinking of playing in the NBA."

Then there was the most popular strike against Ward, which had nothing to do with color, arm strength or elaborate offensive schemes.

"I can't speak for the rest of the league, but my impression was that his height was a major, major factor," says Jets General Manager Dick Steinberg, who says he was a Ward fan. "That's a non-correctable negative."

Although the Knicks list him at 6 feet 2, Ward measured a shade over 5-11 for the NFL. Apparently, that was a few shades short. The league has always favored the 6-3-and-up quarterback, the kind who could remain in the pocket and see above defensive linemen, over smaller quarterbacks who often must roll out or pass between defenders.

"I don't know of any quarterback playing in our league who's under 6 feet," Steinberg says, matter-of-factly.

But a few days after Steinberg made those comments, the Cincinnati Bengals' season experienced a pleasant turn when they switched to Jeff Blake, who stands 5-11 and who played the previous two seasons for the Jets.

Ward's face displays a weary expression when he's asked about the days leading up to the NFL draft. "I heard a lot about what I could and couldn't do," Ward says. "For a person who proved himself at the highest level in college, I sure heard a lot of myths. I'm not one to be real big on excuses. I never use them myself."

When Ward wasn't taken in the first round, his exclusion from the rest of the draft became a matter of economics. Knowing Ward could expect to command nearly $1 million guaranteed annually as a first-round pick in the NBA -- a salary that's about three times what lower NFL picks earn -- football backed off.

He could have gone to the Canadian Football League, like Doug Flutie, another Heisman winner whose height made him an outcast, but Ward never gave it serious thought.

Instead, less than a month after being snubbed by the NFL, Ward switched to wearing baggy shorts and a tank top. Pro football became a dead issue. "I figured I'd put it to them the way they put it to me," Ward says.

Ward was at first mostly a curiosity to NBA folks. Ward played only one complete basketball season at Florida State, and that was a throwaway freshman year. Football commitments bit into his final two seasons, during which Ward played only 34 games.

That inactivity made him a hard read for NBA scouts. Their preliminary report on Ward was favorable, but mostly incomplete. He displayed solid poise as a leader, an obvious carryover from football. The Atlantic Coast Conference provided good competition, which included Duke's Bobby Hurley. Ward's decision-making didn't encourage many mistakes. He had quick hands, which helped him finish as the school's career leader in steals. His outside shooting was average at best and there were times when Ward would bypass open shots.

"He first caught my eye in his junior year," says Ernie Grunfeld, the Knicks' vice president and general manager. "He seemed always under control. There were some flaws, but he never went through the normal preseason regimen. So that actually fell in his favor."

Ward had one month to convince scouts that he was worthy of being taken in the draft's first round, where the money was guaranteed and a place on a roster almost assured.

He made the all-tournament team at the Phoenix Desert Classic, the most influential NBA combine. He followed that with thumbs-up efforts in the United States Basketball League and the NBA's annual pre-draft camp in Chicago and during private workouts with individual teams.

"Charlie made really good strides in the All-Star venues," Grunfeld says. "You could see his game improving steadily. That was impressive for a guy who played basketball only three months out of the year. And every time he played in those pre-draft camps, his teams always seemed to win, and that was impressive, too."

It wasn't a particularly strong draft for point guards. There was Jason Kidd, but few others. Ward played his way into the pack and then it became only a matter of taste for NBA teams.

On the surface, the Knicks didn't have a pressing need for a point guard. During the course of the season, they received veteran Derek Harper through a trade. He would have been named MVP of the NBA Finals had the Knicks beaten the Houston Rockets. Greg Anthony, their top pick three years ago, was the backup, ahead of Doc Rivers.

But Anthony was erratic; the Knicks have been trying to trade him since the season ended. Rivers underwent reconstructive knee surgery at 33.

They also had a pair of late first-round picks, which put them in a perfect position to gamble. So with the 24th pick they selected Notre Dame forward Monty Williams, a capable scorer who had been treated for a heart problem, and then took a Heisman winner at 26. In his first official news conference as an NBA player, Ward asked reporters: "No football questions, please." None were asked.

He was moderately successful in his first NBA test. Ward emerged as the MVP of the New York summer league. He showed 3-point shooting range and an ability to distribute the basketball, the two skills of his that were most questioned.

From there, Ward went to the Knicks' fall training camp and his improved passing drew praise from Coach Pat Riley, who also said Ward "has to take a step up defensively."

When the season began, Ward, as expected, was cemented to the end of Riley's bench, a victim of numbers and seniority. Neither the Knicks nor Ward are pressed for time, however. He is still learning the game and the Knicks are giving him the necessary time and tutoring.

"I have the ability to do what I want to do," Ward says. "Even though others might not believe in me, I've never doubted myself as an athlete. When I do, I might as well give up."

Cincinnati Red owner Marge Schott met with Leonard Coleman, the National League president, to tell him that her preferred location for a new Reds ballpark is in northern Kentucky, the Cincinnati Post reported. Schott denied discussing the issue at the meeting. Golf

The team of Helen Alfredsson and Robert Gamez shot a seven-under-par 64 and share the second-round lead with Beth Daniel and Davis Love III at the J.C. Penney Classic in Tarpon Springs, Fla., at 12-under 130.

Nick Faldo had eight birdies in a record-tying round of 64 for a two-round total of 14-under-par 130 and a seven-shot lead over Nick Price and Bernhard Langer in the Million Dollar Challenge tournament in Sun City, South Africa.

Peter McWhinney of Australia shot a five-under-par 67, tying Mark Calcavecchia for the lead at 136 after the second round of the Greg Norman Holden Classic tournament in Melbourne, Australia.

The World Golf Tour issued a statement saying it was "continuing to move ahead as planned" with its venture to stage six to eight tournaments in 1995, some of which would conflict with PGA Tour events. Winter Sports

American Hilary Lindh, the 1992 Olympic downhill silver medalist, was timed in 1 minute 45 seconds, 0.29 seconds faster than Isolde Kostner of Italy, to win the opening women's World Cup downhill ski race of the season at Vail, Colo.

Signs that the economy is adding jobs without creating inflation sent stock prices soaring and long-bond interest rates plunging on Friday, with the Dow Jones industrial average gaining 44.75 points.

The dollar surged, rising to a three-month high against the German mark and a seven-week high against the Japanese yen. Oil and gold prices plunged.

Traders said the stock market was staging a technical rebound from sharp losses earlier this week.

The Dow Jones industrial average closed at 3,745.62, reversing a 38-point loss on Thursday and ending the week with a 37-point gain.

The Treasury's bellwether 30-year bond yield plummeted to 7.91% from 8.02%, while its price, which moves in the opposite direction, shot up 1 6/32, or $11.875 per $1,000 of face value.

Interest rates dropped despite an unexpectedly strong November employment report, which showed the nation's unemployment rate dropping 0.2-percentage point to 5.6%.

Analysts said that data might have signaled that the economy was growing at an inflationary pace, and could encourage the Federal Reserve Board to further raise short-term interest rates.

But bond investors focused on part of the jobs report that showed a drop in hourly wages and the average workweek, both of which signaled that inflation may not be an immediate problem. Signs of low inflation could slow down any plans the Fed may have for further tightening credit, and that was taken as good news for both stocks and bonds.

"The conclusion, at least for today -- and it's only tentative -- is that the economy is going to slow to a no-boom, no-bust, sustainable, non-inflationary pace," said Hugh Johnson, chief market strategist at First Albany Corp.

But Johnson and others said the market had been technically poised to rally after losing substantial ground earlier in the week, and that technical factors, like program trading, were responsible for some of the market's gains.

"Stock investors are very, very tentative," Johnson said. "The level of confidence is not high."

Still, in the broader market, advancing issues had a solid 3-to-2 lead on decliners on the New York Stock Exchange, where volume was a moderate 284.76 million shares, down from 288.31 million Thursday.

Investors' fears of higher interest rates were also softened by a drop of 0.1% in October in the government's index of leading indicators, and a 0.4-percentage point drop in factory orders in October, analysts said.

Todd Clark, senior director in equity trading at Mabon Securities, said stocks were also getting a lift from the firmer dollar and lower oil prices.

The dollar ended the week in New York at 100.61 Japanese yen, up from 99.34 late Thursday. It was the currency's first close above 100 yen since Oct. 11 and the highest since Oct. 7. The dollar closed at 1.580 German marks -- the best finish against that currency since Aug. 31 -- up from 1.573 marks Thursday.

Crude oil futures plunged to a seven-week low after 28 Pennsylvania counties backed away from using a new gasoline aimed at reducing air pollution.

The prospect of reduced demand for the cleaner-burning fuel triggered a 6.8% drop in gasoline futures and a sharp decline in heating oil.

Meanwhile, light sweet crude oil for January delivery plummeted 83 cents on the New York Mercantile Exchange to $16.99 a barrel, the lowest settlement for near-term deliveries since Oct. 14.

On the New York Commodity Exchange, December gold sank $3.10 to $375.50 a troy ounce.

Among Friday's highlights:

* Whirlpool Corp. sank 2 1/4 to 46 1/2 on news that it is halting shipments to discount retailer Best Buy Co. and that Whirlpool is being investigated by the Justice Department for price practices. Best Buy closed up 7/8 at 33 3/4.

* Quaker Oats Co. jumped 2 3/8 to 62 3/4 on rumors that Coca-Cola Co. will tell the Securities and Exchange Commission that it has bought more than 5% of Quaker's stock. Neither Quaker nor Coca-Cola officials were immediately available for comment.

* ITT Corp. gained 3 1/8 to 80 1/8, boosted by a PaineWebber upgrading.

* Sun Co.'s shares lost 1 5/8 to 27 1/2 after it projected its fourth-quarter operating income at $10 million, down from $55 million a year ago.

* IQ Software dropped 4 1/4 to 11 3/4 after the software developer reported worse-than-expected third-quarter earnings.

* Intel Corp. rose 1/4 to 62 7/8. The stock was recovering from two days of sharp losses amid concerns about problems with the company's Pentium computer chips.

* Amgen fell 1 1/4 to 56 3/4 and Synergen rose 1/64 to 9 3/64 after Amgen revised its antitrust application to acquire Synergen, postponing the acquisition until Dec. 15 from Dec. 3.

Overseas stocks closed lower. In Mexico City, stocks pared some of their earlier heavy losses but still closed sharply lower Friday, hit by rising tension in the southern state of Chiapas and by Thursday's selloff on Wall Street, traders said. The Bolsa index ended 53.86 points lower at 2,537.48.

London's Financial Times 100-share average ended at 3,017.3, down 22.3 points, while Frankfurt's 30-share DAX average lost 8.08 points to close at 2,038.51. In Tokyo, the 225-share Nikkei average lost 15.30 points to finish at 18,998.30.

Advertising Executives Form New Agency: Greg Helm, president of Stein Robaire Helm before its merger last month with Los Angeles-based Kresser/Craig, and John Stingley, senior vice president-creative at Chiat/Day, are teaming up to form Houston Effler Helm Stingley.The new agency, based in Venice, is affiliated with Boston-based Houston Effler. The agency opens with one account, Secure Horizons, formerly with Stein Robaire. Billings are $10 million.

In an unusual display of corporate tit-for-tat, Best Buy Co. seems to have extracted some revenge on Whirlpool Corp. for dropping Best Buy as a customer.

Whirlpool's stock fell in heavy trading Friday after word leaked out that it was the subject of a federal antitrust probe.

The leaker was its jilted former customer, Best Buy.

The Justice Department confirmed the existence of a probe. "The antitrust division has an ongoing investigation of pricing practices in the large home-appliance industry," spokeswoman Gina Talamona said. She declined to be more specific.

County Natwest analyst Nicholas Heymann said the probe, disclosed Thursday, could make it difficult for Whirlpool to raise prices, something the company needs to do to protect its profits in the face of new challenges from low-cost producers.

Heymann said Whirlpool has been the most aggressive appliance maker about raising prices in the United States and Europe, but the gains have been largely offset by heavy promotional expenses.

Whirlpool recently told analysts it intends to reduce promotional spending, but it is unclear if retailers will accept higher prices.

The electronics retailer's stock plunged Thursday after it released a disappointing third-quarter earnings forecast, then fell even further after a report that Whirlpool would no longer supply its Whirlpool appliances to Best Buy.

After the close of trading Thursday, during which Best Buy shares plummeted 26%, the Minneapolis-based company issued a news release confirming its falling out with Whirlpool.

But tucked into the release was a previously undisclosed fact that Best Buy was privy to as a major appliance retailer: Whirlpool is a subject of a federal antitrust investigation.

Whirlpool spokeswoman Robin Skiles said the company decided to stop selling its Whirlpool brand through Best Buy because Best Buy operates largely as a discount warehouse operation and this conflicts with Whirlpool's strategy.

"If we put them into a distribution channel that is a price-value channel, it's a conflicting message for our brand," Skiles said.

In terms of the government probe, she said Whirlpool believes the investigation is focusing on several appliance makers and said Whirlpool is cooperating fully.

Whirlpool shares fell $2.25 Friday to close at $46.50, on volume of 1.08 million shares.

The creators of Disneyland's new Indiana Jones Adventure are banking on it to do more than just take visitors deep within the Temple of the Forbidden Eye for a hair-raising encounter with Mara, deity of ancient India.

They're also hoping it holds the key to the Secret of the Eternally Changing Theme Park Audience.

So even though it doesn't open for three months, park officials on Friday gave the press an unprecedented walk-through tour of a major attraction in progress.

Why are they suddenly deviating from the secrecy that usually cloaks each new addition until the last dab of paint has dried?

To get word out early that "this is not just another ride," answered Tony Baxter, senior vice president of Walt Disney Imagineering and one of the key creative forces behind Star Tours, Splash Mountain and New Fantasyland.

The biggest difference between the Indiana Jones Adventure and other attractions is that this one is, in essence, a large-scale, interactive video game.

*

The third joint project by Disneyland and filmmaker George Lucas (the others are Star Tours and the Captain EO 3-D film), Indiana Jones is a conscious effort to woo the hands-on, participation-oriented video-game generation, Baxter said. "They're used to taking control, pushing the buttons and being part of the action.

"On Pirates of the Caribbean, for instance, the pirates are doing their thing and you just eavesdrop on them," Baxter said during an early-morning stroll through passageways that look like the walls of a catacomb. "Here, everything is happening because of you."

*

"Everything" will include flaming eruptions, collapsing stone ceilings, flying darts and, of course, a giant ball of rock that threatens to crush anyone attempting to escape the temple.

But thrills alone weren't considered enough for the attention span of the MTV generation. So the Indiana Jones Adventure also includes several branching points in its central portion that will, Baxter said, produce 27 variations of the journey through the temple. And, the '30s-vintage-looking vehicles that take people through will have a changing menu of mishaps that befall them. The idea is to give repeat visitors a different experience each time.

*

Once guests board those trucks, different paths lead to either the Chamber of Earthly Riches, the Fountain of Eternal Youth or the Chamber of Destiny. Each room represents one of the gifts that the deity Mara offers to those who adhere strictly to the rules.

Along each journey, riders will be faced with infestations of rats, snakes, bats, insects or other pests. The ride also borrows generously from the Uncle Remus "don't throw me into that brier patch" school of human motivation: Those who enter are warned sternly "not to gaze into the eyes of Mara."

Baxter said designers also acknowledged kids' tendency to touch anything marked "don't touch." Along the path that brings people into the temple (on other rides this is known as "waiting in line"), booby traps will be triggered by those who indulge their curiosity.

*

In fact, the line into the ride is the most elaborate of any Disneyland attraction's, incorporating several hints of what is to come, '30s-style newsreel films detailing an archeological dig and much of the equipment used.

At this point, the attraction, scheduled to open Feb. 28, will not incorporate the voice of Harrison Ford, star of the "Indiana Jones" films. "But we're still looking at that," Baxter said. "We'd sure like for him to be involved."

The ride does include the prop truck from the first "Indiana Jones" film, near the entrance. Everything else is themed to look like an archeological dig in the jungles of India in 1935, from hissing-cobra topped temple columns to a fictitious alphabet created for warning messages carved into the walls.

All this, Baxter said, takes "what at first seemed like a liability and turned it into an asset." The liability: how to fit a significant new attraction into Disneyland's already tightly packed space. Baxter said the project gave designers the opportunity to make the most of that space with multiple levels and snaking corridors that can accommodate 2,400 people per hour, the highest capacity of any thrill ride at Disneyland.

Space Mountain accommodates 1,800 people an hour; Pirates of the Caribbean, not a thrill ride, handles 2,200. A park spokesman said it will take about an hour to get from the camp entrance through the Indiana Jones Adventure.

The ride occupies territory previously part of the Jungle Cruise. A bend in the river has been rerouted to make way for the 60,000-square foot building that houses the trilevel attraction. The Jungle Cruise entrance has been revamped to be thematically more in keeping with the Indiana Jones Adventure and to accommodate more people who presumably will drawn to Adventureland because of it.

The cost of the ride has been estimated at $50 million, a figure that a park spokesman would neither confirm nor deny. He said it is the biggest attraction in Disneyland's history and that it is the focal point of the first complete face-lift for Adventureland since the park opened in 1955.

After 3 1/2 years of occupying the coveted Monday 10 p.m. slot on CBS, the acclaimed series "Northern Exposure" is about to get exposed on a new night.

Starting Jan. 4, "Northern Exposure" is moving to Wednesdays at 10 p.m., while "Chicago Hope," a first-year medical drama that airs Thursdays at 9 p.m., will take up residency in the 10 p.m. Monday time slot on Jan. 2.

Although the ratings for "Northern Exposure" have declined slightly this season, it is still popular, and one of the show's executive producers is less than pleased about the move.

"Yes, we're disappointed," David Chase said in an interview Friday, saying the show has been hurt this season by the popularity of ABC's "Monday Night Football."

"Monday at 10 p.m. was a great time slot for us," Chase said. "I think when football is over, we would have continued to do better in that time period. It's true that when something is not broken you don't fix it, and our show isn't broken. I just hope it isn't damaged by the move."

He added, "However, who knows? This could be the greatest thing that could happen to us. And we're more than willing to shoot it out with any show."

On Wednesdays, "Northern Exposure" will be up against NBC's popular drama, "Law & Order."

The shift is expected to be part of a schedule overhaul that CBS will announce early next week. Among other anticipated changes, sources said, is the cancellation of the low-rated "Touched By an Angel," a first-year drama that was airing Wednesdays at 9 p.m.

In addition to "Northern Exposure," the new Wednesday lineup is expected to include "Women of the House," a comedy starring Delta Burke; "Double Rush," a comedy with Robert Pastorelli (who played the house painter on "Murphy Brown"), and "Love & War," moving over from Mondays.

Filling "Love & War's" slot at 9:30 p.m. Mondays will be "Cybill," a comedy starring Cybill Shepard as an actress with two daughters from different marriages.

CBS officials declined to comment Friday on their plans, or on Chase's statements.

But one network source disputed the notion that "Northern Exposure" was being moved to make room for "Chicago Hope," which was created and is produced by David Kelley, the Emmy Award-winning producer of "L.A. Law" and CBS' "Picket Fences." CBS hopes both shows will benefit.

"This is a hit show, and if we're going to rebuild by shoring up other nights, this is the perfect show to have as a building block," said the source. "If you build it, they will come. The show has a loyal audience that will follow it to Wednesdays. We're taking a hit show and moving it to a night where it will perform better."

The ratings for "Northern Exposure," now in its sixth season, are off about 11% from last year, and the series is undergoing some revamping with the imminent departure of star Rob Morrow. It had its best rating of the season last Monday and still ranks as the 22nd most popular show on television.

"Chicago Hope," while trounced earlier this season in its head-to-head battle with NBC's "ER" on Thursdays at 10 p.m., has shown promise in other time periods.

Said Chase of the move: "More than anything, this indicates that CBS has more than one concern in its life. And we're sympathetic to that. But we would just prefer not to leave."

Beyond being a lavishly endowed recipient of the solemn and empty rhetoric known as lip service, the arts do not occupy a place of more than marginal prominence in the United States. They never have.

Whether it's the art-free curricula found in almost every public school, or the nearly complete absence of writers, artists, composers and the rest from the nation's civic life, the arts languish on the sidelines of American culture. It's easy to see why. The most noteworthy reason Americans don't much care about the arts is that, generally, they regard them as a feminine activity, not a masculine one.

Think of the stock cartoon-depiction of a culturally minded matron dragging her reluctant husband to the opera -- or the museum, theater or concert hall. It's a staple of American humor because it speaks an American truth.

This usually unspoken identification of the arts with feminine activity has lots of ramifications. A crucial one is that the arts get invested with the same peculiar status traditionally afforded women: They're put up on a pedestal, where they won't be in the way for the serious, rough-and-tumble business of daily life.

The feminization of culture in the American mind is an issue whose time may be at hand. It's a subtext to "Guys Who Sew," a small exhibition on view through Dec. 11 at the University Art Museum at UC Santa Barbara. More important, it's moving front and center in the work of a few intriguing artists.

"Guys Who Sew" looks at a recent proliferation of male artists who employ needlework -- a medium historically associated with women. Some early feminists even heralded needlework as the quintessential women's art for the modern era.

Quilts, samplers, embroidery -- the idea is that women, traditionally confined to the home, found an outlet for creative expression through the only means available to them. Usually, that meant the domestic art of sewing.

Curators Elizabeth A. Brown and Fran Seegull have assembled work by 13 artists, including Willie Cole, Robert Gober, Georg Herold, Jim Isermann and Mike Kelley. For some, such as Isermann's 1993-94 pieced-fabric wall hanging, sewing is central to the enterprise. For others, such as Gober's 1989 dismembered wax leg that wears pants, it's incidental. A Lucas Samaras "crazy-quilt painting" from 1979, composed from long, colorful strips of sewn fabric, assumes the role of father figure.

A firm cultural equation between needlework and women's work is essential for a show like "Guys Who Sew" to have any frisson. "Gals Who Sew" wouldn't generate any sense of trespass. But the stew is even more provocatively seasoned by art's repressed aura as itself a feminine activity.

The feminization of culture in the American psyche has meant that art, in order to have any true value, must typically conceal its feminine spirit, often behind an exaggerated masculinity. It has needed to be clear that a man -- specifically a heterosexual man -- has taken charge.

"Guys Who Sew," through its funny, swaggering title, lampoons that commonplace concealment. Yeah, this is sewing-cum-art, but don't worry: Regular guys are doing it ( burp ).

The inclusion of several artists who are openly gay, and of a number of works whose forms pointedly derive from doll clothes, dresses, quilts and other culturally feminine things, plainly seeks to short-circuit established standards. They play against expectations.

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In the work of two other artists (not in the Santa Barbara show), an even more pointed disruption than this is now being encountered. Rather than play against type, as the motif advanced in "Guys Who Sew" generally does, this art means to speak with the very language of our otherwise unspoken cultural prejudice. It makes explicit our subliminal identification of art with femininity.

Thomas Trosch and Sally Elesby make purposefully effeminate painting and sculpture. They are avatars of a voluptuousness that brings the feminization of culture to the surface. Their work takes the sow's ear attributes typically ascribed to women -- weakness, timidity, delicacy, emotionalism -- and sensibly remakes them into haute-couture silk purses.

Trosch, a New York-based artist who had his first solo show in Los Angeles at the Ruth Bloom Gallery last year, makes wonderfully fey paintings of cheerful, wide-eyed society women in elegant, uptown drawing rooms stuffed with avant-garde art. Via cartoony word-balloons, the ladies -- dedicated arbiters of taste -- speak with passionate urgency about Ludwig Wittgenstein's aesthetic philosophy and Dorothy Rodgers' Park Avenue decorating dictums.

These fluttery pictures, made by a man, operate with a drag-queen sensibility. For the feminine artifice and deception of drag doesn't make fun of women, as is often supposed; drag mocks instead the authoritative tastes of straight men.

Trosch's are, as a friend put it, perhaps the faggiest paintings ever made -- and yes, that's meant as a compliment. They luxuriously indulge themselves in the feminine role Americans have silently assigned to artistic culture.

So, in a very different way, do the ecstatic sculptures of Los Angeles-based Sally Elesby, seen this fall in a breakout show at Food House. Rather than painted drag queens, however, Elesby makes luscious showgirls.

Her exuberant, non-figurative wall sculptures strut their stuff in clouds of tulle, feathers, sequins, satin flowers, rhinestones and ribbon. Elesby arrays these seductive materials in serial patterns on wire armatures, melding austere, minimalist structure with floozy forms.

These glamour-puss constructions recall nothing so much as Donald Judd's influential, serial wall sculptures of galvanized iron and painted steel from the 1960s and after. But his industrially pretty, butch decorativeness has been deliriously replaced by her girlish, domestically produced froufrou. Out of Judd's garage workshop and into Elesby's sewing room, a rigorous investigation of sculptural space has been dramatically recast in a whole new set of terms.

Informed by feminist precedent, Trosch's paintings and Elesby's sculptures take a radical, necessary step. Think of theirs as "effeminist" art, for a culture that would rather not know.

* "Guys Who Sew," University Art Museum, UC Santa Barbara, (805) 893-2951, through Dec. 11. Closed Mondays.

Where, oh where, are those Marx Brothers when we need them?

Verdi's "Il Trovatore," which received a sort-of new production at the budget-conscious San Francisco Opera this season, is funny enough without the help of Harpo, Groucho, Chico and the other Nibelungen. But there is a big difference between helpless comedy and inspired foolishness.

The foolishness at the War Memorial Opera House on Thursday was anything but inspired. It was clumsy and tacky -- just the sort of thing that confirms every opera-hater's worst prejudices.

The stage was decorated, once more, by Gerard Howland, San Francisco's new all-purpose el-cheapo designer. For this dark, bloody, tempestuous tale of love, passion, betrayal, intrigue, revenge and mistaken identity in 15th-Century Spain, he came up with a jumble of styles amid kitsch-postcard aesthetics: cloud-cutouts to frame the proscenium, irrelevant religious images painted in cardboard-Baroque splendor, and clunky quasi-modernist props to differentiate primitive locales. The flimsy, arbitrary window-dressing actually made one long for the bad old days of wrinkled canvas.

The costumes, attributed to no one, suggested a desperate though undeniably resourceful raid on the local warehouse.

The staging scheme, such as it is, was created by John Copley for a different cast last September. The current principals, who do not happen to be thespian giants, have been told by Paula Williams where to enter, where to stand, when to clutch heart or throat and where to collapse or exit.

This was opera by the numbers. Dull numbers.

The tawdry and pretentious charade (top ticket: $120) still might have been salvaged, to a degree at least, by great music-making. Or, perhaps, by Divine Intervention. No such luck.

Ian Robertson, who normally functions as company chorus-master, took over the baton from Daniel Oren. He wielded it briskly and lightly, in an ever-efficient manner that might befit Donizetti better than Verdi. He didn't do much, however, to sustain dramatic vitality or to propel rhythmic urgency. If his primary goal was to get home as early as possible, one couldn't blame him.

The production has been plagued by crucial cast changes from the start. The first set of performances found both romantic principals -- Aprile Millo and Michael Sylvester -- on the sick list. The chief attraction at the December revival was supposed to have been the fascinating Hungaro-German soprano Julia Varady (who happens to be the wife of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau), but, true to her habit, she found herself available only for a limited number of cancellations.

To replace her, San Francisco's adventurous impresarios turned to one Zvetelina Vassileva, a possibly terrified neophyte from Sofia, Bulgaria.

She is very pretty, and she struck fetching poses on Thursday. She earned points for restoring "Tu vedrai che amore in terra," a cabaletta most prima donnas prefer to omit. Vocally, alas, she teetered on the brink of disaster.

Her small and thin soprano turned shrill at the top and all but evaporated at the bottom. The arching cantilena defeated her breath supply, and proper pitch was a sometime thing in ascending lines. Leonora's lines ascend a lot.

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In a flight of creative economics, San Francisco had upped the box-office ante by $10 per ticket whenever Placido Domingo appeared this season. By consistent rights, the management should have offered refunds -- say $7.50 per customer -- to acknowledge the value of the latest Slavic import.

The rest of the cast was at least competent. With more incisive dramatic and musical leadership, the abiding dullness factor might have been diminished.

Dennis O'Neill, the stodgy-portly Manrico on duty, looked and acted pretty much like a standard cartoon tenor. Luckily, much of his singing allowed sound to overpower sight. He floated ravishing mezza-voce tones when Verdi asked for them, and, even without the prescribed trills, was able to make "Ah si, ben mio, coll'essere" a poignant reverie. He also mustered a reasonable facsimile of climactic power for "Di quella pira" -- both verses for a change -- and capped the stretta with a plangent top C (a pitch the glamorous tenorissimi avoid via transposition).

Vladimir Chernov, James Levine's anointed Verdi-baritone at the Met, turned the mellifluously evil Count into a pleasant singing-statue. He produced plenty of solid, even, burnished tone, but little dynamic variety and less emotional tension. Although "Il balen" emerged as a good demonstration of the art of legato phrasing, the aria told us little about Luna's tormented character.

Stefania Toczyska sang the affecting plaints of Azucena with more force than her previous efforts in this repertory had led one to expect. She could hardly eradicate memories of her great, fiery, gutsy predecessors in the role -- from Stignani to Castagna, Elmo to Barbieri, Simionato to, yes, Zajick. But she did perform with informed style, admirable security and reasonable thrust. Under the circumstances, one had to be grateful.

Philip Skinner brought ample basso-competence to the narrative platitudes of Ferrando. The resident comprimarios were OK.

Robertson's charges sang the music of the masses lustily for their boss. It it would require a higher power, however, to make anyone take that infernal Anvil Chorus seriously these days, on either side of the proscenium. On Thursday, the quaint crashing and clunking served just one useful purpose: It kept an understandably somnolent audience awake, at least for a little while.

* "Il Trovatore," presented by the San Francisco Opera at the War Memorial Opera House, 301 Van Ness Ave., San Francisco. Remaining performances Sunday at 1 p.m., Wednesday at 7:30 p.m., next Saturday at 8 p.m. Tickets $10 (standing room) to $120. (415) 864-3330.

Jesse Helms' worst nightmare: Karen Finley, be-hatted but otherwise stark naked, moaning out a list of injustices to women ("I make 63 cents to your dollar. . . . I got my perfume on 'cause a woman needs to keep her smells to herself . . . "); describing the death of a 12-year-old who drank Draino because she couldn't tell her parents she was pregnant; and telling about the night her father hit a baby deer and shot its mother and then ran over them both.

You've got to love her. Or at least you've got to be glad she exists, even if seeing her once will probably be enough for most people (except, of course, for the people who want her banned, and they usually don't get around to seeing her at all).

To recap, Finley came to national prominence in 1990 when the National Endowment for the Arts denied her funding after syndicated columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak (who had never seen her perform) attacked her. Apparently her most unforgivable crime was to smear her naked upper torso with chocolate to symbolize society's degradation of women.

Finley stopped into a temporary performance space in Santa Monica on Thursday night to display her distinctive brand of protest art. And while her show, "A Certain Level of Denial" (presented by the Santa Monica Museum of Art in conjunction with "Power in America," a series of events in observance of Worlds AIDS Day and Day Without Art), at times veers dangerously close to parodies of this kind of performance, there is little doubt that Karen Finley feels her pain. In fact feeling her pain is her art, with all of the egocentrism and masochism that implies.

Standing or lying nude, or sitting at a lectern in pants and a turban, Finley rails against prevailing evils, using scenes from her own life to illustrate that things are rotten in the state of, well, everywhere. Like a TV schizophrenic, she employs two voices: One is low and laced with melodramatic vibrato, sounding very much like a Southern evangelist summoning the deepest demons in her congregation; the other is a high-pitched, pain-filled tremolo, like the ones actresses use when playing grown women forced to relive some childhood trauma under hypnosis.

Is Karen Finley an extraordinarily sensitive instrument, a woman who has no emotional defense against all of the pain in the world? Or is she an exploiter and whiny abuser of that pain for her own fame? She claims that karma was invented to keep the miserable in a state of acceptance, yet her endless litany of complaints seems to indicate, if not a love of, at least an attraction, to suffering. ("I've been a mother, a whore and a slave, but never valued by anyone," she says at one point. One wants to step in for her imaginary shrink in this scene and offer some pertinent advice, such as, "Get over it.")

After her show had started, a man in a black wig, leather miniskirt and stiletto heels entered the theater and stood in the back. While she performed a monologue about a friend with AIDS who committed suicide, the man began to sob, deeply and loudly. He continued sobbing into her next story, in which she hung her head like a catatonic and rocked a toy rocking horse by gently lifting its head off its body while recounting a rape by two Chicago policemen. She stopped rocking for a moment and said, gently and in a normal, soothing voice, "I hear you. I just want to tell you that."

The cynical New Yorker in me wondered if the man was a plant. I don't believe he was, and it doesn't matter anyway. At that moment I believed in her pain because it wasn't centered on her own anguish. For me, it was Karen Finley's finest moment. "I am this country! I am this sickness!" she shrieked at another point in the evening, and there is no question that, like her or not, Karen Finley serves a purpose in this culture.

* For more information on the series "Power in America," 1646 18th St., continuing through next Saturday and including various performances and videos by other artists, call (213) 660-TKTS.

There's no easy way to describe the Freeway Philharmonic's music. The quartet's unusual, string-based instrumentation and eclectic take on its material are impossible to slip easily into any one category.

Because improvisation plays a part in its music, it could be called a jazz band. But the instrumentation (there are no horns) and the minor role that jazz rhythms play (the group swings at times, but it also waltzes, rocks and does the two-step) would seem to make it something other than a jazz combo.

Its viola, acoustic guitar and Chapman Stick front line (the Stick is a 12-stringed instrument that looks like a long guitar neck without a body) gives the sound a classical flavor at times. But its arrangement of Aaron Copland's "Hoedown," with its contemporary leanings, stands at a great distance from the composer's original. And even though the group covers the Beach Boys and the Beatles, it is too close to jazz and classical styles to be considered a pop band.

Its show Thursday at the Dana Point Cafe neatly demonstrated the Phil's versatility. The pastoral sound, neither too loud nor too timid, fit perfectly into the cozy setting and suggested that there might be a category for this band after all: Call it "wine bar music."

There was little that demanded strict attention from listeners during the pleasant first set, though there was just enough intricacy in the arrangements and interplay for those who wanted to look beneath the surface. The foursome, together some seven years, falls together in such practiced style that its most complex passages arrive with attractive simplicity.

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With drummer Scott Jackson playing an electronic percussion machine in deference to the intimate cafe's acoustics, the quartet sampled heavily from its just-released "Sonic Detour" CD (on the audiophile-oriented Sheffield lab label). "Bullfrog Rag" featured guitarist Robert Stanton on 12-string, Novi Novag's viola dancing against clip-clop percussion, and Larry Tuttle's bass lines from the Chapman. At times the piece took on a loose, ragtime feel; at others, Novag's viola added touches of bluegrass.

"Albert's Go-Kart" continued the rhythmic and tonal variations with Tuttle's Chapman adding both bass line and synthesized guitar effects. Novag took a short improvisation during the number that was neither too aggressive nor somnolent.

The band's fun-loving side came through in its pop arrangements. Tuttle developed a long string-section introduction before the group swung into "Eleanor Rigby." "Good Vibrations" closed on a tightly played line from James Brown's "I Feel Good."

"Hoedown" was the most varied piece of the set, including not only portions of Copland's high-stepping theme but also touches of "Old Folks at Home" and rural color from Stanton's jew's-harp.

The mood became more somber as Stanton moved to a nylon-stringed guitar for his own "Lullaby of Tears," a moody piece that at times suggested Brahms' famous lullaby. But that tempered frame of mind dissipated quickly as the four responded with the upbeat theme from "The Bugs Bunny Show."

That kind of playful contrast defines the Phil's approach: The band is not too much of any one thing. The musicianship is fine but never so technically oriented that it becomes inaccessible. The band works in a host of musical styles, melding them in a pleasant hybrid that never becomes too emotional, one way or another.

But such evenhandedness might present problems for those who want more dynamics and feeling in their music. The Freeway Philharmonic plays a smooth soundtrack to modern life but doesn't reflect its more intense demands or Angst -producing situations. Need a breather from the harried pace? Try the Freeway.

Auction High Point: Collectors spent more than $25 million on 172 paintings, drawings and sculptures at Sotheby's in New York on Thursday, bringing the auction house its most lucrative sale of American works in five years. The night's top lot was Childe Hassam's "Poppies," which sold for more than $2.6 million, nearly doubling its pre-estimate of $1.4 million. Other big-ticket works were William Merritt Chase's "Seaside Flowers" ($2.4 million), George Bellows' "Dock Builders" ($1.4 million) and Georgia O'Keeffe's "Jimson Weed" ($1 million). In addition, each of 16 Norman Rockwell works offered were sold, bringing in nearly $1.7 million for the group. The sale set records for several artists, including Fitz Hugh Lane, whose "Ships at Sunrise" went for $910,000, six times its high estimate of $150,000. TELEVISION

Loco Like a Fox: Fox network plans to add "House of Buggin' " -- a sketch comedy show starring comic performer John Leguizamo -- to its Sunday schedule on Jan. 8. Leguizamo has had Off Broadway hits with "Mambo Mouth" and "Spic-o-Rama," and co-stars with Wesley Snipes in the coming film "To Wong Foo." The show will air at 8:30 p.m., the slot that has lately been filled with the second of back-to-back episodes of "The Simpsons." "Buggin' " is often referred to as a Latino version of "In Living Color." Fox also has another Latino show in the works: a sitcom starring L.A. stand-up Carlos Mencia.

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Willard's Schedule Change: "Today" show weatherman Willard Scott will reduce his appearances on the NBC show from four days a week to three, beginning in March. Scott, who requested the change, will be doing more features on the show, while WNBC-TV weatherman Al Roker is expected to do the weather on Mondays and Fridays when Scott is off.

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Attempting a KO: A boxing promoter has sued CBS Television over a "60 Minutes" story that accused him of fixing bouts for two fighters in his stable. Rick Parker's suit seeks $120 million in compensatory and punitive damages from the network and Don Hazelton, head of the Florida State Athletic Commission, who is accused of "false and defamatory statements" in the Aug. 21 broadcast. POP/ROCK

Touring Champions: The Rolling Stones' "Voodoo Lounge" North American concert tour continues through Dec. 18, but Performance, the trade magazine that annually tracks concert sales, is already predicting a whopping $119.4-million gross for 57 Stones dates. That would surpass 1994's current top-selling act, Pink Floyd, which brought in $104.6 million in 59 shows. With eight more dates to go, Mick Jagger and company are already in second place, with a take of $102.4 million from 49 performances. The rest of the Top Five: Billy Joel, with $75.8 million from 69 shows (including 21 dates he co-headlined with Elton John); the Eagles, with $73.7 million from 50 shows (30 additional dates have been scheduled for 1995), and Barbra Streisand, with $58.9 million from only 22 shows.

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On-Line Benefit: Aerosmith will kick off what is being billed as an "international cyberspace tour" with a live, on-line conference at 4 p.m. Sunday on CompuServe. The rockers will be backstage at the Palace of Auburn Hills near Detroit; proceeds from connect-time charges and the sale of limited-edition "Aerosmith Cyberspace Tour" T-shirts will benefit the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which works to protect the privacy of computer users and the right to free speech. To take part, connect to CompuServe and go to the CompuServe Convention Center (GO CONVENTION). PEOPLE WATCH

Mrs. Jackson Speaks: Lisa Marie Presley-Jackson has joined those decrying tabloid stories that her marriage to pop star Michael Jackson is about to end. "Once again, the media is being very irresponsible and spreading false rumors," she said in a statement. "Michael and I are very happily married, and very much in love."

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Sticking to His Guns: Actor Tom Cruise has filed a $10-million lawsuit claiming television ads for a Magnavox video recorder illegally contain a snippet of him from the movie "Top Gun." Cruise's attorney, Bert Fields, says the clip can't be used to advertise any product not related to the movie. Cruise's suit names Philips Interactive Media Inc., which makes Magnavox products, as well as the advertising firm Rubin Postaer and Associates. QUICK TAKES

Citing "financial difficulties," the American Ballet Theatre has withdrawn from a Jan. 4-6 engagement at the San Diego Civic Theatre. Kenneth MacMillan's full-evening "Manon" and a repertory program had been announced. The company has also canceled its Dec. 12-24 "Nutcracker" engagement in Purchase, N.Y. . . . Cable's newest 24-hour offering, the Game Show Network, premiered Thursday with a 36-hour game show marathon, featuring one episode from every series in the network's library, including such favorites as "Jeopardy!," "The Gong Show," "Family Feud" and "What's My Line?" The channel is available on satellite via the Hughes Galaxy VII transponder 6.SHAUNA SNOW

Forget Christmas card nostalgia. From its Bauhaus-style snowflake-tutus to the "Blond Ambition" bra on Mother Ginger, the brand-new L.A. Chamber Ballet "Nutcracker" adopts a boldly 20th-Century theatricality.

Danced to tape in its premiere at Cal State L.A. on Thursday, the production set the Christmas party scene against flat geometric panels that could suddenly open up to become a doorway, a box holding doll-dancers -- or a saw-toothed abstraction of a Christmas tree.

Later on, set designer Yu-Ming Chien offered a gigantic origami mobile in place of the usual snow forest and a series of descending brass clock faces to decorate the rather chilly, wide-open vistas of Candyland.

Unfortunately, Chien's taste for emblematic simplicity didn't stand a chance against the blitz of neo-Expressionist effects launched by costume designer Francine Lecoultre -- an astonishing spectacle on its own terms, perhaps, but seldom suited to either the distinctive linear shapes of classical ballet or the curiously traditional version of the story line adopted by the company.

Moreover, choreographer Laurence Blake couldn't tell that story clearly -- much less create dances that defined character -- so all the modernist hoopla of the staging ended up utterly hollow. Little Marie, the mysterious Drosselmeyer and the rest never came alive -- they just kept punching out flashy steps in flashy costumes.

Although his ensemble choreography suffered from the attempt to make Marie a constant participant in the action rather than a mere observer, Blake clearly responded to the feverish drive of these passages in the score with a surge of genuine invention. And his Mouse battle blazed with resourceful stagecraft. But the last act divertissement provided little beyond hand-me-down platitudes -- including a standard-issue pas de deux for a guest ballerina.

At least Sylvia Rico brought impressive warmth, ease and technical surety to her Sugar Plum duties, looking radiant even when Eric Skinner mismanaged a lift and nearly dropped her. Besides being Rico's accident-prone cavalier, Skinner served capably as the Nutcracker soldier and prince, a character very much in the shadow of Drosselmeyer in this version.

However, even Drosselmeyer had no real narrative function after the party scene, and all of Francois Perron's technical authority in the role counted for little under the circumstances. As Marie, Carol Guidry worked doggedly to forge connections between characters and scenes, eventually resembling the desperate hostess of some deadly party.

John Funk proved equally convincing as a hot, wiggly Mouse King and a cool, slinky Arabian dancer. But the most memorable transformation of the evening involved veteran Royal Ballet character dance paragon Stanley Holden as Mother Ginger. A purple-haired, post-punk, music hall vision with nine kiddies hidden under his skirts, Holden set the seal on a production ultimately more focused on dressing outrageously than with dancing, storytelling or the Christmas spirit.

* L.A. Chamber Ballet dances "The Nutcracker" today at 2 and 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m in the Luckman Fine Arts Complex, Cal State L.A., 5151 State University Drive, (213) 466-1767. Tickets: $18 and $22.

Of all the fang-and-cape monsters prowling through "Interview With the Vampire," the oddest has to be Louis, a depressed thing who prefers drinking blood from poodles rather than people. His adopted daughter, a darling kiddie-vamp, is close. She's cranky now and then, but at least she's not so finicky -- grown-ups taste just fine, thank you.

Yes, one thing you can say about this spurting, dripping, giggling film adaptation of Anne Rice's novel is that it has some very strange incarnations of the old Dracula legend. But they're certainly not the first. Hollywood and beyond have been providing peculiar vampires for years.

How about a blood-lover and his loyal blood-loving dog? Then there's the New Yorker who may or may not be a vampire, but, just to make sure, he buys a pair of novelty teeth before stalking prey in Central Park. You demand affirmative action? Black jugular-biters have turned up in a couple of movies.

Finding these suckers shouldn't be hard. You don't need a Renfield or a Van Helsing, just the clerk at the local video store, especially if it's fully stocked. Here's a rundown of some of the stranger, more obscure vampire flicks available -- some decent, some horrible, some frightening, some merely hilarious.

* For camp value, there's "Dracula's Dog," which came out in 1978. It seems the original Count had nothing better to do, so he nibbled on a neighborhood hound named Zoltan. The mutt, now growling with vampire lust, heads to Los Angeles with another vampire to search out relatives of the first Dracula. Yes, this movie's a keeper, as nutty as it sounds. It was released with the snappier title, "Zoltan, Hound of Dracula."

* In "Vampire's Kiss" (1989), Nicolas Cage plays a yuppie who has more than a passionate one-night stand with a woman he believes is a vampire. Cage thinks he's one too, but it may all be in his head, just a manic extension of his womanizing and self-involvement. Cage is hilarious -- besides those fake incisors, he works that slab of a face of his into some amazing vampiric contortions. Although probably too kinky for mainstream viewers, "Vampire's Kiss" is a cartoonish metaphor with bite.

* The only black Dracula to ever rise from the grave is at the furiously pumping heart of "Blacula" (1972). A black prince from somewhere far away is bitten by a vampire, then takes to roaming the streets of Los Angeles, apparently a favorite destination for Transylvanians. This cheapie actually has a few shocking scenes, and director William Crain takes an opportunity or two to investigate the hip, urban black environment of the early '70s. It spawned a stupid sequel, "Scream, Blacula, Scream!," in 1973.

* "The Vampire Lovers," which came out in 1971, is one of the most erotic takes on the legend. It should be, featuring as it does lesbian vampires on the make for both sensual and liquid thrills. Peter Cushing is featured in this, one of the handful of his popular Dracula films made in Britain.

* An amusing follow-up, for often unintentional reasons, is "Twins of Evil" (1972). Get this: beautiful twins are nice to look at, but one of them is a vampiress devoted as much to mayhem as she is to lingerie. The local citizenry can't tell the women apart, a major disadvantage. Almost notable for starring Playboy's first twin playmates, Madeleine and Mary Collinson.

* A true bomb, and funny just because it's so explosively rotten, is "Vampire Men of the Lost Planet." This movie, which soiled drive-in theaters in 1970, melds sci-fi with bloodletting. Vampire attacks have scientists annoyed and confused until they trace them to a distant planet where this sort of thing goes on all the time. A jumble of filmed sequences and stock footage from other flicks is used by schlock director Al Adamson.

* If you are partial to other foul offerings by Adamson, there's "Dracula vs. Frankenstein" (1970). In this, the last movie in the long careers of both Lon Chaney Jr. and J. Carroll Naish, Adamson tries to yank a satire from the jaws of terror. The plot finds an aging Dracula making a deal with an aging Dr. Frankenstein for a lifetime's supply of blood. This is bad, very bad; recommend it to an enemy.

* The French got involved in 1979 with "Dracula and Son," a mild comedy. Christopher Lee stars as the Count, and Bernard Menez shows up as his boneheaded son. A crude, jokey style permeates the throaty misadventures as father and offspring fight for the affections of a gorgeous babe.

* More extraterrestrial madness can be found in "Not of This Earth," the 1988 remake of Roger Corman's 1957 movie of the same name, which isn't on video. The more recent offering follows the first's plot closely, centering on an alien vampire who comes to Earth to collect blood for his nuclear war-ravaged home planet. Former porn diva Traci Lords makes a brief appearance as a tight-skirted nurse.

* The original "Nosferatu" (1922) is the first vampire and perhaps the greatest. F.W. Murnau's silent classic doesn't offer a suave or sympathetic monster (he's not the Bela Lugosi of the far more famous "Dracula" from 1931), just a blood-hungry pervert who is demented and, with his mad great-goblin features and scythe-like fingers, very creepy to look at.

A sequel didn't come along until 1979, when respected German director Werner Herzog made "Nosferatu the Vampyre." Klaus Kinski is eerie as a Dracula with a heart almost as big as his choppers; Kinski is able to be spooky and vaguely sympathetic at the same time. Herzog also evokes some of the expressionistic flavor that helped make the original so compellingly alien.

As a publicist in New York in the '40s and '50s, I was fortunate to represent a number of the great talents of the musical world, including Cab Calloway.

I handled his publicity at a time when he was in a popularity decline, and my most vivid memory of that association was the time I "gave him away" as a prize on the TV quiz show "Stop the Music."He had just returned from a disastrous engagement in a Philadelphia nightclub, where business had been terrible; I proposed that he needed more exposure on the new electronic medium, television. Unlike some clients, he listened and cooperated.

At the time, "Stop the Music" was one of the most popular programs on TV, giving away prizes to people on the telephone who could correctly identify the name of a song the orchestra was playing. I proposed to the producers that instead of merchandise, they "give away" Calloway and the band for one night. (Calloway and the band, of course, were to perform on the program each week until there was a winner.) Calloway and the producers readily agreed.

After about three or four weeks of national exposure on "Stop the Music," Calloway and the band were "awarded" to an elderly couple in Providence, R.I. They had them play at a benefit dance for their church, but first we had them perform at the couple's tiny home, seated on cases of canned foods, appliances and other items.

A month later, the band returned to that club in Philadelphia, and it filled so quickly that the ropes were up nightly by 9.

I can say, without hesitation, that he was a wonderful man and a delight as a client. I already miss him.

DIXON GAYER

Huntington Beach

The way Grant Tinker sees it, TV technology may be leaping ahead in new and exotic forms, but a key to the success of the developing and futuristic alternatives could well be good, original, mainstream series in the network tradition.

"They are coming to realize they have to have something to deliver," the former NBC chairman said in an interview. "That was sort of forgotten for a couple of years while people (companies) ran around and desperately tried to marry each other and merge and acquire so that nobody was going to be left out."

The kind of future programming that captures his imagination, even in the high-tech world, is "quality programming, the kinds of things that succeeded for us at NBC -- the 'Cheers' and the 'Hill Street Blues' and the 'St. Elsewheres.' I'm not talking about the niche programming -- fly fishing and bridge playing -- that are going to be in the narrow channels of the universe that's to come.

"I'm thinking, and have thought for some time, that the one thing that people have not looked ahead to anticipate delivering is the kind of programming we've all grown up with."

*

Tinker touches on this area of contemplation in his new book, "Tinker in Television: From General Sarnoff to General Electric," written with his longtime friend and former head of corporate communications for NBC, Bud Rukeyser.

In a conversation at a Westside restaurant, Tinker said that the kind of programming he is thinking of would "be delivered variously. There are people competing right now -- cable and fiber optics and direct broadcast satellites and over-the-air and on-line. The networks are sort of healthier at the moment than they were a year or so ago, but they're not going to stay healthy forever.

"And I've been wondering: Who is going to collect the resources to make a 'Hill Street Blues' or 'NYPD Blue' or 'ER' or 'Cheers'? I'm talking about new stuff," says Tinker.

Does he think that viewers who have received such traditional, large-scale, commercial new series for free on the traditional networks will now buy them?

"They'll have to," he says. "What else are they going to look at? They'll look at sports and they'll look at news and they'll look at movies -- but that only goes so far. There's always going to be a market for the kind of television we've always known."

Tinker stops short of flat-out predicting what is to come, making clear -- like other TV executives, even those on the extreme cutting edge of the medium's future -- that he is no absolute seer.

But several of his notable accomplishments in TV make his thoughts on programming and the structure of the business -- now and possibly in the future -- intriguing. He guided the jewel of TV's production companies, MTM Enterprises ("The Mary Tyler Moore Show," "Hill Street Blues," "Lou Grant," "The Bob Newhart Show"), and led the rebuilding of the all-but-dead NBC from 1981-86.

These significant television efforts are "two things I'm very proud of," he says.

He could have remained chairman of NBC when its parent company, RCA, was bought by General Electric, but he wanted out. He tried producing some new series, including a number of shows for CBS, but they didn't fly, although he believes that two of the dramas -- "WIOU" and "TV 101" -- might have caught on if given more time.

*

He decided several years ago to get out of "the business that I loved -- the independent production business, where you could truly be, as MTM was, independent, living on your own income, not using (studio) money or reimbursal -- because it was dead, for economic reasons."

Did he ever think of reteaming on projects with his former program chief at NBC, Brandon Tartikoff, after their years together as a remarkably successful and popular TV duo?

"No," says Tinker. "Actually, I sold Brandon a show that's become the world's most popular -- 'Baywatch' -- which he chose to cancel."

For the last few years, Tinker was involved in writing his book, a breezy, personal account of his years in broadcasting.

Talking to Tinker, it quickly becomes clear that although he decided to pull out of "the business that I loved," he still retains his typically quiet passion for TV, especially the networks.

He jokes that, at 68, "I'm Christmas past," but in fact he is not infrequently approached by network executives and producers to sit down and discuss the business as a kind of elder statesman of TV. And he likes it.

"I maintain good relationships with people like (CBS Entertainment President) Peter Tortorici and all the guys -- Warren Littlefield (president of NBC Entertainment) and Ted Harbert (president of ABC Entertainment). They're all very good at what they do. And I'm past going over to sell them shows. Nor am I interested in producing shows. But I love to sit with guys like that.

"I try not to be one of those as-you-get-older-people who say, 'We used to do it better in the old days.' The truth is, they're in a more difficult business today. The audience is fragmented. From a network standpoint, it's two-thirds of what it was for most of my working life."

What kind of problems do the network chiefs have?

"Well," says Tinker, "they're different. Peter at the moment has a problem more like the one I inherited in 1981. At ABC, they're doing very well. And NBC, as we've seen this fall, has had a resurgence.

"CBS clearly has two jobs to do: One is to get more audience and a better (younger) demographic audience, and that's not easy. But it's do-able. I know it's do-able because we did it in the '80s at NBC. So Peter should take some comfort from that. NBC is running very competitively with ABC in that demographic area (of 18-to-49-year-old viewers), which is bottom-line connected."

At his former network, NBC, Tinker thinks the need is "to consolidate some of the success they've been having."

"I thought it was blatantly, overly promotional for them to spend (two) mornings of the 'Today' show on the 'ER' set. There's an awful lot of that creeping into TV, as we know. If you've already got the hit show of the season, you don't have to send Bryant (Gumbel) and Katie (Couric) out here for two days on that set. It may have been a commercially good thing to do, but I didn't think it was a classy thing to to."

*

ABC, he adds, now is "the biggest and best of all the networks. They clearly run their store very well. Their owned stations are head-and-shoulders above the other guys. So there's huge income there. And with things like getting into ESPN (ABC has a piece of several cable channels) and what-not, they've diversified and acquired very well. I mean, they've got a huge business, not just a network."

The position of ABC grew even stronger this week when it allied itself with the new "Dream Team" production company of Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen.

As for Tinker, he likes "the obvious shows" such as "Seinfeld," "NYPD Blue," "Law & Order," "60 Minutes" and HBO's "The Larry Sanders Show" -- an example of the new series being developed on TV's alternative channels. He also likes "both the medical shows" -- NBC's "ER" and CBS' "Chicago Hope" -- "which, as I've said, were badly scheduled against each other." CBS has since moved "Chicago Hope."

Tinker is disturbed by such tabloid series as "Hard Copy," by the proliferation of reality programs, by "much of the subject matter" on daytime talk shows and by local news -- "the preoccupation with the negative: the violent, the bloody, the sexy."

He tosses out a thought. He wonders what would happen "if one network decided to suddenly have a policy -- 'We're going to do news the way it used to be done, not wall-to-wall carnage' -- and stuck to that resolve, and kept doing it. I would like to see whether those stations in those markets wouldn't begin to succeed. And I think that they're all afraid to try it."

Holiday cheer played very little part in Chanticleer's Christmas concert Thursday night at the Wadsworth Theater. Instead, the 12-man a cappella vocal group, now in its 17th year, presented a subdued program that never soared beyond a patina of studied refinement.

Polish and admirable control oozed from every moment. The San Francisco-based ensemble brought reliable intonation, pristine enunciation and an ever-balanced blend to readings of works from the Renaissance and the 20th Century, as well as to familiar carols.

Yet technical perfection emerged as emotional detachment, even in David Conte's "Charm Me Asleep," based on Robert Herrick's poem "To Music -- To Becalm his Fever," in which an ailing protagonist begs music to ease his pain by lulling him into death. Noting that the concert fell on World AIDS Recognition Day, director Joseph Jennings prefaced this piece by pausing "to remember, to reflect, to hope and, if you so desire, to pray."

Awareness was clearly not the problem. The choice of compositions and arrangements -- steadfastly conservative in their harmonies and almost all drawing on the choir's fluid legato -- contributed greatly.

Still, throughout the evening, the singers themselves -- modest voices that never ventured past mezzo forte, and that consistently emphasized the higher ranges -- achieved an insubstantial gloss.

Virtually a whole new cast of principal performers were dancing fast and dying young in "Romeo and Juliet" on Thursday, the second night of this week's San Francisco Ballet engagement at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

It seemed at first as if the fate of the eponymous lovers was to be upstaged by David Justin as the far lustier Mercutio -- a role always in danger of making a straightforward balcony scene seem dull.

Fortunately, the more Romeo and Juliet's stars got crossed, the more Tina LeBlanc and David Palmer grew into their roles. The problem was never technique: Palmer's turns were often impressive, while LeBlanc danced with a sweet precision and harmonious ease. But in the balcony scene, their love seemed like an innocuous crush. It needed the kind of tension you get from moments of suddenness and surrender, and nuanced phrasing that conveys a singular desire you can't bear to imagine destroyed.

Later, LeBlanc, in particular, blossomed in distress; her limbs no longer stretched in vague happiness but found impassioned directness, pleading with her parents, collapsing in despair, reaching and drawing away from the poison. In the tomb, the couple's dramatic choices were finally, beautifully effective.

As Mercutio, Justin's passion never flagged as he made his way through prancing, flirting and sword-fighting duties. Justin is a fully embodied dancer, able to incorporate his sharply correct pirouettes and beautifully buoyant leaps into a foolhardy, likable character. As often happens with a good Mercutio, surrounding characters appeared somewhat drained of life by comparison, even before the bloodletting.

Nevertheless, Peter Brandenhoff held his own as the mild-mannered Benvolio, and Jorge Esquivel provided a strong contrast as a very tense Tybalt.

* "Romeo and Juliet," presented by the San Francisco Ballet at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion of the Music Center, 135 N. Grand Ave. Remaining performances (with differing casts) today at 2 and 8 p.m., Sunday at 2. Tickets $15-$50 at box office. (213) 972-7211. JENNIFER FISHER

"Tell me a story." Sometimes we just want to let our imagination switch into overdrive and, through the mind's eye, paint a picture with words.

Interactive entertainment has acquired new meaning through one of the oldest forms of communication -- storytelling, and no batteries are required.

"Words, Wisdom and Wit" is the first of a series of live spoken-word concerts for and by adults to be presented tonight at 8 at the Beverly Hills Library.

Eight Los Angeles-based storytellers will be featured at the event, including With Our Words (WOW) founding member Milbre Burch.

Burch, a nationally known raconteuse, describes storytelling as a live and healing art.

*

"Storytelling arose in a time in the world when society was a tightly woven fabric," Burch said. "What happens during your life stays with you; storytelling is that reweaving of the fabric, and people have been hungering for it."

Burch said that most adults assume that storytelling is primarily for children, and equate it with baby-sitting, but many are pleasantly surprised, for the experience is not what they expected. "Adults come away from a performance saying, 'Gosh, I enjoyed that!' " Burch said.

As an audience, adults are more polite than children, Burch explained. "Adults will be very nice to you, but children are more vocal. They'll just say, 'I hate that already!' "

Also scheduled to appear at Saturday's performance are Karen Golden, Phyllis Applegate, Vicki Juditz, Angela Lloyd, Kathleen Zundell, Leslie Perry and Willie Sims.

Emmy nominee Applegate is a storyteller who has toured the United States and Europe with her one-woman shows "The Horn of Plenty" and "Sheroes." During the Vietnam War, she brought her USO show to the American forces and received a commendation from the late Gen. Creighton Abrams.

Applegate said that through her performances she connects with people. "Storytelling has a magic, a beauty all its own," Applegate said. "It brings out the extraordinary things that ordinary people do."

* Beverly Hills Library, 444 N. Rexford Drive, $10. Information on future concerts: (213) 933-4614.

Even in a town noted for the eccentricity of its art, Charles Garabedian's seems quirky. These days he's seen as a forerunner of the neo-Expressionism of the '80s, but neither before nor since has he been identified with any set style or movement. He just works away producing compelling images that appear more or less bumbled together.

A current exhibition of about 20 large paintings at the L.A. Louver Gallery pursues the theme "The Labors of Hercules." There's an almost humorous disju