LEAD: Japanese voters, brushing aside appeals to reject the leadership that has governed uninterrupted for 35 years, returned the Liberal Democratic Party of Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu to power in elections for the lower house of Parliament on Sunday.

LONG-RULING PARTY RETAINS CONTROL IN JAPANESE VOTE

LEAD: A likely merger between New England's largest electric utility and the New Hampshire power company that built the Seabrook nuclear plant is troubling the utility industry in the region.

Merger Worries Utilities in New England

LEAD: Finally this season, network television has a new, undeniable hit: ABC's ''America's Funniest Home Videos.''

ABC's 'Home Videos' Pays Off Big

LEAD: Protesters demanding the ouster of President Ion Iliescu took over the provisional government's headquarters this evening, roughly handling one of the new leaders, tossing red-bound party manuals to the crowd below and shouting for a complete end to Communism.

UPHEAVAL IN THE EAST: Romania;   Jeering Romanians Seize Offices To Demand Government's Ouster

LEAD:    Here are holiday schedules.       NEW YORK    Government offices: Closed.    Post offices: Express Mail and special delivery only. Service at main post office at 33d Street and Eighth Avenue.    Banks: Closed.    Parking: Alternate-side rules suspended.    Sanitation: No pickup, recycling collection or street cleaning.

Washington's Birthday Today

LEAD: Apparently alarmed that economic difficulties might touch off unrest, China's leaders have considerably eased economic controls and returned in part to the economic policies that preceded the violent crackdown last June, Chinese officials and foreign diplomats say.

China Acts to Reduce Economic Discontent

LEAD: Waldo Wagner was a big man on the Iowa State University campus back in 1935, the school's first all-America basketball player. And after graduation, he got a job in Washington helping set up the Work Projects Administration, and then went on to a long string of engineering jobs in the Midwest.

Elderly Returning to Campus, This Time for Life as Retirees

LEAD: The Indian Government grounded all 14 Airbus A320 aircraft flown by its domestic carrier today after the crash of an Airbus plane last week that killed 97.

India Grounds Airbus Planes After Crash

BUSINESS DIGEST

LEAD: Time was, no self-respecting New Yorker would let a car cut him off without kicking its tires, or suffer in silence while some cretin in the next row jabbered his way through the second act. In those days, New Yorkers were New Yorkers, and assertiveness was the proud mark of a native.

Mean Streets Force New Yorkers to Just Walk On By

LEAD: John Johnson, the manager of the heavyweight champion, James (Buster) Douglas, said yesterday that Mike Tyson would have to wait for his rematch with Douglas because his fighter would first meet Evander Holyfield, probably in September.

Douglas Shuns Tyson For Holyfield

LEAD: A major contributor to Senator Alfonse M. D'Amato's campaigns had a planned route for a gas pipeline moved off his empty field and into several nearby homeowners' front yards after personally meeting with the Senator and complaining about the pipeline.

After a Talk With Senator D'Amato, Rich Contributor Gets Pipeline Moved

LEAD: They came every day to see John Gotti and to shake his hand. For three weeks strangers queued up outside a Manhattan courtroom for a glimpse of the man the authorities call the nation's most powerful Mafia figure.

Gotti: Dapper Celebrity Or Ruthless Mob Boss?

LEAD: New York City, which is having trouble moving homeless families out of welfare hotels, may be unable to fulfill a pledge to stop using the hotels by June, municipal officials say.

New York Lags in Effort to Move Homeless Families From Hotels

LEAD:    Ethiopia's P.O.W.'s        In the last year, rebels have seized about 55,000 prisoners in Ethiopia's long civil war. Prisoners visited at a camp in northern Eritrea seem dejected but not ill-fed. Page A6.        Raising Stakes in California        Democrats want to move California's Presidential primary earlier despite fears that some of the changes could be for the worse.

INSIDE

LEAD: Paddy Doherty pointed at a cheerful building that not so long ago was a bombed-out casualty of sectarian strife. ''We brought it back to life,'' he said, with a kind of pride and enthusiasm that make peace and prosperity here seem possible.

Londonderry, Burying Strife, Starts to Rebuild

LEAD: Even the most staid audience of doctors applauds with vigor when Dr. Arthur Caplan gets to the part about Gulliver and the Lilliputians.

Many in Medicine See Rules Sapping Profession's Morale

LEAD: HELMUT BALDERIS, balding but helmeted, is a 37-year-old, part-time player for the Minnesota North Stars of the National Hockey League.

  Impossible Dream Plus One Decade

LEAD: The winds of change battering Marxism around the world have hit the South African Communist Party, which has endured by making itself synonymous in many blacks' minds with the struggle of the majority to free itself of domination by the nation's white minority.

In Pretoria: Last Throes of Marxism?

LEAD: After two years of bad news about revenues, New York's financial problems appear to be growing increasingly dire. Financial analysts and even politicians are warning that dramatic steps will be needed to arrest the state's slide toward fiscal crisis.

New York State's Budget Troubles Are Rising, Approaching a Crisis

LEAD: Twenty years ago this month, New York City imposed its paradigmatic consumer protection law. Bess Myerson was consumer affairs commissioner then, followed briefly by Betty Furness. Those were the golden days of the consumer movement.

Metro Matters;   A Commissioner For Consumers Has High Hopes

LEAD: A few impressions of Moscow after an absence of a year:

  Moscow a Year Later: Rutted Streets and Despair

LEAD: The first-place Islanders have lost three games in a row for the first time since their Great Slump of November.

Islanders Continue To Slide

LEAD: So often in Japanese business life, success comes to those who avoid risks and follow the well-trodden paths. Then there are people like Kazuo Wada, chairman of the Yaohan Department Store Company, who personifies another Japanese type: the devoted renegade.

A Different Drummer in Japan

LEAD: Circumstantial evidence suggests that the explosion of ethnic violence in Azerbaijan was not as spontaneous as it seemed. Page A8.

February 19, 1990

Headlines from February 19, 1990

LONG-RULING PARTY RETAINS CONTROL IN JAPANESE VOTE

Merger Worries Utilities in New England

ABC's 'Home Videos' Pays Off Big

UPHEAVAL IN THE EAST: Romania; Jeering Romanians Seize Offices To Demand Government's Ouster

Washington's Birthday Today

Billboard 200

Forever Your Girl

Girl You Know It's True

Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation 1814

...But Seriously

Cosmic Thing

Historical Context for February 19, 1990