April 27, 1990

LEAD: Three weeks ago, when New York State's April 1 budget deadline was still fresh in official memory, budget talks here had a bit of drama. All-night meetings were followed by angry recriminations, then by stirring scenes of reconciliation.

LEAD: An appeals court here ruled today that a pregnant woman, even one who is terminally ill and whose fetus is probably viable, may not be forced against her will to undergo a Caesarean delivery in an effort to save the fetus.

LEAD: Long-term interest rates moved above 9 percent yesterday for the first time in nearly a year, continuing a rise that will crimp certain sectors of the economy.

LEAD: As President Bush's Cabinet-level Economic Policy Council met today to consider which countries to target for reprisal under 1988 trade legislation, Administration officials said that India was likely to remain on their ''hit list'' but that Brazil, like Japan, had worked its way off.

LEAD: Markets

LEAD: ''Whoa, don't even mention higher taxes here!'' yelped Veronica Woodruff, assistant manager of a cosmetics shop at the Woodbridge Center mall. Her eyes squinted as if she were being force-fed a lemon when she heard the name of her new Governor, the recent bearer of bad news, Jim Florio.

LEAD: At the sun-splashed farmers' market on Calvary Street, the asking price for a pound of tomatoes today was half a day's wages. The taxis parked outside demanded astronomical fares to make up for black-market gasoline costing $20 a gallon, and the driver might well have been a newly laid off factory worker.

LEAD: France and West Germany jointly urged Lithuania today to suspend its Parliament's moves toward independence and to seek negotiations with Moscow with a view to finding ''a solution acceptable to all parties.''

LEAD: At night, TriBeCa's tall, heavy industrial buildings and warehouses somehow make it seem darker than the rest of the city.

LEAD: In a sweeping decision that could signal widespread changes for judicial elections throughout the South, the Department of Justice has thrown out Georgia's system for electing judges on the ground that it discriminates against blacks.

LEAD: After only eight months on the job, Arnold F. Staloff, the president and chief executive of the Commodity Exchange Inc., or Comex, resigned under pressure last night, people at the exchange said.

LEAD: There is such desperate need for group homes for the mentally ill on Long Island, the waiting lists grow and grow. Delia Rivas, who suffers from manic depression, has been free to leave Pilgrim State Psychiatric Hospital for four months, but stays, in Building 45, waiting for a group home bed. ''It's not good to stay in a circumstance where other people around you are very sick,'' she says.