November 13, 1990

In September, Annette Berson told her third graders at Kennedy Elementary School about a recycling program run by Kroger, a supermarket chain in the Middle West. If you bring back your paper bags and use them for your next load of groceries, you get a 3-cent refund for each re-used bag. The third graders got very excited about all the trees they could save and decided each of them would ask a store to create a bag-refund plan. Aaron Israel's letter to A&S stores began: "I am writing to you because our world is not doing too well." Jessica Moussazadeh wrote Children's Warehouse: "All of the people in Room 258 of John F. Kennedy School are concerned about the earth."

At Public School 192 on Harlem's western edge, there are moments when the teachers and the principal are not sure who is in charge. Like colleagues at 93 other New York City schools, P.S. 192's teachers have been given the privilege of sitting with the principal as virtual equals on a governing committee that decides school policy.

Nineteen days after a bitter strike began at The Daily News, the struggle between management and the newspaper's nine striking unions remains centered in the streets, not at the bargaining table. The 71-year-old News -- ordinarily the nation's third largest-selling metropolitan daily -- has already become the first New York City daily newspaper in history to continue publishing during a strike by its unions. It has done so using what it calls "permanent replacement workers," in-house supervisors, out-of-state temporaries and some union workers -- or what the unions refer to simply as scabs and strike-breakers.

The Federal Bureu of Investigation is scrambling to investigate the Muslim groups associated with the Masjid al-Salam mosque in Jersey City, where El Sayyid A. Nosair, the man accused of killing Rabbi Meir Kahane, worshiped, according to high-level law-enforcement officials. Although the New York City police say they believe Mr. Nosair acted alone, one law-enforcement official said the investigation into Rabbi Kahane's death had opened "a window" into several radical fundamentalist groups. Besides looking at possible links between these groups and the shooting of Rabbi Kahane last week at a Manhattan hotel, the F.B.I. fears that these groups may be capable of terrorist activities at a time of heightened tensions in the Middle East, thehigh-level officials said.

The Pan Am Corporation has sold off its Park Avenue headquarters building, its Inter-Continental Hotel chain, its routes across the Pacific and now, in a deal on which final agreement could be reached tomorrow, its routes between New York and London. But despite years of trying, the company that used to symbolize the prestige of aviation has never succeeded in selling off itself. So Pan Am is falling back on an alternative strategy: survival as an independent carrier.