March 23, 1991

An American F-15 fighter plane shot down an Iraqi fighter-bomber violating a ban on flights today, United States officials said. It was the second such incident reported in three days. The officials said the Iraqi plane, a Soviet built SU-17 or SU-22, was headed from northern Iraq to bases in the central part of the country. Though they said they had no proof of the Iraqi pilot's intentions, they suggested that he may have been trying to flee advancing Kurdish rebels.

New York State took a major step yesterday toward scaling back school programs for the handicapped by increasing maximum class sizes for students with learning disabilities. The decision by the Board of Regents in Albany, which came over the objections of advocates for the handicapped and the state's teachers unions, is being watched by legislators and school administrators across the nation. Many have expressed frustration that during the fiscal austerity of a national recession they must confine many of their spending cuts to mainstream classes.

Rosa Rivera had no doctor, no prenatal care and dangerously high blood pressure when she arrived at the emergency room of DeTar Hospital in Victoria, Tex., in labor with her sixth child. Dr. Michael Burditt, the obstetrician on call, examined Mrs. Rivera and found that her blood pressure was the highest he had ever seen in a pregnant woman. Then he made a decision that has put him at the center of a Federal court case testing the limits of Goverment regulation of emergency care for poor people.

An eerie tension has enveloped this city as Ethiopians watch what may well be the death throes of their 16-year-old Government and nervously consider what they fear is imminent: anarchy and bloodshed in the capital. Startlingly fast rebel victories against Ethiopia's Army, one of Africa's largest, in the last several weeks have put rebel forces 90 miles from the capital and 30 miles from the Government's only remaining port, Assab.

The Government's senior auditor today sharply criticized the Administration's proposal to bolster the dwindling bank insurance fund by extending its borrowing authority to $70 billion. In his first interview about the Treasury plan to reorganize the program that protects bank deposits, Charles A. Bowsher, the Comptroller General, said that extending the fund's borrowing ability was an unrealistic way of handling the growing crisis that would "ultimately hurt the Administration's credibility."