April 16, 1991

With barbecue season around the corner, a near 30-year low in the nation's cattle herd has resulted in the highest prices ever for steak, hamburger and other cuts of beef. The Government expects the herd to be larger by the end of the summer, but there is a puzzling discrepancy between the growing number of cattle in feedlots and the number actually slaughtered.

FOR anyone craving a stripped-down version of Bach -- one from which three-quarters of the master's notes have been cut away -- help is on the way. A scientist and his musician son have devised a system to condense music to its underlying essence. In a paper published yesterday in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Kenneth J. Hsu, a geology professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, and his son, Andrew, propose that mathematical extracts of the music of J. S. Bach could serve as matrices upon which new compositions of Bach-like music could be constructed, "comparable in quality" to those of the composer himself.

In poignant testimony, a husband and wife who oppose abortion told a Congressional subcommittee today how they nevertheless agreed to use tissue from an aborted fetus in a desperate attempt to save their unborn son from a fatal genetic disease. The experiment, carried out last May on the son of Guy and Terri Walden of Houston while the child was still in the womb, was the first fetus-to-fetus tissue transplant to be tried in the United States.

More than 1,000 worshipers crowded into the unbroken space beneath a soaring dome as the imposing new mosque on the Upper East Side of Manhattan opened yesterday on the Islamic feast day of Eid al Fitr, ending the monthlong fast of Ramadan. After years of delay, the building, the Mosque of New York, at Third Avenue and 96th Street, will now be used regularly for services by Muslims from all nations, especially from New York's diplomatic community. Its size and location will make it a focal point for Muslims in New York, which has more than two dozen mosques of varying sizes. It is the first building in the city to be built as a mosque.

Ignoring appeals from the African National Congress, the 12-nation European Community agreed today to lift its remaining economic sanctions against South Africa in response to the Pretoria Government's continuing moves to dismantle apartheid. Meeting in Luxembourg, community foreign ministers said the move would result in ending a five-year-old ban on imports of gold coins, iron and steel from South Africa. Last December, the ministers revoked a prohibition against new investments in South Africa.