April 23, 1991

The California Insurance Commissioner said today that the Internal Revenue Service had unexpectedly billed the Executive Life Insurance Company $643 million for back taxes and penalties, further imperiling the troubled insurer's ability to pay its policyholders and other customers. The commissioner, John Garamendi, said the huge tax bill seriously raised the possibility, for the first time, that Executive Life might have to be liquidated. He warned that a liquidation could result in large losses for the company's hundreds of thousands of customers across the nation.

FOR two weeks before their scheduled launching last May, four crew members of the space shuttle Columbia used brute force to readjust their biological clocks so they could work the night shift. They willed themselves to stay up through the night, watching old movies to stave off slumber. By day, they took to their beds, tossing and turning, determined to sleep. They ate dinner at dawn and breakfast at night. Although they had the right stuff, they felt awful.

The Government today selected Fleet/Norstar Financial Group Inc., a Rhode Island banking company, along with Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts & Company, the big corporate buyout concern, to buy the failed Bank of New England and two affiliated banks that collapsed in January. L. William Seidman, the nation's senior banking regulator, said Fleet/Norstar's bid had been selected because it represented "the lowest cost" to the program that insures bank deposits. Officials acknowledged that as part of the deal, Fleet, which has a comparatively healthy capital base for a Northeast bank, would have to raise money to satisfy Federal regulations on its financial health. Outlay of $5 Billion Mr. Seidman, the chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, also said the bailout would require an initial outlay of about $5 billion from the bank fund and would ultimately cost the sharply deteriorating fund that insures deposits as much as $2.5 billion.

A vivid and often scathing portrait of the impact that a long history of corruption eventually has on the instruction of schoolchildren is painted in a Board of Education report on a Bronx school district. Among the report's findings were these:

Because of Earth Week Transportation Day, 42d Street will be closed from First Avenue to the West Side Highway tomorrow from 10 A.M. to 4 P.M. Free bus service on the street will be offered from 6 A.M. to 9 P.M.