May 4, 1991

The Labor Department reported today that payroll jobs fell in April but at a much reduced pace and that the unemployment rate edged down two-tenths of a point, to 6.6 percent. The figures point over all to an economy that while probably not yet starting to recover from recession seems to be approaching its low point, analysts said. They cautioned, however, that the decline in the unemployment rate, the first in almost a year, was probably an aberration.

Four days after a cyclone of unimaginable fury swung across the flat coastal plains of southeastern Bangladesh, swallowing up villages and sweeping away food crops, almost no emergency supplies have reached the newly destitute, relief officials and villagers said today. More than 92,000 people have died in the storm, by official count. National newspapers say the toll may reach 200,000, and waterborne diseases and starvation are likely to kill thousands more.

Dr. David Baltimore, a Nobel laureate biologist, has offered an apology to a young researcher and others in science for his prolonged defense of a scientific paper found to have included faked data. The young researcher, Dr. Margot O'Toole, who was the first to question the paper, said today in a telephone interview that she was pleased by the apology but that his statement still was not correct or truthful in some respects.

General Dynamics Division To Build Navy Submarine The contract for the $2 billion submarine was awarded to Electric Boat of Groton, Conn. General Dynamics had said it would close the shipyard by the late 1990's, eliminating 22,000 jobs, if it lost out to Tenneco's Newport News shipyard in Virginia. Page 33.

A day after the worst communal violence between Serbs and Croats since World War II, representatives of both nationalities blamed each other today and gave contrasting accounts of the village firefight in which more than a dozen people were killed. As soldiers and armored personnel carriers from the Yugoslav national army maintained patrols in the tense Croatian village of Borovo Selo, about 80 miles from Belgrade, President Franjo Tudjman of Croatia said in a television address that his republic was "facing the begining of open warfare."