May 7, 1991

Complaints Preceded Crash On a Los Angeles Runway Safety officials reported that controllers repeatedly complained to the Federal Aviation Administration about ground radar at the Los Angeles airport before a fatal collision but no action was taken. Page A18. Curfew in Washington Violence broke out agina in a Hispanic neighborhood in Washington, D.C., but it subsided after a midnight curfew went into effect. Page A18. U.S. Plan for Gulf Role Defense Secretary Dick Cheney proposed that the United States store military equipment in Saudi Arabia and other gulf nations. Page A16. The Koreas Play Ping-Pong North and South Korean table tennis players established a beachhead of good will by fielding a joint team for the first time. Page A9. Quiz: What Is This Thing? What takes this meandering swing through Staten Island and Brooklyn? One of New York City's proposed new Council districts. Page B1.

The Soviet Government transferred control of the Siberian coal industry to the Russian republic today, marking a milestone in Boris N. Yeltsin's campaign to wrest economic and political authority from the Kremlin. After months of conflicting claims by the central Government and the republics, with resulting confusion over ownership and control of natural resources and industries, the agreement on the mines represented the first sizable transfer of an important industry from the national Government to that of a republic.

THERAPISTS who once viewed perverse sexual fantasies as the furtive compulsions of a lonely minority are seeing them in a new light, as more and more "normal" people report them in therapy and new studies suggest that even violent fantasies are surprisingly common. The new research is focusing on fantasies involving what most experts would call aberrant sexual acts, like bondage or cross-dressing, rather than more prosaic fantasies such as making love in an exotic locale or, perhaps the most popular fantasy among men and women alike, making love to someone other than one's partner.

SCIENTISTS have begun to develop a new generation of drugs that they hope will in time do for cancer what penicillin did for infections. The first few of these drugs have glided through laboratory and animal tests and are now being tested in patients. Like penicillin, which works by attacking a feature of bacteria cells not shared by human cells, the new cancer drugs are aimed at features of cancer cells that are not shared by normal cells. For that reason, they are expected to be extraordinarily precise and much less toxic than drugs now used to treat cancer.

Negotiations between executives of Shearson Lehman Brothers and California insurance regulators broke down yesterday, as an effort to avert a potential failure of the First Capital Life Insurance Company grew more intense, people who have been briefed on the talks said. At the meeting yesterday morning in Manhattan, Shearson offered two proposals to improve the finances of the troubled insurance company, which has more investments in "junk bonds" than any other insurer still operating. But both proposals were rejected by John Garamendi, California's Insurance Commissioner, as insufficient to deal with the company's deteriorating finances.