May 9, 1991

Mayor David N. Dinkins painted a grim picture of a fiscally flattened New York in a somber speech last night that served as his strongest appeal yet for sacrifices from every corner and constituency of the city. The Mayor announced that the city could close a $465 million budget gap in the last seven weeks of its current fiscal year. But for the longer term, he said, "we simply do not have the resources to pay for what we need."

President Bush today announced the retirement of William H. Webster, the Director of Central Intelligence, who polished the image of the espionage community in his four years in the job but remained on the fringes of the Bush Administration's national security operation. Mr. Bush said he had not chosen a successor for the 67-year-old Mr. Webster, who said he wanted to return to practicing law. Some officials said Mr. Webster had been gently encouraged to retire.

For more than three decades, Arnie Brown waited for a redevelopment plan that would revive the last old section of this city's downtown district, an area known as the Ninth Square, just blocks from the town green and the towers of Yale University. Four years ago, Mr. Brown tired of waiting. He sold his family's shoe store on Chapel Street in the Ninth Square. The storefront's new owners operate an adult book store and a peep-show parlor.

The housing slump appears to have bottomed out in much of the nation, the Government reported today. In the latest sign that sales and values have picked up from a low point at the beginning of the year, a new survey of bank examiners and liquidators shows that residential real estate improved over the last six months in the West, the South and the Midwest. The survey found that even in the Northeast, which is reeling from overexpansion in housing and commercial real estate, more officials saw an improvement than further deterioration.

A new study of genetic patterns among modern Europeans lends support to a novel theory that starting 9,000 years ago early farmers spread from the Middle East all across Europe, transmitting a common language along with the new agricultural techniques. The conventional theory holds that languages like English, French, German and Iranian are all related because a warlike people speaking the tongue ancestral to all the Indo-European languages over a period of time occupied all of Europe and imposed their language on the conquered. Skeptics who found this idea implausible proposed a different theory based on the known spread of agriculture across Europe: that as the early agriculturists moved year by year in search of new lands, they carried their language with them.