June 4, 1991

Did you hear? This woman trying on a coat in a department store put her hand in the pocket and was bitten by a snake. See, the coat had been made in Taiwan where a viper laid eggs in the pocket. The woman died.

The United States Supreme Court agreed today to hear a suit, brought by R. H. Macy & Company, asserting that California's Proposition 13 unfairly assesses strikingly higher taxes on newly purchased property. The suit challenges the taxpayers' revolt proposition, which was a 1978 amendment to the California Constitution. Proposition 13 set local property taxes at 1 percent of assessed valuation, rolled back assessments to 1975 levels and limited subsequent increases to 2 percent a year.

Hundreds of New York City police officers rousted about 200 homeless people from their scraggly encampment in Tompkins Square Park yesterday morning, and to keep them out the city immediately announced that the park would be fenced off for renovations for at least a year. The carefully orchestrated police sweep and the sudden start of a long-deferred project to demolish the concrete bandstand -- which the police say has become a haven for drug dealers -- are intended to take back control of the Lower East Side park from homeless people and self-styled anarchists who have clashed repeatedly with the police there over the last three years, most recently on Memorial Day.

THE ECONOMY A law intended to encourage involvement of minority-owned firms in managing assets seized from failed savings and loans appears to be having little effect. Government documents show that Federal contracts to manage everything from multimillion-dollar loan portfolios to small apartment buildings have gone almost entirely to companies owned by whites. [ Page A1. ] The U.S. will lift itself out of recession in the second half and unemployment will stop climbing in that period, the O.E.C.D. forecast. The group is widely respected for its projections. [ D1. ]

At about 8 o'clock this morning, doctors at the City of Hope Medical Center in Duarte, Calif., plan to transplant bone marrow into Anissa Ayala, a 19-year-old girl who is dying of leukemia. The marrow will come from her baby sister, Marissa. Their parents say they conceived Marissa to provide bone marrow to save Anissa's life.