June 18, 1991

A small computer-game company based in an abandoned gold mining town in the Sierra Nevada foothills in California hopes to succeed where a partnership between two of America's largest corporations has struggled for years. "We think we can do something in a year and half that I.B.M. and Sears have not been able to do yet, and that is make money," said Michael Thornton, vice president of the Sierra Network, a telephone-linked computer network that its parent, Sierra On-Line Inc., says is the first devoted exclusively to games.

The law that laid the legal foundation of apartheid by classifying all South Africans by race from birth, with resulting privileges or handicaps, was scrapped today by Parliament, more than four decades after it was enacted. The Population Registration Act, enacted first in 1950 and periodically refined since, became the final pillar of statutory apartheid to be pulled down by President F. W. de Klerk, after the repeal of the three other discriminatory laws that underpinned white domination of other South Africans.

Male-Only Policy Upheld The Virginia Military Institute, which is state supported, may continue admitting only men, a Federal district judge ruled in a defeat for the United States Justice Department. Page A10.

The political map of India has been redrawn in the turbulent election of 1991, geographically and demographically. Traditional voting patterns have been upset as fewer voters than ever cast ballots in what is the world's most populous democracy and also one of the poorest of nations. "I do not think our electorate is very clear about what it wants," said Ashis Nandy, a political scientist at the Center for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi. "But the lesson of this election is that any party that has been in power has paid for it." Congress Fares Badly in North By early this morning, with 320 of the 511 contested Parliament seats decided, the Congress Party had won 168 and was projected to win 210 to 215, well shy of the 256 it would need to form a government without a coalition partner. The Bharatiya Janata Party, the surging Hindu nationalist party, had won 73 seats and was projected to win 120. In third place, the Janata Dal coalition, which stirred controversy in championing Government affirmative action for lower castes, had won 24 seats. The rest of the decided seats went to smaller parties.

A furious political battle broke out in California today over the future of the state's huge public-employee pension fund, with the fund's leaders charging that Gov. Pete Wilson was trying to pack its board and squash its highly visible shareholder-rights campaign. The fight broke out after Governor Wilson, a Republican, proposed legislation over the weekend that would enable him to tap the fund for $1.6 billion to help close the state's $14.3 billion budget deficit.