July 2, 1991

Connie Patterson, who worked 35 years for Eastern Airlines as a flight attendant, has Parkinson's disease and spends $95 a month on medicine, in addition to the costs of visits to the doctor. Miss Patterson can handle those costs for now because of the group health insurance provided through Eastern. But with the bankrupt airline undergoing liquidation, those benefits may not last much longer. And the disease will become more debilitating. "This condition can only get worse," she said.

In its second recent venture into one of the most emotional aspects of the law, New York State's highest court today broadly expanded the circumstances under which grandparents can sue to visit their grandchildren, even over objections from the children's parents. The Court of Appeals, in a 6-to-0 decision that overturned an appellate court's ruling last year, found that such suits could be brought even if the children were being raised by both parents.

President Bush today nominated Clarence Thomas, a conservative Republican with a scanty judicial record on civil rights and abortion, to replace the retiring Justice Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court. If confirmed, the 43-year-old United States appeals court judge for the District of Columbia Circuit would follow Justice Marshall as the second black judge to ascend to the Court.

With their immediate budget crises not fully resolved, Gov. Mario M. Cuomo and Mayor David N. Dinkins turned yesterday to finding ways to solve New York City's and the state's deep long-term fiscal problems by shifting and streamlining their complex burdens of taxing, spending and providing services. Just what form such a joint review would take or what force its recommendations might have remained in some dispute, and both sides jockeyed yesterday to be seen as leading the effort. City Hall proposed the creation of a new city-state commission, while the Governor said he favored increasing coordination through existing staff-level efforts.

LAST week's earthquake in southern California may jolt even the building industry, notoriously slow to innovate, into experimenting with new kinds of earthquake resistant buildings. Among the most interesting are so-called smart buildings in which a system of computers, sensors and moving weights detects and moves to counteract the alarming motions generated by earthquakes and strong winds. Traditionally, building engineers have taken a brute strength approach to structural safety. They use massive, heavy materials and build stiffness into a building's infrastructure to resist winds and earthquakes. To filter out shaking, some newer buildings have been constructed on huge rubber pads or materials that act as springs that help dissipate energy. It has taken 30 years to get such passive control systems into the building codes, because American construction companies are extremely slow to innovate, said Dr. Tsu T. Soong, a professor of civil engineering at the National Center for Earthquake Engineering Research at the State University of New York in Buffalo.