August 28, 1991

Vito Dottone, a retired mailman, has spent more than 50 of his 71 years in Flushing. When he thinks about downtown these days, it pains him. "It looks like hell," he says. "It's really a disaster." There is too much traffic, filth and chaos. More and more, he says, his neighborhood is turning into an unwieldly Hong Kong.

A shocked and solemn crowd consisting mostly of young artists from China had gathered in the narrow, dingy apartment on West 145th Street. Upstairs, in a friend's home, a young woman was weeping inconsolably. Between sobs, Duan Haimeng, the widow of a Chinese artist slain near Times Square, managed to say, "I never dreamed that something like this could happen." On Aug. 18, Ms. Duan's 34-year-old husband, Lin Lin, was shot dead while drawing a portrait in the wee hours of Sunday morning. The police said a young man provoked an argument with Mr. Lin and then shot him through the chest when the artist answered back. They later arrested James Skinner, 21, of Brooklyn, and charged him with second-degree murder in the killing. Survival or Freedom? The incident stunned the subculture of Chinese artists to which Lin Lin belonged. Many of his artist and painter friends came to the city in recent years to escape the political atmosphere in China, which they believed threatened their artistic development. And yet several artists said what happened to Lin Lin would be inconceivable in China, where violent street crime is almost nonexistent.

A growing epidemic of telephone fraud is leaving companies and other organizations with bills for hundreds of thousands of dollars of calls they did not make, and is forcing the users of sophisticated phone equipment to scramble for better ways to lock out high-technology phone thieves. The industry has long been plagued by sophisticated users who found ways to tap into phone company lines or people who used stolen credit card numbers to make calls without paying for them.

THE hanging ferns are dead. The tables are set with china instead of crockery. The odds and ends of chipped glassware have been replaced by matching crystal. Just like Jerry Rubin, the radical-turned-capitalist, the hippie restaurants of the 60's have grown up and gone mainstream. Woody Allen, who satirized the Los Angeles health-food scene in "Annie Hall," would not be able to order a plate of mashed yeast in the 90's version of the politically correct restaurant.

The Bolar Pharmaceutical Company said yesterday that it would pay $40 million to the SmithKline Beecham Corporation to settle claims involving Bolar's fraudulent behavior in marketing an inexpensive generic version of Dyazide, SmithKline's popular diuretic drug. The Federal fraud charges, to which Bolar pleaded guilty earlier this year, sent the generic drug industry into a tailspin and touched off criminal indictments and dismissals of Federal Food and Drug Administration officials. Bolar paid fines of $10 million plus $250,000 to cover the Government's costs in the case.

The National Semiconductor Corporation, saddled with excess manufacturing capacity, said today that it would take a $149.3 million charge against first-quarter earnings to cover plant closings and employee reductions. The announcement represents the first big move to improve the company's performance by Gilbert F. Amelio, the president and chief executive. He took command of the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company in May from Charles E. Sporck, the industry titan who ran National for more than two decades before retiring.

After a hastily planned flight from North Carolina, baseball's newest millionaire, Brien Taylor, was finally able to rest with his family at a Manhattan hotel yesterday afternoon. They needed it. In the previous 24 hours, a long-awaited deal with the New York Yankees had transformed Taylor from a 19-year-old would-be junior college pitcher to the highest paid player in the history of baseball's amateur draft. Studied the Rules His plans had been altered, literally, overnight. The direction of his career had changed. Everything had changed, that is, except his family's sensibilities. Bettie Taylor, the mother of the left-handed pitcher who will soon be $1.55 million richer, stared at the movable table of empty room-service plates.

The Brooklyn District Attorney yesterday tried to hold down expectations that a Hasidic Jew would be indicted in the car crash that killed a black child and set off racial violence in Crown Heights last week. At the same time, the child's family said through spokesmen that they would not cooperate in the inquiry. They called on Gov. Mario M. Cuomo to appoint a special prosecutor.

The control room went dark on a Tuesday morning while the dawn sprang gray on Lake Ontario. The nuclear plant sent off a whooping siren that seemed to fall from the sky. It was said to have spooked the cows, but it settled on the house trailers and the front porches and the ballfields like a soft net. The town barely stirred. By late morning, however, men and women in Scriba, were sharing the news: This had been no routine warning to ignore in your sleep. There had been real chaos up the road at Nine Mile Point in the depths of the Unit 2 reactor, where a group of operators, sitting in a windowless chamber, had been at the mercy of a master panel that suddenly turned blank.

The American Bar Association has given Judge Clarence Thomas a mixed rating in evaluating his fitness to be a Supreme Court Justice, officials of the group said today. The bar association committee that conducts the evaluations split on President Bush's choice to succeed Thurgood Marshall on the Court, with a majority rating Judge Thomas "qualified" for the job and a minority of two members finding him "unqualified." No one on the committee found him to be "well qualified," the third available rating and the association's highest.

A PSYCHOLOGIST who studies the hearts and minds of confirmed bachelors over the age of 40 has advice for women who want to marry one: Forget it. "If you get involved with a never-married middle-aged man, don't expect him to change," said Dr. Charles A. Waehler, a psychologist at the University of Akron in Ohio who studied a group of white, heterosexual bachelors 40 to 50 years old. "If you both value independence, it might be okay," he said. "But if you want marriage, stay away."

Down the street from the Kiddie Kottage child-care center and the Magnolia Manor retirement home, on an 1,800-acre estate built by Henry Ford, lies the Pharaon Zone. That is the name some locals here adopted to describe the unlikely preserve of Ghaith R. Pharaon (pronounced fuh-ROAN), who captivated this small town south of Savannah when he parked his private jet and took up part-time residence as the town's eccentric Arab millionaire who played host at lavish parties for the rich and famous.