September 22, 1991

The grizzly bear, a creature of myth and mystery in its Rocky Mountain home, is classified by the Federal Government as a species threatened with extinction. Yet each fall for years, hunters in Montana have paid several hundred dollars to the state for a legal "once-in-a-lifetime" chance to kill a grizzly. Now, several conservation groups are trying to stop this year's hunt, which is scheduled to begin Oct. 1. In a lawsuit in Federal District Court in the nation's capital they have raised the question of how the Government can allow a hunt when no one knows for sure how many bears are left.

IN eight-and-a-half years as Governor of New York, Mario M. Cuomo has generated a significant body of political folklore. There are the legendary Wednesday night basketball games with his staff, in which the 59-year-old Governor uses sharp elbows to compensate for his age and chronically bad back. There are the solitary walks around Albany's Lincoln Park, where dressed in a jogging suit he ponders the events of the day. There are the pre-dawn telephone calls from an aide in New York City, who reads Mr. Cuomo the headlines from the morning papers.

FOR a few giddy days after the allies with improbable ease swept the forces of Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait early this year, it seemed to some members of the Bush Administration that a comprehensive reshaping of the Middle East might be possible. Iran might be brought back into ordinary discourse with other nations, Mr. Hussein's days seemed numbered, the Arabs and the Israelis appeared more favorably disposed to settlement than perhaps ever before. But this historic window of opportunity, as President Bush repeatedly called it, opened onto a political landscape of nightmarish complexity. In the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the other great arena of change of the last decade, events have unfolded to the West's and Mr. Bush's advantage with few bold strokes on his part; but in the Middle East, nothing is that simple. So Mr. Bush found himself last week deeply committed to a vision of the future in the Middle East, and involved in policies designed to turn that vision into reality, but he was finding the going very difficult.

President Bush, who will make his annual appearance before the United Nations General Assembly on Monday, is weighing whether to use his address to call for repeal of the assembly's 1975 resolution equating Zionism with racism, officials said today. Mounting such an effort would clearly be intended to help heal the rift in American-Israeli relations over Mr. Bush's demand for a delay in Congressional consideration of $10 billion in loan guarantees for Israel. The Bush Administration considered a campaign to repeal the so-called "Zionism-is-racism" resolution a year ago but postponed it as it sought to sustain Arab support in the Persian Gulf conflict.

Baseball's grandest rivalries barely flicker now. Somewhere, they vanished. The Dodgers and the Giants, whose rivalry included arguably the sport's greatest moment -- Bobby Thomson's pennant-winning home run in 1951 -- once wore their disdain for each other like a prideful badge. But they seem to have lost it. Same with the Yankees and the Red Sox. Gone.