September 24, 1991

United States securities regulators are expected to sign four new agreements expanding cooperative ties with their counterparts in other nations during an international regulatory conference that opens here Tuesday. The first of these pacts was concluded today by Richard C. Breeden, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and Sir Leon Brittan, vice president for financial institutions with the Commission of the European Communities.

Marcel Proust's flood of memory when he ate the madeleine has long fascinated readers of literature and science. After decades of research, scientists who study the brain are at last poised to explain how the brain is organized to form long term, conscious memory and later to recall a particular memory and its various components. In the beginning of his prodigious seven-volume novel of the mind, "The Remembrance of Things Past," Proust wrote:

Iraq detained about 40 United Nations nuclear inspectors for 12 hours today after they discovered secret Iraqi plans for making nuclear weapons stored in a building in central Baghdad and tried to remove them, Western officials said. After a long standoff, the inspectors were allowed out of the building but had to leave the documents behind, the officials said.

For most of the 1980's, street gangs kept crack out of Chicago, fearing that it could open the way for small dealers to challenge their control of the drug trade. Now crack has arrived and those same gangs are warring over territory. With the eruption of the same kind of turf wars that marked the arrival of crack in Washington and elsewhere, 1991 is shaping into the deadliest year in Chicago history, surpassing the rate during the bloody years of the Al Capone era and even the record year of 1974, when 970 residents were killed.

Robert L. Clarke, one of the nation's top banking regulators, disclosed today that while he was in office two business associates had separately discussed a regulatory case with him but that he did not intervene in the matter. Mr. Clarke's disclosure came in response to questions from the Senate Banking Committee, which is likely to quiz him closely about his personal finances at a confirmation hearing on Thursday regarding his nomination to a second term as the Comptroller of the Currency.