September 27, 1991

Starting on Monday, the suggested newsstand price of The Times on weekdays will be increased to 50 cents in New York City, within 75 miles of the city, and on all of Long Island. The change is prompted by increasing costs. The Sunday price will not change, nor will the weekday price outside the 75-mile area.

The economy contracted at a pace of five-tenths of 1 percent in the spring quarter as merchants and producers slashed inventories even more than previously thought, the Commerce Department reported today. At the same time, corporate profits were weaker than initially reported by all four measures, with three measures that were positive a month ago slipping into negative territory.

In an effort to save the money-losing business of AM radio, the Federal Communications Commission overhauled its rules. Page D1.

THE photograph by Philip-Lorca diCorcia presents a stout figure, a seeming giant in bare feet and cutoffs whose head almost touches the ridiculously low ceiling he is sanding. Or perhaps he is holding up the ceiling, preventing it from squashing him and everything else in the disheveled room. For Mr. diCorcia, as for many of the photographers in "Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort," the big, provocative and groundbreaking exhibition that has just opened at the Museum of Modern Art, the American home is no safe haven. It is a kind of psychological and sociological war zone, the battles no less intense for being waged bloodlessly in the trenches of the bedroom. The fire of a barbecue in a backyard is a conflagration in a photograph by Mary Kocol. And in another of Mr. diCorcia's magnificently stagy photographs, a man stands before an open refrigerator at night. "We see," observes Peter Galassi, the curator, in his essay for the exhibition's catalogue, "not a banal search for a snack but a man confronting the chaos and dissolution of his life."

Sir Roland Smith, the chairman of British Aerospace P.L.C., is resigning after a reported rebellion by large shareholders and the board of the company, which is Britain's largest military contractor and exporter of manufactured goods. By several accounts, Sir Roland's downfall is a result of a clumsily handled share offering now under way, a sharp drop in the company's profits, an autocratic management style and differences over the company's efforts to diversify from the military and aerospace businesses.