October 1, 1991

A Blackstone Group subsidiary that owns the Ramada and Howard Johnson hotel chains agreed yesterday to pay $250 million for Days Inns of America Inc., the 1,214-unit franchise system burdened by some $750 million in debt. If approved by the bankruptcy court, the transaction, which could be derailed if a better offer appeared -- would create one of the world's largest hotel franchisers. The three chains combined now operate 2,236 hotels with 284,000 rooms.

Fifteen months before the police found Tiesha Carter scarred, beaten, burned and locked in a closet, teachers at Public School 229 in the Bronx told a child-abuse hot line there was evidence that she was being mistreated, an education official said yesterday. Despite the call in June 1990, Tiesha, now 8 years old, was not removed from the apartment in the Morris Heights section of the Bronx where she lived with her grandmother, her mother and her stepfather, and where, the police said, she was subjected to brutal abuse and prevented from attending school for the entire 1990-91 year.

Alternate-side parking rules will be suspended today for the Jewish holiday of Simhath Torah.

Tony Salcido, who sells Toyotas in Puente Hills, Calif., is the kind of salesman who makes car companies both smile and cringe. As the top salesman at his dealership, he helps move a lot of cars and keep Toyota's assembly lines humming. But Mr. Salcido's loyalty is to his paycheck, not his brand.

SHE may no longer be called Eve, and her most imaginative and outspoken proponent may have died two months ago, but the provocative notion that our genes hold evidence of a mother of us all is growing ever more powerful. By this theory on the origins of modern Homo sapiens, all 5.384 billion humans on Earth today can be traced to a woman who lived in Africa about 200,000 years ago, and who left an unmistakable if wraithlike signature on our DNA.