December 3, 1991

Dr. David Baltimore said yesterday that he would resign as president of Rockefeller University after an 18-month tenure dogged by a case of scientific fraud against a colleague with whom he wrote a disputed scientific paper. In a letter to the trustees, Dr. Baltimore said that the controversy over the paper had "created a climate of unhappiness among some in the university that could not be dispelled."

Visa USA announced plans yesterday to change its membership rules to make it easier for companies other than banks, like department stores, to issue Visa cards. Although Visa, the leading general-purpose credit card company, has not announced the specific rules governing such companies, it said it would end a 13-month moratorium next week on accepting new members owned by companies that are not banks. The move by Visa also makes it more competitive with Mastercard, which has been gaining market share because it has been more willing to allow non-banking companies to join its system.

In one of the firm's first signs of recovery from the Treasuries market scandal, Salomon Brothers Inc. has won back the business of the World Bank after three months of suspension, the firm announced yesterday. The World Bank was one of the first and most prestigious clients to suspend its dealing with Salomon after the bond trading house disclosed in August that it had submitted a number of illegal bids in Treasury market auctions. The loss of business with the World Bank, whose global bond issues Salomon helped manage for the last several years, was the most stinging client rebuke Salomon suffered.

Japan and the United States are struggling to prevent their successful alliance from being engulfed by a rising tide of frustrations, resentments and recriminations. Solid majorities of both countries say they feel that relations between them are friendly and that the alliance between Japan and the United States is dependable, according to an opinion survey in late November by The New York Times, CBS News and the Tokyo Broadcasting System.

In a vivid display of the struggle now under way over the future management and mission of New York City's public hospitals, a major private hospital announced yesterday that it would no longer provide the doctors who staff a public hospital in Queens. The decision, by Long Island Jewish Medical Center, means that beginning next summer the Queens Hospital Center, a city hospital in Jamaica, will have to find a new source for doctors who do most of the day-to-day work of the hospital.