December 7, 1991

The number of people being tested for H.I.V. has increased almost 60 percent in New York City and has risen sharply throughout the nation in the month since Magic Johnson announced that he was infected with the virus that causes AIDS. In New York, the increase has strained the resources of the City Health Department, which said it can now take up to seven weeks to get an appointment for a test at the city's counseling and testing centers. Before Mr. Johnson's announcement on Nov. 7, most centers provided tests without an appointment or had a maximum wait of two weeks.

In an unexpectedly grim report, the Labor Department today found that employers slashed payrolls by 241,000 in November, the biggest drop in jobs since late last winter, when the economy was mired in recession. The nation's unemployment rate remained at 6.8 percent last month -- and did not rise slightly as had been widely predicted -- but economists took little comfort from any part of the report, which now shows 8,499,000 unemployed. The report is the first comprehensive gauge of the economy's performance last month.

Samuel K. Skinner, who will take over as the new White House chief of staff this month, flew here today from Washington to give a luncheon speech. By commercial airline. In coach class. The no-frills travel was only one of several signals Mr. Skinner sent on the first day after being named to the post that he planned to use a different style, political agenda and perhaps a different staff at the White House than John H. Sununu, whose manner, imperial tastes and economic and political judgments all led this week to his resignation. Until the White House restricted Mr. Sununu's travel this year, he often used Air Force planes for business and personal trips.

Across northern Iraq, Kurds, freed for now from the harshness of President Saddam Hussein's grip, have been uncovering mass graves, torture chambers, elaborate prison systems and documents from secret police files that attest to the inner workings of one of the region's harshest dictatorships. In the city of Sulaimaniya alone, local officials say they have unearthed more than 200 bodies in the last two months, and new sites to be excavated are being discovered every week.

This clearly is not working. The whole idea of banning George Steinbrenner from baseball was to punish him and cleanse the Yankees. It hasn't happened that way. The Yankees are in worse chaos than ever before. A limited partner named Robert Nederlander was persuaded to act as the general managing partner for the last year, but he resigned on Thursday, saying he wanted to get back to something stable and wholesome, like producing Broadway plays and jollying up investors.