February 3, 1992

Unlike alpine skiing, speed skating and the biathlon, ambush marketing is not yet an Olympic event. That could change after the 1992 Winter Games begin on Saturday. Ambush marketing describes a spoilsport strategy by which an advertiser tries to disrupt the extensive and expensive plans of a competitor. The goal is to convince consumers that the company springing the ambush is associated with an eagerly anticipated event, like the Olympics or the Super Bowl, for which a rival has paid a hefty fee for an official affiliation.

Taped-Beating Trial to Start The trial of four Los Angeles Police officers in the videotaped beating of a black motorist is expected to begin this week. Page A10. Irving Kaufman Dies at 81 The judge who sentenced the Rosenbergs and wrote landmark decisions on the First Amendment and civil rights, died in Manhattan. Page D10. Human Ancestor Adrift? Scientists have found a jawbone that suggests that protohumans may have left Africa hundreds of thousands of years earlier than thought. Page B7. Credit-Card Change in N.Y. Passage is expected of new state laws that would keep banking jobs in New York but would increase credit costs to late-paying consumers. Page D1. Author Meets Subject Norman Mailer and the Central Intelligence Agency finally got a close look at each other. Page A10. Bert Parks, 77, Is Dead Bert Parks, whose serenade told 25 Miss Americas they had really won, dies in California. Page D11.

It started out three years ago as the Eastern Airlines Room, a newly renovated area on the fifth floor of the United States Bankruptcy Court in the old Custom House at the southern tip of Manhattan. With 300,000 creditors competing for pieces of the grounded airline, the collapse of Eastern generated so much paper it needed a room of its own. But as big business debacles have multiplied in the last few years, the Eastern room has become what court employees now call the Megacase Room. Reserved for about two dozen of the biggest business blowouts in New York, it is something like a wax museum for corporate nightmares.

In a ramshackle area of wood-frame houses in the Central Ward here, officials held a ground breaking last April that they hailed as the start of a new era for Newark's poorest residents. But there was more to it: The 100 town houses were to be a new start for the Newark Housing Authority, which had become notorious for failing to build or maintain housing even when it had money to do both. The ceremony would begin a $110 million construction program -- as ambitious as any in public housing -- that would replace 11 deteriorated high-rise buildings with scattered two- and three-story houses.

President Bush's proposal to help 90 million Americans buy health insurance with new tax credits and tax deductions would be financed mainly by curbing the growth of Government health programs like Medicare and Medicaid, Administration officials and members of Congress say. In a speech on Thursday in Cleveland, Mr. Bush intends to introduce the proposal, which is intended to help people who have no insurance and those who have difficulty paying for it.