February 8, 1992

The day after the slaying of a Hasidic woman sent hundreds of Jewish demonstrators on a bitter protest march through the streets of Crown Heights, city officials, black and Jewish community leaders and the police tried yesterday to prevent the death from escalating into the kind of racial confrontation that racked the neighborhood last summer. The police said they had no suspects in the killing and no indication that there was any racial element involved. And while the streets in the frayed neighborhood stayed calm through early morning today, it was clear that racial tension still simmered beneath the surface of the community.

For the first time, Pakistan openly acknowledged that it has the technology to build an atomic bomb, but said it had no plans to do so. Page 5.

Leaders of the United States anti-missile research program, or "Star Wars," are pressing to buy critical technologies from the counterpart program in the former Soviet Union. The officials believe that this will significantly speed up deployment of the limited anti-missile defense system now planned by the United States. Their statements have been made in interviews and in Congressional testimony and quoted in an aerospace magazine.

In New Hampshire and in Congress, President Bush's Democratic opponents are offering much more ambitious plans for overhauling the nation's medical-care system than the one he unveiled on Thursday. Although no consensus exists on a particular plan, the Democrats are united in advocating more Government involvement in providing universal insurance coverage and restraining health-care costs.

The United States plans to propose to Russia the formation of a Western-financed clearinghouse intended to find jobs for thousands of Soviet nuclear scientists who might otherwise sell their expertise to hostile countries, Administration officials said today. The clearinghouse would pair the talents of the estimated 2,000 to 3,000 scientists who have the most advanced nuclear knowledge with the needs of foreign investors, universities, private research organizations or governments willing to pay for commercial nuclear research.

The tobacco industry's chief research arm for 40 years described its own mission as a "front" and a "shield" against potentially harmful Congressional hearings, lawsuits or scientific research about the health risks of smoking, according to a ruling by a Federal judge here who publicly quoted secret industry memorandums for the first time. The judge, H. Lee Sarokin of Federal District Court, said on Thursday that a jury might reasonably assume that the industry's decades-old vow to disclose its research findings were "nothing but a public-relations ploy -- a fraud -- to deflect the growing evidence against the industry, to encourage smokers to continue and nonsmokers to begin, and to reassure the public that adverse information would be disclosed."

Perhaps the most striking fact about Hiroshi Yamauchi, the president of the Nintendo Company Ltd., is that he cannot bear to play video games. "I really don't understand them," he said. The second most striking fact about Mr. Yamauchi, the first Japanese to bid for a controlling interest in an American major league baseball team, is that he has lived for 64 years in a nation obsessed with baseball and has never once gone to a game. "Let me put it this way," Mr. Yamauchi said the other day in a 90-minute conversation in his office here, "Baseball, well, baseball has never really interested me." In an Unlikely Position Such studied detachment, friends say, is characteristic of a man who is Japan's most unlikely high-tech success story, as well as an unlikely figure to be at the center of an international dispute over baseball ownership.

Just days before the Iowa caucuses, there are no Presidential candidates kissing pigs or courting farmers, no telephone banks digging for supporters and no crowds at the bars. For months, all has been quiet during what is normally a quadrennial bonanza that brings worldwide attention and tens of millions of dollars to the Iowa economy. But this year, one of the state's Senators, Tom Harkin, is running for the Democratic nomination, so his party's caucuses on Monday are likely to be no contest. The Republican meetings will not even express Presidential preferences. Still, while the state may be feeling a psychological loss, the change has not been the economic blow that many leaders feared.

Jobless Rate Still 7.1% The unemployment rate managed to remain steady at 7.1 percent in January only because of a surge in part-time jobs, while business payrolls shrank by 91,000. Page 35. Haiti Tide Flows Both Ways Arrivals keep pace with departures at Guantanamo Bay, as Haitians are sent back on boats while new refugees are rescued at sea. Page 3. Clashes Widen in Algeria Fighting between the military and Islamic fundamentalists spread beyond Algiers to outlying cities as the number of deaths mounted. Page 3. Tyson Takes the Stand Mike Tyson testified at his trial that his accuser consented to having sex with him, and he strongly denied having raped her. Page 29.

A local peach harvester was fined $1.1 million today by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the largest fine in the agency's history, in an action that showed both how tough and how porous the nation's landmark 1986 immigration reform law can be. Immigration officials said four employees of the harvester, the Lane Packing Company, had smuggled thousands of aliens into the country over the last two years and had employed many of them, keeping them in conditions akin to bondage while the aliens worked to pay off the fees charged by the smugglers.

International 2-5 SOVIET SCIENTISTS FOR SALE . . . To keep scientists from the former Soviet Union from selling their expertise elsewhere, Secretary of State Baker will propose a clearinghouse to match the experts with jobs. 1

They buried Anne-Marie McFadden's brother Michael O'Dwyer in Milltown Cemetery at noon today, three days after he and two other men were shot to death by a demented Royal Ulster Constabulary policeman who later took his own life. There will be four more Roman Catholic funerals on Saturday, and there were two others today, among the rites for the 12 victims of terrorist-related violence this week. The carnage has left many people, Protestant and Catholic, feeling angry and afraid of one another in a province deeply divided by more than 20 years of it.