  A panel of experts appointed by the Food and Drug Administration recommended today that the use of silicone gel breast implants be substantially restricted, in effect transforming the gel implant business into a huge medical experiment that would help determine the risks of implants.   Only women enrolled in experimental trials would be eligible to get the implants. The panel said all women getting reconstruction after breast cancer surgery would be eligible, as would all women with serious breast deformities.

EXPERTS SUGGEST U.S. SHARPLY LIMIT BREAST IMPLANTS

  The end of the cold war may have claimed an unlikely victim: Seymour Cray cannot sell his new supercomputer.   The father of the supercomputer, Mr. Cray has been an icon of American high technology for three decades. But last week, the Cray Computer Corporation, based in Colorado Springs, said it was halting development of its $30 million machine for lack of a buyer.

Cold War's End Hits Cray Computer

THE golfer lined up his shot, swung and grinned. The ball looked as if it were floating toward the sunny green, a nice, long drive.

This is the time of year when golfers think they can't do that. But they can, thanks to something that lets them forget about the eternal enemies of darkness and the elements, not to mention crowds, cantankerous caddies and runaway golf carts: the golf simulator.

Winter Golf That's Ideal: It's in the Mind

  AUSTRIAN WINS SLALOM    Petra Kronberger's margin of Olympic success will be measured in hundredths of a second and gold medals. She is the first Alpine skier at these Winter Games to win two events. Julie Parisien of Maine, the leader after the first run, missed a medal by .05 seconds.    SportsFriday, page B7.

Albertville

  The total number of murders, rapes, robberies, assaults and other serious crimes committed in the New York City subway system declined 15 percent last year, to the lowest level since 1988, the transit police said yesterday.   The decline in felonies, transit officials said, was caused in part by the addition of about 200 officers patrolling the subways each day in 1991, as compared to 1990.

Subway Crime Fell in 1991, Officials Say

  FOR those of us who never warmed to her latter-day incarnation in "Dynasty," Joan Collins will always be the very sexy young actress who took the trashy parts Elizabeth Taylor rejected in the Technicolor B movies of the 1950's. So there's a certain rough justice in the fact that the revival of Noel Coward's "Private Lives" that has brought Miss Collins to the Broadhurst towers over the production that Miss Taylor and Richard Burton visited upon Broadway in 1983.   Is it rude to point out that nearly every other play seen on Broadway in the last decade or so, with the possible exception of "Moose Murders," also towered over the Taylor-Burton "Private Lives"?

Review/Theater: Private Lives; For the Ardent Fans Of Collins and Coward

  American spending on research and development has begun to fall for the first time since the 1970's, even as foreign rivals increase their investments in research, a Federal science agency said yesterday.   The amounts spent on research by the Federal Government and private industry each fell, worrying many analysts. They fear that the nation is losing its edge in the international race for discoveries and innovations that can form the basis for new goods and services.

RESEARCH SPENDING IS DECLINING IN U.S. AS IT RISES ABROAD

  "He didn't rob nothin'. You know why he's dying? He's gonna die because he refused to come in when I called."   Did Marlon Brando mumble those words in "The Godfather"? Or was it Paul Sorvino in "Goodfellas"? Robert De Niro in "The Untouchables"?

Real-Life Tough Guys and Silver-Screen Gangsters

  In the first successful prosecution in the inquiry into influence peddling at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, a New York State businessman close to former Secretary Samuel R. Pierce Jr. pleaded guilty today to attempting to evade taxes on income he received from a consulting firm that had a grant from the housing agency.    The businessman, Samuel P. Singletary of Pleasantville, entered his plea before Judge Stanley S. Harris of United States District Court for the District of Columbia. He admitted that he gave the Internal Revenue Service false information about his earnings in 1985.

Inquiry Into Abuses At H.U.D. Produces Its First Guilty Plea

  Emerging from the two-year-long shadow of a Senate ethics investigation, a newly confident Alfonse M. D'Amato is running hard for re-election, campaigning against a stable of incumbent villains that sometimes even includes his fellow Republican, President Bush.   Anticipating a far-tougher battle than in 1986, Mr. D'Amato is embracing a typically in-your-face strategy as he travels the state on an ever-quickening campaign schedule. With recessionary anxiety as his weapon, he is seeking to turn his political liabilities into political strengths to show that he can be both consummate politician and consummate independent operator at the same time.

Resurgent D'Amato Runs Against Spectrum of Foes

  Kraft General Foods Inc., the nation's largest food company, said yesterday that it planned to cut the prices it charges grocers for some products and reduce spending on promotional campaigns to bring consistently lower prices to consumers.   The move follows a similar action by the Procter & Gamble Company, which, since last fall, has cut prices to grocers on 40 percent of its products and has slashed spending on coupons and promotional allowances paid to grocers. Among the Procter products affected are Folger's coffee and Ivory dishwashing soap. Too Much Spending  

Kraft Plans To Cut Prices To Grocers

  There may be no bigger name in cancer treatment than Sloan-Kettering, but doctors in Danbury, Conn., are far from pleased about a plan by the Manhattan hospital to build its first satellite treatment center there.   The issue, ostensibly, is how best to serve cancer patients in southern New England. Officials at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center say the area needs a new outpatient center to provide radiation therapy.

Doctors in Connecticut Resist Cancer Center Satellite Plans

  Surprising investors and traders alike, the stock market rallied sharply yesterday amid a barrage of program trades and speculation that weak numbers on jobless claims and merchandise trade will put pressure on the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates again.   The Dow Jones industrial average rose 50.32 points to a new closing record of 3,280.64, surpassing the Feb. 12 mark of 3,276.83.

Dow Surges by 50.32, to a Record 3,280.64

  Scores of New Jersey residents who thought they had come into a windfall from a class-action discrimination suit against the USX Corporation are in for a surprise. The state has grabbed their money for child-support payments.   State officials, who called the action precedent-setting, have intercepted $1.2 million intended for New Jerseyans who are delinquent in paying child support.

Delinquent Parents Lose Windfall to New Jersey

  An Israeli armored force backed by helicopters and artillery broke through United Nations barricades in southern Lebanon today to stop rocket attacks by Shiite Muslim guerrillas.   The advance to the villages of Kafra and Yater by tanks and armored personnel carriers was believed to be the largest beyond the nine-mile self-proclaimed Israeli "security zone" in southern Lebanon since the Israeli invasion in 1982.

ISRAELI ARMY HITS BASES IN LEBANON, PIERCING U.N. LINES

  If the world seems especially topsy-turvy now, if everything appears to be upside down, perhaps you are reading too many advertisements.   In the latest effort to capture the attention of ad-weary consumers, a spate of print ads are employing a new gimmick: The top half is printed right side up, while the bottom half is printed upside down.

When Up Is Down, Does It Sell?

  Congressional Democrats moved today to increase the chances for passage of their tax proposals. House leaders dropped an unpopular corporate tax provision and a powerful Senator said he would try to include a politically attractive health insurance measure in the bill.   House Democrats, after a second day of party caucuses dominated by continual criticism of a proposed one-percentage-point cut in the corporate income tax rate, decided to eliminate the provision from the bill entirely. On Wednesday, they had decided to limit the cut to two years rather than make it permanent, as first planned.

Corporate Tax Cut Deleted As Democrats Polish Bill

   Companies    The designated successor as chairman of Time Warner, N. J. Nicholas Jr., resigned and will be replaced as president and co-chief executive by Gerald M. Levin, the vice chairman. Many saw the resignation as a result of friction between Mr. Nicholas and the chairman, Steven J. Ross.  [ Page A1. ]   Experts appointed by the F.D.A. recommended that the entire breast implant business be transformed into a huge medical experiment to determine risk.  [ A1. ]

BUSINESS DIGEST

  Time Warner Inc. said yesterday that N. J. Nicholas Jr., the designated successor to the company's chairman, Steven J. Ross, had resigned and would be replaced by Gerald M. Levin, the vice chairman.   Many in the company saw the unexpected resignation as a result of a clash between Mr. Ross and Mr. Nicholas, whose total 1990 compensation of $96.4 million made them the nation's highest-paid executives. But it also meant the collapse of a succession agreement central to the 1990 merger of two corporate empires, Warner Communications and Time Inc., to form the world's largest media company.

Heir Apparent at Time Warner Is Out Amid Signs of Dissension

  Dwindling exports resulted in a sharp widening of the nation's merchandise trade deficit in December, but for 1991 as a whole, the deficit narrowed to $66.20 billion, the smallest shortfall in eight years.   The Bush Administration hailed the full-year results as a sign of renewed American competitiveness, and members of Congress from both parties said that the improvement last year would be more important in the national debate over protectionism than December's poor showing.

December Trade Gap Widened

  NEW YORK CITY GOTTI ON TAPE: A GENEROUS BOSS   Prosecutors played a tape of the reputed Mafia boss talking about his philosophy of life -- and death. "I would be a billionaire if I was looking to be a selfish boss," Mr. Gotti said in recordings that make up the bulk of the prosecution's case. "That's not me." B2.   REFINANCING ADDS TO CITY AID   New York City officials will have more money to bicker over now that the state Municipal Assistance Corporation has decided to refinance some of its old bonds. The decision will raise $100 million and will bring to $1 billion the total amount the city might be able to tap from the assistance corporation in the coming years. B3.

METRO DIGEST

  AS this century and millennium slouch wearily toward their end, novelists -- like sociologists, historians and journalistic pundits -- have been busy, making their own prognostications about the future. To some, the future will indeed witness the end of history, the end of time, the death of God and the novel. The future, as they see it, will be a post-nuclear wasteland, inhabited by rag-tag bands of refugees, bereft of language and memory, and thrown back on primitive skills of survival. Other writers -- a minority, it must be said -- envision a more utopian future, in which science and human wisdom serve as midwives to a brave new world of global harmony and hope.   In Julian May's new novel, "Jack the Bodiless" (Alfred A. Knopf), the 21st century witnesses, at least temporarily, a new era of peace throughout the universe, in which earthlings develop amazing new metapsychic abilities under the watchful eye of solemn, green-skinned guardians. If the novel's galactic vision owes something to "Star Wars" and "Star Trek," Marge Piercy's new novel, "He, She and It" (Knopf), takes its cue from cyberpunk fiction, as well as such movies as "Blade Runner," "2001: A Space Odyssey" and "The Terminator." The book depicts a 21st-century America in which anthropomorphic cyborgs (robotlike creatures made of computer components with "human implants") can mingle and make love with human beings, and threaten to develop minds of their own.

Critic's Notebook; Making a Literary Lunge Into the Future

  Gamble by South African   President F. W. de Klerk said he would hold a vote to ask whites whether they back his effort to negotiate an end to apartheid. If he loses the vote, he said, he and the long-ruling National Party will resign. Page A3. Choosing Jobs Over Owls   The Interior Secretary plans to seek an exception to law that would leave the northern spotted owl nearly extinct but save logging jobs. Page A12. Decline in Subway Crime    Violence in New York subways fell 15 percent last year, to the lowest level since 1988, officials say. Page B1.    Ex-World Bank Chief Is Dead    Eugene Robert Black, who embodied American postwar confidence as head of the World Bank from 1949 to 1962, died at the age of 93. Page A19. Salvadoran Rightist Dies    Roberto d'Aubuisson, a former army officer believed to be a proponent of death squads during the Salvadoran civil war, died of cancer. Page A19.

INSIDE

  "These are the last remains of a unique and irreplaceable resource. They represent a treasure house of potentially useful resources." -- MICHAEL BEAN, an environmental lawyer, arguing against the logging of ancient forests in the Pacific Northwest.  [ A12:1. ]   "I don't feel comfortable with losing 31,000 jobs." -- INTERIOR SECRETARY MANUEL LUJAN JR., offering a plan in support of the logging.  [ A12:1. ]

Quotations of the Day

  Little more than a week after angry students at Columbia University barricaded faculty members and administrators inside a building to protest a planned change in financial aid policy, a university committee has drawn up a plan to continue meeting, at least temporarily, the financial aid needs of all incoming undergraduate students.    The plan relies on substantial gifts from wealthy alumni, as well as financial sacrifices by faculty and students, to allow the level of financial aid to rise high enough to meet the needs of all 850 new students who will be enrolled in September.

Plan Is Outlined to Avoid Limiting Aid at Columbia

Philip Anthony Jones is an English former professional footballer who played as a defender. Although primarily a centre-back, he was also used as a right-back or defensive midfielder.

February 21, 1992

Headlines from February 21, 1992

EXPERTS SUGGEST U.S. SHARPLY LIMIT BREAST IMPLANTS

Cold War's End Hits Cray Computer

Winter Golf That's Ideal: It's in the Mind

Albertville

Subway Crime Fell in 1991, Officials Say

Billboard 200

Ropin' The Wind

Dangerous

Nevermind

No Fences

C.M.B.

Notable Births

Historical Context for February 21, 1992