March 11, 1992

Gov. Bill Clinton of Arkansas dominated former Senator Paul E. Tsongas today in the biggest test so far of the primary season, winning a string of victories in his native South, including a decisive triumph in Florida. The Super Tuesday primaries and caucuses, held in 11 states, gave Mr. Clinton a powerful lift in his drive for the Democratic Presidential nomination as the race moves on to the March 17 contests in Illinois and Michigan. For Mr. Tsongas, those contests now become critical as he seeks to repair the damage caused by his heavy losses across the South, most tellingly in Florida, the one Southern state where he had hoped to hold the line.

Southern Democratic leaders achieved today what they sought in vain to do four years ago: They gave a mighty heave forward to the Presidential bid of a moderate candidate from their own region. Whether the heave will prove decisive, and Gov. Bill Clinton of Arkansas will capture the nomination in New York this summer, remains to be seen, of course. But his sweep of the Southern states on Super Tuesday 1992 established him as his party's undisputed front-runner with a big lead in convention delegates and gave him a shot at clinching things for all intents and purposes this month.

Lately, when traveling abroad, Jurgen Bohn, the Economics Minister of the state of Thuringia in eastern Germany, gives foreign business executives a demonstration of the dramatic improvement wrought by Bonn's multibillion-dollar investment in this region's antiquated telephone system. He phones home. With each call Mr. Bohn shows not only the modernization of eastern Germany's phone network but also the new technology and business practices that are putting the nation's entire telecommunications industry to the test.

FOR years, stadiums, arenas and ballparks around the country have relied on food-service companies to deal with the logistics of serving thousands of sports fans. Until last year food operations at Madison Square Garden, the home of the Knicks basketball and Rangers hockey teams and the site of countless other events ranging from professional wrestling to the dog show, were handled by Harry M. Stevens, a food-service company that has concessions at scores of sports arenas nationwide. But the Garden, which spent $200 million last year giving itself a make-over, decided it wanted an improved menu to match its classier look. So last year it hired an executive chef to run its own food service. He is Paul Cyr, a man accustomed to feeding the hungry masses as former head chef at the Sheraton Center Hotel in Manhattan and the Shangri-La Hotel in Singapore.

As the region's economy continues to sputter, increasing numbers of household pets are being turned over to animal shelters, animal-welfare officials say. "People who have lost jobs are saying they can't afford their pets anymore," said Marc Paulhus, a vice president of the Humane Society of the United States. "In the last six months, we've heard from animal shelters that an increased number of animals are being turned over because of direct or secondary effects of the recession." Statistics Are Scarce Statistics on the abandonment of pets are scarce. But the Bide-a-Wee Home Association, which operates three shelters in Manhattan and on Long Island, said 1,701 animals were given up for adoption from September through February, compared with 1,295 in the comparable period last year, a 31 percent rise. As a result, for the first time Bide-a-Wee now has a two- to three-month waiting period for accepting animals for adoption, said George Wirt, a spokesman.