March 13, 1992

Facing a rebellion within his own party, Speaker Thomas S. Foley Thursday abandoned his efforts to limit the disclosure of members who abused their House Bank checking accounts. He yielded to Republican pressure to release the names of all members who overdrew their accounts and the number of bad checks they wrote. After a day of wrenching debate, in which representatives mixed their words with sentiments of saddness and resentment, the House voted in the wee hours today 426 to 0 for a disclosure that is likely to destroy several political careers.

THE TRANSPORTATION CHALLENGE The $1.46 billion highway and mass transit rebuilding program announced in New Jersey last week is part of a regional attack on congestion and delays, which officials believe are undermining the economic future of the metropolitan area. The theme of this effort is that the region's network of roads, railroads, bridges and tunnels is essentially complete. Now the challenge for planners is to build more efficiency into this vast transportation system. A1. NEW YORK CITY THE DEATH OF AN EDITOR In his years as editor of El Diario, Manuel de Dios Unanue had become the subject of a kind of running joke among his colleagues about the many threats he had received from anti-Castro Cuban groups, drug dealers and others he had angered. Mr. de Dios was on the front page again yesterday -- in a bold red headline that said "Sangre de Periodista," "A Journalist's Blood." His slaying Wednesday night followed the lethal pattern that Colombian cocaine traffickers have repeatedly used to silence critics in South America, the New York City police and Latin American journalists said. A1 and B2. 'A GOOD, LOYAL SOLDIER' Salvatore Gravano insisted under cross-examination yesterday that he had been "a good, loyal soldier" for John Gotti and followed orders when it came to killing people. In eight days on the stand, Mr. Gravano has been a canny, if somewhat elusive, witness for the prosecution in the racketeering case against Mr. Gotti. B3. THE VERDICT ON DIVORCE COURT Describing horror stories that make Arnie Becker, the sleazy divorce lawyer on television's "L.A. Law," look like a nice guy, the city's Department of Consumer Affairs found the state's divorce system guilty of being "an expensive and costly failure." B3. COUNCIL MOVES AGAINST HERTZ Asserting that businesses cannot discriminate against New York City residents based on where they live, the City Council has barred Hertz from imposing surcharges on car renters who live in areas that have a high rate of accidents. B3. The fledgling law firm at the center of the Irish parade dispute. B2. OTB chief defends her agency. B3. REGION THE LATEST PLAN ON SCHOOL AID New Jersey Assembly Republicans unveiled another in a bewildering series of school-aid revisions, this one cutting $127 million from the figures proposed by the Florio administration in January. Such urban districts as Camden, Trenton and Atlantic City would be hardest hit by the changes, although Newark would not be hurt and 192 small suburban districts would benefit. B4. ADULT TRIAL SOUGHT IN CLIFTON CASE Prosecutors in Clifton, N.J., say they plan to seek an adult criminal trial against a 17-year-old youth accused of strangling his close friend, Robert A. Solimine, last month as they recited the Hail Mary in the victim's car. B4. SHARING THE COST OF TOXIC WASTE A Federal appeals court ruled that 20 Connecticut cities and towns are not automatically exempt from sharing in the $48 million cost of removing toxic waste from two huge landfills, in Beacon Falls and Naugatuck. B4. Our Towns B4

The Senate struggled tonight to clear obstacles to passing its election-year tax bill after confronting unexpected difficulty in killing a bipartisan attempt to strip the heart of the measure, a $300 tax credit for children. Senators agreed to try to complete action on the bill on Friday. Two Democrats, Carl M. Levin of Michigan and Bob Graham of Florida, proposed eliminating the tax credits and spending the $28 billion designated for the credits on deficit reduction and public works instead.

ONE recent night while switching television channels, I happened onto "Amadeus," the movie based on Mozart's life. I had seen it before, but without noticing that it had obliterated Nannerl, Mozart's older sister. Learning only a little women's history had revealed this other Mozart, who was also a pianist and composer as a child genius, and later in life a teacher of other musicians. Perhaps women's history, like all the other courses trying to widen the killing narrowness of our academic canon, might better be called remedial history. Only with such help did I begin to understand that I was missing half of this pair of prodigies who had traveled together through the courts of Europe. Until Nannerl was 15 years old and was sent home to marry, each had been the other's only friend and companion. We don't know whether some compositions attributed to Amadeus might really be Nannerl's, as some musicologists speculate, but we do know from his letters that in his eyes, she was the talented one. That same night, also through the century-skipping magic of television, I came upon "The Right Stuff," a movie about the first United States astronauts. This time, I hadn't even a book to tell me what was missing, but thanks to Joan McCullough's cover story in Ms. magazine -- historical research even when she wrote it in 1973, since the astronaut testing program had started in the 1950's -- I was painfully aware of the absence on screen of 25 female pilots who had been given the same tests as John Glenn and Alan Shepard and had passed them with flying colors. Indeed, one of them, Jerrie Cobb, had entered the program with twice as many air miles as John Glenn, and also emerged lucid from hours in a sensory deprivation tank that had left a male astronaut crying and imagining he heard dogs barking. By its end, this first Mercury Program had found that women in general were more resistant to radiation, less subject to heart attacks and better able to endure extremes of heat, cold, pain, noise and loneliness. Since they weighed less than the men and required less food and oxygen, they would also have saved money in the expensive per-pound business of capsule launching. Nonetheless, their success seemed to come as such a shock that NASA simply decreed: No women. Although two of these candidates, Ms. Cobb and the pioneer helicopter pilot Jane Hart, fought back by organizing a Congressional hearing on this ban in 1962, John Glenn and Alan Shepard testified that women had not met the established jet-pilot requirements. (Never mind that women were not eligible for the program established to meet such requirements.) A NASA spokesman was quoted as saying, "Talk of an American spacewoman makes me sick to my stomach." As Ms. Cobb said after the subcommittee let stand the no-women rule, but failed to question NASA's expensive training program for a chimp named Glenda: "Millions for chimps, but not one cent for women!"

Drawing-room war with Edwardian grace, via Forster, Merchant and Ivory. Another triumph.