April 2, 1992

French Premier Resigns Edith Cresson, the first woman to serve as Prime Minister, quit following the electoral setbacks of her Socialist Party. Page A9. Dim View of Congress A poll shows half the public mistakenly believes that taxpayers made good for House bank overdrafts. A list of the 22 worst offenders, meanwhile, was made public. Page D21. 8 Dead, and a Youth Accused Etheridge Pierce Jr., 18, sought sanctuary in a church on Monday. Now, he faces charges of killing eight people in Rochester and New York. Page B1. Dieting Programs Faulted A Federal health panel says there is no good evidence that popular commercial programs to lose weight do any long-term good. Page D22. Hockey Games Put on Ice The first players' strike in National Hockey League history started with the playoffs a week away. Page B11.

Even as Gov. Bill Clinton has found himself forced to go head to head against Edmund G. Brown Jr. in daily debates, New Yorkers and the nation are pondering Mr. Brown's surprisingly strong Presidential bid and asking, who is this unconventional politician? Leading political figures in California who have known the former Governor well over two decades describe him variously as brilliant, self-absorbed, friendless, idealistic, erratic, opportunistic, cold, hypocritical.

It sits, fragile as a bird's nest, down a country road with no name. The old clapboard house has been abandoned for nearly 30 years, but some of the Svarc family spirit remains. Patches of red honeysuckle wallpaper cling to the walls, and the entrance to the old root cellar where the family stored milk and eggs in the days before refrigeration still stands in the backyard. Though the family moved to town in 1961, Emma Svarc (pronounced schwartz), of Czechoslovak descent and now 87 years old, never sold the old place, which she and her husband, Joseph, bought along with a pickup truck in the 1950's. "I suppose I figured somebody might live in there yet," she recalled one March afternoon at The Wilber Nursing Home.

WHILE many decorators have abandoned the English country-house look that once engulfed Fifth Avenue libraries, East Side studio apartments, Connecticut bedrooms -- even pool houses in the Hamptons -- in favor of a virtuous new minimalism, Josef V. Pricci has stuck to his idea of what the proper gentleman's home should look like. In the last 22 years, Mr. Pricci, a Manhattan interior decorator, has moved and redecorated nine times, done hundreds of rooms for clients, participated in about a dozen show houses -- including three put on by the Kips Bay Boys and Girls' Club in Manhattan -- resolutely striking the same traditional note throughout.

A day after Hoboken voters, for the second time in two years, defeated a plan to redevelop the city's crumbling waterfront with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey as a partner, the bistate agency says it wants a refund of at least part of the $30 million it has spent on the project over the last decade. Sounding clearly frustrated, the chairman of the Port Authority, Richard C. Leone, said yesterday: "As far as I'm concerned, there is no project. The people have decided the issue locally. We've invested about $30 million various ways, and I think Hoboken has a financial obligation."