April 23, 1992

Leaders of New York City's municipal unions yesterday demanded a share of the budget surplus that the Dinkins administration disclosed a day before, and angrily denounced Mayor David N. Dinkins, saying he had previously distorted the budget picture to elicit labor concessions. The Dinkins administration, which has vowed not to grant wage increases without productivity gains, sought to quell the clamor, and not just from the unions, as many contingents came forward yesterday to claim bigger pieces of the budget pie.

Five years ago, Jean Demosthenes, an electrician in his native Haiti, took a job driving a taxi in New York City because his friends from the city of Petionville told him it was the first step on the way to making it in America. Seven months ago, Iftikhar Khan, a computer scientist from Pakistan, began driving a cab because his friends from Lahore told him the same thing.

A series of powerful explosions flattened homes and tore up streets through a working-class neighborhood of this city today, killing at least 200 people and injuring 600 others, the authorities said. The chief spokesman for the Jalisco state government, Jaime Avalos, said the explosions in Mexico's second-largest city appeared to have been caused by hexane dumped by a private cooking oil company into the sewer system. Hexane is a highly volatile liquid used to extract edible oils from seeds.

AFTER a three-hour workshop on "Letting Go of Clutter," Marilyn Vondra, an opera singer, returned to her Manhattan apartment vowing to "de-clutter." She telephoned her clutter-support person a week later to say that, for the first time in some years, she had glimpsed the top of the coffee table. "It's glass," she said. The bookcase, buried under sheet music and concert programs, came into view the next week. Again, she phoned her clutter buddy to report progress. This week finds Ms. Vondra under the dining room table, winnowing through hundreds of yellowing newspaper clippings -- recipes, mostly -- stashed in shopping bags.

Four years after Congress passed major legislation aimed at moving welfare recipients into jobs, the first study of its effect shows it has raised the earnings of people on welfare and reduced the amount they receive in public aid. But analysts are already at odds over whether to deem the gains large or small, and whether they hold much of an answer to the nation's welfare problems.