May 20, 1992

As the recession hangs on and the election nears, the Bush Administration has followed a pattern of altering environmental laws and regulations to open more Federal land and the nation's natural resources to development, top Administration officials say. The pattern emerged last summer, when the White House proposed eliminating restrictions on building and development on half the nation's wetlands. Since then the Administration has fostered a flurry of new proposals to make more of the nation's coal, timber, oil, water and land available to industry and agriculture.

Susan Grymes stood before 30 Rockefeller Center and faced a dilemma. Next to her, two dozen strikers called to her, sometimes plaintively, sometimes angrily, not to go in. Above her, 65 floors to be exact, the panoramic views, the ballroom in the clouds, the elegant 1930's decor, the spicy salmon tartare -- in short, the Rainbow Room -- called to her to come up. She paused to glance at a union flier, then forged through the revolving doors, her husband and two friends in tow, grimacing under a barrage of chants, whistles and catcalls from the strikers.

In what was largely seen as a slowing in the wake of unsustainably rapid increases, builders broke ground on new homes at a rate of just 1,115,000 last month, 17 percent below the March pace, the Commerce Department reported today. It was the biggest decline in eight years and embraced all regions of the country. In addition, permits issued for future construction fell 3.3 percent.

Breaking a 28-year silence, the two pathologists who performed the autopsy on President John F. Kennedy have affirmed their original findings that he was hit by only two bullets, fired from above and behind, and that one of them caused the massive head wound that killed him. And four of five other doctors who attended the President in the emergency room of a Dallas hospital said they observed nothing while treating him that contradicts the pathologists' findings. They also criticized another doctor in the emergency room that day, one whose new book asserts a conspiracy to cover up evidence that the President was shot from the front, not the back. Some Questions Answered The two pathologists, who were Navy medical officers at the time of the autopsy, and the five other doctors have not previously discussed the Kennedy assassination, except before the Warren Commission that investigated it. They made their assertions in interviews reported in the May 27 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association.

New York City yesterday reported a significant decline in the number of students dropping out of high school, putting it ahead of other major cities that have also noted such declines. Board of Education officials claimed credit for the change, saying years of hounding truants and pressing students to complete their required courses were finally paying off. But they acknowledged that a sluggish economy, with diminished job prospects, might be partly responsible for the improvement.