May 31, 1992

Disorder in Haitian Army Eight months after an army coup, soldiers have begun killing soldiers in what many fear is the unraveling of Haiti's military. Page 3.

On the night Los Angeles was burning down, I went to the theater in New York. Earlier on that Friday, May 1, such a plan might have seemed quixotic. Wild rumors and sheer panic seized New York once television images of the South-Central rioting traveled east, and Times Square emptied out at midday. Outside the Marquis Theater, home of the supposedly indomitable "Man of La Mancha," a hastily assembled wall of plywood materialized, turning one of Broadway's most conspicuous houses into a bunker suitable for downtown Beirut.

One myth of American political culture envisions the Presidential campaign as a kind of Arthurian quest. A group of men (it is usually men) sets out in pursuit of the great prize, endures many tests and trials (at the hands of the press, the voters and one another) and is gradually winnowed down to the worthiest of their number. Democracy is served, the voters are served, and the candidate who finally emerges is better for what he has endured.

It was not as if Dawn Staley was familiar with Nancy Lieberman's game, or, for that matter, her face. She couldn't create images of Lieberman, the way she could for Julius Erving's airborne grace or Magic Johnson's exquisite vision. For Staley, a young girl in North Philadelphia in the early 80's whose hero was the 76ers point guard, Maurice Cheeks, Lieberman was a famous yet distant explorer, like Bob Cousy, or Christopher Columbus. "When Nancy was playing, they didn't put women's games on television, so I could only read about her in the history book," said the 22-year-old Staley, sounding like a child of the MTV generation confronted with the question of Sinatra. "Don't tell her I said that."

Mayor David N. Dinkins and the City Council reached an accord on the basics of a $29.5 billion budget for New York City yesterday, nearly a month ahead of schedule and three hours before Mr. Dinkins was to take off for Europe on an economic-development trip. Mr. Dinkins and Council Speaker Peter F. Vallone announced late yesterday afternoon that they had agreed to add $88 million for schools and other programs to the budget proposed by the Mayor last month, to be paid for by changes in revenue estimates and trims in administrative spending. Police and Parks Gain But the settlement, the earliest in recent memory, represented only minor changes in the Mayor's plan. In some ways, its greatest significance lies in its being reached so early and so amicably, signs of an improvement in the city's fiscal picture and a consensus among Council leaders that the Mayor's budget proposal was sound.

Warned by friends and advisers that his re-election is imperiled by Ross Perot's unexpected strength and a perception that he is not doing anything about the country's problems, President Bush is under growing pressure to call in Secretary of State James A. Baker 3d to rescue his campaign. Mr. Bush today denied published reports that a senior aide, Robert A. Mosbacher, the titular campaign chairman, had urged him to dismiss Samuel K. Skinner as chief of staff and replace him with Mr. Baker.

FROM one end of the state to the other, in hundreds of municipalities and in dozens of county and state agencies, officials are experimenting with a concept that stands the traditional notion of government on its head: privatization. The contracting out of government services to private companies has been practiced by some state departments for years, but the recession and tight government budgets have given the idea new currency. Many legislators and officials have hailed it as a means of improving efficiency and cutting costs.

FOR 10 years, Cal Ripken Jr. has not only been on the job, he has also been doing the job so well, so smoothly, so invisibly that it takes a milestone for his consecutive-game streak to be noticed. When the Baltimore Orioles' manager, Johnny Oates, wrote "Ripken" on his lineup card yesterday in Oakland, it marked the 10th anniversary of the start of the 31-year-old shortstop's streak that, day by day, threatens what was thought to be one of baseball's unbreakable monuments: Lou Gehrig's record 2,130 games.

The 25-year-old Elizabethtown Gas Company building in downtown Elizabeth, N.J., has been recycled into a one-building branch campus of Union County College in Cranford, N.J. The 100,000-square-foot, seven-story Sidney F. Lessner Building houses classrooms, administration and faculty offices, triple-tiered lecture halls, computer labs, a bookstore, food service areas and a cafeteria. The basement has been converted into a 3,100-square-foot auditorium with a stage and theatrical lighting system, a lounge, a library, exhibition rooms and galleries.

When developers of a new residential complex in East Meadow, L.I. were seeking a site for a model apartment they could show to prospective buyers, they found space in an improbable location; the vacant ground floor of their own office building. Earlier this month, a full scale replica of the one-bedroom units to be part of the Knolls of East Meadow, opened in an office building at 377 Oak Street in Garden City.

Will profits catch up with the stock market? That was the hope raised last week when the Government reported that after-tax corporate profits leaped 8 percent in the first quarter. The number was better than the seers expected and may reflect the benefits of all the corporate restructurings of the last couple ofyears.

As the rioting ebbed here, Kibok Yoo stared into the cave-like ruin that once had been her liquor store. Melted electrical cables hung like tendrils from a blackened ceiling. A lifetime's savings lay in heaps of ash and shattered glass. The rioters had destroyed the business that provided Ms. Yoo with $6,000 a month in income and the promise of delivering her 3-year-old son into a comfortable life in middle-class America. But the greatest trauma to Ms. Yoo came in the news from her insurance agent: Her $280,000 insurance policy, it turned out, was written by a tiny, unlicensed company in the Caribbean. Like hundreds of other inner-city merchants, she had unknowingly bought from a gray market of policies sold widely in poor areas. She was shocked to hear that she might have to wait months or years to get money on her claim, if she gets it at all.