June 16, 1992

The State Legislature and the New York City Police Department have struck a deal to kill legislation that would have forced the department to arm all its officers with semiautomatic weapons, agreeing instead to give the guns to 1,000 additional police officers in a major expansion of a current pilot program. Faced with the prospect of having the State Legislature tell them how to arm the city's police officers, Mayor David N. Dinkins and Police Commissioner Lee P. Brown said the deal was an unpleasant but necessary compromise.

A fire broke out in an exercise room at a midtown Manhattan hotel last night, only hours after Mayor David N. Dinkins formed a task force to investigate a string of 10 other suspicious but small fires set in other hotels in the midtown area. In creating the task force, the Mayor sought to reassure tourists and thousands of delegates coming to the Democratic National Convention next month that the city's hotels are safe and that the authorities are working to end a series of blazes that have puzzled fire officials.

J. D. Brooks is barreling south through Virginia's Dismal Swamp region, a cellular telephone and a recently drained plastic coffee cup at his side, cheerfully explaining how his company's bacteria destroy the stomachs of Colorado potato beetles. He falls silent for a moment and nods toward the soggy, heavily wooded flatlands crowding the two-lane highway. "George Washington wanted to drain this area into farmland," he says, allowing the conversation to wander only as far as the agricultural issues of yesteryear.

Companies McDonnell Douglas postponed the start of its MD-12 program until next year. The company has had no orders for the planned new jumbo jet, and it has been stalled in its efforts to line up a $2 billion investment from a Tawianese aerospace venture. [ Page D1. ] Scores of companies have employees crisscrossing rural America to drum up business for the first farm products based on gene-splicing and other biotechnology breakthroughs. [ D1. ]

Ending nearly two years of bitter debate, the Japanese Parliament approved a bill today permitting the dispatch of military personnel abroad, for the first time since World War II, to play a limited role in international peacekeeping operations. Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa, who had battled for the bill against widespread criticism in Japan and considerable anxiety in neighboring countries, said he hoped that the first troops to be sent abroad would join the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Cambodia before the end of the year.