June 21, 1992

"Okay, you ex-Commies, let's rock and roll!" The voice of Axl Rose of the Guns 'n' Roses rock band boomed across Prague's vast Spartakiadni stadium, built to display the prowess of Communist athletes but now hosting a hirsute mass of newly capitalistic youths apparently intent on recreating Woodstock. Strobes flashed, fireworks flared, videos rolled. The jeans-clad Czechoslovak crowd seemed suitably wowed. But a small group of neatly coiffed gentlemen in the audience displayed a certain ennui. Ex-Wall Streeters rather than ex-Communists, they were plainly finding it awkward to rock 'n' roll.

WITH the latest projections placing the Nassau County budget deficit at $170.5 million, up by $40 million from last month and by $70 million since April, a tentative four-year contract for the county police is looking a lot like a lighting rod projecting into a storm. County Executive Thomas S. Gulotta and members of the politically divided Board of Supervisors have been groping toward agreement on a plan to reduce the deficit. The package seemed certain to combine additional spending cuts and layoffs with new money-raising proposals, all anchored by tens of millions of dollars in borrowing that may mean higher taxes later.

For nearly 10 years the Sutton Hotel on East 56th Street, near First Avenue, has stood empty as one new owner after another failed in efforts to revive it. The newest attempt, by a group of Hong Kong investors, is a plan to turn the 74-year-old building into a long-term residence hotel where the minimum stay will be 30 days. The developer is Alan B. Friedberg of Manhattan.

President F. W. de Klerk ventured into this bitter black township today in a show of concern for victims of a massacre on Wednesday, but was chased away by angry residents, leaving behind an ugly mood that soon exploded into more violence. About 90 minutes after Mr. de Klerk's motorcade fled before residents blaming him for the Wednesday violence, police officers fired assault rifles into a hostile crowd in a skirmish over the body of a man shot by the police a short time earlier. The number of casualties was not immediately known.

As if the general election were weeks and not four months away, President Bush, Gov. Bill Clinton and Ross Perot today engaged in the sort of full-blown campaigning that is usually reserved for the home stretch. Mr. Bush, echoing the theme Vice President Dan Quayle has been sounding lately to woo conservatives, criticized "liberal elitists" in a speech in Los Angeles. Then he ventured here, into Mr. Perot's backyard, where in a reference to the Texas businessman he told the state Republican Convention that there was "too much at stake, as we say here, to buy a pig in a poke."