August 22, 1992

A year after his triumphant victory over the plotters of a hard-line coup, President Boris N. Yeltsin said today that he -- unlike his old rival, Mikhail S. Gorbachev -- is in no danger of being thrown from power, either by his friends or by his enemies. "I have always said, and I repeat it today, that there is no chance of a putsch No. 2," Mr. Yeltsin said at a news conference, recalling with some relish that the Soviet President's fall had come at the hands of his own hand-picked associates.

A painting crew sandblasting the Williamsburg Bridge repeatedly rained sand, dust and lead-paint chips into Brooklyn earlier this summer before city officials suspended the project under pressure from the state. The maintenance of the aging bridge has been halted for more than a month, and in the community beneath it, residents are anxious about findings of "elevated" and potentially dangerous levels of lead in dust under and around the bridge.

The United States plan for a Pentagon airlift to famine-stricken Somalia has run into problems a week after it was announced, with relief officials asserting that it was put into effect hastily and without adequate preparations. American soldiers sent to Kenya have been forced to wait a week before delivering the food because of conflicts between the American authorities and officials of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The dollar, plagued by a weak economy and more attractive interest rates abroad, plunged to all-time lows against the German mark yesterday. The decline dragged down the American bond and stock markets and raised fears of economic disruptions both in the United States and Europe. The Dow Jones industrial average fell 1.5 percent, or 50.79 points, to close at 3,254.10, while the bond market gave up gains it made in the last two weeks. The sharp fall in the markets is an unwelcome development for the President, who in his acceptance speech on Thursday night asked voters to trust him as the better steward of the nation's economy.

A U.S. Trade Threat to China The Administration threatened to impose import duties of up to 100 percent unless China opened its markets quickly to American goods. Page 33. Photos Hit Nerve in Britain Publication of embarrassing photographs of the Duchess of York and a man from Texas have thrown Britain's royal family into crisis. Page 3. Linked Through Their Grief Months after her daughter died in a car driven by a drunken teen-ager, a Bronx woman remembers the girl through her friends. Page 23.