September 3, 1992

Everything looks smaller now. The mountain on Forest Avenue scaled on the way to school is just a slight pitch in the sidewalk, the big highway that stretched from the front of the house all the way to Chicago is only a road. Seeing an old house again after so many years is a little bit like unearthing old clothes -- a once-mod sweater that lost its shape, a newborn's teeny white shirt with built-in mittens, brought home from the maternity ward. Rooms are like hand-me-downs, lived-in and baggy. They bring flashes of recognition when you unfold them even though you know they no longer fit.

A Federal judge ruled yesterday that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had violated antitrust laws by participating in a decades-long conspiracy with other elite universities to fix the amount of student financial aid packages. Louis C. Bechtle, Chief Judge of the Federal District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, clearly and pointedly rejected M.I.T.'s argument that it was engaged in charity, not conspiracy, when it shared confidential financial information on students with other universities.

California's protracted budget crisis sputtered to an unhappy end early this morning when the weary State Assembly capitulated to Gov. Pete Wilson and approved the final elements of an austere budget 63 days after the state ran out of cash. But the final package was so tenuous, with a pitifully small cash reserve of only $435 million in a $57.4 billion budget, that fiscal experts here warned that the State Government was likely to go broke again by spring and have to go through yet another painful round of cutting, barring an unexpectedly strong recovery from recession.

The Federal Government today nearly tripled its estimate of the natural gas output temporarily lost to the nation in the wake of Hurricane Andrew's battering of production and pipeline equipment in the Gulf of Mexico. The revised calculation by the Minerals Management Service, which governs oil and gas production in Federal waters, is that 2.5 billion to 2.75 billion cubic feet of daily gas output would be halted for at least two weeks. That is equal to at least 20 percent of the region's production and 5 percent of the nation's daily output.

In May 1991, about 80 homeowners in the Hampshire Homes development of southern Miami filed suit against the Lennar Corporation, accusing Florida's largest home builder of shoddy construction with substandard materials. The company fixed some decoration and trim, but said the suits were groundless and the homes structurally sound. Then came last week's hurricane.