September 5, 1992

Lenora Alston watched carefully as a 38-year-old man known as Champagne downed the last of 14 tablets and capsules, standing by a bench in Red Hook Park in South Brooklyn. Then she made a check mark on her clipboard. Mrs. Alston is one of about 50 workers in New York City whose sole job is to see, visit or find tuberculosis patients, people like Champagne, to insure that they take their medication.

The scope of the crisis that faced the Florida Power and Light Company after Hurricane Andrew knocked out electricity to more than 1.4 million customers and demolished mile after mile of its delivery network is best grasped in its particulars. There was the several-mile stretch of 152d Avenue near Princeton choked off by dozens of steel-reinforced concrete utility poles that had crashed across traffic lanes. Installed just three weeks before, the 65-foot, $5,000 poles broke clean at the base and toppled in the storm.

In a stunningly grim portrayal of the midsummer economy, Government figures showed today that American business and industry lost 167,000 jobs in August as factory employment skidded to its lowest level since April 1983. The job losses shown in today's labor-market report, the next to last reading before Election Day, were almost completely unexpected by private analysts. The release of the figures promptly led to another cut in interest rates by the Federal Reserve Board. The action was intended to spur economic growth, but it could also help push the already weak dollar lower against foreign currencies.

The United States and the Netherlands agreed yesterday to an aviation pact that ends most restrictions on flights between the two countries and will allow KLM Royal Dutch Airlines to fly anywhere in the United States. The pact, the first with such wide rights, is expected to have a broad impact on international travel and the airline industry. The United States hopes that the arrangement, by giving KLM broader access to the huge American market, will put pressure on larger European countries to negotiate similar deals.

When the Nikon Corporation, the Japanese camera maker, agreed two weeks ago to pay Honeywell a reported $45 million to settle patent-infringement charges, it became one of the latest casualties in what some people here are calling the "patent wars." With increasing regularity, American companies are demanding, and winning, large royalty payments from Japanese companies for the use of patented technology. But angry Japanese companies are preparing to fight back at what they view as excessive American demands.