September 9, 1992

The Rev. Al Sharpton seems to be campaigning in a different world than his white rivals in the Democratic Senate primary. Article, page B5.

Think of it as a frequent drivers card. The General Motors Corporation is expected to make a widely anticipated announcement today that it will issue a new Mastercard and possibly a Visa credit card designed to build loyalty among car buyers.

The gymnasium was a jumble of faces, hundreds of them, black, white, Asian, Hispanic, male, female, all of them young, all of them listening to a sincere-looking Columbia University student who was talking about the night he came to terms with being gay. He was looking at himself in a mirror, he said, trying to find out who he really was, when he realized that his fate was to live his life "in the arms of other men." He cried at his discovery, he said, with tears of pain and relief -- pain because of the names he knew he would be called and relief because he could begin a "tremendous journey" armed with confidence and hope. New Introductions In the new world of diversity and multiculturalism, this is the new freshmen orientation. Discussions on tolerance, the limits of free speech and the problems of date rape have been added to the dances, picnics and forums on the curriculum that have traditionally been used to help introduce students to the campus and each other.

NEW YORK CITY A CASE STUDY IN FAILURE Five-year-old Randi Anderson scrawled on the walls of her foster home with lipstick. She stole money from her foster mother's purse. She broke all her toys. But while three New York City child-welfare workers concluded that she needed counseling, she never got it. And when she provoked her foster mother's 20-year-old son once too often, she was beaten to death. Randi did not fall through a small, isolated tear in the safety net. Although hers was an extreme case, it points up the failings of the city's child welfare system in caring for the thousands of emotionally troubled children who have poured into foster care in recent years. A1. BYSTANDERS KILLED IN BRONX SHOOTING An argument at a block party in the Bronx escalated into gunfire that killed two bystanders, including a woman who was seven months pregnant, the police said. The baby was delivered in a Caesarean section but died three hours later. B3. 51 TICKETS AND STILL DRIVING Despite a long record of reckless driving and the lack of a valid license, a flawed system failed to keep Christopher Devita off the road. A tow-truck driver who has been stopped by the police and ticketed 51 times since 1985, when his drivers license was suspended, Mr. Devita was behind the wheel on Sunday when he plowed into a car and killed a woman in Brooklyn. State and city officials say that government agencies had no way to prevent a similar incident from occurring. B3. A man wrongfully convicted can sue for damages, a Federal appeals court ruled. B3. Olympia & York will shed a Manhattan office building. Business Day, D3. REGION A GUILTY PLEA IN EXXON CASE The man accused of abducting a top Exxon official pleaded guilty to seven counts of conspiracy and extortion, describing in detail a ransom scheme that went brutally awry and ended, he said, with the victim dying in his arms. A1. JUDGE OUSTED FROM SMOKING CASE The Federal judge who has been at the center of major cases on the risks of smoking for the last decade has been removed from one of those cases by a Federal appeals court, which said that his own words suggested bias against the tobacco industry. The decision capped a five-year effort by the tobacco industry to remove the judge, H. Lee Sarokin of Federal District Court in Newark, from tobacco liability cases, including a New Jersey case that went to the Supreme Court. A1. CLINTON TALKS JOBS IN CONNECTICUT Governor Clinton campaigned in Connecticut, focusing on the need to make American manufacturing more competitive. Whether or not people agreed with his proposals, he was talking about what many wanted to hear: jobs and the economy. A14. THINNING THE GOOSE POPULATION Like football games and falling leaves, goose hunting is a symbol of autumn in western New York. But this year the sounds of gunfire were heard before Labor Day, a result of a special 10-day hunting season aimed at thinning the goose population in three counties. B5. About New York by Felicia R. Lee B3

The man accused of abducting a top Exxon official pleaded guilty today to seven counts of conspiracy and extortion, describing in detail a ransom scheme that went brutally awry and ended, he said, with the victim dying in his arms. In an about-face in Federal District Court here today, Arthur D. Seale retracted his earlier plea of not guilty, abruptly ending a case that began on April 29, when Sidney J. Reso left his Morris Township home for a 10-minute drive to his office. He never arrived, setting off a wide-ranging investigation that ended on June 19 with the arrest of Mr. Seale and his wife, Irene Jacqueline. Victim's Wife at Hearing