October 7, 1992

The personalities and tactics of the New York Senate race were sharply etched yesterday, as Senator Alfonse M. D'Amato took his campaign to the Senate floor in an all-night filibuster for the kind of local cause he has made his specialty. And in New York, where State Attorney General Robert Abrams has been trading rancorous attacks with Senator D'Amato, the state's top Democrat urged a sharp shift in strategy. Gov. Mario M. Cuomo warned Mr. Abrams that to win he would have to find a specialty of his own, a way to set the campaign agenda and thus refocus the political debate.

POLITICAL pundits and Ozzie and Harriet types -- Democrats and Republicans alike -- are howling "Hobson's choice" over the proposed early evening schedule for the Presidential debates, which begin Sunday at 7 P.M., Eastern time. But it is not the apparent conflict between family and country, the choice between sitting down to dinner or sitting down to the debates, that has people so exercised. No, it is the inevitability of high-fat retro food. Oh, some voice the quaint notion that "family dinner" means "no TV." But when pressed, most admit that just about everybody watches television while they eat and that it is the particular cravings that television arouses that make them feel fatalistic.

For the first time since the Mariel boat lift brought 125,000 Cubans to the United States in 1980, refugees desperate to flee the dictatorship of Fidel Castro are arriving here steadily in large groups aboard Cuban vessels, in defiance of American and Cuban restrictions. The authorities say nearly 1,000 refugees have arrived in the last two months, nearly half the number for all of last year.

In a new effort to end ethnic violence in the Balkans, the United Nations Security Council voted unanimously today to set up a war-crimes commission to collect evidence of possible atrocities throughout the former Yugoslav federation and decide who should be prosecuted. The commission, first proposed by the Bush Administration, would be modeled on the Allied War Crimes Commission set up in 1943. The Allied commission collected the evidence of Nazi atrocities that was used at Nuremberg and in other trials.

Mary Wendy Roberts, the labor commissioner of Oregon, set out in 1988 to guarantee most of the state's work force -- 47 percent of which is women -- the right to 12 weeks' unpaid leave when they give birth, adopt a child or need to care for a sick relative. Her strategy: show lawmakers that their own families or friends had a stake. "We'd say: 'You've got grandkids. Was your daughter able to take time off?' " Ms. Roberts recalled. "The work force has changed so dramatically that people making decisions can't close themselves off from it. Someone, either in their family or among people they knew, would be coming to them and saying, 'Hey, I need that.' "