October 26, 1992

At a time when Ross Perot's candidacy once again appeared to be transforming the Presidential contest, the Texas billionaire offered a new explanation today for his decision in July to abandon the campaign. He said he had withdrawn after hearing that President Bush's campaign was scheming to smear his daughter with a computer-altered photograph and to disrupt her wedding. Mr. Perot offered no evidence, only quoting friends and an unidentified "top Republican."

Joe Carter kept thinking Bill Buckner 1986. Dave Winfield refused to think Dave Winfield 1981. The Atlanta Braves would just as soon not think anything today, thank you, because the Toronto Blue Jays are the World Series champions and they are not.

Allowing parents to choose their children's schools may be the hottest idea in American education, but a new flood of research argues that such "choice" programs alone will not help schools and, in some cases, can actually hurt them. A report to be made public today by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, a leading educational research group, is the latest of several to argue that choice primarily benefits children of better-educated parents, does not necessarily improve student performance, requires additional money and, without certain safeguards, may actually widen the gap between rich and poor school districts.

One October night two years ago, Ok Sun Kim called her three children in South Korea with good news. After eight years of working in other Koreans' grocery stores, she and her husband, Tong Kwang, had saved enough to set up their own corner grocery in Brooklyn. Soon, she promised the children, they would be able to afford to bring them to America. That promise was abruptly broken.

When you are the erratic Giants, when players start to point fingers, when the crowd boos even the drum major at halftime, when the coach is struggling to forge his own team, then who needs elegant victories? What the Giants needed today was Seattle, and what they got was an inelegant 23-10 decision over the flightless Seahawks that will sustain for a while.