November 27, 1992

Breaking with legal and royal tradition, Queen Elizabeth II will voluntarily pay tax on her private income and personally absorb a larger share of the public cost of the royal family's expenses, the Government declared today. In what appeared to be a well-timed public relations initiative to defuse festering resentment over the royal wealth and life style among Britain's recession-weary public, Prime Minister John Major disclosed the Queen's proposals in a surprise statement this afternoon before the House of Commons.

To accommodate holiday weekend news and advertising, SportsFriday starts on page D1 today. Business Day begins on page D9.

IT'S another New York City holiday weekend, and you're desperately seeking that New York parents' grail, something new to do with the kids. Of course it should be intellectually stimulating, or why are you living in the city instead of providing your children with backyards and wholesomeness in suburbia? Your jaded ones have already cowered before the bears in the American Museum of Natural History, failed to appreciate art at the Metropolitan Museum, and hogged all the plastic vegetables in their shopping baskets at the Children's Museum of Manhattan. So why not escort them to yet another worthwhile educational activity, the Brooklyn Children's Museum?

METRO DIGEST MAKING SHOPPING MALLS SAFER HAVENS Following several recent and well-publicized crimes at shopping malls, many centers in the New York metropolitan region, like many across the nation, are increasing their uniformed security forces and developing elaborate surveillance systems in an effort to restore peace of mind among an increasingly skittish public. Tactics include using undercover officers as decoys to trap potential carjackers and robbers, increasing the number of mobile patrols cruising parking lots and installing hidden video cameras that can zoom in on license plates in the farthest reaches of the lot. A1. NEW YORK CITY PIONEER SPIRIT REVISITED "From struggle, we have something here, and aren't living in the street," said Rosa Campbell. "We give thanks for where we live." Mrs. Campbell and her husband share a five-story, brown-brick building in the South Bronx with 21 other families, urban homesteaders who have moved from building to building, pushed on by evictions by the city or fires. Each time, they started over in what others would regard as disaster areas, buildings full of garbage without windows or working plumbing, buildings like those that litter the stricken neighborhood. A1. PACKING THE CARS TO CLEAR THE HIGHWAYS In a bid to ease traffic congestion for Staten Island commuters, the Dinkins administration plans to call for eliminating the toll for vehicles carrying three or more occupants on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. B3. PERKY! SPIRITED! POMPOMS, TOO! Marching in the 66th annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade were 504 National Cheerleading Association's All-American Cheerleaders, a high point in their visit to New York. Between rehearsals, the cheerleaders made the usual tourist rounds. But the real highlights included the thrill of high-speed taxi rides, the purchase of low-cost wrist watches, and the once-in-a-lifetime chance to have their pictures taken with New York City sanitation workers. B3. DINKINS'S ELUSIVE QUARRY: PEACE Mayor David N. Dinkins's televised speech on Crown Heights was not only a broad plea for civic harmony but an unusually impassioned personal appeal for understanding, acceptance and political peace -- commodities that have often eluded him in his three years as New York City's first black mayor. Political memo, B4. Brooklyn man arrested in beating death of his 82-year-old father. B8. REGION CONVICT ASKS FOR NEW REVIEW Vincent James Landano, who has been fighting a murder conviction for 15 years, has asked the New Jersey Supreme Court to review his case and free him, if not from the conviction, at least from the state court system. B6. DRIVER, 74, WARDS OFF THIEVES, POLICE SAY A 74-year-old Queens woman driving alone to a Thanksgiving Dinner fought off two would-be carjackers who made five separate attempts to halt and commandeer her car, the Nassau County police reported. B4. KEEPING DIFFICULT STUDENTS IN SCHOOL From suburban Hyde Park, rural Amenia or urban Poughkeepsie, some of Dutchess County's most difficult teen-agers land at a special school, Dutchess Alternative, bringing with them their anger and frustration, their family problems and their addictions. B6. FUGITIVE IN GRAVESIDE SUICIDE ATTEMPT For more than 13 years, Joseph Florczak lived on the run, a fugitive wanted in the 1978 stabbing death of his former wife. The authorities waged a nationwide manhunt but were unable to find Mr. Florczak until last week, when he showed up at the Connecticut grave of his former wife and shot himself in the chest. B12. TAKING THE BITTER WITH THE SWEET Members of the Empire State Honey Producers met at a conference in Syracuse, and the focus was on how the honey industry is facing some of the toughest challenges in recent memory. Beekeepers in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut are battling insects, black bears, diseases, honey exports from China and other problems. B14. Our Towns by Andrew H. Malcolm B6 Chronicle B16

This struggling city, the largest in New Jersey, is accustomed to indignity, and the last year brought more. The sole remaining department store, Macy's, closed in August, mocking once again the persistent hope of public officials that a commercial renaissance was at hand. And a core of young thieves who have turned Newark into the car-theft capital of the country led to a police response that has come under investigation for its harshness. But nothing in recent years seemed to hit vulnerable community leaders as hard as the realization last fall that the YMYWCA -- its budget, endowment and membership depleted almost beyond salvation -- would file for bankruptcy and abandon the city it had served for 112 years.