December 4, 1992

Frustrated by their apparent inability to put a dent in the city's high teen-age pregnancy rate, Baltimore public health officials are planning to offer Norplant, the surgically implanted contraceptive, at clinics in city schools. The program is apparently the first in the nation that would provide students with the implant, which lasts five years. Baltimore has one of the highest teen-age pregnancy rates in the nation. One in 10 Baltimore girls from 15 to 17 years of age gave birth in 1990, the last year for which statistics are available.

John H. Gutfreund, whose aggressive leadership of Salomon Brothers seemed to embody Wall Street in the heady 1980's, agreed yesterday to never again run a securities firm and to pay a $100,000 fine as part of a settlement of civil charges stemming from the firm's illegal bidding in Treasury auctions. He and two other former senior executives of Salomon settled with the Securities and Exchange Commission one day after the agency charged two other former Salomon employees with a raft of securities law violations involving phony bids in a series of Treasury auctions. Involved Civil Charges Mr. Gutfreund and the two other executives who settled yesterday, Thomas W. Strauss, the investment house's former president, and John W. Meriwether, a former vice chairman, were not charged with any illegal actions. Rather, the men settled civil charges that they had failed to properly supervise their employees.

Like many big Wall Street investors, people here who put their nest eggs in the shares of the Comptronix Corporation, a local electronics manufacturer, have lost a bundle. The fast-growing company's stock, once a source of glee in the town, plummeted on Nov. 25 to a fraction of its former value after its chairman, William J. Hebding, and two other top executives were suspended for falsifying the books. The news stunned Wall Street, which had been attracted to the little company's robust growth and clean-cut image. But if the people here share Wall Street's pain, they do not share its astonishment. The men who founded and built the company to annual sales of $101 million, and who have now disgraced it, were figures in a society where the distance between the lofty and the humble is often no wider than the local luncheonette counter.

With a surge of new immigrants and new babies, the population of the United States is growing much faster than projected just four years ago, the Census Bureau said today. In 1988, the Government projected a population of 268 million for the year 2000 and 300 million for 2050. The bureau now estimates that the population, now 255 million, will reach 275 million in the year 2000 and 383 million in 2050. That amounts to an increase of 50 percent in six decades.

THE holiday trees are scrawny and overpriced, and traffic seems set in cement. Snow, when there is any, turns to a soggy mess as soon as it hits the ground, and shopping becomes an excruciating exercise. For many people in New York City, Christmas is definitely not the season to be jolly. Ah, but it has its joys. Many New Yorkers have come to regard a tour of store windows dolled up for the holidays as one of the season's happier rituals, ranking somewhere above lighting a yule log and just below calling the family in Florida.

Creating a new hurdle to Mortimer B. Zuckerman's plan to acquire The Daily News, a Federal judge ruled yesterday that Mr. Zuckerman cannot strip the typographers union of its lifetime job guarantees if he wants to buy the ailing newspaper. The ruling by a Federal District judge in Manhattan overturned a bankruptcy court decision by Judge Tina L. Brozman that had favored Mr. Zuckerman's argument that he is not bound by the job guarantees because The Daily News is in bankruptcy. The ruling sets back his plan to buy the paper, but nonetheless leaves him in control in his bid to become a New York City newspaper publisher. Harsh Negotiating Strategy The judge in the case, Lawrence M. McKenna, declared that Mr. Zuckerman's harsh negotiating strategy with the union, the New York Typographical Union No. 6, was "not compatible with the good faith bargaining" required under Federal law."

Mayor David N. Dinkins went to a Queens Democratic club last night and came face to face with rising Jewish anger over his handling of racial strife in Crown Heights. The Mayor was heckled and called a "Jew hater" as he sought to speak out against bigotry and defend his condemnation of the beating of a black man by Hasidic Jews on Tuesday in Crown Heights.

The United Nations Security Council approved tonight a United States-led military intervention to protect the delivery of aid to Somalia, and the Bush Administration assured Americans that the international force would complete its mission quickly and return home. But the assurances were undercut by disagreements between the White House and Pentagon officials over how long it would take the force, which is to include at least 28,000 United States troops, to complete its mission.

The police in Hartford have begun seizing the cars of men cruising the city's neighborhoods for prostitutes, under a state law that allows authorities to take property used in committing a crime. Three cars were seized Wednesday in the first sweep by vice detectives under the new policy, which was announced today. The policy had been requested by residents of Frog Hollow, a neighborhood that is bordered by the State Capitol, Hartford Hospital and Trinity College but plagued by gangs, drug dealers and prostitution.

President Bush will sign the North American Free Trade Agreement on Dec. 17, while President Carlos Salinas de Gortari of Mexico and Prime Minister Brian Mulroney of Canada will sign the pact the same day in their countries, the White House announced today. The agreement, which would eliminate trade barriers among Canada, Mexico and the United States, will not take effect until legislatures in all three countries have approved it or legislation putting its provisions into law.

The United States has concluded that Serbia is routinely violating the United Nations ban on flights over Bosnia and Herzegovina and is consulting its allies on a possible resolution authorizing force to stop the flights, senior Administration officials said today. The officials said that the United States might be prepared to introduce a resolution at the United Nations as early as next week that would for the first time provide an enforcement mechanism for the ban. That could eventually lead to allied combat planes threatening to shoot down Serbian aircraft defying the ban.

Mr. Murphy goes to Washington. Easy and breezy.