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.