December 6, 1992

When Bill Ceyrolles visits New York, he says, he feels like a Jew returning to Berlin after the Holocaust. "The world I knew is gone," says Mr. Ceyrolles, a social worker in Washington. "I walk down the streets and I think that's where so-and-so lived, and there's where another friend lived, and another. It's overwhelming, so many have died." Mr. Ceyrolles, who is gay and is himself infected with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, estimated that he has "known well" 100 people who have died of AIDS in the last five years and that well over half of his close friends are sick or dead. He has also watched others disappear: a waiter at his favorite restaurant and a man who cut his hair.

AT Sachem High School recently an audience of 300 people was listening in silence as an official of the New York Power Authority described the benefits of a 150-megawatt natural-gas power plant that the authority is building in Holtsville. Then the official, the environmental and licensing director, John J. Suloway, mentioned that the project meant "badly needed jobs on Long Island," and the auditorium exploded with applause.

President-elect Bill Clinton picked Senator Lloyd Bentsen to be his Treasury Secretary to send the political signal that the deadlock between the White House and Congress is over and to assure the financial markets of a calm, steady hand on the nation's economic levers, Clinton advisers said today. But the advisers, here and in Arkansas, also said the Texas Senator's selection and the fact that the top candidates for the directorship of the Office of Management and Budget also come from Congress indicated how, after 12 years of Republican Presidents, Congress is the only realistic place to turn for experts who have dealt with pivotal matters like taxes and the budget deficit.

The recession in the New York region has thrown once-comfortable lives into crisis. As hard times affect more people, compassion seems to be spreading; charitable organizations report increases in the numbers of volunteers as well as requests. Through charities supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund, aid come in many forms. For a single mother quick to strike her child, an unemployed clerical worker facing eviction, and young men and women in need of clothes for job interviews, the Neediest fund offers help and hope.

AFTER months of negotiations, dire warnings and political warfare, the Legislature last Monday passed, and Gov. Jim Florio signed, a landmark measure to overhaul New Jersey's troubled health-care system. The law ends 12 years of state control of hospital rates. It also creates a new way to subsidize care for the uninsured, by replacing the proceeds of a 19.1 percent surcharge on hospital bills with $1.6 billion diverted from the state's Unemployment Insurance Fund.