December 24, 1992

The public will gain access to 22,000 acres of evergreen forest and white-water river in the northwest Adirondacks under a plan announced today that includes the largest gift of land in the 100-year history of the Adirondack Park. Much of the land is wilderness for which the state once planned to pay as much as $6 million, but will now get free. The land donation by the International Paper Company represents a rare but major environmental breakthrough for New York, whose wilderness preservation program has been all but stymied in recent years by budget shortfalls and voter rejection of a $2 billion environmental bond act in 1990. The tract, along the Raquette River near the village of Tupper Lake, was at the top of virtually every list put together by state officials and environmentalists of areas that should be protected for future generations. Warning About Wilderness But as he praised the gift, Gov. Mario M. Cuomo said it also emphasized that the state had no money to buy land, a situation he has unsuccessfully sought to remedy with the creation of an environmental trust fund.

The hiring of a private company to run the Federal center for foreign animal diseases here, undertaken last year to cut costs, has gone so awry that it is not only undermining safety but eroding research efforts, according to newly released documents. The documents show that because of rising operating costs, spending for research has dropped 20 percent this year. A report by the Agriculture Department, which runs the research effort here, concluded that a "massive cost overrun" had forced the "postponement of important agricultural research projects."

It was a two-by-three-foot blowup, a haunting photograph of a beautiful, fresh-faced young girl smiling slightly. It leaned against a small stand where four lighted candles on a wreath of Christmas pine stood. And beyond that was the altar where a memorial Mass in her honor was offered. It was a photo of Laura Gossmann, who was found slain three days before Christmas on a Sunday morning last year, not far from her home and in a gully between the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and Conrail tracks in Woodside, Queens. A Friend He Never Met Among those who gathered Tuesday night for the Mass at St. John's Preparatory School in Queens, where she had gone to high school, played varsity basketball and served as a spiritual retreat counselor for other students, were her mother, Susan Gossmann, and about 50 relatives and friends.

A civilian employee of the United States Army was killed in the interior of Somalia today when the vehicle in which he was traveling hit a mine. The death was the first in the American-led force that arrived here two weeks ago. Three State Department security officials also in the vehicle were wounded when it hit the antitank mine outside Bardera, 200 miles west of here in the Somali bush. The military said the four men were preparing for the arrival of 1,000 marines in Bardera on Thursday.

At least 23 large companies have abandoned the health benefits that they were providing to thousands of retired employees. Dozens more have announced that they will not provide coverage for future retirees, and most employers who still offer the benefits are reducing their share of the costs, which have been climbing steeply. The companies are rushing to shrink these obligations before Jan. 1, when a new accounting rule goes into effect. The rule forces employers to subtract from their profits the future costs of providing benefits to retirees.