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.

After a full day of work, sniffling from a cold, Charles J. Hynes slumped at a lectern, judging a mock trial at Brooklyn Law School. But even in the after-hours world of student court, there was no respite from the borough's racial consciousness. The case was simple burglary, the students told only that the suspect was 17 years old, no word about his skin color or ethnicity. Yet within minutes, the young woman playing the defense lawyer was arguing that her innocent client had fled the scene because as a black man he had reason to fear the police.

Administrators at five hospitals in Queens and Brooklyn have agreed to a tentative contract with nurses, after a day in which it had appeared that one of the hospitals would reject the agreement. Four of the hospitals -- Brookdale Hospital Medical Center and St. Mary's Hospital in Brooklyn and St. John's Queens Hospital and St. John's Episcopal/South Shore Division in Queens -- signed the agreement early yesterday morning.

NEW YORK CITY HOMELESS RULING TO CUT CROWDING A state judge, ruling that New York City has illegally sheltered 1,200 homeless men in two dangerous, overcrowded armories, one in the Bronx and one in Brooklyn, ordered the city to cut the number of men there by two-thirds and upgrade fire safety. A1. THE CHANGING FORTUNES OF CHARLES HYNES Five years ago, after prosecuting four white men for chasing a black man to his death in Howard Beach, Charles J. Hynes became a celebrity. But his stardom has waned in a relentless stream of high-profile, often violent, bias cases. Now, a new case threatens to entangle the Brooklyn District Attorney in a divisive racial dispute. A1.

Richard Kramlich invests in fledgling companies that he says typically start out as "three guys and a dream." He is one of America's leading venture capitalists, and while the entrepreneurial dreams he backs are risky, the successful ones can be incubators of new technology and new jobs. When Mr. Kramlich and his colleagues at New Enterprise Associates, a San Francisco-based partnership, put money in a company, it stays there for five years or more. They sit on the boards of the companies they invest in. They help with marketing plans and product designs -- they even interview job applicants.

A plainclothes transit police officer who was shot and critically wounded last month said yesterday that his gun was in its holster when his fellow officers opened fire on him without warning. He said the officers began shooting even after he fell into a fetal position to protect himself. In his first public statement since the shooting, the officer, Derwin Pannell, contradicted the account given by the other officers, who have said they fired only after they called out 'Police! Don't move!' and he turned toward them, gun in hand. Their account has been supported by a woman Officer Pannell was holding as a suspected fare beater outside a Brooklyn subway station when the other officers came upon the scene.

Ruling that New York City has illegally sheltered 1,200 homeless men in two dangerous and overcrowded armories, a state judge ordered the city yesterday to cut the number of men housed there by two-thirds and to upgrade fire safety in the sprawling spaces where the men sleep cot to cot. It was the second time in a month that a judge ordered tough steps to remedy what she described as the city's failure to shelter the homeless adequately. Last month another judge, Helen E. Freedman of State Supreme Court in Manhattan, found high-ranking officials in the Dinkins administration in contempt of court for allowing homeless families to sleep in city offices while they waited for the city to find places to put them.

IT is 7 P.M., and Robin Williams has just returned home from taping "The Arsenio Hall Show." His two younger children are scampering and laughing in the hallway, and Mr. Williams, wearing a black shirt and baggy pleated pants, steps into the living room and sits wearily on a footstool. His wife, Marsha, brings him a Coke. He tries to stifle a yawn. He has jet lag from a London flight earlier in the day, and he has barely had time to unpack.