January 8, 1993

The nation's chain stores yesterday reported stunningly strong sales in December, their best holiday season since 1988. Retailers had anticipated moderate gains for the Christmas season, but few had predicted sales as vigorous as they turned out to be. And even the most optimistic were surprised by the results.

In an apparent rebuff of the allied demand that Iraq remove its newly deployed surface-to-air missiles in southern Iraq, Baghdad said today that it was entitled to station the weapons anywhere on its territory. The Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister, Tariq Aziz, said Baghdad had the right to "deploy air defenses throughout the country." Allied military action to compel removal of the missiles would be a violation of international law, Mr. Aziz said.

Paul W. Mozer, the aggressive former head of Salomon Brothers' lucrative government-securities trading operation, agreed yesterday to plead guilty to lying to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in connection with a Treasury securities auction. Mr. Mozer, who was at the center of the bidding scandal that erupted at Salomon in August 1991, made his first appearance in Federal court at an arraignment before Magistrate Leonard A. Bernikow in Manhattan.

A nationwide shortage of nitroglycerin, a heart drug taken by hundreds of thousands of Americans to relieve pains from angina, has developed because of a manufacturing problem at a plant owned by the pill's only American maker. The nitroglycerin pills are sold as Nitrostat by Parke-Davis, a division of the Warner-Lambert Company of Morris Plains, N.J. Problems at the plant in Puerto Rico began in November and have since been corrected, said Peter Wolf, a company spokesman.

Making the Mummies Dance By Thomas Hoving Illustrated. 448 pages. Simon & Schuster. $25.

Mortimer B. Zuckerman opened a new era at The Daily News last night in a tense labor confrontation, beginning the process of telling more than 170 employees, some of whom had worked at The News for decades, that they no longer had jobs. Mr. Zuckerman is cutting by one third the number of unionized news and business employees. The move signaled a low point for the union, the citywide Newspaper Guild, which represents news, advertising and circulation employees at The News, The New York Post, The New York Times and other news organizations.

Putting the Big Bang theory of cosmic origin to its sternest test yet, an American satellite has made precise temperature measurements showing that 99.97 percent of the radiant energy of the universe was released within the first year of the primeval explosion. "This is the ultimate in tracing one's cosmic roots," Dr. John C. Mather, a scientist for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, said today in announcing the newest results from the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite, or COBE (pronounced CO-bee).

BY 1935, Dorothy Parker had abandoned the life of a New York sophisticate for that of a Hollywood screenwriter, but the sunshine did nothing to mellow her caustic outlook. As she wrote in a letter back east to Alexander Woollcott, her friend from the old days of the Algonquin Round Table, "Aside from the work which I hate like holy water, I love it here." It was the kindest thing she ever said about writing for the movies. About the same time, George S. Kaufman, the quintessential Broadway playwright, wrote to a friend, "I'm going to Hollywood, God damn it, this Saturday, but only for a few weeks." He was true to his word, which went a long way toward saving his self-respect.

A formidable partnership ladled the name "3DO" into the alphabet soup of new consumer electronics product names at the industry's annual winter trade show here this week, adding more chaos to the most confusing period in the business's history. Time Warner, Matsushita, MCA and Kleiner Perkins had previously announced the joint formation of the 3DO Company to set a new standard for what are known as interactive multimedia players; the devices use compact disks, called CD-ROM's, that can store enormous amounts of video, sound, graphics and text. But late Wednesday, the 3DO team surprised the industry by announcing the addition of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, which brings not only another wealthy equity partner but also a company with the telecommunications clout that could eventually give the new standard a tremendous mass-market edge.

Gov. Lowell P. Weicker Jr.'s call for a statewide school-integration effort will not end a suit challenging segregation in Hartford's schools, but it could lead to a resolution of the suit that would avoid a court imposing a desegregation plan on the state capital and its suburbs. The outlines of Mr. Weicker's plan, lawyers for the plaintiffs in the suit said today, meet one of their basic requirements, that integration be approached on a regional basis.

NEW YORK CITY DAILY NEWS BEGINS NEW ERA WITH LAYOFFS Mortimer B. Zuckerman began a new era at The Daily News with a tense labor confrontation, telling 170 employees, some of whom had worked at The News for decades, that they no longer had jobs. The move by Mr. Zuckerman to cut the membership of the Newspaper Guild by a third signaled a low point for the guild, which represents journalists at several news organizations in New York City. A1.

Mayor David N. Dinkins moved yesterday to give unmarried heterosexual and homosexual couples in New York City some of the rights enjoyed by married couples. Through an executive order, the Mayor created a city registry in which city residents or nonresident municipal workers who live together could register as unmarried "domestic partners." A second executive order detailed several ways in which such partners will now be treated the same as married spouses by the city.