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.