January 16, 1993

Consumer prices rose by 2.9 percent in 1992, the best performance in six years, as inflation decelerated in nearly every major category, the Labor Department reported today. Even more impressive, various analysts said, was that the so-called core inflation rate, which excludes food and energy, eased to 3.3 percent. This was the slimmest rise since 1972, when the economy was subject to price controls imposed by the Nixon Administration.

Sammy Cahn, one of the last American songwriters to embody the scrappy can-do spirit of Tin Pan Alley, died yesterday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. He was 79. He had been hospitalized two-and-a-half weeks ago for congestive heart failure, said Ron Wise, a hospital spokesman. A lyricist whose most important collaborators were the composers Jule Styne, Jimmy Van Heusen and Saul Chaplin, Mr. Cahn wrote the words for dozens of songs that became hits, including "All the Way," "Day By Day," "Time After Time," and "Three Coins in the Fountain." The typical Cahn lyric was brashly assertive and often unabashedly sentimental. "When somebody loves you, it's no good unless she loves you all the way," went his opening line for "All the Way," from the 1957 film "The Joker Is Wild." The song became a No. 1 hit for Frank Sinatra and won the year's Oscar.

The Coast Guard has begun moving cutters and will deploy patrol boats and aircraft to the waters north of Haiti to block an expected wave of refugees seeking to reach the United States. Administration officials said the deployment was ordered in consultation with aides to President-elect Bill Clinton. It was intended, in part, to put teeth into Mr. Clinton's announcement on Thursday that he would temporarily abandon a campaign pledge and continue President Bush's policy of returning Haitian boat people without providing them the opportunity to apply for political asylum.

The Bush Administration is ending its days in power with a series of striking decisions affecting national parks, forests, agriculture, land, industrial wastes and endangered species. The decisions -- some supported by business interests, some by environmentalists -- make this the most active period of the Bush Presidency on natural resource issues. Just this week, the United States Forest Service, a unit of the Department of Agriculture, said it would end clear-cutting on 5.3 million acres of national forest in the Sierra Nevada to save the habitat of the California spotted owl and head off a possible threat of its extinction.

Two days after allied planes launched an air strike against Iraq, American forces were again prepared for action tonight, this time over Iraq's refusal to guarantee the security of United Nations inspectors who fly into their country. And even if Iraq backs down, officials said, the Administration may order an attack aimed at some surface-to-air missile batteries that were missed in Wednesday's raid.