April 16, 1993

Workers' compensation and automobile insurance, two largely private insurance systems that pay more than $40 billion in health- care bills each year, are presenting the President's Task Force on National Health Care Reform with a devilish dilemma. For people injured on the job or in car accidents, it is workers' compensation or auto insurance that pays their medical bills, not their standard health policies.

L'ALBERGO di Monte Mohonk e bello e romantico -- molto bello, molto romantico. I probably could not have said that before I recently spent a Tower of Babble weekend learning Italian at Mohonk Mountain House, a remarkable hotel magnificently situated within a 7,000-acre wilderness in the Shawangunk Mountains, just 90 miles from New York City. But the resort, which has been a moderately well-kept secret since it was founded in 1869, does encourage flights of rhapsody, in whatever language.

United Nations officials said tonight that Bosnian defenders were negotiating a surrender to Serbian forces of the besieged Muslim enclave at Srebrenica that would guarantee the evacuation of 60,000 civilians and the beleaguered garrison. The officials said Srebrenica could be in Serbian hands as early as noon Friday, and at any rate within two or three days, because Bosnian efforts to defend the city appeared to have virtually collapsed.

WAGNER'S "Ring des Nibelungen," a cycle of four large-scale operas intended to be performed on consecutive evenings, has achieved wide circulation on the stage as well as on disk and tape in recent decades, but the sheer scope of the undertaking insures that each new outing will remain an event. The Metropolitan Opera's current production has been slipping back into the repertory an opera at a time in recent weeks. On Monday evening, the Met will begin two weeklong presentations of the entire cycle to end its season.

After a nationwide search for a president to lead it into the 21st century, Yale University turned to its own campus today and selected Richard C. Levin, a 46-year-old economist who has spent nearly half his life at the university, most recently as dean of its Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Mr. Levin, who will become Yale's 22d president on July 1, faces high expectations. Faculty, students and others will be looking to him to rescue the university from the economic troubles and low morale that plagued his predecessor, Benno C. Schmidt Jr., who resigned last May. Traits Other Than Experience Though Mr. Levin has less administrative experience than other candidates who were said to be under consideration, trustees and other university leaders say he brings important compensating traits to the job: leadership, an insider's knowledge of the institution and an ability to bring factions together on the 11,000-student campus.