May 4, 1993

A donnybrook between the giant Marriott Corporation and Hilton Hotels is riling the hotel industry. And as the invective has intensified, the Hyatt Hotels Corporation has cautiously sided with Hilton while Holiday Inn has come down equally gingerly on the side of Marriott. "But mostly it's been kind of fun just sitting back watching our competitive brethren go at one another," Ken Pierce, a vice president of Holiday Inn, said.

Merrill Lynch & Company, the lead underwriter for New Jersey Turnpike Authority bonds, said today that it had suspended three senior executives involved in a $2.9 billion bond transaction that is now the subject of a Federal investigation. Merrill Lynch said a routine audit had turned up "apparent irregularities" related to transactions conducted in 1992 with Armacon Securities, a bond consultant in Camden County. The irregularities raised the suspicion of improper payments to Armacon to obtain more bond business.

Six people including a baby were slain -- most of them beaten, stabbed and strangled -- in an East Harlem apartment that was then set on fire yesterday in an apparent attempt to conceal the crime. The motive for the brutal killings remained a mystery yesterday as the police questioned a former boyfriend of one of the dead women, who was the center of a family striving for a better life. The police speculated that the crime was not connected to drugs but rather was an act of revenge, or a crime of passion. They grappled to explain why the bodies were so mutilated -- with bruises, slashes and rope burns -- and how one or more people could have killed an entire family without attracting attention in the densely populated Thomas Jefferson Houses, a public housing project on East 115th Street.

Mayor David N. Dinkins presented a $31.4 billion budget plan yesterday that drew criticism from independent fiscal experts for putting off tough decisions in an election year. Mr. Dinkins proposed a modest series of cuts, including eliminating the Police Cadet Corps, ending 300 community college classes and slowing reductions in the commercial rent tax. But the core of the plan was his proposal to close a half-billion-dollar budget gap by relying on state and Federal aid that has yet to materialize.

ROGER D. CONE, a molecular biologist at Oregon Health Sciences University in Portland, has a dog named Koda, a big, grizzled, lumbering tail-thumper who is part German shepherd, part collie. Lots of people own dogs that look like Koda, but not many are likely to know the molecular nuances of why their pets bear the coat colors they do. And it is because his dog so perfectly embodies basic principles of mammalian pigmentation that Dr. Cone has brought the animal into the laboratory to serve as exhibit A. "Koda has classic agouti fur," says Dr. Cone, pushing apart a patch of the creature's thick pelt so the individual hairs can be seen in detail. "Black at the base, a yellow stripe in the center and black at the tip -- that's the archetypal agouti." As though in proud concurrence, Koda thwacks her tail on the floor.