May 11, 1993

OF the United States' 20,000 native plants, about 4,200 are threatened with extinction, perhaps 750 of them within a decade. In the hope rescuing as many as possible, conservationists -- the Johnny Appleseeds of the 1990's -- are sowing the American landscape with rare and endangered flowers and shrubs. But these introductions are proving surprisingly controversial. Many fail. That can mean disaster if, as sometimes happens, the transplantation is done to compensate for a developer's destruction of the plant's existing habitat. The price of success could be almost as high in some cases: ecologists fear that other native plants could be crowded out if an endangered species is introduced outside its natural range or if an ecosystem is manipulated to favor it over other species.

NEW YORK CITY 7 INDICTED IN KILLING OF A JOURNALIST Angered by articles about the multibillion-dollar drug trade, leaders of a Colombian cocaine cartel ordered the murder of a crusading Spanish-language journalist, Manuel de Dios Unanue, who was slain in a Queens restaurant 14 months ago, Federal authorities said. The authorities announced that two suspects had been indicted in the murder, and law-enforcement officials said that five others had been arrested in the conspiracy but that the indictments against them had been sealed. A1. The Cali cocaine cartel is a strong and brutal presence in Jackson Heights. B2. 17 MONTHS LATER, ANOTHER SON IS KILLED A Marine Corps recruiting sergeant home on leave for Mother's Day was shot and killed as he sat on a Bronx park bench a few feet from the spot where his only brother was shot and killed 17 months ago. B3. CHOICE BETWEEN RIVALS TROUBLES DINKINS An effort to forge a black-Hispanic coalition to bolster Mayor Dinkins's re-election campaign has led to a standoff between a black and a Hispanic candidate for the city's No. 2 office and put the Mayor in a delicate bind between political calculation and old loyalties. B3. A majority of the New York City Board of Education lined up to elect Carol A. Gresser, a longtime parent association leader in Queens, as the next board president, but Mayor Dinkins made a last-minute plea to delay the vote. B3. REGION RAIL NETWORK IS EXPLORED With faith that three-hour train trips from New York to Boston will be commonplace in a few years, about 100 rail experts gathered in Warwick, R.I., to sketch out the next step: an advanced rail network that would extend over much of eastern North America. B4. DUN & BRADSTREET TO MOVE STAFF In what Connecticut officials hailed as a victory for their economic-development campaign, Dun & Bradstreet, the financial information company, said that it had accepted a $7.2 million grant from Hartford and would move its headquarters staff of 300 people from midtown Manhattan to Wilton, Conn. B5. SCHOOL OFFICIALS OPPOSE STATE TAKEOVER Undaunted by a scathingly critical state report on Newark's schools, the school district's officials acknowledged problems but said they remained unalterably opposed to a state takeover of the system. B5. FEWER SHAD IN THE HUDSON Swimming upstream with the tides, shad are returning from the Atlantic Ocean to the Hudson River later than usual and in smaller numbers. Commercial fishermen in the river attributed the late season to a cold March. B5. BUNGEE JUMPING FROM CRANES IS BANNED New Jersey banned bungee jumping from cranes, but said the sport could continue where permanent platforms are built. B4. A woman who authorities say is suffering from depression was arraigned in Nassau County on charges of trying to kill her daughter. B4. Chronicle B4 Our Towns by George Judson B5

Bitter Croat-Muslim battles in Mostar, sandwiched between cease-fire agreements, will only complicate the already tangled attempts to patch together a peace in the Balkans, Western diplomats in Croatia say. The new fighting also underlines the fact that the Serbs are not the only aggressors in Bosnia, the diplomats said. This bolsters those opposed to Western military involvement on the ground that Bosnia and Herzegovina is a quagmire of feuding groups from which a foreign power would never extricate itself.

International Under intense pressure from the White House, some leading Congressional critics of the North American Free Trade Agreement are toning down their oratory. A few are even saying they might support the pact after all. [ Page D1. ] China has become the largest buyer of gold, ending the United States' 25-year reign and giving gold's price a new buoyancy. Much of last year's purchase was in the form of gold jewelry. [ D1. ]

As 17-year-old Daniela Furci sat crying in the chambers of a judge last June, he took her green identification card, ripped it up and ordered her to get a new one with her real name, Mariana Zaffaroni. He warned her never to use the name Furci again. Two days earlier, a blood test proved that she was not the child of the Argentine couple who had raised her but the daughter of slain Uruguayan leftists. The man she had assumed was her father, a former secret police agent named Miguel Angel Furci, had played a part in kidnapping her mother and father when she was 18 months old.

Petty Officer 3d Class Paul Gilberry glanced up from his makeshift bunk in the torpedo room on the attack submarine Montpelier and said that as long as his shipmates did their jobs well, he didn't care if they were homosexual or heterosexual. "I rely on my shipmates to be professionals," said Petty Officer Gilberry, 22, of Fort Lauderdale, Fla. "I can trust a homosexual as well as anyone else to bring me a fire extinguisher in a casualty situation."

IN a few weeks, its promoters hope, crowds of dinosaur fans will pack theaters to watch "Jurassic Park," Steven Spielberg's $56 million dinosaur movie, the most ambitious Mesozoic-monster film ever made. Based partly on recent advances in microbiology, the movie's visual thrills and state-of-the-art animation may leave audiences gasping. Scientists seem as eager as anyone else to see the highly publicized film, which incorporates some of the latest discoveries about the preservation of the DNA of extinct animals. But many microbiologists are critical of the movie's speculative premise that dinosaurs might one day be resurrected from the dead. Some scientists are also uneasy about what they perceive as an anti-science bias in the plot, a charge that the author himself acknowledges.

Needing a factory to build a new generation of engines, Audi, the German car maker, spent years considering sites in Spain, France, Austria and eastern Germany, among others. It finally made a choice that is becoming increasingly common among Western manufacturers: Eastern Europe. In particular, Audi and many other manufacturers have picked this Hungarian region 30 miles from the Austrian border to take advantage of sharply lower labor costs and access to Western markets.

The Clinton Administration has decided to invite air traffic controllers dismissed in their 1981 strike to reapply for their former jobs, Administration and Congressional officials said today. The controllers, barred from re-employment by President Ronald Reagan, would be allowed to seek reinstatement after the Administration decided how many were needed, what criteria to use in their rehiring and what retraining they would require.

A man posing as a subway motorman took an A train carrying hundreds of passengers on a 47-mile trip through the city Saturday, until he finally tripped an emergency brake because he was speeding, transit officials said yesterday. Then, taken to Transit Authority headquarters by a transit inspector, the man bolted and escaped into the Borough Hall station in downtown Brooklyn, officials said. Later discovered to be an impostor, he was still at large yesterday.

For decades telescopic sights, triangulation and trigonometry tables were good enough for laying out roads and figuring out town boundaries. But Adolph N. Sokolyansky deals with a problem that demands higher precision: garbage. Out for another day of work at the Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island, already the nation's largest landfill and still growing, Mr. Sokolyansky sets up his surveyor's tripod, sends out a beam of infrared light and makes calculations, using the speed of light as a yardstick. His aim: to make sure that every cubic inch of space is used.

China has become the largest buyer of gold, ending the United States' 25-year reign and giving gold's price a buoyancy it has not had in a decade. Last year, the Chinese bought more than 350 metric tons of gold, much of it in the form of chuk kam, or pure gold jewelry, according to the annual report on the gold market by Gold Fields Mineral Services of London. Its figures are the most closely watched in the market, and this year provided some of the first concrete data on Chinese gold purchases.