May 20, 1993

The White House abruptly dismissed its seven-person travel staff today and asked the Federal Bureau of Investigation to examine its books. Administration officials, who said the low-level appointees had failed to account for thousands of dollars, questioned some of their contracts with air charter companies. None of the staff members were appointees of the Clinton Administration, and all had worked in the White House for at least a decade. Three who were dismissed said tonight that they had not been told of the F.B.I.'s involvement, and denied any wrongdoing.

Fingerprint by fingerprint, investigators in the World Trade Center bombing are amassing forensic evidence, from New Jersey apartments and a storage locker where bomb-making chemicals were kept, that further links suspects in the conspiracy case. Laboratory reports from the Federal Bureau of Investigation suggest that the fingerprint evidence will be one of the crucial elements that will be unveiled in the trial of the seven people charged in the Feb. 26 bombing that left six people dead and injured more than 1,000.

"When I'm running for office," Herman Badillo once acknowledged, "it's like running against three people because in the Puerto Rican community they call me bah-DEE-oh, in the Italian community they call me bah-DILL-oh, and in the Jewish community they say Herman." Today, nearly three decades after he first sought elective office, fewer New Yorkers may know his name at all, much less how to pronounce it. For a candidate who was often considered ahead of his time, the fundamental question Mr. Badillo now faces is whether time has passed him by -- whether he remains an icon, among Puerto Ricans, in particular, or has become a political relic.

JOHN GUARE is a born, bred and committed New Yorker, a man who travels widely but is firmly convinced there is nowhere else to live. When he is here, he is often afoot, walking his dogs in Greenwich Village, where he lives with his wife, Adele Chatfield-Taylor, or covering the city by himself. On a clear day, he thinks nothing of strolling uptown to Lincoln Center. To the playwright's delight, the movie version of his play "Six Degrees of Separation" has been shooting throughout Manhattan -- at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Central Park, the Strand bookstore. Mr. Guare was especially pleased that a scene was filmed at one of his favorite habitats, the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The investment house owned by Gov. Jim Florio's chief aide and another Florio political associate earned more than one million dollars in three years even though the firm performed little underwriting work, and in some cases none at all, for the money, according to Wall Street executives, lawyers and government officials who did business with it. The firm, Armacon Securities, was federally licensed to buy new bond issues and to resell them to the public, but it lacked almost all of the normal essentials of an underwriter.

RRIIPP. . . . The sound of sawing wood echoed through the aisles at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Manhattan the other day. "Not a reassuring noise to hear at a furniture fair," said Dan Mack, a New York designer, as he trimmed the top of one of his ecologically sensible cabinets. "I think this one grew while it was here," said Mr. Mack, whose reputation as a rustic furniture star keeps growing as well. He was at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair, which for four days made Manhattan a mecca for chair, table and lamp lovers.

EMPIRE CHIEF IS LEAVING Albert A. Cardone will step down as the head of Empire Blue Cross and Blue Shield, the financially troubled insurer of 8.5 million New Yorkers, a state government official said. Mr. Cardone's fate was determined at a meeting of Empire's board of directors, but the terms of his departure were not known. Mr. Cardone served as both chairman of the board and chief executive of the company, posts he has held since 1987. A1. RECESSION SETTLES IN SUBURBS For two decades, New Jersey has been reshaping the American suburb into a powerful magnet for economic growth. But with a four-year recession that is proving deeper for this state than for any other, its grand suburban experiment has hit a roadblock as wide as a semi-trailer jack knifed across Interstate 80. A1.

Saying that traditional measures underestimate the economies in developing countries, the International Monetary Fund has concluded that China's economy is more than four times as large as previously measured. That makes it the third largest, behind the United States and Japan. The new study, to be released next week, also greatly increases estimates of the economies of India, Indonesia, Mexico, Brazil and other developing countries.

Two new studies of more than 120,000 men and women strongly suggest that supplements of vitamin E can significantly reduce the risk of disease and death from fat-clogged coronary arteries. But the researchers and other experts cautioned against rushing out to buy the vitamin supplements before further clinical trials confirm that they are beneficial and safe. The studies, by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, showed that initially healthy people with the highest daily intakes of vitamin E developed coronary disease at a rate about 40 percent lower than comparable men and women whose intake of this vitamin was lowest. The preventive effects of vitamin E occurred independently of any change in blood levels of cholesterol.

Christopher J. Steffen, whose efforts to streamline the Eastman Kodak Company ended abruptly with his resignation last month, will become a top executive at Citicorp in June, responsible for making the nation's largest banking company more efficient and more profitable. Mr. Steffen will join Citicorp's six-member management committee as a senior executive vice president and will also be nominated to the board, John M. Morris, a Citicorp spokesman confirmed last night. 2d Recruitment Try John S. Reed, Citicorp's chairman and chief executive, tried to recruit Mr. Steffen before he joined Kodak earlier this year, Mr. Morris said. Mr. Reed resumed his efforts after Mr. Steffen resigned as Kodak's chief financial officer.

Backed by his party's Congressional leadership, President Clinton appeared today to have quelled a revolt by conservative Democrats in the House who had demanded more spending cuts, fewer taxes and caps on benefit programs like Medicare. But some of the rebellious Democrats insisted, at least for public consumption, that the White House still lacked the votes to pass the President's economic package. And no sooner had the Democratic leadership declared the revolt among House Democrats over than a similar challenge began to take shape among a group of conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans in the Senate. Boren Leads Dissent In what threatened to be a serious setback for the President, the bipartisan group, led by David L. Boren, Democrat of Oklahoma, reached agreement tonight on a plan to swing the Clinton budget sharply away from higher taxes and toward more spending cuts.

SOME words are perfect, and "tacky" is one of them. The dictionary synonym is "poor taste," but tacky says it all and poor taste doesn't. Poor taste doesn't sound right. It's too . . . tasteful. The only alternative expression to tacky even worthy of consideration is "the pits" -- it's slang but it's on the same wavelength. As perfect as tacky is, it isn't an all-encompassing word. It has degrees, gradations and subtle distinctions. Light tack, for example, is the only variety that could conceivably pass for more tasteful poor taste. It consists of "pity they don't know better" actions, regrettable but not all that bad.