June 8, 1993

The planning group that more than half a century ago proposed the system of parkways that today unites the New York region has concluded that it is now critically important to identify and protect broad corridors of woods, open space and sparse development that still survive 40 to 100 miles from New York City. The group, the Regional Plan Association, said that vast expanses of open space, previously considered invulnerable, are now threatened. A decade of frenetic development has claimed farmland, forests and verdant private estates from northern Connecticut to southern New Jersey, it said.

It is now almost a year and a half since Italy's corruption scandal erupted, and hundreds of prominent executives and politicians have been humiliated or ruined by the revelations. Not only has the scandal touched virtually every political party and corporation; it has also demonstrated the hollowness of Italy's economy, where hundreds of millions of dollars -- some say billions -- have been wasted in payoffs and other bribes. The Political Damage As local elections showed on Sunday, the damage wrought to the established parties has redefined Italy's political geography.

The serenity of the Milky Way in the night sky masks the appetite of a cannibal. That cannibalism provides an important clue to the extent and nature, if not the identity, of the mysterious invisible matter that dominates the universe. The clue is that a vast halo encompassing the Milky Way galaxy contains 10 times the mass that astronomers can see in the multitude of visible stars. Astronomers said this was the most important estimate yet of the amount of invisible matter in a single galaxy, and proof of the existence of what is known as dark matter.

The Supreme Court ruled today that public school systems that open their schools to after-hours use by community groups must permit religious groups to use the buildings on the same terms. The 9-to-0 decision in a case from Long Island had the effect of overturning a New York State law that state courts and education officials had long interpreted as barring the use of school property for any religious purpose.

Pat Wallace doesn't agonize over her daughter's mental illness anymore. Thanks to medication, Kelly, 31, has emerged from a decade-long nightmare of psychiatric confinement and suicide attempts amid conflicting diagnoses, from schizophrenia to manic depression. "It was almost like I was on the moon -- in a different atmosphere -- but without the proper gear," said Miss Wallace, her voice a little wobbly but her demeanor perfectly poised as she talked in her parents' apartment in Brooklyn Heights. It is the same apartment where she once jumped out the window, landing on a patch of soil four stories below with barely a bruise.