July 23, 1993

A plan to offer up to $2 million in Government money for information about a missing suspect in the World Trade Center bombing has been stymied since mid-April by a dispute over what agency should foot the bill, officials acknowledged today. The disagreement between the State Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation has meant that the United States has still not offered a reward for information about Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, who is believed to have fled to Iraq soon after the attack. The officials say privately that they fear the United States may have squandered a crucial chance to track down Mr. Yousef before he disappeared in the Middle East.

Despite increasing pressure from Republican senators to spell out her positions on controversial issues, Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg today resisted giving her views on the death penalty and gay rights as she completed her third day of testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. With little suspense over the outcome -- she is expected to be confirmed easily as the nation's 107th Supreme Court Justice -- the day's hearing was highlighted by a display of just how much the committee's Democratic and Republican members have traded roles since Bill Clinton's election. [ Excerpts from the hearing, page A16. ]

The Federal Reserve said today that the main yardstick it used in guiding the economy's growth for more than 15 years had become so unreliable that it would largely abandon it. Alan Greenspan, the central bank's chairman, said the Federal Reserve would stop relying on growth in the money supply -- its traditional tool -- and begin relying on interest rates, an approach more akin to the way it worked before it started relying on the money supply figures. Changes in Investments In an appearance before the Senate Banking Committee today, Mr. Greenspan said the central bank was jettisoning the money supply approach because changes in the way Americans invest their money meant it could no longer predict how much economic growth would be produced by a certain amount of growth in the money supply.

When he was questioned by state investigators about a lack of coordination between City Hall and the police during the violence in Crown Heights two summers ago, former Deputy Mayor Bill Lynch responded this way: "My position was always, whether that was good or bad, was that we worked different sides of the street." Behind the voluminous official state report on Crown Heights, with its finding that a long skein of leadership failures and miscommunications allowed the violence to rage out of hand, city and police officials said yesterday, was a sense of divided responsibility for handling the crisis.

Scrambling through cornfield flotsam into a borrowed boat, Richard Frakes ignored the terrible beauty of what the river had done. He was too intent on reaching his mother's inundated house a mile distant on the watery horizon and wading into the upstairs in search of a computer disk. "The family tree is in the computer," he said, anxiously pushing off from a riverbank that had rushed four miles inland from where it used to be, before the rain-swollen waters systematically brushed aside the levees and sandbags and rolled 11 feet over the best of this farming hamlet.