July 29, 1993

The much-heralded "information superhighway" may well begin as an electronic amusement park in which people play video games over the telephone network. A.T.& T., the nation's leading long-distance company, said today that it had bought part of a company that lets people from around the country play games with one another on personal computers.

In an often partisan hearing, State Senate Republicans yesterday sharply questioned the credibility of a former New York City Board of Elections official who now works for Mayor David N. Dinkins's re-election campaign and raised concerns about whether duplicate registrations and other irregularities could skew a close race this fall. At the hearing at the State Office Building in lower Manhattan, Board of Elections officials acknowledged that they had found as many as 22,000 duplicate registrations on file in the city between the time of the Presidential election last fall and this spring, but they said that a random check of 180 of them had found no evidence that any of those registrants had voted twice. They said they were weeding out the duplicates from the three million voters on the rolls. Duplicate Registrations For years the board has been plagued by administrative problems, and Senator Michael F. Nozzolio of Seneca Falls, the chairman of the Senate's Elections Committee, called the hearing to examine recent reports of sloppy record-keeping and potential irregularities, especially in the wake of big voter registration drives last year. Aides to the Republican-Liberal mayoral nominee, Rudolph W. Giuliani, who lost in 1989 by less than 50,000 votes, have repeatedly claimed there is potential for outright fraud, arguing that duplicate registrations, particularly in heavily black districts, could hurt their candidate this fall.

Providing more evidence of the strong rebound in auto sales, the Ford Motor Company reported today that its earnings had doubled in the second quarter, while the Chrysler Corporation said its profit was nearly four times the level of a year ago. Ford and Chrysler each benefited from the recovering automotive demand in North America. But Ford, which relies heavily on overseas operations, said it lost money in Europe, where auto sales were off drastically from a year ago. Chrysler, which does not have significant European operations, escaped the negative impact of Europe's weak economy. Earnings Meet Forecasts The General Motors Corporation, the largest auto maker in the world, is expected to announce improved earnings on Thursday but, like Ford, will almost certainly be hurt by poor sales in Europe. The three principal nonautomotive subsidiaries of G.M. posted healthy earnings reports today.

THE Hag is talking apocalypse. "It's like a war zone coming back here," he says. "Back here" is the East Coast, and Merle Haggard, the country music legend, has descended from his Northern California ranch to cover it by bus, armed with his guitar.

Heralding the far-reaching changes in the business of health care, Merck & Company, the world's largest pharmaceutical company, announced yesterday that it would spend $6 billion to buy the country's largest mail-order drug company. The purchase of Medco Containment Services Inc. gives Merck a discount drug distribution arm at a time when prescription drugs, its main business, are coming under increasing price pressure from Washington and employers eager to curtail rising health care costs.