August 2, 1993

Known more for glitz and glamour than for the jobs and commerce that it creates, the ever-expanding film and television industry is emerging as a bright spot in an otherwise gloomy economy here. With some $8 billion in revenues last year, the film and television industry has become the leading producer of jobs in the Los Angeles area, eclipsing aerospace, real estate and tourism, which are all in decline.

The same sorts of accusations of lavish spending and poor management that rocked Empire Blue Cross and Blue Shield in New York are also jarring plans from Maryland to Colorado. The latest problems surfaced in Louisiana this week when the State Insurance Commissioner forced the resignations of the local plan's chairman and most of its board members. The commissioner, James H. Brown, accused Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana of squandering premium money on exorbitant salaries and perquisites and engaging in questionable billing practices that may have bilked policy holders and Medicare of tens of millions of dollars. Spoiling an Apple-Pie Image "Blue Cross has always been looked on as American as apple pie," said Mr. Brown, whose action seemed to catch many in the state capital as well as in the plan by surprise. "You used to have blue-chip civic boards and doctors and medical people playing major roles.

Thousands of Lebanese began to stream back home today, creating wild traffic jams on roads leading from Beirut to the agricultural hamlets, villages and small seaside towns of southern Lebanon after a cease-fire reached on Saturday ended a seven-day Israeli bombardment. Dazed residents poured into scores of tiny villages perched on the steep mountain ridges and along the Mediterranean shore to scenes of collapsed houses, burned hulks of cars and concrete rubble. The landscape of destruction was unlike anything seen in years in this country, which has experienced civil strife and war since 1975.

Rickey Henderson is a great player, but . . . That's the way Don Mattingly views the move of his old buddy to the Toronto Blue Jays, the team that leads the Yankees by one game going into their four-game series that begins tonight at Yankee Stadium.

In the hallways of a former Catholic elementary school, refugees from Somalia, Sri Lanka and Eritrea wander from room to room, looking for a way to pass the afternoon. A war widow rebraids her daughter's hair. A group of Somali women wearing long, colorful dresses pores over a pamphlet on the health risks of ritual clitoridectomy, a procedure each of them has undergone. Several children play quietly in a dark alcove marked with a hand-printed sign that says "waiting room."