August 6, 1993

The United States and Canada settled a five-year-old trade dispute today that had threatened to result in sharply higher prices for imported Canadian beer. Mickey Kantor, the United States trade representative, and Trade Minister Thomas Hockin of Canada struck the deal during a recess from their continuing negotiations on labor and environmental issues linked to the North American Free Trade Agreement. The talks, which also include Trade Minister Jaime Serra Puche of Mexico, are scheduled to continue on Friday.

Super juggernaut of an adventure owes nothing to the past, including that series.

As if 54,386 lawyers in five boroughs are not enough, New York suddenly has 13,000 more. For the next six days, the city is playing host to the American Bar Association, which is holding its 115th annual meeting here. Lawyers from throughout the country, along with bar leaders from 35 countries, along with various spouses and dependents, will fill 21 hotels and clog the city's sidewalks in their annual ritual of enlightenment, enrichment and entertainment.

A CYNICAL self-promoter partial to fad diets and naughty jokes, Thomas Alva Edison was the sort one would have dreaded visiting when he was alive; antisocial, all but deaf, he chewed tobacco when he wasn't chain-smoking and was happy to call a man a fool to his face. Fond of bromides like "If there is an evil in the world for which there is no excuse, it is stupidity," he was a rumpled crank who badgered his underpaid employees, ignored his faithful wife and neglected his fractious children. I was happy, then, that America's most prolific inventor wasn't around when I was standing in the dim, mahogany-paneled library of his research lab in West Orange, N.J. In the absence of the paranoid Edison (who died in 1931 at the age of 84), I could examine the yellowed notes on his desk, meditate on an oddly sensual portrait of the inventor as a pouty young genius and gape at a statue called "The Genius of Electricity," a winged marble nymph brandishing a blazing light bulb.

Over the last decade, New York City and 30 states have turned to a social program that seemed to offer remarkable results. With just a brief but intensive dose of counseling and social services, proponents said, the appealingly named "family preservation" program would keep families together and children out of expensive foster care. The Clinton Administration has embraced the approach. But as Congress considers a budget package this week that would pour more money into such programs, researchers say a growing body of evidence suggests that family preservation has not lived up to its name.