August 12, 1993

No mess is too big for Dirt Devil vacuums to clean up, boasts their manufacturer, the Royal Appliance Manufacturing Company. It even says the vacuums have cleaned up a royal mess: Spoofing a racy tabloid newspaper, the cover of Royal's 1992 annual report shows a fictitious newspaper with a picture of Prince Charles and Princess Diana and this headline: "Dirt Devil Unites Royal Family."

In an embarrassing breakdown of communications in the line of command, the Marine Corps said today that it planned to phase out enlistments of married men and women, only to be reversed hours later by Secretary of Defense Les Aspin. A day of almost madcap shifts of policy and public relations gaffes began after reporters took notice of a directive released last Thursday in the name of Gen. Carl E. Mundy Jr., the Marine Corps Commandant, saying the Marines would phase in restrictions against married recruits. The directive said too many young married recruits were failing to re-enlist after long tours away from home.

The New York City Board of Education's asbestos task force has a history of incompetence that stretches beyond the mismanaged federally mandated inspection of public schools, city investigators and board officials say. In 1986, the board was forced to close a school for handicapped children in Washington Heights after the task force failed to supervise an asbestos-removal job adequately. In 1987, the task force concluded that all of its asbestos testing during the preceding seven years was so unreliable that it had to be redone.

In a major bureaucratic overhaul aimed at reducing costs and unifying New York City's health clinics with its hospitals, the Dinkins administration will turn the management of dozens of city clinics over to the public corporation that owns the municipal hospitals. The average patient will not see an immediate change in service at the clinics, now run by the city's Health Department. But city officials say the shift is part of a larger reshaping of the city's health system intended to improve health care for the poor. Ultimately, the goal is to provide a network of neighborhood clinics practicing preventive medicine and working in tandem with nearby hospitals, thus easing the strain on emergency rooms.

President Clinton today picked Gen. John Shalikashvili, the current NATO commander and a critic of early Western inaction on Bosnia, to be the next Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. If confirmed by the Senate as expected, the Polish-born artillery officer would succeed Gen. Colin L. Powell as the armed forces' top officer and the senior adviser to the White House on military affairs. General Powell retires at the end of September.