August 21, 1993

In a feat of surgical wizardry, surgeons at Children's Hospital of Pennsylvania yesterday separated 7-week-old Siamese twin girls who relied on a common heart. Only rarely have surgeons successfully divided twins who shared this vital organ. It was a bittersweet triumph since, as had been predicted before surgery, Amy Lakeberg had to give up her life so that her sister, Angela, might have a chance to live. Even with the highly technical surgery, doctors thought it unlikely that either twin would live, some putting the odds as low as 1 percent. With the help of some creative surgery, Angela has so far beaten the odds, but the next three to five days pose a particularly dangerous period.

This forlorn little town of rickety shotgun shacks and 1,467 people, surrounded by the table-top-flat cotton fields of northwest Mississippi, has the spent air of a place that history has passed by. But throughout this forgotten corner of America and in the other poorest parts of the South, hamlets like Jonestown are writing a bitter epilogue to integration. Small towns that were once economically stable and racially mixed are becoming pockets of poverty and overwhelmingly black -- 75 to 100 percent so. 100 With Jobs The pattern is so striking that some experts say a new kind of ghetto is evolving: rural instead of urban, but sharing many conditions of the inner city: white flight, black poverty, a disappearing job base, reliance on government welfare payments, rising crime and social isolation.

Six weeks ago employees of the American Museum of Natural History packed four skeletons into separate boxes and shipped them to Greenland. These were the remains of Eskimos whom Robert E. Peary brought to the museum in 1896 to be interviewed, examined and measured. Their return for a traditional burial in the Arctic permafrost brings to a close a tragic and shameful tale of aboriginal people victimized by scientific zeal. It is a story of human beings brought here as specimens, who with no natural immunities quickly succumbed to diseases of our latitude. It is also a story about the one who survived, a young boy named Minik, who grew up in the Bronx, enrolled at Manhattan College and fruitlessly challenged the Museum, its directors and the lionized discoverer of the North Pole, demanding his father's body so he could bury it.

As they move forward with the Tailhook case, the Navy and Marine Corps are having trouble turning the initial accusations of sexual harassment and abuse at an aviators' convention into criminal charges or administrative punishment. A Pentagon report in April accused 140 fliers of indecent exposure, assault and lying to investigators under oath, among other violations, but the Navy has already dropped half of its 120 cases outright, largely for lack of evidence. Only five Navy cases and one Marine case have so far gone to a military grand jury or to a court-martial.

Striving to negotiate an end to the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina before winter sets in, international mediators today presented a draft peace accord to Bosnian Muslim, Serbian and Croatian leaders and gave them 10 days in which to accept or reject it. Slobodan Milosevic, Serbia's President, and Franjo Tudjman, Croatia's President, who joined the peace talks on Thursday, immediately backed the plan. Leaders of Bosnian Serbs and Croats said they had reservations about the plan, although they indicated that they were also willing to accept it.