September 19, 1993

King Hussein's Choice To Jordanians, a minority in their own land, and to their King, accustomed to political leverage, the future may depend on how the Israeli-Palestinian agreement plays out. Page 12. Recycling Goes to the Office The next battleground in the fight to reduce New York's waste is the trash basket at work, be it in an office, a restaurant or a factory. Page 45. The Talk of Kentucky For more than a year, Kentuckians have been transfixed by a relentless stream of revelations about corruption in state politics. Page 26.

Ilya Drutz, an agile, round-cheeked boy of 12, was calmly describing his decision to become circumcised. Last summer, he attended Moscow's first Jewish camp. "Before I went to the camp I knew nothing about my religion, and I felt very uncomfortable," he said. "My father is a writer and my mother a librarian, and religion wasn't talked about at home."

If the Yankees manage to rise from their precarious position and somehow win the American League East, they will remember yesterday's wacky game and smile. They will remember the overzealous fan who charged onto the field near third base in the ninth inning, caused the third-base umpire, Tim Welke, to call timeout and nullified Mike Stanley's game-ending flyout. The Yankees never made that final out again. Somewhere, that kid was smiling. Buoyed by their new opportunity and what amounted to getting an extra out, four straight Yankees reached base after the bizarre incident and helped them rebound from a seemingly insurmountable 3-1 deficit to emerge with a 4-3 victory over the Red Sox at Yankee Stadium. Don Mattingly clubbed a single off Greg Harris to deliver the tying and winning runs and climax the game that had two distinct endings, but the Yankees understood the thrilling rally might not have happened without the teen-age instigator.

The civics books suggest that the real wheeling and dealing over restructuring the health care system will begin Wednesday, when President Clinton formally presents his proposals to a joint session of Congress. But in fact, for seven months, in a marathon series of meetings within the Government and with 1,100 outside groups, the Administration's health planners have already agreed to a complex series of political trade-offs. One way of comprehending the intricacy of this plan, which is a challenge even to those who have spent their careers in health policy, is to understand the basic political strategy behind it.

EVER since Franklin D. Roosevelt mused, at the height of World War II, that he might someday try to make peace between Jews and Arabs, every American President has fantasized about his own chances of reaching that goal. Now it's Bill Clinton's turn to dream.

The environmental side agreement that President Clinton negotiated to the North American Free Trade Agreement is much broader and ambitious than the companion labor agreement, one reason why many environmentalists now support free trade with Mexico and Canada while labor leaders are united against it. Final legal texts released this week by the White House have made labor unions even more unhappy. They show that while the environmental pact will create a powerful three-nation bureaucracy to pursue a wide array of environmental problems, the labor pact will create a much smaller and tamer apparatus limited in its enforcement powers to a narrow range of specific issues.

With a settlement of the war in Bosnia apparently one step closer, President Clinton may be forced in coming weeks to confront the prospect of sending a large contingent of American troops to the Balkans as part of an international peacekeeping force. Despite reports this week from Geneva that an agreement was near between the Muslim-led Bosnian Government and its Serbian foes, almost all the details remain to be worked out if talks resume on Tuesday in Sarajevo as planned. Lord Owen, the European Community mediator, cautioned today that the date was not firm, but said an accord seemed "tantalizingly close."

Compounding the disarray as the opening of New York City's schools approaches tomorrow, the Board of Education failed yesterday to release as promised a complete list of the elementary and junior high schools that would have to be closed because of asbestos problems and those whose schedules would be reshuffled. Superintendents of the city's 32 local school districts frantically continued to try to determine which of their schools could not open and to find alternatives. Their efforts, however, appeared hampered by the enormousness of the task and by a logjam of results from asbestos tests and visual inspections.

Remember that callous wisecrack about the people the Wall Street crash of 1987 put out of a job? Question: "How do you call a stockbroker?" Answer: "Waiter!" In the 1990's, the unwitting targets of such gallows humor could well be surgeons, hospital workers, health-insurance brokers and pharmaceutical researchers. Under President Clinton's health proposal, which would light a fire under a number of trends already happening, a lot of Americans in the medical business, many of them well paid, would be looking for new and often less lucrative lines of work, or at least seeing their incomes fall substantially. Others, however, would adroitly seize new opportunities and come out far ahead.

The Eyes of Texas had already begun to accept the worst. Outmanned and outgained by a Syracuse team with aspirations of a national championship, the young, unranked Longhorns were facing defeat as Pat O'Neill lined up for the 33-yard field-goal attempt that would save the Orangemen. But when O'Neill's kick sailed wide right with 8 seconds to play -- wide by at least a yard -- it became Syracuse's last special-teams mistake in an emotional 21-21 tie that had the feel of a surprising victory among the crowd of 65,897 at Memorial Stadium and the pain of a baffling defeat on the Orange sideline.

HE said it was just one of those youthful acts of experimentation. He thought that it might be fun to dabble in intravenous-drug use. So he and several friends from his neighborhood in Brooklyn injected heroin and cocaine on and off for about a year, sharing needles along with the drugs. He was 18, and the year was 1980. He had never heard of AIDS and never gave the disease much thought until five years later. Two friends from his drug-using days who had been diagnosed as infected with H.I.V., suggested that he have his blood tested.

ON the Yankee Stadium scoreboard beyond left field, the electric bulbs glowed through the gloomy grayness like a lighthouse in the fog: TOR 5