September 28, 1993

Strike Halts Publication Of The New York Post Rupert Murdoch's company said it would cease efforts to buy The New York Post after workers honored one union's picket lines. Page B1. Yeltsin Rejects Election Plan Both President Boris N. Yeltsin of Russia and holdout legislators rejected the compromise proposal for early simultaneous elections for President and Parliament. Page A10. CBS Concedes Cable Battle CBS conceded defeat in its long struggle to win payment from the cable television industry for the rights to carry the signals of the local broadcast stations it owns. Page D1. Doctors Appraise the Plan For a young doctor in private practice, the health proposal is a threat. But for a doctor in an H.M.O., the plan is a non-event. Page B11. James H. Doolittle Dies The aviation pioneer who led the first bomber raid against Japan in World War II was 96. Page B13. Wait Till Next Year The Yankees were eliminated as the Toronto Blue Jays clinched the American League East title. The Chicago White Sox won the West. Page B15.

On a balmy Sunday after church, Elizabeth Crane stood in a parking lot trying to recall her address. It had been a month since the river took the house she lived in for 44 years, the little town of Hardin, Mo., where she settled as a war bride, the antique table linens from her mother in Germany and even the cemetery where she buried her husband. "Let me see," she said, looking to the pavement for clues. She thought hard, then opened her purse and began mining for anything with her house number on it, growing more frustrated with each wrong envelope she found.

For 16 years the case of four mentally handicapped men who died in a boarding-house fire was forgotten, swept into the back corners of memory in a seaside town that measures time in cycles of onslaughts by summer visitors and angry winter storms. For the last five weeks, however, Sea Bright has been squirming under a spotlight cast on the 1977 deaths and how suspicions about them were investigated. The spotlight is coming from an unlikely source, a weekly newspaper based in nearby Red Bank, The Two River Times, and its owner, Geraldo Rivera.

A CONSORTIUM of American companies and the nation's main nuclear weapons laboratory have joined forces to develop and market a revolutionary new type of computer and television display screen based on synthetic diamond film. The new display screens would exploit a recent discovery that synthetic diamond emits showers of electrons when exposed to weak electric fields. The consortium hopes to steal a long march on competitors in the electronics industry, particularly the Japanese, in a technology expected to earn some $9.4 billion by the year 2000.

During the late 1980's, when Spain was booming, Kuwait came shopping for corporations and investments, got a little carried away and plowed $5 billion into paper, chemical and fertilizer companies, as well as two leaning office towers whose bizarre silhouette dominates the Madrid skyline. But now Spain's boom has turned to bust, the Kuwaiti corporate flagship here is in receivership, many of its businesses have closed, more than 20,000 jobs have been lost and the office towers are not even completed much less occupied. As for the investment, it has become the object of countless lawsuits disputing how the money disappeared.

Paramount Communications Inc. cleared the way yesterday for merger talks with QVC Network Inc., the home shopping service, but the Paramount board insisted on proof of QVC's financing before it began discussions. The effect was to create a delay in the start of any talks with QVC. At the same time, by not turning its back on its agreement with its original merger partner, Viacom Inc., Paramount gave Viacom's chairman, Sumner Redstone, additional time to improve his bid.

Rupert Murdoch's company announced early this morning that it would pull out of its agreement to buy The New York Post, after the Newspaper Guild of New York went on strike yesterday and production unions refused to cross the guild's picket line. The announcement put the 420,000-circulation daily at the brink of extinction once again as it failed to publish this morning's editions. Responsibility for the newspaper will now be returned to the Peter Kalikow's bankrupt estate if Mr. Murdoch stands by his position, The Post's publisher said. Mr. Murdoch had been scheduled to complete his purchase of the paper on Friday.

AMERICAN forests are silent battlefields between trees and the pathogens that prey on them, particularly foreign fungi and other blights against which they have not yet developed defenses. The chestnut and the Dutch elm were two eminent casualties of this strife. Now the hemlock and the red pine are under deadly assault. But biologists now have more powerful tools to bring to bear. They are busily working to defend the hemlock against its new foe, the woolly adelgid, and even to restore the American chestnut to its former glory.

Having failed to win acceptance from cable-television operators for three ideas for new cable channels, CBS bitterly conceded defeat yesterday in its long struggle to win payment from the cable systems that carry the signals of the broadcast stations it owns. Not only did CBS fail to win cash payments from cable operators for the right to carry local stations like WCBS in New York, but the network also became the only one of the four broadcast networks to fail to create a new cable channel and receive payment for it from the cable systems in lieu of retransmission fees. Congressional Backing Just last year, in passing a new cable television law, Congress gave ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and their affiliates across the country the freedom to demand money from cable systems, which pay to carry cable channels like ESPN and Nickelodeon but have not paid to retransmit broadcast signals.

Faced with mounting Congressional concern about the mission of American troops in Somalia, the United States has moved away from the goal of capturing the faction leader Mohammed Farah Aidid and is focusing instead on isolating him and creating a political structure without him, Administration officials said today. The new strategy, which has gained urgency since the killing of three American soldiers on Saturday, is aimed at dispelling the view that the United States is nothing but a combatant in the fighting, determined to use whatever force may be necessary to punish General Aidid.

SCIENTISTS have known for more than two decades that birds and many other animals navigate with help from the earth's magnetic field. It now appears, however, that birds must frequently calibrate their sense of magnetic direction using many nonmagnetic cues, including the natural polarization of daylight. New research, moreover, suggests that in at least one species, the bird's eye detects the earth's magnetic field using the energy of daylight to sensitize a chemical in the retina to the earth's magnetic polarity.

President Clinton today laid down a long list of American conditions for sending peacekeeping troops to Bosnia and called on the United Nations to be much more selective about where it sends such troops in the future, saying the United States could not afford to go on subsidizing open-ended missions. In his first address to the United Nations General Assembly, which has just begun its annual fall session, Mr. Clinton also proposed a worldwide treaty that would ban production of fissile materials for nuclear weapons. But the thrust of his remarks was an appeal to overhaul the peacekeeping machinery of the United Nations and to define more clearly its mission in the post-cold-war world. [ Excerpts, page A16. ]