October 2, 1993

In Japanese festivals, dozens of people together hoist a heavy portable shrine, known as a mikoshi, and chant as they carry it through the streets. Since it is impossible to tell who is actually doing the lifting, it is only natural that some shrine carriers shirk off, shifting more weight onto others. Japanese companies, too, have what is called "mikoshi management." People work as a group and the achievers often carry the laggards along. Salary depends much more on how long one has worked for the company than on how much one contributes to it.

* How funds did in the third quarter * How to cushion against a market decline Today in YOUR MONEY, pages 37-43.

In the four years since they last ran for mayor, David N. Dinkins and Rudolph W. Giuliani have refined their positions on what should be done for the city's impoverished multitudes and now present voters with distinctly different approaches to homelessness and welfare reform. But even as they have become more sophisticated about the issues, the already staggering scale of the city's social ills has worsened, fueled by a deep, prolonged recession, rising numbers of people with AIDS, a virulent drug crisis, a persistent low-income housing shortage and the spread of tuberculosis.

Two days after the largest earthquake to hit India in 50 years savaged these placid rolling farmlands, flames from dozens of funeral pyres glinted in the dawn, dotting fields of newly cut sugarcane like fireflies. Here and there a solitary figure was faintly visible squatting by the crackling fires. As villagers struggled to come to terms with the loss of their world, estimates of the death toll from Thursday's devastating quake oscillated wildly. Local officials suggested that as many as 30,000 people may have died during those few moments of terror, while the national authorities hewed to the figure of 10,000.

A Justice Department report on the fire that consumed a cult compound near Waco, Tex., and killed most of the group's members criticizes mid- and lower-level Federal agents there who recommended that negotiations be abandoned in favor of a tear-gas assault, according to law-enforcement and Administration officials who have read the report. But the report is said to clear senior officials from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Attorney General Janet Reno of making any significant mistakes, even though Ms. Reno, acting on the advice of the senior bureau officials, ordered the assault on April 19 in which armored vehicles punched holes in the compound and filled it with tear gas.