October 3, 1993

FOR weeks Cablevision Systems of Woodbury, the cable television company that holds a virtual monopoly on Long Island, has been warning its nearly 600,000 subscribers that certain programs may be missing from its service as early as Wednesday. The problem, the company says in its billing enclosures and cable advertisements, is a Federal law that allows networks to demand payments for allowing cable operators to carry their signals. It was not fair, Cablevision said, for the networks to demand money for what was free to anyone with an antenna. The networks argued that they should be paid, just as cable companies pay to carry premium channels like Showtime and HBO. On Long Island the availability of stations like WCBS-TV, WNBC-TV and WABC-TV was on the line. Now it appears that little will change. In the battle between the networks and the $20 billion cable industry, an industry in which Cablevision is a major player, cable appears to have won. The most fervent holdout, CBS-TV, capitulated, and others had reached or were near agreement.

MAKING IT WORK 3 Barry Benepe's tenacity has produced 20 Greenmarkets for the city -- and for himself, a fair share of critics. NEW YORKERS & CO. 4 This personal trainer won't build your biceps, but he will teach you to spar -- with computer technology.

FROM his spare seventh-floor office here, Ariel Sharon can see a thin gray line in the distance that is the Mediterranean. "The way things are going," the old general and Likud Party elder said, grimly joking, "I'm afraid that's where the Jews of Israel will be pushed." Actually, if any back is to the sea, it is that of Israel's right wing, dominated by Likud and its young American-style leader, Benjamin Netanyahu. The right is convinced that Israel has put itself in mortal peril by accepting the legitimacy of the Palestine Liberation Organization and agreeing to Palestinian self-rule in the occupied Gaza Strip and West Bank. But it has yet to figure out how to respond effectively to this dramatic new situation, which caught it unawares and underlined how out of touch it is despite having run the Government for 15 years, until displaced last year by the Labor Party and its leader, Yitzhak Rabin.

At one point during the 11-day siege of Sukhumi, when Abkhazian separatist forces aided by Russian irregulars were bearing down on the coastal city, Eduard A. Shevardnadze, the Georgian leader, found out that his own bodyguards, fearing for his safety, had confiscated the keys to his car. "They said he yelled at them, called them wet rags, cowards and, excuse me, old women," said a top aide, Teymuraz Stepanov. "And then he jumped into another car and drove off to the front."

OLD FRIENDS By Tracy Kidder. 352 pp. Boston: A Richard Todd Book/ Houghton Mifflin Company. $22.95.