October 12, 1993

Defying a Presidential order and requests by its own investigators, the Agriculture Department continues to give billions of dollars of business to politically powerful agricultural companies that have been caught rigging bids, fixing prices and defrauding Government programs. Repeatedly in the last decade, the Agriculture Department's Inspector General, the internal watchdog official responsible for investigating corruption and abuse within the department, has urged top department officials to bar these businesses from participating in Government programs or, at the very least, to impose stiff fines on them, according to interviews and thousands of pages of internal documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

NEW YORK CITY ASBESTOS CRISIS LINGERS IN SCHOOLS Three weeks into the fall term in New York City schools, after a delayed start because of the asbestos crisis, classes are still disrupted for more than 50,000 students. While administrators say that teachers have coped creatively, it is not yet clear how the students' educations will be affected. A1.

The children from Public School 4 in the Bronx spent two weeks at the New York Botanical Garden learning biology and botany; now they sit two to a desk in a church basement, trying to make up their other subjects. The students at P.S. 196 in Queens spent half-days at a neighboring school; now they are getting twice the usual homework. And pupils at P.S. 156 in Brooklyn are in their second school of the month and soon will be headed to a third; their own school is closed indefinitely. Three weeks into the fall term in New York City schools, after a delayed start because of the asbestos crisis, classes are still disrupted for more than 50,000 students. Twenty-eight elementary and junior high schools remain closed because of exposed asbestos, and another 300 schools have at least one room closed for abatement.

AS long as there have been poets to pierce the darkness with their diamond songs, and painters to capture rays of sun shattering on cool cathedral stone, and artists of all persuasions to consort with the gods and articulate the union, there have been social critics to notice that an awful lot of these creative people are mentally unsound. "Why is it," Aristotle asked in the fourth century B.C., "that all men who are outstanding in philosophy, poetry or the arts are melancholic?" Three hundred years ago, the English poet John Dryden wrote, Great wits are sure to madness near allied;

Even as arbitragers were betting up the stocks of hospital companies last week after two giant chains, the Columbia Healthcare Corporation and HCA-Hospital Corporation of America, agreed to merge, industry executives and health economists were predicting a grim long-range outlook for both investor-owned and nonprofit hospitals. "There will be a significant amount of hospital failures over the next 10 years," said Richard L. Scott, Columbia Healthcare's chairman. "Society is saying it wants to limit the amount of G.N.P. that we are going to spend on health care."