October 26, 1993

For all its woodsy wealth, its understated downtown of bistros and boutiques and its ability to calculate millionaires per square mile, this corner of Fairfield County has a very humbling and down-to-earth problem: water. Greenwich, one of the wealthiest towns in the nation, and a paradise for sellers of estate-sized lawn-sprinkler systems, imposed mandatory bans on nonessential water use in late July. It is the only community in the state aside from nearby Darien, which is served by the same water company, with water restrictions, and one of only a handful in the region, state officials said.

He has perhaps the toughest management job in America and he's an I.B.M. executive, but he is not the company's new chief executive, Louis V. Gerstner Jr. Nicholas Donofrio, a slender 48-year-old former chip designer, is faced with the Herculean task of trying to halt the rapid decline of the company's mainframe franchise -- still the company's biggest business, but one battered by vicious price-cutting and threatened by new computers using low-cost microprocessor technology. It is Mr. Donofrio's job to sell machines that have the image, deserved or not, of being the dinosaurs of computing.

In health care today, fundamental principles of the marketplace do not apply. Prices are not determined by supply and demand or by competition among producers. Comparison shopping is impossible. Greater productivity does not lower costs.

For a decade, the Indian state of Punjab has witnessed the most violent of India's many sectarian and ethnic conflicts, with a rebellion by Sikh separatists that led to the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and posed perhaps the most serious threat to Indian national unity. But today, after the years of bloodshed in which thousands have been killed, the atmosphere has changed. The anxiety of Punjabis is no longer driven by the Sikh rebels or gangs who have carried out killings in the past, but by the crackdown by the army and the police.

The Liberal Party, led by Jean Chretien, a Quebec lawyer and former Cabinet minister, steamrolled to victory in elections Monday that foreshadowed major changes in Canada's political landscape. The Liberals swept Ontario and the eastern provinces, crushing the Progressive Conservatives, who have led the country for nine years. A preliminary count gave the Liberals 177 seats in the House of Commons, a clear majority of the total of 295, to just 2 for the Conservatives, who had held the majority.