December 22, 1993

Promising a new direction in health care, Mayor-elect Giuliani nominated New Jersey's Health Commissioner to head New York City's hospitals and clinics. Page B3.

For nearly a decade, Domino's Pizza has enticed customers with a sure-fire marketing gimmick, a promise to deliver pizza within 30 minutes. But stung by a jury verdict in St. Louis last week that awarded more than $78 million to a woman struck by a Domino's driver in 1989, the company said yesterday that it would no longer promise such speedy delivery.

A state-mandated program to help handicapped children in Suffolk County is rife with abuse, a grand jury has found, and aggressive recruiting by poorly regulated treatment centers and therapists has made the $126 million program the most expensive one in the state. In a report released today, the Suffolk County grand jury said that state law gives too much power to therapists and treatment centers to decide which children should receive services and how much to charge, opening the program to abuse and making it difficult to control costs.

Gifts of food used to be the easy, last-minute way to give something that couldn't possibly be objectionable. But those days are definitely gone. Now, nearly everyone has some kind of peculiar relationship with some kind of food. Maybe chocolate is their greatest passion, but its fat content has led them to view a box of candy as potentially lethal. Or maybe fruit seems too virtuous. What is a gift, if not a fulfillment of an inarticulated fantasy?

Two Bronx school superintendents hired to help improve schools and fight graft are being ousted by their local school boards, which have long histories of corruption. The two superintendents, Felton Johnson in District 9 and Robert Henry in District 12, have been notified in recent days that their contracts will not be renewed. The two districts were singled out again last week for censure by the New York City school system's top investigator in a report on voter fraud in the spring school board elections.