December 25, 1993

Christmas morning is when people remember the phrase "batteries not included." And the search begins. Page 47.

Changes in the way doctors and hospitals are paid -- how much and by whom -- have begun to curb the steady rise of health care costs in the New York region. Costs are still going up faster than overall inflation, but the annual rate of increase is the lowest in 21 years. Economists said this trend was especially noteworthy in view of the New York region's long-standing identification with high-cost health care. In fact, in recent months, medical-care inflation in the rest of the country has outpaced increases here.

After cresting in Cologne, the floodwaters of the Rhine began to creep back, leaving thousands of families in Germany homeless for the holidays and threatening cities down river in Germany, France and the Netherlands with the possibility of danger, damage and evacuation.

The smallpox virus, one of the biggest killers in history, has won a temporary stay from its planned execution next week because some scientists have begun to argue that the virus could yield useful medical knowledge about smallpox and maybe other diseases. Health officials in the United States and Russia, who hold the last known stocks of the smallpox virus, had planned to destroy them simultaneously by New Year's Eve.

In a renewed display of tension over the resurgence of Russian nationalism, the former Soviet republics grouped in the Commonwealth of Independent States rejected a proposal today by President Boris N. Yeltsin to grant special status to Russians living inside their borders. The Russian President put forward the proposal at a meeting in Turkmenistan of the leaders of the 12 countries that make up the Commonwealth, which comprises all the former Soviet republics except the three Baltic countries.