January 19, 1994

At 1 P.M. yesterday, Tina Byrd picked up the telephone at Headquarters for Hair, where she is a stylist, and took another step in the long goodbye to her son, Sherif. After almost five and a half years, the police called to tell her that they had arrested someone in the murder of the 10-year-old Bronx choirboy, who was shot to death on a summer day as he played in the spray of a fire hydrant. "It was a sigh of relief but it won't bring him back," Ms. Byrd said with composure but sadness as she worked at the shop in the Highbridge section of the Bronx. Her voice was soft, her words deliberate. "It doesn't put my mind at rest because I'll always miss him."

Staying in Paramount Fight Viacom raised its offer for Paramount, adding cash and assurances that the stock portion of its bid would retain value after a merger. Page D1. Skater Denies Role in Attack Tonya Harding met for more than nine hours with authorities and told them she played no part in the attack on skater Nancy Kerrigan. Page B11. CBS Gets 1998 Olympics Filling a sports programming void after losing pro football, CBS won the rights to televise the 1998 Winter Games in Nagano, Japan. Page B11.

PAUL ZALOOM, political satirist, performance artist, puppeteer and children's television-show host, leans over his plate of smoked trout and begins explaining the theory of relativity. "It's got to do with energy and mass," he says, launching himself with confidence. After all, this is all in a day's work for Mr. Zaloom, who plays the crazy scientist Beakman on the Saturday show "Beakman's World," on CBS.

Three of the largest New York banks said yesterday that losses from bad loans fell sharply in the last three months of 1993 as they renegotiated troubled real estate loans and sold properties they had repossessed. The reduced losses, along with continued strong trading results, led Citicorp and the Chemical Banking and Chase Manhattan corporations to report sharply increased profits for the fourth quarter. All three said profits for 1993 were at record levels.

Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin warned Israelis today that peace with Syria may require them to pay a more "painful price" than they expect in territorial concessions on the Golan Heights. Mr. Rabin offered no hint about what might qualify as a painful price on the Golan, the strategic plateau that Israel captured from Syria in the 1967 Middle East war, but he said a "significant withdrawal" could mean uprooting some of the three dozen Jewish settlements there.