February 7, 1994

Insurance companies are expected today to announce losses of $2.5 billion from the Los Angeles earthquake last month. That loss is only a small part of the total damage, now estimated at $20 billion or slightly less, but enough to make it the third-most-expensive disaster ever for insurers. Although 5 of the 10 most expensive insurance losses since 1950 have occurred in the last five years, the flurry of claims does not seem to have caused a severe increase in the cost of insurance, except in some coastal areas at risk of hurricanes. Still, higher prices for insurance to protect homes and buildings in other regions have been widely forecast.

Preliminary 1993 ozone data shows that this summer's intense heat produced an increase in smog in the region. Smog, or ground level ozone, is created in sunlight by the interaction of chemicals from gasoline or car engines and nitrogen oxides. New York, New Jersey and Connecticut all saw a jump in the number of days the federal standard for ground level ozone of 120 parts per billion was exceeded. Although ozone violations have been decreasing over the past ten years -- partly because of cleaner fuels and the gradual replacement of older cars -- the 12 Eastern states from Virginia to Maine agreed last week to impose more stringent auto emission standards to control smog.

Some of them make their way to class with the aid of walkers or wheelchairs. Others who are in their 90's have trouble completing reading assignments in less than two weeks. But the 550 members of the Institute of Retired Professionals are for the most part enthusiastic students of a daunting variety of academic subjects at the New School, and now they are angry. What has them upset is a proposal by New School administrators to change an adult learning program that has been jointly sponsored by the institute and the New School for more than 30 years.

DEATH OF A LEGEND: SHEA & GOULD For a change this year, Milton S. Gould, the 84-year-old paterfamilias of the law firm Shea & Gould, decided to wait out the winter in a pastel house with a pool and a dock in Naples, Fla. And that is where he was last week, reeling from a bitter blast from New York: while he was on vacation, the partners in the scrappy law firm that bore his name voted it out of existence. A1.

When Gerry Nelson and his first wife divorced five years ago, she got the house and he agreed to pay $150 a month in child support for their daughter and figured the deal was done. But after Britain overhauled its system of child support last year by taking responsibility for setting and collecting payments, Mr. Nelson's agreement, like those of thousands of others, is being undone and he will at least have to increase his payments by 100 percent.

Claire Shulman, the formidable Borough President of Queens, had just vowed to "break anybody's head who tries to take my cultural money and put it in the Metropolitan Museum of Art" when her chief aide cleared her throat, a bit nervously. A towering pile of blue budget books had just arrived from City Hall, and Alexandra Rosa, Ms. Shulman's chief of staff, found in them a line of numbers her boss wasn't going to like.

After 11 months of being trapped, Igor Boras thought he had escaped war-torn Sarajevo on Friday. By the time he arrived at the Olympics, the hemorrhaging had caught up to him. On Saturday, as he walked through the Oslo airport, Boras looked up at a television screen. He could not believe what he saw. Bodies were stacked where bread and macaroni and beans had once been in Sarajevo's central market. Sixty-eight were dead, some 200 wounded by a mortar attack. A prosthesis lay on the ground, attached to a boot but no longer to a person. Boras did not want to see any more.

The Economy Many employers have turned to open-ended H.M.O.'s, having found in them a way to tame rising health care costs while giving employees freedom to choose their own doctors and hospitals. These point-of-service plans have gone from a little-used option to become the nation's fastest-growing type of health plan. [ Page A1. ]

Japanese auto executives do not have to be reminded about the Chrysler Corporation's new Neon, the small car with the low price that has been dubbed a "Japanese car killer." It is just the latest threat to Japanese auto manufacturing, which these days finds itself in the unaccustomed role of being on the retreat in a growing American market. But the Neon has already been recalled twice because of defects, a portent perhaps that any notion of knocking out the Japanese may be fanciful.

Police Commissioner William J. Bratton announced yesterday that he was authorizing officers to carry additional rounds in the 9-millimeter semiautomatic handguns being phased in by his department. The announcement by Mr. Bratton, providing for a magazine of 15 rounds rather than 10, removed a limit imposed by his predecessor when the Police Department introduced the semiautomatic weapon last year. The 10-round magazine was preferred by Raymond W. Kelly, then the Commissioner, to address concerns that officers in stressful situations would empty their guns and possibly wound bystanders.

The newspaper of the future may -- or may not -- be here. Last May, The San Jose Mercury News started a series of electronic services available by computer, telephone and fax. It calls them electronic extensions of the newspaper -- on-line copies of the contents of the newspaper, news updates, news conference transcripts, electronic "chats," movie theater schedules and more.

In what seems the realization of the worst nightmare of a generation of dedicated Vietnamese Communists, the Vietnam War has now given way to the opening volleys of the Cola War. In the first days after a 19-year-old American trade embargo against Vietnam was lifted, most large American consumer products companies are still nowhere to be seen here. Their people are not yet in place; their advertising campaigns are still weeks away.