February 27, 1994

Perched on a red leather banquette, squeezed behind a hand-painted cafe table in the nightclub named after her, Laura (Nell) Campbell raised her arms and waved them from side to side. "This is what I've heard they do," she said, "those rave people. They're all doing ecstasy and whole rooms full of them do this for hours on end."

Bill Clinton sat at her cafeteria table at Yale Law School, attended her wedding in 1986, spent hours reminiscing at a private dinner party a week after his inauguration last year. On June 3, he withdrew her nomination for the top civil rights job at the Justice Department. They haven't spoken since.

COMPASSION FATIGUE ON THE HOMELESS In New York, the youths who used to give the old men cigarettes now curse them. In Seattle, the homeless are fined for sitting on sidewalks. Over time, the growing national impatience with the presence of dirty and desperate people has turned frustration to apathy and then anger. A1. New York's new commissioner for the homeless said she would keep trying to have nonprofit groups run the city's homeless shelters. B2. NEW YORK CITY SEARCH OPPOSED FOR AIDS BABIES A panel of New York State AIDS experts rejected a controversial proposal to identify newborn babies that test positive for H.I.V., amid concerns that it would jeopardize the privacy of mothers. A1. Washington is expected to waive a rule and let foreigners with the AIDS virus attend the Gay Games in New York in June. B4. JOB CUTS MAY FOCUS ON POVERTY AGENCY The Giuliani administration has identified many of the city jobs it hopes to eliminate through a severance offer, and almost half of those would come out of the agency that provides services to New York City's poor, officials said. B3. PLAN FOR JOURNALIST'S MURDER RETOLD An admitted murderer and double-crossing drug dealer testified in court that he had recruited a teen-ager to shoot Manuel de Dios Unanue to death without knowing that the victim was a muckraking anti-drug journalist. B3. GIULIANI CRITICIZES SUBWAY CENSORSHIP Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani criticized the Transit Authority for restricting the filming of violent movie and television sequences in the subway system. He said attempts to screen the content of films raised freedom-of-speech questions. B4. SLIWA'S HIRING MAKES MONEY FOR STATION The hiring of Curtis Sliwa as a talk show host on New York City's main public radio station has been a surprising fund-raising bonanza for the station, even though many longtime listeners have stopped donating as a result, WNYC officials said. B3. REGION CUOMO PLEA TO WASHINGTON Gov. Mario M. Cuomo went to Capitol Hill to urge New York's Congressional delegation to keep the fight for a formula that gives the state more Medicaid money at the center of its negotiations on President Clinton's health-care proposals. B5. CLUES SOUGHT IN VIRUS DEATH Health officials began the painstaking medical detective work to explain the death of a Long Island college student last month from a mysterious virus spread through mouse droppings. B5. FISHERMAN SHOT IN HOLDUP AT HOME Three gunmen, one of them masquerading as a police officer, entered the home of a 29-year-old fisherman in Bayville, L.I. Wednesday night and shot him after he refused to give them money, the Nassau County police said. B5. Falling chunks of ice closed several bridges, jamming traffic in the region. B4. Chronicle B4 Neediest Cases B2

Ever worry that the home you might buy could be on or near the next Love Canal? Claritas, a private marketing research corporation based in Alexandria, Va., has created an environmental hazards database that can be accessed by computer or telephone to provide a risk report on any address -- or latitude-longitude point, census tract, Zip Code, county or state -- in the United States. The reports cost $75 for each address and provide a list of every known toxic-waste site and type within one mile. Larger scale and more detailed environmental risk reports can cost thousands of dollars more, however.

Baruch Goldstein's journey through the West Bank settler movement ended singularly on Friday when he fired his assault rifle at a congregation of Palestinians. But the journey began 11 years before in the same place as so many others have: the borough of Brooklyn. Thousands of New Yorkers, many of them from Brooklyn and Queens, have moved into the white concrete houses and apartment blocks of the West Bank since the settler movement began after Israel captured the territories in 1967. Some, like Dr. Goldstein, who was born in Bensonhurst, have gravitated toward the extremes of anti-Arab furor, while others lead placid, less political lives, commuting from the territories to jobs inside Israel.

THE SCENE, IN MANY WAYS, WAS familiar. On a recent blustery afternoon, Mikhail Baryshnikov, the preeminent male dancer of his time, stood in a near-empty Manhattan studio, rehearsing a new dance by Jerome Robbins, the third Mr. Robbins has choreographed for him over the years. In black tights and a blue T-shirt, with his boyish shock of sandy hair, Mr. Baryshnikov cut a lean, sculpted figure. But this is 1994, 20 years since he left Russia's Kirov Ballet to dance in the West, 8 years since he last performed "Giselle," 4 years since he started the White Oak Dance Project, his modern-dance troupe. And like the steps, the patter had changed. "This iswhere I feel so sorry for myself, for my knee, for my age," Mr. Baryshnikov said wryly, holding an arabesque as a cellist played a mournful saraband from Bach's Suites for Solo Cello. The musician switched to a gigue. Mr. Baryshnikov responded, marking the first few bars, then breaking into a jazzy romp. After a somersault, he essayed an immaculate string of turns, a reminder of his greatness in major classical ballet roles. "You've got ballet steps in there," teased Rob Besserer, a charter member of White Oak. Mr. Baryshnikov punched him playfully. "We don't do ballet," he replied.

"A hat," as the 1930's slogan went, "makes all the difference." It certainly did for Karl Lagerfeld, who sent out feather-trimmed, mask-like hats in his Chanel couture collection last month and was the butt of feminist fury. "An insult to women!" came the cry from a fashion editor in The Independent, in London. "Reduced to faceless blowup dolls!"

IN 1986, Little Flower Children's Services, a Roman Catholic agency based in Wading River, found a loving home with foster parents, Margaret and Frank Stadier, for a baby born with H.I.V. The Stadiers, who live in Patchogue, christened the baby Peter, adopted him, and raised him until his death from AIDS six years later. Following Peter's placement, Little Flower started a program that has found homes for dozens of other infants infected with H.I.V.

IN opening fire on Muslim worshipers in the West Bank city of Hebron on Friday, Dr. Baruch Goldstein of Israel added a new weapon to the arsenal of memory that inflames the Middle East. For Israelis, Hebron has always been remembered for the Arab riots that took nearly 70 Jewish lives there in 1929; now, Palestinians can enshrine the name along with past atrocities: Deir Yassin, Kfar Kassem, Sabra and Shatila. The massacre could thereby corrode a fragile peace process that depends on the capacity of both peoples to face and overcome history. And that is probably what Dr. Goldstein had in mind. Far from being the lone, demented criminal that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin branded him, he was the product of an ideology, declaimed by the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, that has found fertile ground on the West Bank as an amalgam of anti-Arab bigotry, religious certainty and nationalist zeal. Dr. Goldstein may have acted alone, and he may, indeed, have been mentally ill. But he existed well within the support network of Kahane followers and other extremists who have been drawn to the Jewish settlements by the free-wheeling, frontier environment that some Israelis dub the Wild West Bank.

BUOYED by a tightening of the market and an improvement in the regional economy, unregulated rents in Manhattan moved upward in 1993, reversing the previous year's downturn, real-estate agents and analysts said. The increase, many of them said, was especially notable on the Upper West Side, where rental space is at a premium and which is rapidly becoming a magnet neighborhood for those interested in just that -- a neighborhood, and all that the word means. Agents said that Greenwich Village, SoHo and TriBeCa were also booming.

TOM BRODERICK, 26, of Larchmont wears a jacket and tie as a representative in his father's State Farm Insurance office in New Rochelle, but several times a year he sheds that uniform for his fireproof black overalls and jacket with yellow reflector stripes and rushes to help other members of the Larchmont Fire Department try to subdue blazes. On evenings and weekends he will more often respond to routine calls like stove fires, burst pipes, smoke alarms or attend meetings, drills and sometimes parades and fund-raising and social events.

"LADIES, what can you expect from a gentleman when you are about to be seated at the dining table?" asked Marc Brett, as a group of 5- to 8-year-olds watched him curiously. Mr. Brett paused a moment for a show of hands, then smiled when he received the right answer. "That's absolutely right. He will pull the chair out for the lady. It's the proper thing to do." Mr. Brett, the director of sales and marketing at the Short Hills Hilton Hotel, was speaking to the children at an elegant luncheon held recently in the hotel's dining room. It was one of several etiquette classes for children the Hilton will offer over the next few months. The mood was formal, somewhat like a debutante ball for tots, with children and their parents in their Sunday best. Each young gentleman and lady received a corsage upon arrival.