February 28, 1994

The tension between the United States and Russia over the war in Bosnia and Russia's spying in Washington has raised the question in the minds of many: Just what is the relationship between America and Russia today? Allies? Not exactly. Enemies? Not really. Acquaintances? That's not it either. Across Washington last week, officials, diplomats and lawmakers struggled with that question as Russia has engaged in more and more behavior that seems hostile to American interests.

For Genaro Parra, memory returns with every glance at the putty-filled bullet holes that dot the blue Formica counter in his restaurant. Nancy Burgos sidesteps her memory of a brother by taking another route to work. One of Mr. Parra's cooks cannot walk through a back room without seeing visions of bodies and blood. One night last March, a gunman walked into Mr. Parra's seven-seat Mexican luncheonette, known as the Lena, in the Bedford Park section of the Bronx. The man yanked down the security gate, ordered the cashier to hand over the $100 in the till, then shot four people. Three were killed; the fourth, a teen-ager, was shot in the head but survived by pretending to be dead, and was left partially blind.

The sudden, spectacular brush with bankruptcy last month of Metallgesellschaft A.G. is exactly the sort of debacle that Germany's system of corporate control is supposed to make impossible. Like most German companies, the Frankfurt-based metals and engineering conglomerate has both a managing board that runs the business and a supervisory board that oversees the managers. Controlling Metallgesellschaft was an especially formidable task, given its labyrinth of 258 subsidiaries with annual sales of $15.5 billion and 58,000 employees worldwide in businesses as diverse as zinc smelting and plant construction.

The Federal Reserve, having dropped its reliance on the money supply figures that made markets soar or swoon in the 1980's, is increasingly basing interest rate decisions on an approach best summed up as banker's intuition. When Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Fed, gave his semiannual testimony before Congress on Tuesday, the only section of his written testimony that he did not bother to read aloud concerned money supply measures like the M-2, which represents the total of cash, checking accounts, savings accounts, certificates of deposit of less than $100,000 and several other financial instruments.

In the age of computer communications and digital telephone calls, the American people must be willing to give up a degree of personal privacy in exchange for safety and security, the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation said. In an interview on Friday, Louis J. Freeh, the F.B.I. Director, defended proposed legislation that critics say would turn the nation's telephone network into a vast surveillance system. He said taxpayers would be asked to pay up to half a billion dollars to develop and deploy the necessary network software.

The Economy The F.B.I. chief says Americans must be willing to give up a degree of privacy, in exchange for safety and security, in an era of computer communications and digital telephone calls. Louis J. Freeh is defending proposed legislation that would enable law- enforcement agents to gather a wealth of personal information by monitoring citizens' calling patterns and credit-card transactions over the phone network. Critics say the legislation would turn the telephone network into a vast surveillance system. [ Page D1. ]

Six months ago, the nation's diabetes experts made a sensational announcement. By following a strict medical regimen, they said, diabetics can measurably slow the onset and maybe even prevent the dire complications of the disease. The threat of blindness, kidney failure, heart attack or amputation, they proclaimed, could be greatly reduced or virtually eliminated. Diabetes centers across the nation geared up for an onslaught of patients wanting to begin the new treatment. They hired more staff members, added telephone lines, prepared educational materials and ordered the home monitoring devices that would allow diabetics to test their blood sugar 4 to 10 times a day. The blood sugar tests are a crucial part of the tight regimen that the study, which followed 1,441 patients with Type I diabetes for nine years, found to be clearly beneficial.

On the night before he killed more than three dozen Muslims at prayer in the dimly lighted Cave of the Patriarchs, Dr. Baruch Goldstein himself prayed in the cave, on the Jewish side of the shrine. He was there to participate in services marking the Jewish holiday of Purim. But when Arab worshipers on the other side of the partition began to taunt the Jews, Dr. Goldstein seemed particularly distraught, other settlers said.

Khalid Abdul Muhammad, the Nation of Islam speaker who ignited a furor in recent weeks with a vitriolic attack on Jews, Catholics and others, has delivered a harsh new tirade against Jews, blaming them for the death of Jesus and saying he prays "that God will kill my enemy and take him off the face of the planet Earth." Addressing a black women's group in Baltimore nine days ago, Mr. Muhammad defended and repeated many remarks in his speech at Kean College in Union, N.J., last November, when he called Jews "bloodsuckers of the black nation," labeled the Pope a "no-good cracker" and urged black South Africans to kill all whites.

A new radio format is taking shape from San Francisco and Seattle to Austin, Tex., Nashville and East Hampton, L.I. About 50 commercial stations, and an equal number of noncommercial ones, have converted to what the industry calls adult album alternative, or A.A.A., although neither name is as euphonious as the sound the stations seek. "I don't like the word 'alternative,' " said Steve Richards, the program director at WEHM-FM, in East Hampton, which changed to the format in October. "It's sort of rock. No, I don't like the word 'rock'; that connotes head-banging. It's geared for adults, but no pop."

Seeking to defuse Arab anger and allay international concerns over the Hebron massacre, the Israeli Government today ordered some of the toughest measures ever taken against militant Jewish settlers in the occupied territories. The actions, which were accompanied by the creation of a commission to investigate the massacre and by the planned release this week of up to 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, affect a relatively small number of settlers for now. At his headquarters in Tunis, Yasir Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, quickly rejected them as "empty, hollow" gestures. [ Page A8 ]

NEW YORK CITY A HOSPITAL GRAPPLES WITH DECAY In a city where even many private hospitals are old and crumbling, Kings County Hospital has been a symbol of inefficiency and decay, even to the medical personnel who remain dedicated to the place and to the many poor or uninsured, for whom it is the only sure way to gain access to CAT scans or chemotherapy. A1.