March 3, 1994

In the end, it was a shattered window and some observant New Yorkers who helped lead the police to arrest Rashad Baz in the drive-by shooting of four Hasidic students on the Brooklyn Bridge, New York City police officials said yesterday. Cases like this are typically solved when the police capitalize on the mistakes of their suspects, and this case appears to illustrate the rule. For all the helicopters and patrol cars involved in the search, and for all the assistance of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the police official said, the gunman might have gotten away if he had not stopped at a repair shop in Brooklyn, apparently concerned about his broken car window.

Millions of adults and children with cancer suffer unnecessarily because doctors fail to treat the pain associated with their disease aggressively, experts said today in releasing new Federal guidelines for relieving cancer pain. Fears about the use of narcotics and other strong pain relievers were among the chief reasons for undertreatment of pain, said an independent panel that developed the pain management guidelines for the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research, a branch of the Department of Health and Human Services. The panel added that these fears were unfounded.

Tobacco companies may yearn for the old days, when they could call on Rob and Laura Petrie of the "Dick Van Dyke Show," or even Fred Flintstone, to yabba-dabba-doo about their cigarettes on their programs. Last week the tobacco industry faced the prospect of the sharpest restrictions on advertising yet, as the Surgeon General said she would rather see no advertising for "something we know to be a poison and a killer." But as hostility toward smoking and its advertising has grown, companies have increasingly pursued other strategies to attract new customers. Over the last four years, the tobacco industry has cut its advertising in half, shifting to sales approaches that are proving more efficient than traditional broadcast and print. A Pioneer in Marketing Why pay to reach people who will never smoke if you can offer discount coupons, merchandise and other blandishments to those who do? Restricted from television and radio advertising more than 20 years ago, the tobacco industry is among the pioneers in selling its products without the very sort of media bombardment that has made American consumer brands so familiar in the first place. "The tobacco industry has been in the vanguard," said Bonnie Carlson, chairman of the Promotion Marketing Association of America.

Despite bad weather and low levels of savings, consumers stepped up their spending by five-tenths of 1 percent in January, matching December's satisfying gain, the Commerce Department reported today. It was the 10th consecutive increase in this indicator, which covers two-thirds of business activity. "That's some kind of evidence that the household sector is maintaining its spending momentum," Paul W. Boltz, economist at T. Rowe Price in Baltimore, said. "That's an impressive number."

Consider Sphynxes, one of the world's rarest breed of cat.They are literally naked. Totally hairless. Their heavily wrinkled brows don't add allure. Their ears are so large they look like the opening of the Chunnel. "I tell people don't think of them as a cat, think of them as E.T. or Yoda," says Sandy Adler, who uses the pulsating cats, blood warm because they have no fur, as foot warmers while in bed in her home in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. "Then right away they're cute."