March 9, 1994

3 Officers Held in Extortion Three police officers in Brooklyn were held on charges that they shook down drug dealers, traded in stolen guns, made false arrests and used their badges to intimidate. Page B3. Migrant Students Ignored A California school district with a $10 million surplus shortchanged children of migrant workers by not providing bilingual instruction. Page B9. Cable TV Antitrust Inquiry The Justice Department is investigating whether General Instrument has a stranglehold on technologies used to provide cable television. Page D1. Studying Sleep Habits A sleep researcher has realized her fondest dream: interviewing Long Island Rail Road commuters about their dozing on trains. Page B1.

The law firm employee who testified before a Federal grand jury about destroying documents from the files of Vincent W. Foster Jr. now says he was told to shred the material after a special prosecutor had announced that he would look into the suicide of the White House aide. Jeremy Hedges, a part-time courier at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, Ark., pinpointed the date in a telephone interview today. Mr. Hedges said that when he had fed the documents into the firm's shredder, he had already heard of the appointment of Robert B. Fiske Jr. as special counsel.

State officials said yesterday that they would immediately change the way they release information about suspected child abusers to comply with a Federal court ruling last Friday that called the state's system of tracking suspects unacceptably flawed. The officials said that the state would still maintain its central registry of suspects, but that it would now require a higher level of proof that abuse occurred before releasing a person's name to agencies screening prospective child-care workers, foster parents and adoptive parents.

LIKE an impassioned coach reviewing every punt, pass, tackle and block of a game just played, Cathy Nonas, the director of the Theodore B. Van Itallie Center for Nutrition and Weight Management in Manhattan, paced in front of a group of eight patients in a weight maintenance group last week and considered the food choices that each had made the previous day. Beef instead of fish at a dinner party? Fumbled pass. An extra glass of wine? Throwing an interception. But forgoing an hors d'oeuvre tray? Touchdown!

After a weekend of secret talks in which Rogers Communications Inc. sweetened its offer for the shares of Maclean Hunter Ltd., the two Canadian companies ended a five-week standoff today and signed a merger agreement that will create Canada's biggest communications company. The value of the deal works out to a little more than $3 billion (Canadian), or about $2.5 billion (United States), most of which will be financed through bank loans.

Is anyone looking to import a few hundred Mercedes sedans, purchase an elevator conveniently dismantled for shipping or acquire three tons of bismuth? How about bartering for a 200-mile oil pipeline or a train load of Bulgarian vegetables? Perhaps you are in the market for a Russian spouse, a plane load of chicken parts or a place to park some rubles?

CERTAIN things, like Gorgonzola cheese or hoppy ale, don't necessarily surrender their full charms on first taste. With repeated samplings, though, their complex, multilayered flavors finally reveal themselves. Fermented fish definitely belongs on the same list. We first encountered this culinary phenomenon in one of its most aggressive forms. Sitting in an open-air food stall in southern Malaysia enjoying a great meal, we were suddenly startled by an intensely pungent aroma. Looking up, we saw the cook spooning a thick brown paste into his smoking-hot wok. As the goop hit the wok, a murky, fishlike smell of unremitting intensity rose into the air like an aromatic fog.

Six years ago, environmentalists cheered as the Suffolk County Legislature approved a bill banning a host of plastic products, from hamburger containers to polystyrene cups. Although its champions heralded it as a measure that should be adopted nationwide, the restrictions never really took effect. Efforts to enforce the stringent law, which permitted biodegradable food containers only, were repeatedly postponed by the 18-member Legislature as delicatessens, retail food stores and fast-food chains requested more time to find substitutes that were cost-effective and environmentally acceptable. Recycling Instead But today, the Legislature adopted an amendment eliminating the ban on plastics that would push for more recycling instead.

HOUSTON'S best-known face has been sculptured and framed by four complete lifts, two nose jobs, a cartilage chin implant, a brow lift, an eye job, collagen injections, cheek implants, full rows of capped teeth, blue tinted sunglasses and white pompadour wigs. Fans of Marvin Zindler -- the 72-year-old star of the evening news on KTRK, Channel 13, and the man who shut down the best-known whorehouse in Texas -- expect no less. "It's show business," Mr. Zindler said, his voice only beginning to approach the roar that confronts his nightly viewers. "And if this isn't show business, then I'm a fairy godmother."

Five years ago, Dr. Joyce Walsleben boarded a Long Island Rail Road train in Central Islip and realized as soon as she sat down that she had bought a ride on the scientific laboratory of her dreams. The morning rush-hour train, she discovered, was a veritable rolling bed of snoozing suburbanites, a railroad car crowded with the drowsy, the droopy and the dead-to-the-world. Some snored. Some snorted. Some dozed quietly, with mouths half-opened, their heads pitched forward or wedged between the headrest and the window.

The Justice Department's antitrust division is investigating whether the General Instrument Corporation, a leading supplier of equipment to the cable television industry, may have a stranglehold on the delivery of advanced video services. People familiar with the inquiry say the Justice Department has demanded a wide range of information from General Instrument, both about the company's past relationships in the cable industry and about new technologies that can be used to deliver interactive television and hundreds of channels of programming. In a Crucial Position The inquiry could have a broad impact because General Instrument has evolved into a technology gatekeeper in the cable television industry and is also an important contender in the emerging market for new services to be delivered over future two-way cable systems.

From an office on Madison Avenue, a former oil trader turned Italian sculpture expert is quietly unraveling what some have said is one of the biggest bad bets in the commodities business. Since mid-December, Nancy Kropp Galdy has been working 12 to 18 hours a day, sometimes seven days a week, trying to make the most of a mountain of oil futures contracts that have already produced $1.35 billion in losses.