  A grand jury voted not to indict five New York City police officers in the death of an epileptic prisoner in police custody last May. Page 25.

Officers Not Charged in Death

  A 28-year-old woman who admitted smoking the drug PCP as she drove along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway has been charged with murder after causing a crash Thursday night that killed two top officials of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North and South America, the police said.   The two officials, the Rev. Dimitrios Frangos, 81, chief secretary to Archbishop Iakovos, and the Rev. Germanos Stavropoulos, 51, archdiocesan chancellor, were pronounced dead shortly after 8:30 P.M. at the scene of the accident near the bottom of the Northern Boulevard exit ramp off the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.

Murder Charge After 2 Priests Die in a Crash

  Bentsen Looks to Asia   Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen is meeting with finance ministers from 17 Pacific countries as the U.S. focuses on Asian trade. Page 39. Caputo Fit for Trial in Killing    A Long Island judge found Ricardo S. Caputo mentally fit to stand trial in the first of four murders he says he committed in the 1970's. Page 25. 2-Way Bosnia Pact Signed    The Muslim-dominated Bosnian Government and Croats signed a federation agreement, adding to the pressure on Serbs to make peace. Page 4.   2 Arts

INSIDE

  The wind whipped dust across Jack MacLean's 50,000-acre sheep ranch, where the fences are falling down, the weeds are a foot tall, and the shearing shed is coated with a thick layer of dust.   "We've hit rock bottom here," said Mr. MacLean, a 68-year-old descendant of Scottish immigrants. "It will be years before this land can recover and be used again."

Patagonia Fortunes Fade in Cloud of Volcanic Ash

  Three police officers from a Harlem precinct were arrested yesterday on charges of assault and robbery, after a police sting operation videotaped them breaking into an apartment, beating up an occupant, searching for drugs and stealing cash, the authorities said.   The sting operation, in which undercover officers pretended to be running a drug den, was set up in an effort to snare the officers after investigators received reports that they had been shaking down drug dealers and stealing property on their beats.

3 Officers Held in Police Sting After Robbery Is Videotaped

  In the nation's widest experiment in letting private groups run alternative public schools, Massachusetts today turned over 15 schools to private management, including the first schools to be run by the for-profit Edison Project.   In naming 13 different organizations to run the new schools, which will be designed from scratch, the state will have an unusual ability to compare the results of various reform strategies. Edison, for instance, will introduce a longer school year of 210 days, 30 more than the state requires.

15 Massachusetts Public Schools Are Entrusted to Private Managers

  After weeks of intense negotiations, the United States announced steps today to help peace talks resume between Israel and the Palestinians and cleared the way for the passage today of a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning the massacre last month in Hebron.   At a hastily called news conference, Secretary of State Warren Christopher announced that Syria, Lebanon and Jordan agreed to come back to the peace talks in Washington next month.

U.S. MAKES STRIDES AIMED AT REVIVING MIDDLE EAST TALKS

  Senior officials of the South African Police armed and assisted Zulu nationalists in a campaign of partisan warfare, political hit squads and terrorist attacks, according to testimony disclosed today by a judicial inquest.   The report by Judge Richard J. Goldstone, the chairman of a standing commission on violence, was the strongest evidence South Africans have seen of what is popularly called a "third force" -- a conspiracy within top levels of the security forces to sabotage the transition to majority rule.

Inquest Finds South Africa Police Aided Zulus in Terror Campaign

  A review being conducted by President Clinton's personal lawyer is likely to conclude that the Clintons lost less money from their Whitewater investment than they have claimed and may therefore have underpaid their income taxes, associates of Mr. Clinton said today.   The review, by accountants working for the lawyer, David E. Kendall, may be concluded as early as next week, the associates said. They said the Clintons were considering whether to make the findings public after sharing them with Robert W. Fiske Jr., the special prosecutor who is looking into the Whitewater matter.

Review Likely to Find Taxes Were Underpaid by Clintons

  A brief report in Business Day yesterday about a takeover bid for America West Airlines misstated part of the terms of a revised offer in some editions. Along with $65 million in loans, an investment group led by Michael Steinhardt, a New York money manager, is offering $155 million to acquire 33.5 percent of the airline's stock, not $120 million.

Corrections

  Because of an editing error, a front-page article on March 10 about new financial disclosure rules for the municipal bond market misstated the position of the Public Securities Association. The association, which represents municipal bond dealers, has supported the need for issuers of bonds to report regularly on their financial status after the initial sale of the bonds.

  There are people in the ranks of the New York City Police Department who should be doing 20 years to life for some of their crimes. -- WILLIAM J. BRATTON, Police Commissioner.  [ 1:3. ]

No Headline

  Because of an editing error, an article on March 8 about politics in Maine misstated the state's record in Presidential elections. Maine has voted for the loser more often than any other state only since 1936, not throughout the history of the country.

  An article on the Media Business page on Jan. 24 about competing wine magazines referred imprecisely to two critics, Dan Berger and Robert M. Parker Jr., who have written for Wine Enthusiast magazine. Neither man has signed a contract to write for the magazine. This correction was delayed by an editing lapse.

  International 3-7 STEPS TO AID MIDEAST TALKS   The United States announced steps that will help bring about a resumption of talks between Israel and the P.L.O. and said that Syria, Lebanon and Jordan will return to the broader Mideast peace talks.  1

NEWS SUMMARY

  When Edouard Balladur was named Prime Minister last year, the French seemed ready for his reassuring, grandfatherly style, and in no time, they turned the 64-year-old Gaullist into the front-runner to succeed President Francois Mitterrand in next year's elections.   Cautious by nature, though, Mr. Balladur said he was puzzled to find that he was popular while the French economy was stagnant and unemployment was still rising. In fact, he often cautioned aides that the seeds of social unrest lay beneath the country's apparently calm surface.

As Social Ills Stir, French Premier's Ratings Sag

  Secretary of the Treasury Lloyd Bentsen said today that if the Clinton Administration had to decide whether or not to renew China's preferable trade status now, it would not do so because of Beijing's human rights behavior.    Mr. Bentsen, speaking in Los Angeles this morning before flying to Hawaii to be the host of a conference of Asian Pacific Finance Ministers, was asked about the status of the Administration's China policy after Secretary of State Warren Christopher's visit to Beijing, which was marred by repeated arrests of Chinese human rights advocates during his stay.

Bentsen Says China Would Lose Trade Status Now

  The dense blankets of snow clinging to the thatched roofs and tall windbreaks of this hamlet in Japan's far north are beginning to thaw earlier than usual this year. On a few recent mornings there was even a promising blue sky lending a pleasant sheen to the stubbly brown rice fields.   The bright weather was a harbinger of what is usually the most hopeful season of the year on these rugged, poor plains near the Sea of Japan. In a region that Japan's rush to affluence has largely passed by, spring has also meant the return of hundreds of husbands, fathers and grandfathers, even some grandmothers, who for generations have been forced by the meager yields and a dearth of local industry to spend half of every year in factories and construction sites in central Japan.

Inagaki Journal; The North Finds Spring, Too, Brings Discontent

  Bosnia's Muslim-dominated Government and Bosnian Croats signed an agreement today that links their territories into a single federation, a move that aims to isolate the Bosnian Serbs and pressure them to make peace as well.   Administration officials said that the agreement was one indicator that an overall peace might be in the offing in Bosnia. The brightened prospects, they said, are also a result of American and Russian pressures on the Bosnian Serbs to make territorial concessions to the new Bosnian federation.

Muslims and Bosnian Croats Give Birth to a New Federation

  Serbian nationalists have pressed ahead with a campaign to expel thousands of Muslims, Croats and Gypsies from western Bosnia despite United Nations protests, reports from the area and from a United Nations official here indicate.   "The Banja Luka area is the worst place in Bosnia in terms of human-rights abuses," said Kris Janowski, Sarajevo spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, speaking of western Bosnia's largest town. "It's a campaign of murder and intimidation, and nothing effective is being done about it."

U.N. Says Bosnian Serbs Press 'Ethnic Cleansing'

  Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was reported today to be thinking about moving the Jewish settlers in Hebron, taking them out of their several enclaves in that flash point West Bank town and concentrating them in one or two locations there.   Officials insisted that they had no concrete plans, adding that in any event they would do nothing until the Palestine Liberation Organization agreed to return to peace talks that have been suspended since the massacre at a Hebron mosque three weeks ago, in which at least 29 Muslim worshipers died.

Israel Considers Moving Jews Within Hebron

  The P.L.O.  praised the adoption today of the Security Council resolution condemning the Hebron massacre, but stopped short of saying it would immediately resume peace talks with Israel.   "We consider the adoption of the resolution an important step toward the establishment of peace," Yasir Abed Rabbo, the official spokesman for the P.L.O. Executive Committee, said after the vote.

P.L.O. Praises Resolution

  Following is the text of Security Council Resolution 280, which was approved today, calling on Israel to prevent violence by settlers and to protect Palestinian residents and reaffirming support for the peace efforts between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization: THE SECURITY COUNCIL,   SHOCKED by the appalling massacre committed against Palestinian worshipers in the Mosque of Ibrahim in Hebron, on 25 February 1994, during the holy month of Ramadan,

U.N. Resolution on Mosque Massacre

  After three weeks of tortuous negotiations, the Security Council condemned the Hebron massacre today. But the United States strongly disavowed a suggestion in the Council's resolution that Jerusalem was part of the Israeli-occupied territories, and insisted that the city's future must be negotiated.   The United States said the language on the status of Jerusalem would have led it to veto the resolution if not for the decision by Syria, Jordan and Lebanon to resume discussions with Israel next month and the agreement between the Palestinian Liberation Organization and Israel to have high-level contacts aimed at restarting the stalled peace effort.

U.N. Security Council Condemns the Hebron Slayings

  At the founding of the far-right Arena party in El Salvador in 1981, few would have predicted that Armando Calderon Sol, a successful but obscure lawyer from a middle-class family, would eventually become its presidential candidate.   The question that most political analysts here are asking now is not if Mr. Calderon Sol, who enjoys a healthy lead in the polls, will win elections on Sunday, but whether he will capture the presidency outright or need to submit to a runoff.

March 19, 1994

Headlines from March 19, 1994

Officers Not Charged in Death

Murder Charge After 2 Priests Die in a Crash

INSIDE

Patagonia Fortunes Fade in Cloud of Volcanic Ash

3 Officers Held in Police Sting After Robbery Is Videotaped

Billboard 200

Toni Braxton

The Sign

12 Play

The Colour Of My Love

Music Box

Historical Context for March 19, 1994