March 31, 1994

For decades, marketers have managed to convince American consumers that they had problems they never knew were problems -- halitosis, body odor, coffee nerves, dishpan hands, even bad breath in dogs -- and then peddle them solutions. Now the Pepsi-Cola Company seeks to add to that list a most unlikely problem, staleness in sodas. Beginning tomorrow, Pepsi, the nation's No. 2 soft-drink maker, will sell Diet Pepsi with freshness dates emblazoned on can bottoms, indicating the contents are best if used in 12 to 14 weeks. Freshness dates will soon follow on all other Pepsi brands, including the flagship Pepsi-Cola.

As the White House and Congress debate the best way to reshape the nation's health system, an overriding concern remains: What effect will the final plan have on the quality of care Americans receive? Many Americans -- at least those with money or health insurance -- now get the best medical care in the world, and under the proposals now before Congress many more would get access to basic and preventive care. But at the same time, hospitals and health maintenance organizations are coming under pressure to reduce costs, and even some Clinton Administration officials worry that quality could decline without safeguards.

Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and the municipal labor unions announced last night that they had reached an agreement on a package of severance offers that the Mayor hopes will cut 7,600 jobs from New York City's payroll without having to resort to layoffs. The agreement was Mr. Giuliani's first success in his effort to reduce the size of the city's work force of 216,000 as he seeks to close a $2.3 billion gap in the next fiscal year's budget.

Borrowing a page from hard-sell television merchandising, Kent Kresa, chief executive of the Northrop Corporation, offered a $70 million premium for the Grumman Corporation today, but only if it agreed to a merger offer within 24 hours. After a deadline of 3 P.M. Eastern time Thursday, Northrop, a weapons company based here, would pay a lesser price for Grumman, which agreed earlier this month in secret negotiations to merge with the Martin Marietta Corporation.

The Clinton Administration announced today that it was scrapping virtually all export controls imposed during the cold war on shipments of telecommunications equipment and computers to China, and to Russia and most other former Soviet bloc countries. The move is expected to open a market worth roughly $150 billion over the next decade. Administration officials said that stringent export controls would be kept on complex supercomputers and material that could be used in making nuclear bombs and other weapons of mass destruction.