April 6, 1994

How should information be priced in the information age? That is the central riddle of the digital revolution. Proposing an answer, Dialog Information Systems Inc., one of the largest publishers of electronic data bases for corporate librarians, will announce a new fee structure on Wednesday that departs from current industry pricing.

CLAUDIA SHEAR enters the restaurant in a dazzling gold raincoat and a dazzling smile, curls crowned by a baseball cap. She's as kinetic as she must have been when she carried plates of pasta across this very room for a living, before she was famous. She is at the elbow of the restaurant's manager, laughing warmly. This is mildly surprising, considering the scene in her one-woman Off Broadway show, "Blown Sideways Through Life," when she recalls restaurant managers she has known: "Die on the street!" she hisses at one steakhouse lizard. "Die under a bus!"

As the Clinton Administration weighs whether to revoke China's preferential trade status and whether to impose trade sanctions on Japan, a new factor is creeping into its calculations: What impact would such moves have on already volatile global stock and bond markets? The diplomacy of the stock market is an increasingly important calculation for American officials. Fifteen years ago, the impact of a foreign policy decision on the stock and bond markets might only have been a small consideration. But now it is being taken much more seriously.

It wasn't the reception on their television sets that left officials in the Town of East Hampton frustrated and angry; it was the reception they were getting from their cable television company. Over the last year, they said, the company had raised rates, reduced the number of channels in its lowest-priced package to 10, from 23, and as officials here see it, treated their complaints with arrogant dismissiveness. And so, at a meeting last week, the officials took an action other communities have contemplated but few have tried: they pulled the plug on their cable company, revoking its franchise agreement and effectively ordering it to stop providing service to the town's 11,000 subscribers as of Oct. 1.

A sharp policy disagreement over whose taxes to cut has emerged as a central obstacle to a new state budget, now five days late, Gov. Mario M. Cuomo and legislative leaders made clear today. Five days after saying they had the outlines of a new budget, several issues that from the start had been viewed as vital were clearly still in dispute. In addition to the tax fight, budget negotiators were arguing over how to allocate aid to schools and how to divide construction money that New York City wants to repair schools and that other communities want for swimming pools and minor-league baseball stadiums.