May 16, 1994

It was a wave of the hand from a 10-year-old boy with a Botticelli face and Dennis the Menace bangs that brought Elizabeth Alvarez to her death on a humid afternoon last August. The boy, Jacob Gonzales, wheeled around a bank parking lot on the banana seat of a pink bicycle he had stolen and looked for a robbery victim. His accomplice, Damien Dorris, a 14-year-old drug dealer who owed the neighborhood kingpins $430, lay in wait near the automated teller machine.

For the last five years, California has been the national leader in the fight against smoking, using a combination of restrictions, taxes and advertising campaigns to reduce cigarette consumption by almost 30 percent. Now, with smoking higher than ever on the nation's health agenda and other states beginning to look to California as the model for ways to combat it, the country's largest tobacco company, Philip Morris, has begun an all-out counterattack intended to slow and then roll back the nationwide drive toward more stringent smoking laws.

In Latin America's worst banking crisis of the free-market 1990's, a string of failures since January has left half of Venezuela's banking industry in the hands of the Government. Venezuelan taxpayers face a $6.1 billion bailout bill, as the Government props up nine banks, including Banco Latino, the nation's second largest. More banks may fail as inspectors unravel a five-year-long banking spree generated by deregulated interest rates and minimal Government supervision. This often resulted in banks offering rates for deposits that were far higher than were justified by loan demand.

Carlton Beil allows as how he has never heard a mockingbird imitate a wood duck, though generations of Staten Islanders are sure for some reason that he has. But he eagerly volunteers that a wood frog in mating season can sound like a duck with a sore throat. Mr. Beil, 86, talks of turtles and American chestnut trees and finding his first rare fossil. Children gaze at him with awe as he lights a fire the Indian way. He is a naturalist, a teacher, a student.

In April of 1993, an African-born livery van driver from Rockaway Beach accused a male police officer of raping him at gunpoint. Four acquaintances of the driver told the police they witnessed the incident, but the case was not presented to a grand jury for a decision on whether the officer should be tried. A few months later, four more men -- all black, all immigrants from Africa or the Caribbean and all connected with the furtive, unlicensed van trade in the Rockaway area -- accused the officer, Reggie Rivera, of sodomizing them as well.