May 18, 1994

Because of schizophrenia, Lexie Poole lost her first child, a girl, to foster care. Failing to take her medication, she became paranoid, hearing voices and hallucinating, and was deemed a danger to her daughter by the Department of Social Services. She was determined not to let that happen again when she became pregnant last year, but it wasn't sheer will that allowed her to keep her 5-month-old son. It was a sea change in the thinking about parenthood in New York's mental health system, and new programs that found her a place to live, monitored her medication and helped train her to be a mother and run a household.

The blunt refusal of the United States to authorize the immediate dispatch of 5,500 United Nations troops to Rwanda reflects a new caution from a White House now determined to stand in the way of United Nations peacekeeping missions it regards as unwise, Administration officials said today. In insisting that a first-wave United Nations force in Rwanda remain more modest, the Administration has made clear that it intends to apply its rigid new constraints on peacekeeping to all United Nations operations, not just the ones in which the United States might play a central role.

Amid the abandoned factories and urban blight of central Trenton, the Apex Lumber Yard stands out as a island of hustle and bustle. "My parking lot is bursting at the seams," said Mark Goitein, the owner of Apex Lumber. "Sometimes it gets so busy we have to go out and start directing traffic."

The Federal Reserve raised two short-term interest rates by half a percentage point today, the sharpest increase in more than five years, but signaled that further increases were unlikely to follow soon. Abandoning the gradual pace of three previous increases this year, the nation's central bank sought today to brake the nation's economic expansion before it feeds inflation, and to protect the value of the dollar in international markets.

After an overture that lasted more than a decade, the reclamation of 42d Street's neglected playhouses was officially declared under way yesterday with a ceremony at the Victory Theater, which is to reopen next year with performances and programs for children. The 94-year-old Victory, a delicately ornamented two-balcony house, would be the first of the historic theaters along the street to be renovated. So there were celebratory speeches yesterday and billowing cascades of balloons.