June 4, 1994

After years of cost overruns and long delays, the Administration announced today that it would scale back its $7 billion program to modernize the nation's air traffic control system. David R. Hinson, administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, said the changes would probably mean that only the air control towers at the largest airports would get new computer systems. And he said a sophisticated new system intended to expedite air traffic would be re-examined.

After years in which the process of dying has increasingly become the domain of doctors, more and more Americans are trying to take back control of the time, place and circumstances of their death. Some are leaving hospitals to die at home. Millions are thought to have signed living wills. Many are giving friends and family the power to shut off medical treatment when they no longer can.

Lawyers for many important witnesses in the criminal case against Representative Dan Rostenkowski said today that their clients would challenge some of the most damaging charges the Government has made against the 66-year-old Chicago Democrat. The lawyers said the witnesses who would support Mr. Rostenkowski include the top aides in his Chicago and Washington Congressional offices and at least 8 of the 14 people listed in the indictment as "ghost employees" who were paid by Congress for either not working or for doing personal chores for Mr. Rostenkowski.

For three years, the centerpiece of the United States drug war in the Andes has been to use military radar and spy planes to attack traffickers at their weakest point: the air bridge of small planes linking the coca leaf fields of Peru with the cocaine laboratories of Colombia. But barely a year after this air interception network started to disrupt trafficking routes, the Pentagon abruptly shut the operation down on May 1. With the radar coverage suspended, Colombian and Peruvian defense officials say that drug trafficking flights have increased.

Joe Slovo's first newsworthy act as President Nelson Mandela's Minister of Housing was to dismiss the director of the housing department and put in a man he trusted. "It is common practice internationally" to purge department heads when a new Government takes power, a spokesman for Mr. Slovo said.