June 17, 1994

After a decade in which thousands of mentally ill people -- some of them menacing, many of them pitiful -- have made their homes on New York City streets, momentum is building in support of proposals that would give health workers and mental health officials more authority to force people into treatment against their will. In Albany, five bills are pending in the State Legislature that to varying degrees would make involuntary commitment easier. At least one measure appears to have wide support from lawmakers: a bill that would place those released from mental hospitals under court order to take medication and get counseling -- or go back to the hospital for evaluation and possible commitment.

In this land of big lawsuits, the growth of multimillion-dollar jury awards has been halted: juries nationwide have become markedly tougher on people who sue doctors, insurance companies and other deep-pockets defendants, siding less often with plaintiffs. And there is evidence that the size of the awards has leveled off, too. In 1992, plaintiffs won 52 percent of the personal injury cases decided by jury verdicts, down from 63 percent in 1989, according to Jury Verdict Research, a legal publishing firm in Horsham, Pa., that is the only one nationally to compile such data. And there are indications that the downward trend continued last year.

Companies The head of AT&T's multimedia efforts will join the Creative Artists Agency, Hollywood's most powerful talent agency. The hiring is an example of how the entertainment, information and communications businesses have converged. [ Page D1. ]

The United States publishing arm of Bertelsmann A.G., the German media giant, said yesterday that it had agreed to acquire a group of magazines from The New York Times Company that are directed primarily at the women's market. The best known of the publications are Family Circle and McCall's, but the unit that is being sold, the Women's Magazines Group, also includes Fitness, American HomeStyle, Child, Mary Emmerling's Country, Custom Builder and others.

IN the transcendent final scene of Tony Kushner's play "Perestroika," three characters, one of whom is dying of AIDS, sit on the rim of Bethesda Fountain in Central Park and reflect on the end of the cold war, the millennium and the future of gay life in the face of the epidemic. Reflecting on his own imminent death, the dying character Prior Walter offers a benediction and a prophecy.