August 6, 1994

In the four months since 12 officers in the 30th Precinct in Harlem were taken away in handcuffs for dealing cocaine and protecting drug dealers, the station house has been painted, its sidewalks replaced, the lighting improved. Officers now wear their shoes shined like Marine boots and their hair cut as short as golf course fairways. That's just the cosmetics. Where spotty supervision once led to illegal drug searches -- "booming doors," it was called -- there is today at least one sergeant at every drug arrest. Each platoon has a full-time lieutenant. New narcotics strategies are in place, and arrests are up 24 percent in the last four months, compared with the same period last year.

Hours after Serbs tested NATO by seizing impounded weapons, American planes blasted a Serbian anti-tank vehicle near Sarajevo. Page 4.

The economy continued to produce jobs at a brisk pace in July, the Government said today, prompting drops in financial markets as investors expressed fear that the Federal Reserve might raise interest rates again soon to prevent any increase in inflation. Employment grew by 259,000 jobs last month while average hourly earnings rose 4 cents, to $11.12, the Labor Department announced. President Clinton welcomed the news, saying that nonfarm employment had now risen by 4.1 million jobs since he took office, half of the 8 million jobs that he promised to create during his first term.

Health Bills and Tactics As lawmakers plotted strategies to alter or kill House and Senate health care bills, the scores of Congressional aides who actually wrote the bills continued to fine-tune and reinvent their concoctions. Articles, page 7. Hard Choices on Rwanda Relief organizations must decide whether to encourage Rwandan refugees to stay in the camps or prod them to go home. Page 3. A Lesson in Investing Millions of Chinese have learned how quickly stock prices can climb and fall, and climb again. Page 33.

The roots of violent confrontation over abortion in this graceful city on the Gulf of Mexico run deeper than the killing of a doctor and his escort last week and of another doctor last year. They go back at least a decade, to Christmas Day 1984, when all three abortion clinics here were firebombed, an act that one of the four people convicted of the crime described as "a gift for Jesus on his birthday."