September 5, 1994

The city boy visiting this little central Nebraska town had delivered the insult with a laugh. "You're a hick," he told Tressa Baxter. Growing up on Rural Route 3, on a farm embraced by wheat fields and cattle rangelands, Miss Baxter, 18, had spent many blue-sky mornings galloping in the saddle atop her paint mare, Angel. She had also played trumpet in the high school marching band and french horn in the concert band. She was a member of the Spanish club, the volleyball team, the track and field team and, when she had time, the cheerleading squad.

One game into the National Football League season, the Giants and the Jets are perfect. Behind Dave Meggett's 68-yard punt return, the Giants defeated Philadelphia, 28-23, yesterday in East Rutherford, N.J.

A day before the start of the United Nations population conference, United States and European officials said today that new language was being prepared to assuage Vatican and Islamic fears that the gathering will enshrine abortion as an international right or as a means of family planning. The European Union has formulated "reinterpretive language" on the use of the word "right" in the conference's preparatory documents because of Vatican complaints that proposals using the word were intended to impart a binding international right to abortion, said Timothy E. Wirth, the Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs and a dominant voice for the United States in preparations for the conference.

When Schools Chancellor Ramon C. Cortines paid a surprise visit to Public School 146 in East Harlem last week, the freshly buffed blackboards and gleam of newly waxed floors made his day. He strode the hallways until he found the man wielding the mop, Tony Roselli. "This school is just beautiful," Mr. Cortines said, pumping Mr. Roselli's hand. "Thank you for keeping it so clean!"

On an April Saturday in 1993, a journalist was hawking The Socialist Worker along Shipquay Street in Londonderry when a neighbor sidled up and said, "Here, you'll never guess who I just saw going into John Hume's house." The journalist pricked up his ears. John Hume, a large bear of a man of uncertain health at 56, a former French teacher turned politician, was the most respected and influential Catholic leader in Northern Ireland.