September 22, 1994

In a surprising assault on party unity, Herbert London, the Republican candidate for comptroller, criticized his own party's nominee for governor yesterday, saying State Senator George E. Pataki "has not clearly defined himself or his plan to cut taxes and stop runaway spending." The criticism from Mr. London, who had been Mr. Pataki's chief rival for the Republican nomination this spring, came in a one-page statement only hours after the question of comptroller independence emerged as the defining issue in a debate between Mr. London and his Democratic opponent, H. Carl McCall.

You could almost hear the gritting of teeth in Washington this week, as the great bowed to the small and the small reluctantly nodded back. President Clinton telephoned the Rev. Jean-Bertrand Aristide on Sunday night.

Cherise Wade saw the blood on the television news Tuesday, her boy's blood, dripping down the steps of a Brooklyn housing project. Later, numb with grief, she went to the project to see the stains for herself. The seventh-floor stairwell of the Sumner Houses in Bedford-Stuyvesant had already been scrubbed clean of any evidence of Gregory Wright's murder. It was, Ms. Wade said yesterday, as if the brief and troubled life of her 13-year-old son had been erased before she could begin to absorb the news of his death. She had always feared she would lose him to the streets, she said. But she never expected that it would be so soon.

In a case that highlights the tension between protected free speech and illegal sexual harassment -- and raises new questions about what legal protections apply to computer messages -- a junior college in California has agreed to pay three students $15,000 each to settle charges stemming from its men-only and women-only computer conferences. Santa Rosa Junior College reached the settlement after the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights, with whom the claim was filed, told the college in a letter last June that it had found a probable violation of the Federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in schools.

Fossils of the oldest human ancestors have been discovered in Ethiopia, where these apelike creatures lived 4.4 million years ago on a forested flood plain. Not only do they represent an entirely new species, scientists said, but they also may well be the long-sought relatives who lived close to the fateful time when the lineages leading to modern apes and Homo sapiens went their separate ways. "The discovery of these ancient fossils and their context signals a major step in our understanding of human origins," Dr. Tim D. White, a paleontologist at the University of California at Berkeley, said yesterday in an announcement of the findings.