October 7, 1994

In her nightmares, she screams that someone is pulling her by the hand, trying to kill her. Awake, she remembers fitfully, asking why she is in a hospital bed, bruised, hooked up to wires and tubes. Two months after falling from a fourth-floor window with her father, who died in a suicide leap, 7-year-old Lidiya Kitayev of Belarus has recovered enough to take a wheelchair to a playroom, scold her mother and the medical staff, plead for split pea soup and farina with jelly, and complain that she has nothing to wear.

Three months after his testimony helped convict a gang member of murder, and just one week before he was to testify in the trial of a second defendant, 19-year-old Elijah Ragland was found dead in a creek in east Fort Worth. He had been repeatedly shot in the head and neck. And though the killing in January remains unsolved, the police say they believe it was related to Mr. Ragland's testimony.

The lobbying bill's defeat demonstrates how quickly a conservative network can be mobilized in support of a minority party that feels increasingly powerful. Page A22.

Even as the United States struggles to reach new market-opening agreements with Japan, some foreign and Japanese economists believe that natural forces could eliminate Japan's huge trade surplus within the next decade or two. "The trade surplus will disappear toward the end of the decade," Robert Alan Feldman, the chief of economic research for Salomon Brothers in Tokyo, predicted. Edward J. Lincoln, an economic adviser to the United States Embassy in Tokyo, said, "Certainly in the first decade of the 21st century it will disappear."

Six months ago, Connecticut became the first state in the nation to embark on a voluntary program to integrate its schools across town lines. The first results of the planning process are now in, and they confirm what critics have long predicted: None of the state's 11 regions has submitted a proposal that would significantly integrate classrooms any time soon. The regional planning groups, covering all of Connecticut's 169 cities and towns, have submitted plans that propose a total of just five new magnet schools for the state, which has 508,000 public-school students.