October 18, 1994

Hundreds of police officers descended on 125th Street in Harlem yesterday to carry out the Giuliani administration's order to clear the busy thoroughfare of street vendors, and 22 people were arrested as scuffles broke out between the illegal merchants and officers. Although the sweep went relatively smoothly -- the police had been anticipating trouble -- many store owners, fearful of reprisals from vendors, kept their doors shut for much of the day.

Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, delivered a public rebuke today to his son, the Prince of Wales, for cooperating with a biography that presents the Prince as someone who underwent a lonely childhood, has an unsatisfactory relationship with his parents and was browbeaten into a loveless marriage. Excerpts from the book, which will go on sale next month, appeared over the weekend in The Sunday Times, which has a circulation of nearly 1.2 million. It has proved a bombshell. The coverage today squeezed the story of Chancellor Helmut Kohl's narrow election victory in Germany off the top of most front pages here.

Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who campaigned on a promise to privatize public hospitals, has found the process far more complicated, both substantively and politically, than anyone had anticipated, both critics and supporters of the plan say. As a result, 10 months after taking office, city officials have yet to come forth with a plan -- or make a decision about whether the hospitals would be leased, sold outright or simply turned over to new private managers.

THE stench of chemicals, leather, rotting flesh and stale air overwhelms visitors to Jajmau, a neighborhood on the edge of Kanpur, home to 175 tanneries on the southern bank of the Ganges River. A brief shower converts the little enclave of bumpy roads and semipaved lanes, lined with hides and bark used for dyeing, into a squalid mess. For decades, industrial effluents from the leather factories here, including toxic heavy metals such as chrome, and millions of gallons of untreated domestic sewage have spewed into the Ganges from hundreds of cities, towns and villages along the river's 1,560-mile journey through the sprawling northern Indian plains.

POLICE REORGANIZATION RECOMMENDED A Police Department task force has recommended a sweeping reorganization that would raise standards for recruitment and graduation from the police academy and require monthly performance evaluations of officers. The recommendations are designed to produce a decentralized, better trained and better supervised department. A1.