November 11, 1994

The F.C.C. giveth and the F.C.C. taketh away. Having ordered cable television operators in February to cut their rates by 17 percent, the Federal Communications Commission today offset that action by giving the operators the right to raise prices when they add new channels.

A Federal education panel today will announce new world-history standards that keep William the Conqueror and the Battle of Hastings in public-school lesson plans but also give emphasis to non-European hallmarks like China's Sung dynasty, which developed paper currency, gunpowder and wood-block book printing from the 10th to the 13th century. The standards, which are voluntary, retain the study of the Greek city-states and the Roman Empire but add the Mauryan Empire in India and the Olmec culture, which influenced the Zapotec and Mayan civilizations.

Governor-elect George E. Pataki expressed shock today upon learning that he would inherit a projected $4 billion budget shortfall next year from the Cuomo administration, but said he remained committed to his campaign pledge to cut income taxes by 25 percent over four years. Mr. Pataki also asserted that the Cuomo administration should have taken steps to close next year's budget gap this year. "There's no question if there is that much of a deficit looming that it should have been revealed and steps should have been taken during the course of the year to correct our spending problems so we wouldn't be facing them come next April," he said. The state's fiscal year begins on April 1.

Kuwait, which has been scaling down its United States petroleum operations, announced today that it planned to sell the oil and natural gas properties owned by its Santa Fe International Corporation. Kuwait's $2.5 billion cash purchase of Sante Fe International in 1981, at the zenith of the petroleum industry, was the largest single Arab investment in the United States at the time.

I TOOK my two children to Muscoot Farm on a dreary Sunday in November, when the bored quarreling that begins on a day to be spent indoors sent me running for a map and extra sweat shirts and dry socks to stuff in a shopping bag. The farm, in the Westchester County town of Somers, is a long drive from our house in New Jersey, and there were moments, as we approached the Tappan Zee Bridge, when I had my doubts as the rain and the unseasonably warm temperature wrapped the car in a white haze. My daughters ate the Halloween candy they had brought and submerged themselves in headsets and the silence that usually means the Offspring and Pink Floyd. But it was raining, and I was on the run from a Sunday indoors. "A farm?" Susan, 12, had asked in disbelief. In an instant, she remembered a major school project on Ulysses S. Grant that was due the next day. She didn't need a trip to a farm. She had to do her homework. "Do it later," I told her.