December 9, 1994

The Securities and Exchange Commission sent a strong message to the mutual fund industry yesterday that fund executives who are active in the affairs of public companies must set up special procedures to prevent the improper use of inside information. The commission emphatically made its point by bringing a disciplinary action against firms run by the fund manager Mario Gabelli. The case is the clearest expression so far of how the S.E.C. expects mutual fund managers who play an active role in corporate affairs to cope with a task that is a fact of life for traditional Wall Street firms: the maintenance of what are known as Chinese walls, or internal rules, to prevent the firms from profiting on confidential inside information.

NEWARK GROUP'S FINANCES ARE EXAMINED Almost every week now, another Newark official or agency receives a subpoena arising from a Federal investigation into municipal corruption. But prosecutors are not only rooting around City Hall. Some of their most valuable pieces of evidence may lie a few miles away, at the office of a private fund-raising group founded by Mayor Sharpe James. A1. NEW YORK CITY

HANS HAACKE first achieved a measure of fame in 1971 when he did not have a show at the Guggenheim Museum. One had been planned. Then the museum's director, Thomas Messer, discovered that Mr. Haacke wanted the show to include documentation of the real-estate holdings of New York City slumlords. The Guggenheim wasn't the place for "active engagement toward social and political ends," Mr. Messer proclaimed. He canceled the exhibition, and its curator, Edward Fry, was dismissed. Seen today in the lobby of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Mr. Haacke doesn't look fearsome. He's friendly, if a little cautious. He has only one stipulation about touring the museum: no photographs of him. "I don't want to push myself as a person into the foreground," he says. "The foreground should be my work. And also the image can be a fetish, a fetishization of the artist, which I don't want." For the record, the 58-year-old German-born Mr. Haacke is balding, bearded and of medium height, and on this day he is dressed casually in a black leather jacket.

THE title of Donald Margulies's play "What's Wrong With This Picture?" asks a loaded question. The temptation is to respond in kind: What's right about it? In its initial stretches, the work, which opened last night at the Brooks Atkinson Theater, presents itself as a Jewish family sitcom, all bright colors and broad swipes. It then veers off into loopy fantasy for a while. By the time the evening is over, it has sobered up considerably and the issues on the coffee table are guilt and mourning.

President Clinton has decided to send as many as 25,000 United States troops to Bosnia to assist in the withdrawal of United Nations peacekeeping forces there if a pullout is ordered, senior Administration officials said today. Until this week, Mr. Clinton had said he would send American forces to Bosnia only to enforce a peace agreement in the war-shattered country. But with a settlement appearing ever more unlikely and with Western European governments saying the peacekeepers' withdrawal may now be inevitable, the officials said, the President believes that it is time to make clear that the United States would help in what would be an embarrassing retreat.