December 18, 1994

When Transportation Secretary Federico F. Pena meets next month with hundreds of airline employees and other aviation experts, a basic question will be on the table: What is being done to improve airline safety? The question is rarely raised in so public a forum. But then again, it has been years since travelers have so frequently been led to ask: "Another crash? What caused it?"

WITH infrared and black lights, silver stars and a large luminescent moon painted on the black ceiling, Joe D'Angeli has turned his basement here into a plush haven for six Egyptian bats. "There's so much beauty in bats," Mr. D'Angeli said recently as he lovingly stroked the head of 10-week-old Boo Boo, nestled in the palm of his hand. "They're so misunderstood and so persecuted."

THE County Board of Legislators, expected to act on the 1995 county budget tomorrow, is under intense pressure to find ways to reduce a possible property-tax increase of 12 percent or more. In recent weeks, calls for spending cuts have come from groups as diverse as the Taxpayers' Alliance of New York, the League of Women Voters of Westchester County, an ad hoc group of officials and the Westchester County Chamber of Commerce.

THIS is a banner era for the champions of nature over nurture, who think we have much less say over our impulses, our body shape, our choice of mates, our careers, even our attempts at heroism and generosity, than our wistful imaginations might have fancied. Scientists recently announced, for example, the discovery of a gene that makes mice get fat and that very well could be involved in some types of human obesity. The most notorious book of 1994, "The Bell Curve," by Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein, insists that there is a strong heritable component to intelligence, and that, sorry, some ethnic groups have a greater share of the bright stuff than others. Researchers have put forth candidate genes for homosexuality, aggression and criminality, which for most of this century were attributed largely to social conditions and upbringing. And a steady stream of books about the evolution of behavior -- most notably "The Moral Animal" by Robert Wright -- argues that the hand of natural selection urges powerful men to dump their aging wives for nubile beauties, women to fixate on the thickness of a man's wallet, and both sexes to consider dallying in adulterous waters.

The people of Grozny were ready for war again. Surrounded by Russian troops for a week, the city had no more hot water, few phone lines and only scarce heat and electricity, but residents seemed in no mood for compromise. Chechens have been sneering at Russia and its ultimatums for 300 years. They were proud of their outlaw status when they were stealing Cossack horses, and many are proud now, when the commodities from the north have become Volvos and machine guns.