January 2, 1995

When Danny Cabero returned recently from two years in prison for drug possession he hardly recognized his old turf in Washington Heights, where streets were once congested with young men hawking drugs to drive-by addicts, and guns and knives were preferred means of communication. "It's quiet," said Mr. Cabero, 20, who went back this spring to the northern Manhattan neighborhood that became a landmark in the nation's cocaine crisis. "They have less people selling drugs in the street. Less people robbing. One thing you can say about Washington Heights: you can walk down the street here and be safe."

The war for Chechnya has turned into a vicious block-by-block street brawl. After the capital had been pounded from the skies for days, teams of Russian snipers entered central buildings in Grozny today and fired on Chechen soldiers throughout the day. Casualties were said to be heavy on both sides as the badly outnumbered Chechen soldiers fought back ferociously, but there was no reliable accounting of casualties on either side. The hulks of several Russian tanks -- some with troops still in them -- smoldered near the central train station, where much of the heaviest fighting has taken place.

Investigators said today that they were trying to figure out why John C. Salvi 3d, a New Hampshire man accused of killing two women at abortion clinics in Massachussetts on Friday, came to this Tidewater city, a hotbed of anti-abortion activity. Mr. Salvi, 22, has been charged with murder and with assault with attempt to murder in the attacks in Brookline, Mass., in which two receptionists were shot to death and five other people were wounded. Mr. Salvi was arrested here on Saturday, after shots were fired at a Norfolk abortion clinic; no one was injured.

AIDS's Other Victims There are many nights that Deborah Sollod, a nurse, goes home from work and cries. That's one of the burdens of working with patients with AIDS. She's not alone. Page 25. Tightrope Act in Mexico President Zedillo will lay out his plans for economic recovery tonight, seeking to contain the impact of a weaker peso on the nation's simmering social problems. Page 39. Cease-Fire Begins in Bosnia As a four-month cessation of hostilities took effect, Bosnian and Serbian commanders met to hold the first of a series of talks to work out the details of the truce. Page 3.

A great debate is about to begin over one of the major premises of America's social welfare policy: that low-income people are legally entitled to Government aid guaranteeing a minimum standard of living. Many of the Republicans who will take control of Congress on Wednesday contend that welfare, Medicaid and food stamps should be stripped of their status as open-ended "entitlements." Instead, they say, Congress should appropriate fixed amounts of money each year for those programs, whose size would no longer increase automatically when, for example, a recession put more people out of work.