January 7, 1995

It is nearly a month since Boris N. Yeltsin ordered Russian troops to put down a secessionist movement in Chechnya. In that time, nothing has seemed to go as planned for the embattled Russian President. Not only has the military failed to crush the ragtag Chechen forces, but Mr. Yeltsin has found himself the subject of the most searing domestic criticism ever leveled against a Kremlin leader. Mr. Yeltsin is in trouble, and the Chechnya fiasco has provided a good club with which to hammer him. Even his friends in the West have joined in the carping.

Making clear its intention to continue an offensive in Chechnya despite domestic and foreign criticism, Russia's National Security Council met here today as the army unleashed its most powerful artillery barrage yet on the capital of the secessionist southern region. As Russian forces pummeled the rebel capital, Grozny, with shells from artillery positioned in several nearby villages, President Boris N. Yeltsin vowed yet again to rein in the furious attack.

Tony Doyon used to routinely spend $300 a month to indulge his passion for baseball and other sports cards. But not now. Call it the revenge of the fans. Angered by baseball and hockey's labor disputes, and resenting the 1990's flood of heavily promoted, gimmicky cards, legions of children and adults are striking back.

Democrats abandoned their opening-week niceties today and took up the stoop labor of a true Congressional minority, charging that a Republican balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution might just be a ploy to gut Medicare and other popular benefit programs. Republicans scoffed at that. But they also allowed, as Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia did on Thursday, that Medicare and other big programs may have to undergo "systemic" changes if the $4.7 trillion Federal debt is ever to stop growing, much less shrink.

Unemployment fell in New York and New Jersey, but experts said that the gain did not signal a turnaround in the region's economy. Job growth in New York City was still flat. Business Day, page 39.

Censures in F.B.I. Standoff The F.B.I. Director reprimanded 12 employees, including his acting deputy, over the botched 1992 stand-off with a white separatist. Page 10. Race an Issue in Conviction A court has struck down the conviction of a black man by an all-white jury for the 1974 kidnapping of a Long Island executive. Page 25. Give That Man a Cigar Atlanta Hawks Coach Lenny Wilkens won his 939th game, passing Red Auerbach of the Boston Celtics for most N.B.A. victories. Page 33. Long-Distance Price War The price war widened in the long-distance telephone industry as Sprint offered flat rates. Page 39.

A surprisingly robust American economy ended the year by generating more than a quarter-million new jobs in December, making the 1994 gain in employment the greatest in a decade, the Government reported today. The unemployment rate slipped to 5.4 percent last month, the lowest level since July 1990 and comparable with levels not widely experienced at any other time since the early 1970's.

A mentally ill man accused of pushing a woman to her death under a subway train Wednesday had been classified as violent or even homicidal by state psychiatrists less than a year ago and committed to a state hospital. But once he was there, state doctors repeatedly gave him the freedom to walk the large campus despite four escapes, officials said. Reuben Harris's case did not fall through the cracks of fragmented medical, social-service and criminal justice bureaucracies. To the contrary, he had been under the watchful eye of a state program specifically established to prevent dangerous mental patients from killing innocent people -- and placed in a state institution, Manhattan Psychiatric Center, that had full knowledge of his diagnosis.

The Supreme Court agreed to decide whether the organizers of Boston's St. Patrick's Day parade have a constitutional right to exclude marchers who seek to identify themselves as gay, lesbian, or bisexual Irish-Americans. The issue of openly gay participation in the most public of Irish-American street festivals has been a contentious one for the last several years in both New York and Boston, where courts have issued contradictory rulings.

An article yesterday about the departure of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee referred incorrectly in some copies to the party that asked him to step aside. It was his own party, the Democrats, not the Republicans.

Paraguay's army commander clearly expected the political ground to tremble when he bellowed recently to a group of peasants, "We don't know if the man has been born yet who can sew up the mouths of the military." But the next day, a Senator suggested that the commander, Gen. Lino Cesar Oviedo, retire. Another member of Congress accused him of violating a new law banning military involvement in politics.

An article yesterday about the school at the Adolescent Reception Detention Center on Rikers Island misstated the given name of the teacher who runs the auto shop. He is Martin Torres, not Joe.