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.