January 20, 1995

New York City's Parks Commissioner is pushing a plan to increase the real-estate taxes of people who live around Central Park to help pay for upkeep. The commissioner, Henry J. Stern, said the idea was one of a number of measures his department was pursuing to make up for a series of budget cuts that have drastically reduced the size of the maintenance staff and left scores of city parks in dilapidated conditions.

After weeks of relentless bombing, shelling and rocket attacks, Russian troops finally smashed the symbol of Chechen resistance today and triumphantly hoisted a Russian flag over the collapsed hulk of the presidential palace in the heart of this besieged city. Chechen fighters who fled the burning palace around 3 A.M. said they had evacuated the Russian prisoners they had been holding inside the building. They vowed to carry on the fight elsewhere in the city and in the hills beyond.

COUNCIL DEFIES MAYOR ON POLICE MONITOR Defying Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, the City Council voted to create an independent agency to monitor the police and guard against corruption. But Mr. Giuliani said he would ignore the vote, forcing the Council to take him to court to establish the agency. A1. FRAUD PLEA MAY BE BARGAIN OF A LIFETIME A year after he admitted bilking General Motors out of $436 million, John M. McNamara, a former Port Jefferson car dealer, was back in business. He continued to live in a house with an indoor pool. He has not spent a day in jail. To Federal prosecutors, it was all part of a deal they struck in return for his cooperation. A1.

Can great big software companies write truly great computer programs? The question is being raised by users of Apple Macintosh computers, who are widely reviling and rejecting the newest version by the Microsoft Corporation of its word processing program, Word, for use on the Macintosh. Microsoft, the world's largest software publisher, dominates the market for Macintosh software, including a 65 percent share of Macintosh word processing programs.

The death toll from the huge earthquake that devastated this city passed 4,100 today, and 275,000 homeless people huddled on floors and in stairwells of public buildings and other shelters, their initial shock giving way to discontent and even despair. The homeless included more than one-tenth of this city's population of 1.5 million and many others in surrounding areas. In Kobe, they gathered mostly at City Hall and 471 other public buildings and schools that have been converted into shelters. With water, food and gas in short supply, city officials were worried about food panics or epidemics, though so far such problems have not occurred.