  President Clinton has endorsed a policy shift intended to convince third-world countries that the United States will never again conduct explosive tests of its nuclear arsenal, the White House said today.   The move is part of the Administration's quest for a permanent ban on the spread of nuclear weapons.

U.S. IN NEW PLEDGE ON ATOM TEST BAN

  The Promus Companies, which owns Harrah's casinos and Embassy Suites, said yesterday that it planned to split its hotel and gaming businesses into independent corporations by the middle of the year.   Michael D. Rose, chairman of the Memphis-based company, said that splitting Promus in two "should help insure a strong correlation between management performance and shareholder value."

Promus Proposes to Divide Its Units Into 2 Companies

  The markets opened with a shudder yesterday. Another headlong plunge by the Mexican peso sent American stock and bond prices tumbling, with the dollar falling to a three-month low against the German mark.   The peso dropped to its lowest value yet in the current crisis, closing at 6.35 to the dollar, down nearly 10 percent from Friday's close of 5.735. It has lost 45 percent of its value since Dec. 19, when its malaise began.

Plunge by Mexican Peso Jars U.S. Stocks

  When Alex Kelly last saw his parents' home here, he was 18, just graduated from high school, a handsome athlete about whom the description all-American came easily. He was also awaiting trial in the rape of two teen-age girls.   He went to Colorado to work at a ski resort, and didn't return. Fleeing to Europe, the authorities say, for the next eight years he moved freely among ski resorts there while his parents dealt at home with the consequences of his flight.

From Ski Slopes of Europe to a Rape Trial?; Eight Years After Fleeing, an Ex-Darien Athlete Surrenders in Switzerland

  Openly upset with his abrupt dismissal, the Deputy Police Commissioner, Walter S. Mack Jr., accused senior commanders of the Police Department yesterday of resisting his efforts to combat police perjury and other criminal misconduct.   Mr. Mack and two of his confidants said that the Deputy Commissioner had proposed a number of aggressive tactics to weed out officers who lied in court, brutalized suspects or stole drugs or money from dealers.

Police Official Claims Dismissal Was the Result Of His Agenda

  Simpson Team Reprimanded   The judge in the O. J. Simpson murder trial reprimanded the defense for violating disclosure rules and let the prosecution supplement its opening statement. Page. A18 Sickle Cell Treatment    For the first time, a drug has effectively attacked the underlying cause of the disease rather than simply its painful symptoms. Page C1. Soccer Death Shakes Italy    With tensions high after the stabbing of a Genoese fan, Italian sports officials suspended all national events for this Sunday. Page B7.

INSIDE

  Some of the players will be new but the result, most analysts say, will be more of the same -- higher interest rates -- when the Federal Reserve meets Tuesday and Wednesday.   The Fed's chief policy-making arm, the Open Market Committee, is expected to raise short-term interest rates for the seventh time in a year. Many analysts expect an increase of half a percentage point in the Federal funds rate, which is what banks charge each other when they borrow money overnight. Such a move would lift the Fed's target for short-term interest rates to 6 percent, exactly double the level from which the increases started last February.

Rate Rise Is Widely Expected

  Which country recorded the world's highest growth rate last year? If you thought it was China, Malaysia or Brazil, guess again. It was Peru, which had been written off a few years ago as a bomb-scarred basket case. In 1994, though, the Peruvian economy expanded 12 percent.   Foreign investors are suddenly big players in this $32 billion economy, more than doubling their holdings last year, to $5.8 billion from $2.3 billion. Even Peru's current border skirmishes with Ecuador look unlikely to tarnish the nation's luster for investors.

Peru: On the Very Fast Track

   PATAKI PROPOSES DEEP CUTS IN WELFARE   Governor Pataki proposed deep cuts in welfare programs in New York State, calling for tough new restrictions on eligibility, broad requirements for work and reductions in benefits for both able-bodied recipients and mothers with children. A1.

METRO DIGEST

  Gov. George E. Pataki today proposed the deepest cuts in the 60-year history of welfare programs in state, calling for tough new restrictions on eligibility, broad requirements for work and reductions in benefits for both able-bodied recipients and mothers with children.   Mr. Pataki, a Republican who made welfare policy a centerpiece of his campaign, insured that his proposals received singular attention by announcing them at a news conference two days before he is to unveil his budget for the coming fiscal year. Normally, a governor would include the recommendations as part of his budget proposal to the Legislature.

PATAKI PROPOSING DEEPEST CUTBACKS IN WELFARE PLANS

  Was the Super Bowl a super bore? Then you must have watched the game instead of the commercials.   In a twist only slightly less astonishing than if the 49ers had returned to San Francisco ringless, many of the expensive and elaborate spots that ran Sunday during Super Bowl XXIX, seen by the estimated 120 million people who watched all or part of the game, were actually enjoyable and entertaining.

THE MEDIA BUSINESS: SUPER BOWL XXIX -- Advertising; Super Bowl Campaigns Break Long Losing Streak

  International    The Mexican peso plunged nearly 10 percent, dragged down by fears that Congress would not approve the proposed $40 billion in loan guarantees. The peso's plunge unsettled markets in Mexico, elsewhere in Latin America and in the United States.  [ Page A1. ]

BUSINESS DIGEST

  Calling an early halt to a national trial because of promising results, doctors today announced the first treatment for sickle cell anemia that attacks the underlying cause of the disease rather than simply combating its painful symptoms.   The National Institutes of Health said it was issuing a clinical alert to thousands of doctors nationwide informing them that the drug hydroxyurea should be considered for many adult patients with the crippling blood disease. The institutes had sponsored the trial of the drug at nearly two dozen centers to see if it could reduce the painful episodes characteristic of the disease, which in this country primarily afflicts African-Americans.

Sickle Cell Trial Called Success, Halted Early

  FERMAT'S last theorem, which has tantalized mathematicians for more than 350 years, has at last been solved, say those who have read the revised but not yet published proof. But the endgame of this furious chase has proved as full of last-minute surprises as a murder mystery.   For Dr. Andrew Wiles of Princeton University, the chief author of the proof, triumph had to be snatched from the jaws of disaster. His first proof, which aroused worldwide attention when announced two years ago, turned out to contain a gap, which Dr. Wiles found he was unable to cross alone.

How a Gap in the Fermat Proof Was Bridged

  In an attempt to ease what officials call a crisis in New York City school overcrowding, Schools Chancellor Ramon C. Cortines said yesterday that he plans to move even faster than his advisers recommend on an experiment in year-round schooling. At least two schools, and probably more, will be placed on year-round schedules this summer, he said.    Mr. Cortines, who compared recent increases in school enrollment to "a train roaring down the track," made his recommendation while releasing the findings of the commission he established a year ago to look at school overcrowding.

Year-Round Classes to Begin in Summer

  The battered Mexican peso plummeted today to its lowest point yet in the current crisis, driven down by mounting doubts that the United States Congress would approve the $40 billion in loan guarantees for Mexico proposed by the Clinton Administration.   The Mexican currency closed at 6.35 pesos to the dollar, down nearly 10 percent from Friday's close of 5.735. Its continuing decline disrupted financial markets and provided ammunition for officials here and in Washington who have warned that Mexico needs a rescue package to keep its economic crisis from becoming a financial debacle that could affect the rest of the world.

Peso Plummets Anew on Fears Congress Won't Assist Mexico

  THE serene, snowy valley of the Lamar River in Yellowstone National Park would be a cafeteria for wolves at this time of year. Thousands of elk, deer and bison, driven from higher elevations by winter, congregate in the valley. But wolf packs have not prowled it for decades, so the animals that would be their natural prey live there in comparative peace.   Now, in an ambitious restoration project, two packs and the nucleus of another -- 14 wolves in all, the first of a group that could eventually grow to hundreds -- have been living since the middle of the month in three one-acre pens within the valley and are soon to be set free. When they are released, the result is likely to be an ecological upheaval whose ripples will spread in time to the farthest, most obscure corners of a region the size of West Virginia. It is the largest nearly intact ecosystem remaining in the temperate latitudes of North America, and with the wolf's reappearance it will become more or less complete again.

Wolf's Howl Heralds Change for Old Haunts

  Speaker Newt Gingrich told the nation's hospital officials today that "we are going to rethink Medicare from the ground up," arguing that the 30-year-old health program for the elderly was too bureaucratic, too centralized and too dominated by the government.   He also said that the proposed Constitutional amendment to require a balanced budget by the year 2002 "has a very profound impact" on efforts to reconfigure health programs.

Gingrich Vows Total Review Of Medicare for Cost Savings

  Particles so slight they were long thought to have no mass at all may be some of the most consequential matter in the universe, probably much more abundant and substantial than all the ordinary matter in planets, stars and galaxies.   In experiments aimed at answering one of the most intriguing questions in particle physics and cosmology, scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico have produced especially strong evidence that these elusive particles, called neutrinos, do indeed have mass.

Cosmos's Missing Mass: Wispy Particle Weighs In

  The Federal Health Department said that nine states, including New York, had improperly obtained $449 million in Medicaid matching funds and must repay Washington. The department also said that the bill to those states and nine others could run as high as $2.5 billion.    Article, page A15.

Medicaid Repayments

  After months of preparation, the prosecution and defense lawyers made opening arguments yesterday in the biggest terrorist trial ever to come to an American courtroom. They immediately clashed sharply over the charges, the evidence and, perhaps most important, the credibility of the key witness in the case, a man who even the Government admitted had once lied under oath in a New York State courtroom.   Beginning the Government case against Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and 11 other men, accused of plotting to blow up the Hudson River tunnels and the United Nations Building and other crimes, a Government prosecutor, Robert S. Khuzami, told the jury in his very first sentence: "This is a case involving a war."

Biggest U.S. Terrorist Trial Begins as Arguments Clash

  This spring, when the Smithsonian Institution displays part of the fuselage of the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan, it will be accompanied only by a small plaque and perhaps a video interview with its flight crew.   Yielding to critics, the Smithsonian's Board of Regents voted today to eliminate the rest of the 10,000-square-foot exhibit that had been planned to commemorate the end of World War II and the 600-page script that was to accompany the bomber.

Smithsonian Scales Back Exhibit Of B-29 in Atomic Bomb Attack

  Think no one remembers what's said (or sung) at those news briefings that occur every day at the State Department? Fifteen years ago, HODDING CARTER 3D, the State Department spokesman during the Iran-hostage crisis, berated reporters for printing remarks he had made about the crisis -- off the record, he thought -- at Princeton University, his alma mater.    After news executives accused him of being irresponsible, he sang "Call Me Irresponsible" at a briefing and said there was nothing else to report. Over the years, the song became something of an anthem for Mr. Carter and his wife, PATT DERIAN, a former Assistant Secretary of State.

CHRONICLE

  The reformed East German Communist party, trying to broaden its appeal and become a force in national politics, has denounced Stalinism and pledged to accept the established conventions of German politics.   At a weekend convention, delegates overwhelmingly re-elected their party chairman, Lothar Bisky, who ran without opposition. Mr. Bisky, a moderate, had threatened to quit if the party did not approve a break with its Communist past.

World News Briefs; East German Communists Vow to Play by the Rules

Many displaced New Yorkers who long for the conveniences and pleasures of their former home have also not forgotten how difficult a place it can be. Some of them maintain their ties to the city through donations to The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund.

"I often miss the excitement of the city and its people and I still think of New York as my spiritual home," wrote Ellen Zadoff, echoing the sentiments of many former New Yorkers who have given to the fund's annual appeal for donations, now in its 83d year.

January 31, 1995

Headlines from January 31, 1995

U.S. IN NEW PLEDGE ON ATOM TEST BAN

Promus Proposes to Divide Its Units Into 2 Companies

Plunge by Mexican Peso Jars U.S. Stocks

From Ski Slopes of Europe to a Rape Trial?; Eight Years After Fleeing, an Ex-Darien Athlete Surrenders in Switzerland

Police Official Claims Dismissal Was the Result Of His Agenda

Billboard 200

The Hits

Dookie

II

Hell Freezes Over

Vitalogy

Historical Context for January 31, 1995