February 11, 1995

Stripped of the myth that went with his ever-present mask, the leader of the peasant rebellion in southern Mexico is a bearded former college professor, the Jesuit-trained son of a provincial furniture salesman, a voracious reader who resigned from his teaching job here 11 years ago and fell out of touch with his family and friends. After months in which the leader, known as Subcommander Marcos, captivated, angered and sometimes bored Mexicans with a stream of literate communiques from Chiapas state, Government officials said today that they hoped the disclosure of his identity would by itself help to break a rebel movement that has never been militarily strong.

Ideals that are not propped up with practical solutions do not stand much of a chance in the John Henry Hale housing project here. Young women who live in and around the neighborhood say morality alone has seldom saved anyone from the cycle of teen pregnancy. Amelia Turner, 18, is a five-year veteran of I Have a Future, an after-school program that teaches teen-agers to delay sex and childbearing, allowing them to build careers and lives. The program, started in 1987 by President Clinton's nominee for Surgeon General, Dr. Henry W. Foster Jr., combines job training, tutoring, medical services and family planning.

On Aug. 19, 1992, Al B. Tatum called in sick and took his bottled-up fury over co-workers' taunts and slurs to the Milwaukee office of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Mr. Tatum, who is black, filled out Charge No. 260920645, alleging racial discrimination by his employer, Cooper Power Systems. The torrent of slurs was so unrelenting, he has said, that he eventually quit his job.

Edmund M. Croteau served eight years of a 30-year sentence for the 1977 murder and attempted sodomy of an 8-year-old Nutley boy. Yesterday, he acknowledged another sex attack.

Harold and Caroline Thomas say their financial plan would have helped to rebuild the South African economy. But a judge in Johannesburg was skeptical yesterday and ordered the Thomases, who are from Hackensack, jailed on charges of trying to defraud a South African bank of $700 million. A South African banker who is serving a prison term for fraud told the court that the Thomases had promised him money and a Lamborghini sports car if he guaranteed millions of dollars for the purchase to underwrite unsecured foreign bonds.