March 18, 1995

In his second bow to the political right in a week, Senator Bob Dole of Kansas, the majority leader, has promised the National Rifle Association that he will make it a legislative priority to repeal "the ill-conceived" ban on assault weapons, a centerpiece of President Clinton's year-old crime bill. "I hope to have a bill on President Clinton's desk by this summer," Mr. Dole said in a letter to the N.R.A. that was made public today by Congressional Democrats.

With white and Asian students dominating enrollment in the city's best high schools, Schools Chancellor Ramon C. Cortines yesterday proposed opening a new math and science institute to coach 350 seventh and eighth graders, most of whom would be black and Hispanic, for the notoriously difficult entrance exams to Stuyvesant High School, Bronx High School of Science and Brooklyn Technical High School. At Stuyvesant, a school nationally renowned for its academic excellence and the most selective of the three, only 4.8 percent of the students are black, down from 12.9 percent in 1979. Half the students at Stuyvesant are Asian, 40 percent are white and 4.3 percent call themselves Hispanic. Total enrollment at the three high schools is 10,145.

After years of controversy and delay, Federal officials yesterday approved the first vaccine in the United States to prevent chicken pox, one of the most contagious childhood diseases. Saying the vaccine was 70 percent to 90 percent effective in preventing the viral infection, the Food and Drug Administration gave Merck & Company of Whitehouse Station, N.J., approval to market the chicken pox vaccine for children 1 or older. The vaccine, known as Varivax, will be available in about six weeks and cost doctors $39 a shot, the company said.

On the broad plains of the Navajo reservation here the other day, there was talk of war. In a muddy lot where a group of tough teen-agers had gathered to spend an empty afternoon, their leader, a 19-year-old Navajo who called himself Gee Mony, considered a group of rivals and told his followers: "We can take it all the way to murder. If they want to go to war, if they want to shoot at us, we'll shoot back."

Patrick Gordon rubbed the stubble on his 65-year-old face, peered up the crowded cobblestone street where the sound of the drums and the brass was getting louder, and said, yes, all things considered, "the peace will hold." "The longer it lasts, you see, the harder it will be for anyone on either side to pick up a gun," he said. "We're all getting used to living like this, without the bombs and the killings. Even the normalcy is beginning to seem normal."