March 21, 1995

Trying to win elections by appealing to ethnic groups may be as American as pizza pie, but Mayor Anthony Russo doesn't like it, as least when the candidates are his political foes. The candidates, for the Board of Education, want to run as Phyllis Spinelli and Ines Garcia Keim. No, Mr. Russo argues. They should run as Phyllis Spinelli-Evans and Ines Maria Keim, as their names appear on the voter registration rolls. The board secretary, Anthony Curko, says the State Education Department's Division of Controversies and Disputes sides with the Mayor.

The Nasdaq stock market proposed far-reaching changes yesterday that would make it much easier for individual investors to trade at better prices than they get now, but it stopped short of going as far as some critics had suggested. Joseph Hardiman, the president of Nasdaq, said he thought the changes, embodied in a new trading system called Aqcess, would lower the profit margins of many brokers, but he voiced hope that it would stimulate enough additional trading to keep overall profits from falling.

Dow Hits Another Record; Dollar Up, Bonds Decline The Dow rose 10.03 points to a record 4,083.68 in mixed trading, but analysts warned that it may pull back as the industrials near 4,100. Tobacco, pharmaceutical and retailing stocks rose sharply, but steel, bank and automobile stocks fell. D8.

After more than two months of shifting signals, the White House announced today that President Clinton would travel to Moscow in May to meet with President Boris N. Yeltsin and to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Allied victory in Europe. The meeting, which was proposed by Mr. Yeltsin in January, has become the subject of the kind of debate in Washington that used to be reserved for the summit-planning decisions of the cold war.

One after another, the firefighters rose to speak at the union meeting at a Queens banquet hall. Weeks into the Fire Department's ambitious plan to use them to respond to medical emergencies, the rank and file were angry -- at the Mayor, at the department, at their own union leadership. They had joined the department to fight fires, not to be doctors, they said at the emotional meeting last month. The medical training was too difficult; the studying to master thick manuals on the cardio-pulmonary system was too taxing. A pilot program, they said, appeared fraught with problems -- exposing them to disease, potentially endangering them at fire scenes, and often forcing them to race into their gear and through the streets only to find people waiting, with suitcases packed, for a free trip to the hospital.