March 28, 1995

New York's county executives, almost all of them Republicans and an important source of Republican power in the state, have broken ranks with Gov. George E. Pataki over his income tax-cutting plan, calling on him to slow down the cuts to avoid future increases in local property taxes. With only four days left in the state's fiscal year, the county executives' efforts to alter Mr. Pataki's plan underscores the Republican Governor's central political challenge: to create and sustain a coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats who will support his proposal to make some of the deepest spending and tax cuts in memory.

Last fall, when Reginald McFadden was charged with the murder of an elderly Long Island woman and the rape of a second woman in Rockland County, the public stir reached far beyond those crimes. At the time of those charges, Mr. McFadden had been free from a Pennsylvania prison for just 92 days, thanks to the Governor of Pennsylvania, who had commuted the convict's life sentence for a 1969 murder.

SmithKline Beecham Clears A Hurdle on Tagamet Sales An F.D.A. advisory committee recommended that a less potent form of the anti-ulcer drug Tagamet be sold for treating heartburn without a prescription.

Senate Republicans today embraced a central element of the House-passed welfare bill, deflating the hopes of Democrats who are seeking major changes to preserve the current Federal guarantee of cash assistance for poor people. The chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Bob Packwood, said he and other Senate Republicans supported a provision of the House bill that would replace the current program with lump sum grants that states could use as they wished to assist low-income people.

THE essence of emotion -- the rapture of happiness, the numbness of depression, the angst of anxiety -- is as evanescent as a spring rainbow. It is hard enough for a poet to capture, let alone a neuroscientist. Now brain researchers, in their own fashion, have begun to do so. A major result emerging from the new research is that the brain does not have just a single emotional center, as has long been believed, but that different emotions involve different structures. Another is that the brains of men and women seem to generate certain emotions with different patterns of activity.