April 10, 1995

The Devils and the Rangers, who treated hockey fans to such an epic playoff series late last spring, are headed in different directions this spring. The Devils are setting shutout records and climbing toward the top of the Atlantic Division, while the Rangers are fighting to stay in the playoff race just a year after winning the Stanley Cup. The Devils made the Rangers' position more precarious this afternoon with a 2-0 triumph at Byrne Meadowlands Arena that left the defending champions with just 2 victories in their past 12 games. The Rangers are 2 points behind Hartford for the eighth and final playoff spot in the Eastern Conference, and in a tie with Montreal and Florida.

The dollar crashed to a postwar low in trading this morning and recovered modestly only after the central bank swept in to support it. After closing in New York trading on Friday at 83.82 yen, the dollar plunged this morning to 80.15 yen, a startling drop of more than 4 percent. In late afternoon trading, the dollar was at 82.90 yen.

Araceli Cobarrubias, a 23-year-old single mother of three with a ninth-grade education, still struggles with English. But in the past three weeks, while politicians in Washington have been making speeches about people like her, who are on public assistance, she has been using a vocabulary that would gladden the hardest-line anti-welfare crusader. "I have to market myself," said Ms. Cobarrubias, whose only job was as a part-time saleswoman in a clothing store nine years ago. "I don't want my kids to be on welfare."

The board room shake-up at W. R. Grace & Company, effected with stunning speed last month, has not yet run its course. But the effort by dissident shareholders to force change at the $4 billion specialty chemical and medical services company is already seen as a watershed in the annals of corporate governance. The Grace episode has raised eyebrows across the country, not only because the company agreed to make sweeping changes, but because the fight was led by a shareholder -- TIAA-CREF -- that in most respects was more than satisfied with its investment and that in the past had tended to prefer private diplomacy to a public fight.

NEW YORK CITY is dirty. And every candid New Yorker knows it. Officially, it's clean, of course. The Mayor's latest Management Report, City Hall's own report card, claims that 74.4 percent of the city streets are "acceptably clean," about the same as last year and the year before. But since the report only covers streets, curbs and sidewalks, that's like saying a 2-year-old with a freshly scrubbed face is clean, even though his hands are grimy from making mud pies. New York City, from Jerome Avenue to Richmond Terrace, is loaded with mud pies -- with trash in vacant lots, along highways, in parks, behind schools. Sections of every borough are filthy despite Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani's commitment to improving the quality of life in New York, despite a labor agreement that promises more productive sanitation workers, despite the efforts of businesses and community groups to do their own cleanups.