April 11, 1995

Hugh Miller killed his former girlfriend and then his best friend, prosecutors say. After confessing to his mother, the authorities say, he shot her, too. Mr. Miller, 30, of Burlington Township, was ordered held on $2 million bail yesterday, charged with going on a six-hour killing spree that started Friday night.

The dollar recovered today from a terrifying ride, and the market gyrations intensified a bitter round of finger-pointing by the United States' main economic rivals about who bears responsibility for fixing a problem that threatens to reshape financial relationships around the world. The dollar, which had plunged in Tokyo this morning to a postwar low of 80.15 yen, rebounded to settle at 84.02 yen in New York trading late in the day, up from 83.82 yen Friday.

In the trial of a woman accused of killing her five children a quarter-century ago, a pediatrician who treated two of the children testified that there was no medical evidence supporting the mother's admission that she had smothered them. The trial has affected life in the mother's small town. Article and column, page B4.

Only twice in the last century has New Jersey had a drier half year than it did from October through March. David Robinson, a state climatologist and a professor of meteorology and geography at Rutgers University, said that precipitation was only 68 percent of normal; the only years when that period was drier were 1947 and 1985.

At 16, Naikeya Haley decided to have a second child despite the state law that denied her extra welfare benefits because she was already receiving aid. "It was a planned pregnancy," said Ms. Haley, who is now 17. The law that kept her from collecting $102 more a month "doesn't make any difference to me," she said flatly, other than to make it that much harder to provide for her family. She and her two daughters live on $322 a month, and stay with friends.