May 31, 1995

With a show of force befitting a small invasion, the Police Department seized two East Village tenements yesterday, overwhelming a defiant group of squatters who had resisted city efforts to retake the buildings for nearly nine months. Using a tanklike armored vehicle and carrying riot gear, hundreds of officers moved in on the city-owned buildings to try to end years of occupation by the squatters, who argued that their long-term presence and efforts to rehabilitate the once-abandoned buildings gave them the right to stay.

The Supreme Court yesterday let stand a state court injunction that said abortion foes could not picket within 100 feet of the Westfield, N.J., home of a doctor who performs abortions. Lawyers for the protesters had contended that the injunction went too far in limiting free speech because the demonstrations were peaceful. [ Supreme Court roundup, page B7. ]

Municipal Court in this Willamette Valley town of old-style rhythms is being visited by a new class of offenders: mothers and fathers of the children of Silverton. They are charged, essentially, with being bad parents. "My son was caught with a cigarette in his mouth," Carley W. Brock, one of the first of a dozen people to be cited under this town's Parental Responsibility Law, told the court recently. "That makes me guilty, I guess."

A ring of counterfeiters passed bogus $100 bills here all weekend. The casinos did not notice, but a prostitute did. After the woman was paid with three counterfeit bills, she alerted the authorities and they were able to arrest seven men, all from Brooklyn and Queens. The authorities said the men had been busy at five casinos, exchanging almost $20,000 in fake $100's for real money. They had another $20,000 to spend.

Where can you find workers willing to sign up for longer workdays and shorter lunch breaks? In the Morris County Clerk's office, that's where. When workers there were offered the chance to work a summer schedule that would give them three-day weekends in return for longer workdays, "they were just thrilled," said Dorothy Heerwagen, the deputy county clerk.

The Bosnian Serbs edged closer today to a formal state of war with United Nations peacekeepers, declaring them an enemy, annulling all agreements with them and threatening the life of a spokesman. The defiant statement from the Serbs, who released 6 French soldiers but continued to hold more than 320 peacekeeping troops hostage, came as British forces arrived in the Croatian port of Split with a mission to reinforce the United Nations mission in Bosnia by providing it with artillery for the first time.

An Atlantic County teen-ager was arguing with his mother Sunday when a friend of hers tried to intervene. Prosecutors say 18-year-old Quincy Rodriguez went up to his room, got a gun and fatally shot the friend, Abel Respes, 44. Yesterday, Mr. Rodriguez was in court, being arraigned on murder charges.

Two of the Midwest's largest savings institutions, Charter One Financial Inc. and the First Fed Michigan Corporation, said yesterday that they had agreed to merge, in a deal that reflects the continuing consolidation of the savings and loan industry. Analysts said the combined company would be the nation's ninth-largest savings institution.

After several incidents in the last week involving misconduct by school safety officers in New York City, Zachary Tumin, the executive director of the Division of School Safety, resigned yesterday, saying that the schools lacked the resources to police themselves and that the Police Department should take over the job. Mr. Tumin turned in his resignation minutes before he was to be suspended for what Schools Chancellor Ramon C. Cortines called a lack of leadership in improving the professional standards of the 3,000 safety officers who patrol the city's 1,100 schools.

Morgan Stanley & Company said yesterday that it had paid a fine of $:240,000, or $384,000, to British regulators because of a failure to conduct and supervise foreign-exchange business that led to $28 million in losses for its clients. Though small by American standards, the fine is the largest ever imposed by the Securities and Futures Authority, the regulator of London's investment markets, which monitors roughly 1,350 firms in Europe's biggest financial center. In addition, Morgan Stanley made a substantial, but undisclosed, payment to help cover the agency's costs.

The senior Japanese politician managing the country's increasingly contentious trade dispute with the United States said today that he had already made "the maximum possible concession" to Washington, contending that the planned American sanctions would add to job losses in Japan. The official, Ryutaro Hashimoto, is the Minister of International Trade and Industry and is widely viewed as a leading candidate to become the next prime minister. In a lengthy interview in his office today, Mr. Hashimoto also contended that the Clinton Administration had reneged on previous understandings regarding how the two countries would handle negotiations over automobiles and auto parts.

The Boeing 777, which is is scheduled to enter commercial service next week, can skip a two-year test period and begin flying routes up to three hours from the nearest possible landing point, the Federal Aviation Administration said yesterday. It is the first time a new twin-engine plane has won such certification. Usually, there is a two-year test period during which new twin-engine jets are required to stay close to major airports, generally 60 minutes' flying time. "You fly around a couple of years with the plane in service, carrying passengers, as a proof test that the combination of airplane and engine is a reliable combination and it's not going to keep flaking out," Richard S. Meyer, a spokesman for the agency, said.