June 3, 1995

Emerging Multimedia Mecca

The White House upbraided the Bosnian Serbs today for shooting down an American F-16 jet fighter, calling them "outcasts and international pariahs." Officials said they feared the pilot had been killed or captured. Only a few hours later, on a day of shifting emotions and confusing developments, the White House press secretary, Michael D. McCurry, applauded the reported release of more than 120 United Nations peacekeepers whom the Bosnian Serbs had been holding as hostages. But he demanded that the rest of the hostages, who numbered more than 200, be freed at once.

Sixty-three days after the start of the fiscal year, Gov. George E. Pataki and the state's legislative leaders concluded their tortuous negotiations today, declaring a final agreement on a state budget that by at least one critical measure will reduce state spending for the first time in a generation. The budget, on which both houses of the Legislature began to vote this afternoon, will also cut income and business taxes and impose modest new restrictions on welfare recipients.

In the most sobering evidence so far of the economy's abrupt slowdown, employers lopped 101,000 workers from payrolls in May, the biggest monthly decline since the end of the last recession in the spring of 1991, the Labor Department reported today. At the same time, the Government index intended to forecast the economy posted in April its third straight decline, a development often interpreted as pointing to a recession six to nine months ahead.

With New York City receiving less financial help than expected from Albany, City Council Speaker Peter F. Vallone called yesterday for the first tax increase in four years, proposing to raise property taxes on one- to three-family houses used solely as rental properties.