June 13, 1995

The escape attempt yesterday at Ocean County Superior Court is not likely to inspire a made-for-TV movie.

A Federal judge ordered owners of the Kenmore Hotel to forfeit the dilapidated, 22-story building to the United States Government yesterday as punishment for letting drug dealers operate there. A residence hotel with many poor and elderly residents, the Kenmore has become a notorious warren of crime, where crack dealers, thieves and prostitutes have roamed the hallways. The 621-room hotel at 143 East 22d Street is the largest building in New York City ever to be surrendered to the Government.

Faced with a significant slowing of the economy as the season of Presidential politics heats up, Administration officials say the White House is gradually zeroing in on a well-known culprit: the Federal Reserve and its interest rate increases over the last 16 months. The evolution of the Administration's stance -- which comes despite the strong objections of the Treasury Secretary, Robert E. Rubin -- began earlier this month, officials said today. It was given voice on Sunday by the White House chief of staff, Leon Panetta, who said the Administration would welcome a move by the Federal Reserve to lower short-term interest rates.

A cheap and painless set of tests developed in leading medical centers around the country promises to predict heart disease and stroke, and pinpoint the patients who really need aggressive therapy, far more accurately than do the traditional risk factors. The new method includes a simple measurement of the difference in blood pressure between arms and ankles, and a noninvasive acoustic test that measures narrowing of the carotid arteries that carry blood to the brain.

An Abundance of Fees In Lotus Takeover I.B.M.'s takeover of Lotus Development is providing rich pickings for Wall Street investment bankers and lawyers, who should collect about $35 million in fees. About $12 million is going to CS First Boston, I.B.M.'s adviser, and Lazard Freres, which helped Lotus, could get $9 million. [ Page D6. ] Louis V. Gerstner Jr., the chairman of I.B.M., met with Lotus employees, and they learned that a reorganization and job cuts already planned at Lotus would continue. [ D6. ] Jim P. Manzi, Lotus's chief executive, said he agreed to stay at the company only after he was assured he could hold the job long enough to carry out his vision for Lotus Notes. [ D6. ] Drug for Lou Gehrig's Disease Cephalon said its genetically engineered drug Myotrophin had shown effectiveness in reducing the severity of symptoms and slowing the progression of Lou Gehrig's disease. The news lifted shares of Cephalon and Chiron, which co-developed the drug. [ D2. ] Labor Chief to Retire Lane Kirkland, president of the AFL-CIO, said he would retire in August. He supports his long-time deputy, Thomas R. Donahue. [ A16. ] Communications Bill Stalled The Senate, trying to overhaul Federal communications laws, was stuck in disputes about letting the regional Bell telephone companies offer long-distance service. [ D6. ] Salomon Executive Resigns Nancy B. Peretsman, whose ties to media industry executives helped Salomon Brothers win a starring role in several big media deals, resigned to join Allen & Company. [ D4. ] State Bans On-Line Harassment With debate raging over whether to regulate the speech and behavior of Internet users, Connecticut became one of the first states to enact a law that would make harassing someone by computer a crime. [ A1. ] Mesa Takes Field Off Block Mesa said it had withdrawn its offer to sell its portion of the Hugoton natural gas field and might have to sell its holding in pieces to reduce its debt. [ D7. ] Royal Crown Plans New Cola Royal Crown said it would be introducing a new cola next week in New York and Los Angeles. Royal Crown Draft Premium Cola, which has the amber color of beer, will come in beer-like 12-ounce glass long-necked bottles and is made with pure cane sugar, not corn syrup. The company said the introduction would cost about $7 million and initial advertising would cost $3 million. The product's initial objective is 1.5 share points of the cola market, or about 50 million cases. [ D4. ] Steering Retirees Toward H.M.O.'s More than 50 employers across the country have joined in a program to push older retirees into Medicare-financed health maintenance organizations. [ D2. ] Financial Fears About Japan The short-term question confronting Tokyo as the Japanese stock market falls is whether the Government will risk public anger and bail out the country's troubled banks. Floyd Norris: Market Place. [ D10. ] House to Be Built in Mall Country Home magazine is sponsoring the construction of a two-story, 1,500-square-foot log house inside the main rotunda of the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn. The three-bedroom house will be filled with products from the magazine's advertisers, and the project will be the centerpiece of a holiday issue in the magazine in 1996. Stuart Elliott: Advertising. [ D9. ]

On a brisk spring afternoon in Far Rockaway, Queens, it caught Anthony J. Fasulo's eye. There, where Beach 22d Street spilled into Mott Avenue, it glinted up at him in gaping shamelessness: a pothole. It was a small one, not yet a full-fledged crater, and certainly not one of those Bigfoot-sized ditches that pothole initiates call a "wear-and-tear." No, this was a mere thumbprint, an "A-hole" in pothole parlance, barely deep enough to rattle the handlebars of a bicycle. A pothole-repair crew might have passed it by for more urgent fixes.

In the end, I.B.M. landed the Lotus Development Corporation by offering a little more money and a surprising measure of independence to the Lotus management team. Is the cost too high on both counts? The International Business Machines Corporation's promise of freedom to the Lotus management is regarded as a deft early move by Louis V. Gerstner Jr., I.B.M.'s chairman, to reassure the Lotus staff, keeping the company's intellectual assets intact.

Most of her young life, 16-year-old Latoya Sims was not a ward of the child-protective system. Instead, she hovered at its edge. Home was an abandoned apartment with no toilet, or a room where she was too afraid to sleep. They were places where she lost her dolls, her diaries, her baby pictures, her childhood.

Looking deep into time, out in the vast emptiness between distant galaxies, astronomers have made the first definitive detection of the helium created in profusion in the first two minutes after the Big Bang, the explosive birth of the universe as understood by most scientists. This is the long-sought primordial helium, one of the two original chemical elements (the even more abundant hydrogen being the other) from which all stars and galaxies were being formed in that early epoch of cosmic evolution, some 10 billion years ago.

TO most who venture out of doors, lichens seem familiar, their lacy gray-green dressings everywhere adorning tree trunks and rock faces. Yet in spite of their ubiquity, these delicate, often strikingly beautiful growths have remained largely mysterious to biologists, with even their evolutionary origins a well-kept secret until now. Not one organism but two closely entwined, every lichen is a symbiotic pairing of a fungus with an alga. In part because of their intimate association with algae, the lichen-forming fungi have been difficult to study and even harder for researchers to classify, leaving them to lump these species into a single group seen as not quite like the rest of the fungi. Even the scientists who study lichens are relegated to a separate discipline, with scientific societies and meetings apart from the rest of the world's fungus biologists.

Elementary school students in all 32 New York City school districts raised their math and reading test scores this spring for the first time in six years. The achievement is a significant one for the nation's largest school system, which last year absorbed $540 million in budget cuts and faces $1 billion in cuts this fall. In recent years, the poorer districts have seen a steady erosion of student performance, and in 1992, the city had an across-the-board decrease in reading and math.

The United States and North Korea have reached an agreement on providing up-to-date nuclear reactors to North Korea, clearing a major hurdle toward the dismantling of that country's suspected atomic weapons program, officials said today. "Our capitals have accepted the joint statement and authorized its release," Thomas C. Hubbard, the State Department official leading the negotiations said this morning in a telephone interview from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where the negotiations have been taking place.