June 18, 1995

The latest battle with City Hall was reaching a boil three weeks ago when Schools Chancellor Ramon C. Cortines left New York to spend the Memorial Day weekend at the home he has kept in Pasadena, Calif. As Mr. Cortines sat by his pool in his neatly landscaped backyard, a friend from New York turned to him and said, "Remind me again why you're in New York." "He just laughed," said the friend, Chip Block.

The leaders of the seven major industrial nations issued a double-pronged warning today to President Boris N. Yeltsin of Russia, telling him that the "situation in Chechnya should not be resolved by military means" and indirectly condemning his Government's planned sale of nuclear reactors to Iran. In remarks to reporters before he and President Clinton met for private talks, an obviously agitated Mr. Yeltsin pronounced Chechnya "the center of world terrorism, of bribery and corruption and mafia."

IF IT WORKS, WHY FIX IT? WHY subject Paris, the most extravagantly beloved city since the beginning of time, to a huge program of major public works? Wouldn't it be better to tamper with, say, Marseilles and leave the City of Light alone? It's a little late for such questions. The Grands Travaux -- the Big Works decreed by President Francois Mitterrand -- are all up and, for the most part, running. Now, with Mitterrand out of office, the hour has come to reckon with their impact. Has the change in the city's shape diminished its grandeur and ruined its image? Is a bigger, up-to-date Paris better than the old Paris? And what is the impact on the emerging generation of young architects?

TWO feet of rain had fallen around New Orleans at the height of last month's fierce Gulf storm, shutting down regular air service into the city, and still the oil executives kept coming. One group hired a private jet and then a helicopter. Others had to abandon their car to wade through water up to their necks, holding their briefcases high to keep them dry. The Government was selling oil and gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico and a little derring-do to get to the auction site was a small price to pay for a piece of the action. When the bidding was over at the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service office in the flooded suburb of Metairie, the executives had forked over $307 million for drilling rights -- nearly triple what the Government had expected.

ON a damp afternoon recently the telephone rang at Buzz and Jean Seward's house in Greenwich. The caller had found a listless chipmunk in her yard and wanted some help. Within 15 minutes, Leslie Cooper and her two children arrived at the Seward home with the chipmunk in a shoebox. Mr. Seward carefully wrapped the small creature in a white cloth and placed it in a plastic container with a ventilated cover. Then he made a space for it in a warm incubator crowded with several other containers that had once held Cool Whip Lite and margarine but were now homes for abandoned baby birds.