June 23, 1995

Adobe Systems Inc., extending its reach in the growing market for electronic publishing, agreed today to acquire the Frame Technology Corporation in a $500 million stock swap. Frame, based in San Jose, Calif., produces software used for creating technical documents in large corporations; most of the software runs on high-powered computer work stations using the Unix operating system. As such, it complements Adobe's Pagemaker product, which runs primarily on personal computers and is used to create documents like newsletters for smaller companies. Pagemaker was added by Adobe last year when it acquired the Aldus Corporation.

Timothy P. Shriver leaned back in his chair, loosened his tie, cradled the phone on his shoulder and turned on the charm in an effort to sell a $150,000 30-second television spot on the Special Olympics World Games opening ceremonies. "Do you have 20 minutes for me?" Mr. Shriver murmured into the receiver. "I can come down to New York."

Egged on by nervous parents, 65 children ages 8 to 14 from eight states arrived in Wildwood yesterday to compete in the World Series of Marbles, an annual four-day event sponsored by three marble manufacturers. Listening to a portable radio while playing and wearing rosary beads in memory of her coach, who died last week, Stephanie Zlokas, 14, of Allegheny County, Pa., captured the girls' title. The male winner was Jason Williams, also 14, of Clarksburg, W. Va. They each got a trophy, a plaque, a National Marbles Tournament wristwatch and a $2,000 scholarship. The match took place in concrete rings erected on the beach. TERRY PRISTIN

WE are in a French country inn. We sit on rustic chairs in a mansard room wallpapered in burgundy toile. We sip welcoming glasses of chilled chardonnay from etched goblets. We look out at the water. En famille, we inhale the musk of roasting garlic wafting up from the kitchen. We hear: vvvvROOOOM! A motorcycle accelerating to warp speed screams past below the window, followed by a babble of radio from a passing convertible and the pounding rhythms of rap from a next-door neighbor's boombox. The water is not the Loire or the Dordogne. It is Eastchester Bay. We are abroad at home, in the Bronx.

State prosecutors charged yesterday that a Mafia-dominated cartel used arson and threats to control the city's commercial garbage business for more than 50 years, forcing virtually every business, university, and hospital in New York City to pay up to 40 percent more for trash collection than they would have in a free market. Culminating a five-year investigation led by an undercover police officer posing as a garbage hauler, a state grand jury indicted some of the largest garbage haulers in the city, as well as executives described as senior members of the Gambino and Genovese organized crime families.