June 30, 1995

One hundred current and former New York City employees, including 2 police officers and 24 welfare department workers, have been charged with welfare fraud because they illegally collected benefits while on the city payroll, investigators said yesterday. In the 14-month inquiry by the Department of Investigation, a list of every city employee was matched against welfare rolls to uncover individuals who were illegally collecting benefits. In contrast to other recent investigations, which have uncovered networks of corrupt employees in the welfare department, the computer match found people who had apparently individually lied to obtain benefits.

On basically party-line votes, the House and the Senate today adopted a seven-year Republican plan that is supposed to cut taxes, limit spending for Medicare and other social programs and balance the Federal budget by the year 2002. The votes showed in stark colors how much the political landscape has changed since Republicans won control of Congress in the election last November.

The posters of his smiling face are badly worn now, the pennants with his likeness tattered by breezes whipping up dust on Gaza's streets. But the sand-covered square where he was welcomed back by his people a year ago is now a carefully tended park with a spanking new playground. Like the posters and pennants, Yasir Arafat is a faded though enduring national symbol to most Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. But a year after returning last July 1 from decades in exile, he is undergoing a transformation in many Palestinian minds.

Lawyers for Capital Cities/ABC Inc. have entered into preliminary discussions with the Philip Morris Companies about settling a huge lawsuit the tobacco company filed against the network, an executive familiar with the legal strategy in the case said last night. In the suit, Philip Morris is seeking $10 billion, a record for a libel case. It accuses ABC News of defaming it in reports on Feb. 28 and March 7 on the newsmagazine program "Day One," which said Philip Morris had followed a policy of adding nicotine to cigarettes to help addict smokers.

HAVE you any idea why Alfred Lunt and Lynne Fontanne were Broadway's most exacting, most stylish acting couple? Did Hollywood deserve its reputation in the 1930's for ruining great plays and corrupting great playwrights? Is it possible that theater, at least as it had been known for more than 2,000 years, was doomed the minute the movie close-up was introduced? Good, serious, funny, often contradictory answers to these questions, and a number of others you may never have thought to ask, are being offered in Screen Plays: From Broadway to Hollywood, 1920-1966.