July 3, 1995

New Link in Bombing Case Federal investigators have made links between weapons stolen in a robbery in rural Arkansas last November and the two suspects in the the bombing the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Page 6. Desperately Seeking Jobs With money for job programs drying up, the search for summer work has a depressing air of futility for many teen-agers throughout the New York City region. Page 23.

Gathered outside a college classroom, Sayaka Fujimoto and six of her friends tore open their packages from the United States, and to the astonishment of their male friends who were watching, pulled out $1,133 worth of Victoria's Secret lingerie. "We're going to have a sleep-over and wear everything -- like a fashion show," said Miss Fujimoto, a 20-year-old college student who often orders clothes through the mail along with her friends.

On a summer night as sweet and soft as any he had ever known, Pierre Mathurin and another young man pulled to the curb in a quiet section of Queens, snorted a couple of lines of cocaine and set out down the sidewalk. They had spotted a man and a woman strolling alone, and now they were going after them, Mr. Mathurin's fingers tightening on a chrome-plated .25-caliber pistol. It was just a week shy of Mr. Mathurin's 20th birthday, and his career as a drug dealer and robber was gathering momentum nicely. But that evening did not go as expected. The woman screamed, and Mr. Mathurin, fleeing with a wallet and a gold chain, was chased down by neighbors with baseball bats, turned over to the police and eventually sent to a prison drug treatment program that transformed his life.

At a meeting quietly convened at a mountain house in the Grand Tetons of Wyoming, representatives of some of the largest employers and purchasers of health insurance agreed last week to pursue a fundamental shift in emphasis in the nation's managed health-care systems: They want the primary focus to be placed on measuring the quality of care now that costs have begun to be controlled. The broad-based agreement was reached at Jackson Hole last week by 30 officials of Federal, state and local public employees organizations, consumer groups and officials of such major employers as American Express, the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company, the Ameritech Corporation and Pepsico, which together represent an estimated 80 million consumers of health insurance.

In the next few weeks, Congress will consider legislation to alter rules on food safety drastically. The changes, scattered throughout several bills, have been proposed by the Republicans to limit the Federal Government's authority to regulate not only food safety but also health and the environment. Taken together, the bills would reduce the burden on businesses to prove that food is safe and would increase the burden on Government agencies to prove that proposed rules would reduce risks to the public and would be worth the cost. The bills would also expand the food industry's chances to appeal the rules in court.