July 14, 1995

A man who mass-produced bootlegged videotapes of hit movies like "Jurassic Park," "The Lion King" and "The Flintstones" in the basement of a home in Nutley pleaded guilty in Federal District Court yesterday to felony copy infringement. The authorities said Nedal Yousef Rasheed made more than 1,000 illegal videotapes a day and earned more than $5,000 a month selling them on the streets of Newark and New York. He agreed to turn in the tapes along with the 52 videocassette recorders he used to make the illegal copies. TERRY PRISTIN

I HATED her. For five minutes, I hated one of my best friends, who was late for lunch one afternoon. It wasn't the fact of her lateness that incited me, but rather its cause: when I looked out my living room window to see if she was walking toward my building in Greenwich Village, I observed her crouched on the sidewalk, sorting through several stacks of hard-bound books, picking at them like a queenly pigeon, accepting one crumb, rejecting the next. A pile of volumes was rising in her lap, shelved between her thin arms, swelling, brimming. "Anything good?" I shouted, projecting eight floors down, through wind, over traffic.

Nicotine Limits Backed The White House indicated that it generally supported a proposal, made Wednesday by the Food and Drug Administration, to declare nicotine a drug, and regulate cigarette sales to minors. Page A18. OTB Posts a Profit After years of multimillion-dollar losses, Offtrack Betting showed a $4.6 million profit. Page B1. Devils Will Stay, for Now The Devils agreed to play at the Meadowlands for at least next season while they try to wrap up details of a 12-year lease with the New Jersey sports authority. The deadline for agreement is Sept. 15. Page B7.

In the first specific outline of how city budget cuts could affect classrooms next fall, Chancellor Ramon C. Cortines said yesterday that community school districts should be allowed to increase class size from 25 to 27 pupils and to shorten the school day in the city's elementary schools. He also said districts should have the option of eliminating aides now required in all kindergartens and to increase the size of bilingual classes to 20 students, from the current 15.

After years of losses caused by inflated payrolls, antiquated technology and unappealing betting parlors, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani announced yesterday that his management team had started to turn the Offtrack Betting Corporation around.