July 15, 1995

The scourge of heat that killed at least 15 people and thousands of cattle in the Midwest descended upon the New York area yesterday, bringing a high-misery combination of near-record temperatures in the mid-90's and the heavy wetness of a tropical rain forest. The regionwide steam bath was expected to intensify today. Because warmer air has a greater capacity for moisture, today's high humidity levels will represent the highest moisture content detected at these latitudes in recent years, meteorologists said. Conditions will begin to ease on Sunday.

A generation ago, when the Vietnam War was driving a wedge through America, Marco Scolari, a union concrete worker and World War II veteran, could scarcely bring himself to speak to any man who had avoided military service. Back then, it seemed that passions over Vietnam might never cool, on either side. But when President Clinton extended diplomatic recognition to Vietnam on Tuesday, a move that once would surely have ignited a firestorm, the response across the nation, in interviews with dozens of Americans, was measured, and mostly favorable.

New York Newsday, a suburban newspaper's bold experiment in breaking into the largest and most competitive city market with a new type of tabloid, will publish its last issue tomorrow, its publishers said yesterday. The paper, which emerged in the economic boom of the mid-1980's, was the victim of corporate pressures for profits and of a newspaper market that changed sharply over the last decade, as the paper struggled to build a readership from a new middle class in the city, particularly Brooklyn and Queens.

A year after an exodus of a million Rwandans flooded the plains around Goma, more than 720,000 Hutu refugees remain in camps in the area, many of them afraid to return, others rearming and preparing for a military offensive against the Tutsi-led Government in Rwanda. The refugees here are Hutu who fled the advancing Tutsi rebel army that took control of Rwanda last year. They include tens of thousands of soldiers, militiamen, civil servants and farmers who took part in the killing of at least 500,000 Tutsi and a small number of moderate Hutu politicians.

Ignoring international condemnation and Western threats of retaliation, Bosnian Serb forces began an attack on another Muslim enclave in eastern Bosnia today, hours after they completed the "ethnic cleansing" of a nearby Muslim area overrun on Wednesday. The new attack's target was the town of Zepa, which has an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 Muslim residents and 79 Ukrainian peacekeepers who were deployed to protect its status as a "safe area."