July 17, 1995

Conventional wisdom has it that the second quarter brings a slump to the producers of computers, software, semiconductors and disk drives. Not so this year. With a few exceptions, the companies that have reported second-quarter results have met or exceeded Wall Street analysts' estimates, sending already lofty prices of technology stock to new highs on an almost daily basis.

Barely two months after taking office, President Jacques Chirac today publicly recognized France's responsibility for deporting thousands of Jews to Nazi death camps during the German occupation in World War II. His statement put an end to decades of equivocations by successive French Governments about France's wartime role.

Metro-North workers could strike at any time, leaders of the railroad's labor unions warned yesterday after contract talks broke off despite significant movement by management on wages and work rules. Preparing for a walkout, the railroad will have 400 buses ready this morning to ferry riders, if need be, from counties north of New York City and Connecticut to take them to subway and bus stops in the Bronx, Donna Evans, a spokeswoman for the railroad, said.

The heat wave that scorched much of the Northeast with record-setting 100-degree temperatures killed at least 11 people in New York City, who died of causes like hyperthermia and heat stroke, city officials said yesterday. Officials were only beginning to assess the impact of Saturday's withering heat spell, which caused several power failures outside the city, damaged roads that buckled under the fierce sun and led thousands to seek emergency medical help.

House Republicans have begun drafting proposals to make immense changes in Medicare, by imposing annual limits on spending in the program and by giving elderly people a choice of private health insurance plans as alternatives to the standard Federal program. Confidential documents prepared by Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee describe numerous options that would increase costs for Medicare beneficiaries who stay in the standard program, under which the Government pays separately for each doctor's visit and each hospital admission. More than 90 percent of the 37 million Medicare beneficiaries receive care through such fee-for-service arrangements.

They came like a parade of death: police truck after police truck, delivering the bodies to the Cook County morgue, until finally there was no more room for the dead. Wicked heat is being blamed for hundreds of deaths across the eastern half of the country, and perhaps 300 deaths in Chicago alone, said Edmund Donoghue, the medical examiner for Cook County, where refrigerated trucks are being used to store the overflow from the morgue.

The Campbell Soup Foundation has increased its contribution to the newly remodeled New Jersey State Aquarium, adding $100,000 to its initial donation of $500,000. The foundation also pledged to give up to $150,000 more if the aquarium is able to lure additional visitors to its tanks, which used to specialize in New Jersey fish but now display more exotic breeds. On Friday, the foundation presented its check to Governor Whitman, and she got a look on Friday at the aquarium's $3.75 million makeover.

As rebel Serbs moved in on a second United Nations protected area in eastern Bosnia, Muslim refugees from the so-called safe area the Serbs captured last week gave new, detailed accounts today of the killing and rape of civilians. Reconstructing precisely what happened in the safe area of Srebrenica is almost impossible at this point because of the chaos among the thousands of refugees here and the fact that many seem traumatized and disoriented.

The king of pop has been dethroned by a cartoon princess. And that's hardly good news for Sony Music Entertainment. Only three weeks after the release of Michael Jackson's long anticipated new album, "HIStory" on Sony's Epic label, it has been bumped from the top of the charts by the soundtrack from "Pocahontas," the Disney animated film about the Indian princess who was the daughter of Powhatan.

A frenzied and chaotic gold rush is under way across vast expanses of rural China, where newly wealthy "gold lords" and the peasants who toil and fight for them are challenging the authority of the state. Here in the far western province of Qinghai and in other parts of China, modest gold deposits, long under the exclusive control of the Communist Party and state mining combines, are being overrun by a wave of entrepreneurial and well-armed private miners.

The giant onion of Castrofilippo went unnoticed in Rome and Naples, and barely got a mention in the towns near the tiny Sicilian village where it was grown. But it was news this summer in Astoria, Queens. "Six pounds," marveled Salvatore Marino, an Astoria resident for 26 years. "That is a big, big onion."

Hideo Nomo, rookie pitcher and sudden icon, sat before his locker thumbing through a Japanese paperback, headphones plugging his ears, and succeeded, once again, in sealing himself from the mounting frenzy around him. Upstairs in Dodger Stadium, young men and small children in Nomo T-shirts and Nomo caps hurried past pockets of middle-aged Japanese tourists who hovered close to their tour guide, getting directions to their seats. In this desultory baseball season, the personality of the moment is Nomo, who is the first Japanese pitcher in 30 years to pitch in the major leagues and who, in a scant two months, has forever destroyed the image of the male Asian athlete as a slight and polite young man who can win by smarts but never by strength. The Dodgers may love Nomo for packing the house, and Japanese may adore him for showing what a local boy can do against the big leaguers. But for Japanese-Americans like Brian Niiya, Nomo is the best thing to come along since Bruce Lee martial arts movies -- even if Nomo remains aloof.