July 20, 1995

THE jewel-box gallery and bookshop run by Jane Stubbs like a modern-day version of Bloomsbury is probably the closest thing New York has to that early-20th-century insular world of artists, writers and thinkers. Certainly the love of estheticism is there at Stubbs Books and Prints. As is the quality that Sir Osbert Sitwell called an enormous tolerance for the untoward or eccentric. Blame it on her Mississippi-bred Southern hospitality, but Ms. Stubbs just can't seem to get the insular part exactly right.

The union that represents toll collectors on the New Jersey Turnpike accused management yesterday of unfair labor practices, including bargaining in bad faith, harassing members of the union's negotiating team and refusing to allow toll collectors to come back to work immediately after their eight-hour walkout on July 3.

After days of painful uncertainty for thousands of Metro-North commuters, railroad officials yesterday invoked a provision in Federal law to postpone a possible strike for four months. The move came at the end of a day in which the railroad's unions gave up some of their cherished, decades-old work rules in contract talks.

Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman, gave a favorable portrayal of the economy's health to a House panel today, which some traders in the financial markets viewed as making further interest-rate cuts unlikely soon. His comments, while open to conflicting interpretations, contributed to big early-afternoon selloffs in the bond and stock markets.

Four months after hinting that he might scale back Federal preference programs based on race and sex in the face of Republican demands to end them, President Clinton today issued a ringing reaffirmation of the goals and results of affirmative action, saying it has been good for America. "Affirmative action has not always been perfect, and affirmative action should not go on forever," Mr. Clinton said in a speech at the National Archives. "It should be changed now to take care of those things that are wrong, and it should be retired when its job is done.