August 1, 1995

President Clinton and Senator Bob Dole, his leading Republican rival for next year's Presidential race, presented competing visions of welfare reform to the nation's governors today. Playing both to the governors and to a broader public widely disillusioned with current welfare programs, Mr. Dole and Mr. Clinton each said welfare must be changed, but they disagreed about the role the central Government should play in fashioning assistance to the poor.

In the second-largest corporate takeover ever, the Walt Disney Company moved yesterday to create the world's most powerful media and entertainment company, announcing that it would acquire Capital Cities/ ABC Inc. for $19 billion. The combined company would bring together the most profitable television network and its ESPN cable service with Disney's Hollywood film and television studios, the Disney Channel, its theme parks and its repository of well-known cartoon characters and the merchandise sales they generate.

"Corrections officers should be held to a higher standard," said Glenn Cunningham, public safety director for Hudson County. That is why 40 Hudson County correction officers, who were found to have suspended or invalid driver's licenses during a routine insurance check, now have 30 days to correct the problem or face disciplinary action.

Just after dawn on April 25, two patients arrived for scheduled surgery at Long Island Jewish Medical Center in New Hyde Park, Queens. Denise Verbeeck, a mildly retarded, 27-year-old former athlete, was about to undergo routine elective surgery on a damaged kneecap. Lloyd Reback, a strapping, 25-year-old bodybuilder, was facing a more complicated, but hardly life-threatening, operation to remove a benign tumor from his jaw. After a nurse examined each patient, they changed into gowns and headed toward the operating suite. Mr. Reback waved to his mother, Myrna. "Goodbye, Ma, I love you," he said.

SCIENTISTS call it the set point: that vexing and seemingly immutable weight that even the most assiduous dieters keep drifting back to. But the actual mechanism of the body's set point or fat-setting thermostat has long been elusive. The discovery of a fat-signaling hormone last week has given new insight into the body's system of fat control and suggested promising new practical approaches to the treatment of obesity. It may help solve the puzzles of how the body knows how much fat it has and why a person's weight seems always to be forced back to the set point.