September 26, 1995

More than two decades after the high tide of court-ordered school desegregation, critics of school busing around the country are mounting renewed campaigns to end Federal desegregation initiatives and the busing plans that come with them. Encouraged by conservative electoral successes and a string of Supreme Court decisions limiting the responsibilities of schools to foster desegregation, Denver, Minneapolis, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Seattle, Wilmington, Del., and Indianapolis are among cities revisiting the emotional debate over school busing. Norfolk, Va., and Oklahoma City have already eliminated mandatory busing for the purposes of desegregation.

In what may become the first case tried under New York State's new death penalty law, an unemployed grocery clerk in Kingston, N.Y., was charged yesterday with the kidnapping and murder of a 7-year-old girl who disappeared on Thursday.

Officials of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey said yesterday that the Lincoln and Holland tunnels and PATH stations will get face lifts. Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani said the authority is doing more for New Jerseyans than for New Yorkers, again. [ Page B5. ]

Congressional Republicans are poised to pass legislation requiring the Internal Revenue Service to turn over some debt collection to commercial interests, thereby giving certain private citizens access to confidential taxpayer information for the first time. The agency's appropriations bill, now stalled in a Senate-House conference over an unrelated issue, would provide $13 million for the I.R.S. to test whether private bill collectors could do a better job than the agency's own employees, even though they would be denied such governmental powers as the ability to seize property.

The West Bank agreement concluded on Sunday had little of the triumphal hoopla that usually accompanies such pacts, things like starting a new era or bringing peoples together. This document was more of a divorce agreement -- a detailed and unsentimental arrangement hammered out in intense and sometimes stormy negotiations between two people who recognized that they could not live together, and had to decide exactly who gets what, where and when.