October 10, 1995

Just after 6 A.M. Sunday, only hours after he had been named New York City's new schools chancellor, Rudolph F. Crew picked up the phone at a friend's home in Sacramento, Calif., and began placing calls to New York. He has not stopped since. He spoke to the Mayor, the president of the Board of Education, the president of the New York Urban League, the president of a parents' group, even the Speaker of the State Assembly. He talked so much on Sunday that he missed two flights from Sacramento to Tacoma, Wash., barely making the last flight home.

A grocer who fatally shot a 16-year-old youth during a holdup at his store last weekend was in stable condition yesterday at University Hospital in Newark. Three people, including Erica Rivera, the sister of the dead youth, Steven Rodriguez, were in custody and were expected to be arraigned today on charges stemming from the robbery Friday night at the South America Grocery Store in Passaic. The store owner, George DeJesus, was wounded in the eye, possibly when a shot fired by one of his assailants struck some glass and shattered it, said Lieut. Daniel Paton of the Passaic police.

It looked like one of the great success stories of Wall Street and high technology. An obscure company produced a software program that quickly became a best seller. And its shares zoomed in price, from 3 cents in March to a high of $32 this summer -- a gain of more than 100,000 percent. But now things are looking glum for those who leaped into the stock of Syncronys Softcorp. The program, called Soft RAM, is under attack for doing little if anything. Since August, the company's stock price has plunged. Yesterday, it traded as low as $6.50 before bouncing back to close at $8.25.

For months, Republican plans to curb Federal health care spending have sailed along on a silent wave of interest group approval, or at least resignation, that seemed remarkable after the brawl over President Clinton's health care legislation. While Democrats denounced the plans, advocates for the elderly were all but silent. Doctors bought an advertisement praising the plan. The insurance industry approved. The hospitals stuck out in their unhappiness, but even they seemed to have toned it down since last spring.

BIRDS do it, senators do it, even fuzzy little bees do it: they engage, that is, in the ancient art of sexual harassment. Stress it on the first syllable or stress it on the next, but harassment is probably as old as the partition of sex cells into sperm and eggs. Indeed, the more carefully biologists survey the field, the more often they spy examples of males hounding females (and, on occasion, the reverse) to listen up, settle down and mate, mate, mate. Now some researchers are attempting to quantify the toll that harassment exacts on the recipient of the unwanted advances, to determine when conventional male ardor becomes dangerous to the female, detracting from her capacity to care for her young and even, on occasion, leading to her death. Two papers on the subject of sexual harassment and coercion appeared recently in the journal Animal Behaviour, one an in-depth study of sexual harassment in a species of solitary bee, the second a sweeping overview of harassment among a broad variety of animals. The take-home message is that males will often do whatever they can to seize the resource they covet most: female sexuality. As for their methods, we're not talking champagne and soft jazz.