November 21, 1995

New Jersey and its refineries have been the butt of jokes over the years. But a national environmental group says people should take them seriously, giving the state top marks on a scorecard for pollution prevention. A study released yesterday by the Environmental Defense Fund said New Jersey's standards are stricter than Federal guidelines, because the state requires reports on chemicals brought into refineries in addition to those that are released. The need to gather all that data forces refineries to examine their operations more carefully, said Lois Epstein, the principal author of the study.

THE early decisions are always the hardest. Should I sleep a little longer, or piously go running? Should I get out of bed at all? Which shampoo will leave my hair the least flat? Read the paper and be depressed, or skip the paper and risk sounding stupid later on? Yet as difficult as the average adult morning may be, it is a lazy Sunday compared with the dawn of life for embryos. Theirs is the ultimate wake-up call, for the first thing that any embryo must figure out before it rouses itself and gets to work is, which way is up? Whether destined to become a fly or a worm or a person or a tulip, the embryo must learn its top from its bottom, its front from its rear. Scientists call this initial stage of development "establishing early polarity," which essentially means the embryo must make heads or tails of itself.

When the White House chief of staff, Leon E. Panetta, took his latest offers for ending a Government shutdown to Republican leaders of the budget committees at midafternoon on Sunday, his negotiating team was not especially optimistic. They made two modest proposals that would commit President Clinton to the Republicans' goal of balancing the budget in seven years. But, they recalled today, each offer also included an escape clause big enough to seem a sucker punch. The first would have cloaked such a commitment in a nonbinding "sense of Congress" resolution that would not require the President's signature.

By pure luck, no one was hurt when a sinkhole big enough to swallow a truck opened on Main Street at the start of rush hour yesterday evening, officials said.

President Clinton and Republican Congressional leaders have got the Government back to work with an agreement on a temporary spending bill, but the much larger issue of how to balance the budget lies ahead. And on that, the potential for disagreement is vast. How the larger debate plays out will depend in part on each side's willingness to compromise, a temperament that will be shaped by opinion polls as much as political convictions. It will also depend on what the Congressional Budget Office concludes when it updates its calculations of the economic future. Those calculations will determine how much cutting has to be done.