November 25, 1995

If George Herbert Walker Bush was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, Malcolm Stevenson Forbes Jr. was born with a complete place setting. Money -- by the bucketful -- is at the core of Mr. Forbes's candidacy for the Republican Presidential nomination. It may not buy him love from the voters, but it is certainly buying him attention, to say nothing of a respectable standing in the polls.

In the past several weeks, the Environmental Protection Agency has canceled hundreds of pollution inspections at factories, water treatment plants and other sites nationwide because of budget cuts imposed by temporary spending legislation. Senior officials in the agency say that the reduction in inspections, which began when stopgap spending bills reduced the agency's budget last month, is likely to intensify if Congress has its way.

From Atlanta and Miami to San Diego and Seattle, a new brand of youthful volunteerism is flourishing, nurtured largely by a network of organizations devoted to providing varied and flexible opportunities for busy young professionals to serve their communities. The movement began in 1986 in a living room on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where six friends gathered to discuss their frustrations with established volunteer agencies in New York City. Their meeting led to the formation of New York Cares, a clearinghouse designed to connect service-minded New Yorkers with dozens of projects around the city.

Tensions among some of New York's most powerful Colombian drug rings have spawned a series of murders and kidnappings across northern Queens when violent crime is dropping almost everywhere else in the city, the police and Federal agents say. Coming after the arrests of six of the top seven kingpins of the Cali drug cartel in Colombia, the surge in violent crime suggests that discipline is eroding in the upper levels of the Colombian cocaine distribution system that supplies New York, New Jersey and much of the Eastern Seaboard, officials say.

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