Superheroes and supervillains, cutesy animals and karate-kicking kids -- from Popeye to Scooby Doo, the latest American television export to be pumped into worldwide circulation is children's programming.         Hoping to match the international success of the Cable News Network and MTV,  the nation's top purveyors of children's shows are racing to expand into a still-developing global marketplace with more than $100 billion in potential revenue.   

Can the Flintstones Fly in Fiji?

INSIDE

    PATAKI REVEALS A METHOD TO HIS MILDNESS   

METRO DIGEST

The young white-tailed deer with the well-formed rack of antlers stared intently over its right shoulder, frozen in the classic stance of an animal sensing danger and preparing to spring for cover.         But its fluffy white tail refused to give the distinctive flick that alerts its kin to danger. Pulling out a crescent wrench, David Clayton, an officer for  the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, tinkered with a tiny motor in the deer's hindquarters. "The last time out, he got shot in the tail and they messed up our robotics a little bit," he said.   

Operation Bucky: When the Deer Is a Decoy and a Hunter Is the Prey

In his campaign for governor last year, George E. Pataki outlined a succinct  set of goals for his administration. Lower taxes. Smaller government. Less regulation. A death penalty.         Just 10 months into his term, Governor Pataki has all but fulfilled these goals. He has pushed through a three-year income tax cut that will eventually be worth $3.6 billion. He has reduced the size of state government, though not nearly as much as his tax cuts would seem to demand. He has created an agency whose sole purpose is to eliminate regulations that are deemed to cost too much. He has reinstituted the death penalty.   

A YEAR IN ALBANY: A special report.;Goals Met, Pataki Reveals A Method to His Mildness

Officials are considering an ordinance that would force companies that do business with the city to pay their workers a minimum of $12.50 an hour.         "This is a start toward raising the standard of living of more and more people in the area so that they can raise families," said the Rev. George Ligos, pastor of St. Paul of the Cross Roman Catholic Church and a member of the Interfaith Community Organization, a coalition of religious groups that proposed the ordinance.   

NEW JERSEY DAILY BRIEFING;Ordinance Would Raise Wages

To understand the deep changes roiling The Los Angeles Times and its parent,  the Times Mirror Company, four months after a management turnover that brought wrenching cutbacks to the paper and its staff, it is useful to look much further back, to a different turning point in the paper's history.         On March 5, 1961, the newspaper began a tough five-part series on the far-right-wing John Birch Society. But for those who knew the Chandler family, which controls the newspaper, it was more than an expose on some anti-Communist  zealots.   

A Family Struggle for the Soul of Times Mirror

When Awilda Lopez took her first hit of crack cocaine on the hardscrabble streets of Bushwick, Brooklyn, in 1988, she crossed the shadowy divide that separates tough urban poverty from mind-numbing neglect.         In a matter of months, Ms. Lopez lost everything to the drug, according to the accounts of several friends and relatives. First, she lost her junior high school sweetheart, then her rundown apartment on Knickerbocker Avenue and finally her three oldest children, Rubensito, Kasey and baby Elisa. Now, Ms. Lopez, 29, stands charged in the beating death of 6-year-old Elisa, who died last week from blows so severe her brain hemorrhaged. Elisa will be buried on Wednesday.   

A Mother's Tale: Drugs, Despair And Violence;A Life Mired in Urban Ills Ends in a Daughter's Death

America went to the mall over the weekend, snooped around for bargains, nibbled on Mrs. Fields cookies and went home.         The post-Thanksgiving shopping traffic was heavy -- but spending was not, retailers and those who study them said yesterday. "We've had a lot of cruisers," said Vinny Castoro, an assistant manager at the Sears Office Center in the Paramus Park mall in Bergen County, N.J. "Time will tell if they'll come back and buy."   

Retailers' Vision Of Full Registers Goes a Bit Awry

    Computer Industry Debates The $500 Connection Does the world need a $500 diskless computer, intended simply for connecting to  the Internet and other computer networks? Some executives imagine a future rich  in low-cost, limited-function machines; I.B.M., Toshiba, Oracle and other companies are planning to make them.   

BUSINESS DIGEST

This Hunterdon County Borough really doesn't want its young people to start smoking.         Last summer the Borough Council passed an ordinance outlawing cigarette vending machines. Today it is expected to pass a measure making it illegal for anyone under 18 to smoke in public.   

NEW JERSEY DAILY BRIEFING;Voting on Public Smoking Ban

The Governor, meanwhile, is concerned about young people whose brushes with the law involve more than illegal smoking.         On Thursday, the Assembly will take up a legislative package from Mrs. Whitman that is aimed at revamping New Jersey's disjointed system for handling juvenile delinquents. The bills would create a Juvenile Justice Commission to coordinate programs for young offenders now administered by the Departments of Law and Public Safety, Human Services and Corrections and various private agencies.   

NEW JERSEY DAILY BRIEFING;Streamlining Juvenile Justice

Late last week, Giants management met to discuss the future of Coach Dan Reeves. Wellington Mara and Bob Tisch, the co-owners, as well as General Manager George Young talked about what to do with their head coach. And they agreed on one thing: Now is not the time to do anything rash or make any official decisions. Reeves's fate will be officially determined at the end of the season.         But even before the Giants played the Chicago Bears today and eventually lost, 27-24, on a 37-yard field goal in the final seconds before 70,015 at Giants Stadium, Reeves was being closely watched by management. And that will be the case for the remainder of the year.   

PRO FOOTBALL;Painful Loss Shows That Reeves Is Under Fans' Microscope, Too

In the corridors of Congress and across the country, critics of United States involvement in NATO's plan to enforce a Bosnia peace accord have drawn comparisons with three other American missions: Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia.         A few months ago, the Pentagon, which has opposed nearly every peacekeeping mission since the end of the cold war, would have agreed. But after reviewing details of the accord initialed last week, even the most skeptical commanders now express confidence that the NATO force, including 20,000 American troops, can achieve a tightly circumscribed set of goals with minimum casualties.   

Pentagon Confident, but Some Serbs 'Will Fight';Military Now Says Bosnia Peace Plan Will Work

With the cold war a fading memory, the nation's spy satellites are beginning  to turn some of their attention to nature.         In addition to peering at the usual military targets, they are monitoring such natural phenomena as clouds, glaciers, sea ice, deserts and tropical rain forests to gather clues about long-term global climatic change and ecological threats.   

U.S. WILL DEPLOY ITS SPY SATELLITES ON NATURE MISSION

Barry Diller, who built his reputation creating the Fox network and expanding QVC, the home shopping service, moved on two fronts during the weekend to expand the reach of his new enterprise, the Silver King Communications television network.         Mr. Diller, Silver King's chairman and chief executive, has agreed to acquire the controlling stake of the Home Shopping Network Inc. from its parent company, Tele-Communications Inc. Using Silver King stock as payment, Mr. Diller will buy Tele-Communications' 35 million shares of Home Shopping in a transaction valued  at $300 million. The 35 million shares represent 41 percent of the equity and 80 percent of the voting stock of Home Shopping. Shares of Home Shopping closed at  $9.50 on Friday, up $1, on the New York Stock Exchange.   

Diller Moves To Bolster TV Holdings

Two men armed with a bottle of flammable liquid and a match turned a token clerk's booth into an inferno inside a Brooklyn subway station early yesterday,  critically injuring the clerk in an attack that officials said may have been patterned on a current movie.         The liquid was squirted into the bulletproof booth, igniting with such force  that the booth was blown apart, spraying broken glass, charred insulation and splintered wood inside the Kingston-Throop Avenue station on the A and C lines in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Trapped inside was the clerk, Harry Kaufman, 50, working  an overtime shift he had volunteered for, who suffered second- and third-degree  burns over 70 to 80 percent of his body.   

Attackers Set Fire to Token Clerk in Brooklyn Subway Station

Many states are currently involved in or have concluded some sort of lawsuit  within the last 15 years regarding state financing of public schools. Plaintiffs have argued that finance disparities between rich and poor districts violate the guarantee of a minimal education in state constitutions. New Jersey is one of about a dozen states under court order to close the gap in spending among districts and New York could soon be another. A suit brought by a New York City  citizen's group says the state's system of finances is unfair. Although New York has 37 percent of the state's public school students, it receives only 37 percent of its education aid.   

PULSE;School Financing

The redrawing of the boundaries of Sarajevo, clean and neat on the conference table, is the most contentious part of the Balkan peace agreement, one that threatens to draw NATO troops into the kinds of firefights American officials desperately hope to avoid.         Demoralized Bosnian Serb leaders said today that the United States- sponsored agreement, initialed in Dayton, Ohio, last week, had led to a disintegration of  their authority over a bitter, well-armed populace that regards the accord as a  betrayal.   

Pentagon Confident, but Some Serbs 'Will Fight';In Sarajevo Suburbs, Talk of Resistance

A new poll could provide food for thought for the many politicians nationwide who have set out on the tax-cutting trail blazed by Gov. Christine Todd Whitman.         The Star-Ledger/Eagleton poll, released yesterday, shows that only 31 percent of New Jerseyans said they had benefited from her 30 percent cut in income taxes. At the beginning of Mrs. Whitman's term, 48 percent of residents said they thought they would benefit.   

NEW JERSEY DAILY BRIEFING;Poll Discounts Effect of Tax Cut

The young man crawled carefully out from under the conference table where he  had been imprisoned for hours. His head was misshapen from blows, his eyes swollen nearly shut, his shins and forearms rippled with welts.         His captors offered him for an interview and, mechanically, Big Fish (as he is known in Soweto) confessed to raping, robbing and beating people.   

Blacks in South Africa Turn To Vigilantes as Crime Soars

Have we got anything yet?" asked Lieut. Walter Wilfinger, in his office as chief of detectives of the 61st Precinct on Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn. He  squared the black-rimmed glasses on his face and turned to Bob Sommer, one of his detectives.         "Nothing," replied Sommer, his amber tie loosened, sitting across the desk from him. "It's going on three weeks and still not a clue. It's a total mystery."   

BOXING;Success Story Is Rewritten As a Mystery

Fred Hemke thought he had seen just about everything in his 15 years as the faculty representative to the Athletic Department at Northwestern University and more than three decades on the campus.         He arrived in the early 1960's when Ara Parseghian was the football coach and Northwestern reached the top 10 in a brief flirtation with success. He saw the school's purple flag flying at the Rose Bowl on New Year's Day, and assumed the  Wildcats would never come closer than that. He watched athletes endure the humiliation of the 34-game losing streak from 1979-1982, and sat in on meetings  when Northwestern's worthiness as a Big Ten member became the subject of an intense debate.   

Northwestern and Its Fans Get to Stop and Savor the Roses

Fort Monmouth and the Army Chaplain Center and School will formally say farewell at a ceremony on the base today.         The school, which trains more than 1,500 students each year, is moving to Fort Jackson, S.C., next month as part of Federal base realignments.   

NEW JERSEY DAILY BRIEFING;Packing Up and Moving Out

People have no confidence in the justice system. They don't even go to the police. They are more and more trying to deal with it on their own. And the danger is that they revert to summary judgment and punish immediately." -- SYLVESTER RAKGOADI, a researcher on vigilantism in South Africa. [A6:1.]   

No Headline

Suliasi Bainiua Vunivalu is a professional rugby union footballer who plays for the Queensland Reds in the Super Rugby and the Australian national team. His regular playing position is wing.

November 27, 1995

Headlines from November 27, 1995

Can the Flintstones Fly in Fiji?

INSIDE

METRO DIGEST

Operation Bucky: When the Deer Is a Decoy and a Hunter Is the Prey

A YEAR IN ALBANY: A special report.;Goals Met, Pataki Reveals A Method to His Mildness

Billboard 200

Alice In Chains

Daydream

Jagged Little Pill

Dogg Food

Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness

Notable Births

Historical Context for November 27, 1995