December 8, 1995

Challenging aggressive Wall Street deals that it contends have improperly stretched the tax law, the Clinton Administration proposed today to limit the deductibility of various innovative financial practices. The limits would raise nearly $6.5 billion in the next seven years as part of a $28 billion list of initiatives included in President Clinton's budget plan that he sent to Congress today. They are intended to curb corporate subsidies and to close loopholes involving activities ranging from the issuance of 100-year bonds, to farming, to manufacturing pharmaceuticals in Puerto Rico.

EACH year, the holiday feeling is the same, a claustrophobic, stultifying sensation of walking through a bright department store in a winter coat, not knowing where to look first, fighting through throngs of similarly desperate people as they wander from floor to floor, dodging models with atomizers filling the air with the latest cologne. As far as I'm concerned, there are two kinds of people I shop for each holiday season: relatives for whom I don't know what to get, and friends for whom I don't know what to get. And each year, I come up with the same solution: procrastination. So it is that for more Christmas Eves than I care to remember I'm on the telephone with large Manhattan department stores asking how late they are open. And there I am, braving the thousands of other shoppers who curse themselves for waiting until the last minute, pawing through the remaining merchandise, searching for something, anything, that will fit into a box and look presentable the next morning.

A man who was accused earlier this year of hiring someone to kill his girlfriend was arrested in Florida yesterday while trying to obtain a driver's license with a fake birth certificate, the authorities said. The man, James Minett, fled his home in Union, N.J., on May 25, the day the police charged Charles Ward of Newark in the shooting death of Holly Jo Desch, said Edward M. Neafsey, Acting Prosecutor for Union County.

A sheet-metal worker from Springfield, N.J., won a slot-machine jackpot of more than $6.3 million at the Showboat Casino last night. The winner, Tom Severini, 50, traveling on business, won the prize on a Megabucks progressive slot machine, which is linked with machines in other Atlantic City casinos to produce multimillion-dollar jackpots.

THERE have been dream teams of basketball players and lawyers, and all-star baseball teams. This week, the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened a sort of dream couture show, with pieces for every significant change in fashion in the last 150 years. The show, encased in glass and called "Haute Couture," is a virtual runway of couture's greatest hits, familiar to the eye from historic photos and from the cover versions of those hits that other designers have created in recent years.

War, never gentle, was hard enough on Hana Comic, making her a refugee before she was two years old. But, three years later, the idea that peace might spirit her home to Bosnia makes her weep. Home has come to mean a place she has seen on television "where there are massacres, refugees, where the children have no food, no clothes, no shoes, where children are burned and crying," said her father, Ekrem Comic, 29. Her mother, Hiba, 26, said that whenever Hana, now 5, hears adults talk of returning to Bosnia, she breaks down and cries.

Passing up a chance to reshape the Federal Reserve for fear of a political battle with Congress, the Clinton Administration is leaning toward reappointing the central bank's top two officers as a package deal. Administration officials hope that Senate Republicans' fondness for the Fed's chairman, Alan Greenspan, will persuade them to accept another term for the vice chairman, Alan S. Blinder.

Hoping to get budget negotiations with Congress off the ground, President Clinton today offered a new plan that he said would balance the budget in seven years, but it was immediately assailed by Republican leaders. Following a 90-minute negotiating session in the Capitol this afternoon, Leon E. Panetta, the White House chief of staff, said of the President's new proposal: "We think it works. We think it's credible. We think it's defensible."

In a ruling that means subway and bus fares will remain at $1.50 for now, a Federal appeals court said that a lower-court judge was wrong to block the 25-cent transit fare increase on civil rights grounds. The ruling cast doubt on the logic opponents had planned to use to fight the increase: that it is discriminatory against the mainly black and Hispanic commuters who use the city system, an issue that still must be decided by the lower court.

Gov. George E. Pataki, who as a candidate vowed to attack fraud and waste in state government, has stripped nearly all of the staff from the office responsible for investigating those abuses. Of the 25 employees in the Office of the State Inspector General when Mr. Pataki became Governor, 22 have been let go. Only five replacements have been hired, most with ties to the Republican Party.

The sponsor of a bill that would have reduced welfare benefits for people suspected of moving to New Jersey to collect higher payments withdrew it yesterday because he did not have enough votes for passage. The bill would have cut the benefits up to 25 percent for residents who could not prove they had lived in New Jersey for nine consecutive months. Both the Legislature's legal adviser and the State Attorney General's office said the measure was unconstitutional. But the bill's sponsor, Senator C. Louis Bassano, Republican of Union, said he would try to revive it, The Associated Press reported.

New York City's public school teachers voted down a proposed five-year contract last night, dealing a staggering and surprising setback to the union leadership and Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, whose labor strategy was plunged into uncertainty. It was the first time in the 35-year history of the United Federation of Teachers that the rank and file membership rejected a tentative contract agreement negotiated for them. With all 55,059 teachers' ballots counted, the vote was 56 percent against to 44 percent in favor, according to figures from the American Arbitration Association, the nonprofit group that tallied the results.