December 9, 1995

In the latest embarrassment for the Navy, a senior admiral in Europe has been demoted and forced to retire early after being found guilty of sexually harassing a woman who worked for him, the Navy said today. A Navy inquiry concluded this week that the officer, Rear Adm. Ralph L. Tindal, who is deputy commander of NATO forces in Spain and Portugal, had been involved in "an inappropriate" yearlong affair with a female enlisted aide.

In the next month, Connecticut is to enact a series of tough new welfare measures, but the state has run into a hitch: the Clinton Administration appears to be balking at some of the most controversial proposals. As part of his effort to reduce welfare, Gov. John G. Rowland, a Republican, wants to discourage poor out-of-staters from moving here, and so has proposed a two-tier benefit plan that would pay newcomers 10 percent less than longtime residents. He also wants to impose the nation's shortest time limit for collecting benefits, 21 months.

Saying he does not believe that condom demonstrations in the classroom are appropriate for any age group, Chancellor Rudy Crew will ask the Board of Education next week to adopt a curriculum on AIDS and H.I.V. that would offer instruction on how to use a condom only to high-school students who specifically request it. His request would require the board to reverse a decision it made in January to teach ninth graders how to use a condom. The decision addressed the issue of an AIDS curriculum for seventh through ninth grades. The issue before the board now is what should be taught in high schools.

Eight people in a Harlem clothing store were killed yesterday in a fierce, smoky blaze that the police said they believe was deliberately set as part of a bitter landlord-tenant dispute that led to angry protests in the neighborhood. Among the dead was a man the police suspect set fire to the store before apparently shooting himself in the chest. The fire gutted the first-floor storefront that housed Freddie's Fashion Mart on Harlem's main thoroughfare, 125th Street, shortly after a tall gunman, waving a .38-caliber handgun, burst into the store across the street from the Apollo Theater. The police said last night that they believed the gunman had once joined a group of demonstrators who had picketed the store in recent weeks in a feud over the threatened eviction of a subtenant, the Record Shack, a neighborhood institution.

It was just after 10 o'clock and Harlem had begun like an orchestra to tune up for another great performance. Traffic rumbled. Stores were open. Sidewalk vendors were out. And people moved briskly in the cold December morning, headed for work or shops or favorite haunts, carrying bags like responsibilities. Across from the famed Apollo Theater, on the southeast corner of 125th Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard, the gunman appeared out of nowhere at Freddie's Fashion Mart, a white-owned business that for months had been picketed and boycotted over a plan to expand that meant the eviction of a black-owned record shop next door. Feelings had run high. There had been threats.