December 12, 1995

At the end of this month, Heidi Moller will move from South Africa to Germany, leaving the country she was born in without a hint of regret. Her husband's business was not doing well. The school system, she says, is disintegrating. But most of all, she says, she is leaving because fear had come to overwhelm her family. Last year, her husband, Hans, a surveyor, was shot at from a passing vehicle while working in a Johannesburg suburb. A few months later, he was forced off the road by hijackers and was shot in the leg. One of Mrs. Moller's best friends was shot and her husband killed in front of their children. Her brother-in-law was shot at in his driveway as four men tried to steal his car, while his family watched helplessly from the house.

ROSE RIVERS is not a naive woman. Nothing is guaranteed in this life, she knows. She also knew there was an element of risk when she took the business plunge of her life three weeks ago by setting up shop as La K Fashions, on West 125th Street just east of Malcolm X Boulevard, a k a Lenox Avenue. Actually, she took ownership of an existing store that had sold women's clothes under the name of Leona for more than 50 years. Not wanting to upset faithful customers with sudden change, she decided to leave the neon "Leona" sign above the entrance and to keep the store's appeal to "the mature female shopper."

Biologists are not quite sure why this year's migration of tiny bats to the seaside village of Cape May Point is bigger than ever, but they say they suspect that last July's heavy rains may have something to do with it. "They could be hanging around because there is still food here," Annette Scherer, an endangered-species biologist for the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, told the A.P. Not to worry, though. None of the 44 species of bats are bloodsuckers, said Barbara French of Bat Conservation International, a nonprofit group in Austin, Tex. TERRY PRISTIN

The day before a gunman-arsonist turned a Harlem clothing store into an inferno that killed seven employees and himself, the store's owner, who is Jewish, told a court that demonstrations by black protesters outside his premises had become a menacing caldron of anti-Semitic, anti-white racism and that arson and physical attacks seemed imminent. A hearing on the owner's appeal for relief from the protests was under way in State Supreme Court in lower Manhattan last Friday even as Freddy's clothing store, on 125th Street, lay in ruins, the trapped employees dead inside with the assailant, Roland J. Smith Jr.

A little-noticed addition to the Republican welfare bill, now awaiting final action in Congress, would eliminate the longstanding guarantee of health insurance coverage for many welfare recipients. The versions of the welfare bill initially passed by the House and the Senate would have retained the guarantee of Medicaid coverage for anyone qualifying for cash assistance under the standards in effect on June 1 of this year.