December 19, 1995

Months after Consolidated Edison was ordered to pay a $2 million fine and improve its environmental record in the wake of a steam pipe explosion in 1989, a Federal monitor yesterday harshly criticized the company's efforts and said that several employees had been punished for reporting environmental mishaps. The monitor, who was appointed after Con Ed admitted that it failed to report that asbestos was released in the explosion, found that even after pleading guilty to environmental violations the company still had a "corporate culture" that discouraged employees from reporting environmental problems.

Under a bill passed unanimously by the Assembly yesterday, the police who see people they believe to be under age 21 and drinking alcohol would be allowed to enter private property to make an arrest, said Assemblywoman Rose Heck, Republican of Hasbrouck Heights and a sponsor of the bill. The bill is now before the Governor.

Plans to attract a minor league baseball team to southern New Jersey moved forward yesterday when the Senate sent Governor Whitman a bill that would authorize the Delaware River and Bay Authority to build a sports stadium. The measure would allow the authority to construct and own the stadium and lease it to a minor-league franchise. The Governor has not taken a position on the bill, her spokesman, Carl Golden, said.

Fleet Financial Group Inc. of Boston has agreed to buy the United States banking operation of Britain's National Westminster Bank P.L.C. for $3.5 billion, according to several people involved in the transaction. The details were being negotiated last night, and an announcement was scheduled for today in New York. Spokesmen for both companies declined to comment.

IT was four years ago that a vacationing German couple happened across a well-preserved body lying face-down in a slushy pocket of glacier in the Italian Alps. Since this chance discovery of what turned out to be a 5,300-year-old corpse, the world's oldest known human-flesh remains, scientists and archeologists have teased out remarkable information on the man and his environment from the equipment and clothing found with him. A bit of ember he carried to restart his campfire was from a tree likely to have grown south of the spot where he died. That evidence suggested he was on his way from the fertile Venosta Valley in northern Italy and had probably made his home there. A grain of domesticated wheat clinging to his fur clothing indicated that he had had contact with civilization, which in those days and parts would have been a small farming village.