January 5, 1996

Testifying in Albany, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani said yesterday that cuts planned by the state would cause pain for New York City, forcing him to slash city services further. The Mayor noted that Gov. George E. Pataki's budget calls for 25 percent cuts in block grants for mental health and other health care. His criticism was in marked contrast to testimony this time a year ago, when he endorsed many state cuts and even suggested the Governor could go further in trimming the budget.

Less than a year ago, Red Hook's ambitious plan to remake itself was hailed as a paradigm of late-20th-century urban renewal. City officials, residents and politicians spoke enthusiastically of the plan's scope and realism, its lack of ideology and its abundance of consensus. The plan was a blueprint laid out by and for the people of that troubled section of Brooklyn. It envisioned hundreds of units of new housing, a new 500-student high school and a revitalized waterfront, an enterprise with the potential for returning Red Hook to the working-class maritime village it had been decades ago.

A veteran parole officer has been dismissed for neglecting his duties in his handling of Darnell Collins, the drug addict from Atlantic City who killed seven people and wounded two others last year during a rampage through two states, The Associated Press reported yesterday. Last June, Mr. Collins told his parole officer, John Goodman, that he was having problems with drugs, but Mr. Goodman gave him three days to check into a drug treatment program. The day after their conversation, Mr. Collins went on a five-day crime spree that ended when he was killed in a shootout with the police. Mr. Goodman's lawyer, Paul Kleinbaum, said his client is appealing the Dec. 14 dismissal.

Weary of taking the blame for the continuing Government shutdown, House Republican leaders today abandoned their strategy of using closed Government offices as a lever to force President Clinton to agree to a seven-year balanced budget, but their rank and file revolted. The proposal to put all Government workers back on the job, with pay until at least March 15, met a sometimes hostile reception in a Republican caucus tonight. When it ended, Speaker Newt Gingrich canceled a scheduled news conference to avoid speaking to reporters.

In the United States today, about 3,000 patients die annually waiting for an organ transplant. Some 100,000 more die each year never having qualified for a place on the waiting list. But in the near future, victims of organ failure may have a new alternative: a heart, liver, lung or kidney from a genetically altered pig. Four small biotechnology companies are racing to develop pigs that could serve as organ donors for humans. Significant medical and technical hurdles remain, but the progress in recent months by these companies and their academic collaborators prompts some of their scientists to suggest that the first organ transplant from a pig to a human could occur within a year. Xenotransplants, as such cross-species operations are known, could be commonplace a decade from now, they say.