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.

Under mounting pressure from the United States and NATO, Bosnian Serb officials backed down from their most serious challenge yet to the Dayton peace agreement and late today released 16 Bosnians who had been detained while traveling through Serb-controlled suburbs of this city. The 16 people, almost all middle-aged men, looking haggard and bewildered, were taken from a jail in the Serb-controlled suburb of Lukavica and left in a nearby restaurant.

AND now it's time for breakfast with Richard Foreman, just the way to start the day when the world is seeming inscrutable.

Atoms of antihydrogen have been created by scientists in a laboratory near Geneva, the first complete atoms of antimatter ever seen. Each atom consists of a negatively charged proton orbited by a positively charged electron, the reverse of the charges in ordinary matter. When more of it has been gathered, the antihydrogen should help studies of the nature of matter and the origin of the universe. Article, page A9.

A memorandum by a former Presidential aide depicts Hillary Rodham Clinton as the central figure in the 1993 travel office dismissals, a politically damaging episode that the aide said had resulted from a climate of fear in which officials did not dare question Mrs. Clinton's wishes. The newly released draft memorandum, written by David Watkins, the former top administrative aide at the White House, also sharply contradicts the White House's official account of Mrs. Clinton as merely an interested observer in the events that led to the dismissal of the White House travel staff and their replacement with Clinton associates from Arkansas.

A Recessionary Feeling To Stores' Christmas Retailers reported their worst December sales since the 1990-91 recession period. While they gave all sorts of reasons, the weakness suggested that the economy was likely to grow slowly in the months ahead.

Motorcyclists will still have to wear helmets in New Jersey now that a bill to eliminate the requirement was killed by the Assembly. The measure, which was approved by the Senate last month, got 20 votes yesterday -- 21 short of the number needed for passage. The helmet requirement has saved innumerable lives since it was approved in 1968, contended Assemblyman John V. Kelly, Republican of Nutley. "You'd have to be insane to vote for this bill," he added.

On the first Friday of almost every month, the Government publishes statistics on employment, its single most important set of figures on the economy, watched by business people and ordinary workers as well as economists, bond and stock traders. The 21-page Employment Situation release, along with a hearing on it conducted by the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, is a regular part of the city's enduring rituals. On occasions over the last four decades, Labor Department officials have slept in their offices to make sure that blizzards would not prevent its release. But what storms cannot do, the budget impasse has. The partial shutdown of the Federal Government has furloughed most workers in the Federal statistical system, and the numbers will not appear.