February 2, 1996

Citing conflicting eyewitness reports, a Gloucester County grand jury declined yesterday to indict five Rowan College students -- including two members of the football team -- who had been charged with involvement in a brawl outside a bar last October, prosecutors said. JOE SHARKEY

Defying Boris N. Yeltsin, the President they helped bring to power, nearly half a million russian coal miners went on strike yesterday to demand $200 million in back pay. The strike, joined by about half of Russia's miners, carried particular political resonance and signified far more than an economic setback for Mr. Yeltsin. In 1989, a Soviet coal miners' wildcat strike signaled the decline of Mikhail S. Gorbachev. And another strike in 1991, which Mr. Yeltsin championed, helped topple Mr. Gorbachev and sweep the Russian president to power.

AROUND the time Michelangelo was polishing up his colossal "David" for the Medici in early 16th-century Florence, a sculptor in West Africa was carving a woman's pendant head in ivory for the King of the great nation of Benin in what is now Nigeria. Less than a foot high, it is widely recognized to be among the sculptural masterpieces of world art. The David is, of course, still in Florence, but the Benin head is here in New York, in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And with the reopening of the museum's largest African gallery after a nine-month renovation and reinstallation, this astonishing object and more than 400 other works from sub-Saharan and Central Africa are once again on view in the Michael C. Rockefeller wing.

HANG onto your old Bee Gees records. Don't throw out those Annie Hall clothes. It may be time to brush up on Watergate trivia and to dust off that copy of "Shogun." The 1970's are back.

Last November, representatives from the communications firm of Robinson Lerer Sawyer Miller were invited to the Chinese Embassy to present an ambitious three-year public-relations strategy for Beijing. Focus on "hot-button issues" like human rights and weapons sales, the Chinese were told, according to people familiar with the day-long presentation. Put on a road show of Chinese athletes during the summer Olympics. Create a "command center" to handle crises. Set up a news bureau with television links and an on-line information system. The firm boasted that it operated "well behind the scenes" and represented corporate giants like Microsoft and Chrysler and the Governments of countries like the Philippines, Columbia, Chile and Indonesia.