February 8, 1996

THE thermometer read 15 degrees last Sunday afternoon, but that was not the reason my fingers had turned blue. The culprit was an old Kerman carpet, supposedly worth $28,000, being sold at an auction of Oriental rugs and textiles held at the fashionable Mark Hotel on the Upper East Side. Two spit-moistened fingertips and one surreptitious rub later, I had navy blue stains that vanished only after steady scrubbing. The spit test for ferreting out what is known to the trade as "liquid restoration" -- recoloring with paint, dye or even Magic Marker -- was a trade secret divulged by Rosalind Candlin Benedict, a rug consultant, appraiser and editor of "Rug News," a trade publication. She was my guide during portions of a months-long odyssey through the highways and byways of carpet buying in New York City.

TIME was when every living supertwin -- that means every triplet, quadruplet, quintuplet and sextuplet in the world -- could count on a birthday card from Miss Helen Kirk. In 1939, when Miss Helen, as the Galveston, Tex., dowager always calls herself, was a young medical assistant to a doctor who delivered a set of quadruplets, she began recording multiple births and writing to the parents as a hobby.

Caesars Atlantic City Hotel Casino dismissed a security guard who found a customer's bank card and used it to withdraw $100 from an automatic teller machine. But that was not enough, state regulators said yesterday, fining the casino $5,000 for not properly reporting the episode, the A.P. said. SUSAN JO KELLER

A Boeing 757 carrying 189 people, mostly tourists on their way home to Berlin and Frankfurt from the Dominican Republic, crashed into the Atlantic late Tuesday about 13 miles offshore. At least 105 bodies were recovered, American officials said, but The Associated Press quoted a Dominican civil defense official, Domingo Antonio Vargas, as saying as many as 126 bodies had been found by late yesterday. Debris was spread in an area two miles long and 150 yards wide, the United States Coast Guard said, suggesting that the jet broke up before it hit the water.

From practically anywhere in this city, you can see the mansion on the hilltop, with its 100-foot flagpole stabbing the sky. Up there, anyone can tell you, lives Jack Simplot, the billionaire who has dominated the local economy for seven decades and is responsible for the jobs of more than 14,000 people in this part of America. He has also been embroiled in one of the oddest melodramas in the computer industry: the recent ouster, and reinstatement eight days later, of the chairman and chief executive of the chip maker Micron Technology Inc.

The State Board of Regents issued school districts new guidelines intended to improve the level of instruction, an early step in a sweeping plan to revamp the basic curriculum across the state. The guidelines are intended to help schools prepare students for a new, tougher Regents exam. They offered a glimpse of the changes under consideration, emphasizing critical thinking over memorization and analysis over rote learning in mathematics, science and English.

Some 750,000 people in northern New Jersey found themselves with little or no water yesterday after two large water mains ruptured, causing some schools to close, hospitals to postpone operations and firefighters to resort to portable water tanks. The break occurred under Main Street in New Milford in almost exactly the same spot where a water main ruptured seven years ago. [Page A1.]

China secretly sold nuclear-weapons technology to Pakistan last year and could face the loss of billions of dollars in business deals under United States law, Administration officials said today. But, they said, President Clinton may waive the penalties to ease tensions with Beijing. China sold Pakistan magnets used to refine bomb-grade uranium, the Central Intelligence Agency told the Administration late last year. State Department officials said today they had concluded that the evidence regarding the magnets was strong enough to trigger the penalties.

A special panel appointed by Gov. Christine Todd Whitman to review the operation of the State Commission of Investigation has recommended extending the commission's life for six more years but curbing its responsibilities and independence. Under the proposal the agency, which was created to investigate organized crime and official corruption, would confine its inquiries to state, county and local government operations. It would be required to refer all evidence of criminal wrongdoing to the State Attorney General's office and get the Attorney General's permission to conduct hearings and issue reports. A spokesman for the commission, Lee Seglem, said enactment of the the recommendations would mean that the agency's ability "to act as an independent watchdog for citizens would be completely undercut."

A minister who was robbed and shot at least six times after he left his East Orange church was in critical condition yesterday at University Hospital in Newark. Police officials in East Orange said two men attacked the Rev. William Barnett, 56, pastor of the Citadel of Hope Mission, after he drove parishioners home from an evening service Tuesday night. According to Lieut. Robert Kolb, the suspects took a bag containing church donations and one gunman chased Mr. Barnett and shot him as he ran to the porch of a home and then crawled to a nearby street. Later, as the suspects drove off in Mr. Barnett's Plymouth van, they shot him again, Lieutenant Kolb said. The police found the van yesterday, abandoned in a downtown Newark parking lot.

The welfare and Medicaid proposals endorsed by the nation's governors this week lack detail and have a long way to go if they are ever to become law. But if approved, such changes would revolutionize social policy by shifting large amounts of money and decision-making power to the states. It is not surprising that governors would recommend changes that enhance their own authority. What is surprising is what they have accepted in exchange: a continuation of many Federal standards and requirements.

Only about 21,500 voters, 5 percent of the state's Republican registration, turned out for the Presidential caucuses in Louisiana on Tuesday, and the party's two top contenders -- Bob Dole and Steve Forbes -- were not even on the ballot. But a day after the first caucuses of the 1996 election season, Patrick J. Buchanan was talking like a man with a big headstart on the field, having won 13 of the 21 delegates at stake. Phil Gramm's campaign organization was left to acknowledge that it had miscalculated on a number of fronts in a state he had expected to win easily. Mr. Buchanan declared that his victory in Louisiana, on top of that in a straw poll in Alaska, gave him a "fighting chance" in the caucuses in Iowa, and Mr. Gramm conceded that he might be out of the race if he is not among the top finishers there.