February 12, 1996

One evening last week at American Legion Post No. 166, as 100 members of the Alliance Republican Club finished their $7 chicken and mashed potato dinners, their fellow Republican, Congressman Ralph Regula, rose to speak. But before he could get all the way out of his chair, his wife, Mary, grabbed his arm and whispered: "They're discouraged. They think what happened in '94 has been lost."

The engineer whose train appeared to have run a red light before a crash that killed him and two others in Jersey City on Friday had been cited twice before for passing red signals, and once for derailing a train, Federal investigators revealed yesterday. In addition, he might have had a problem distinguishing colors, officials said. The engineer, John J. DeCurtis, was suspended in 1986 and 1989 for running a red signal, said James M. Hall, chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board. Meanwhile, New Jersey Transit crews completed a day of feverish work to replace the splintered ties and twisted rails left by the crash, and officials predicted near-normal service today. [Page A1.]

GIVING up his law practice and moving back into the maelstrom of government is not exactly what Nicholas Scoppetta, former prosecutor and City Investigation Commissioner, thought he would be doing at the age of 63. "If someone had told me five years ago I'd be heading up the child welfare agency today, I would have said, 'What have you been smoking?' " But starting today he is indeed serving as Commissioner of the children's agency Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani created in response to the brutal death of Elisa Izquierdo. "It's a tremendous opportunity," Mr. Scoppetta said in an interview on Friday. "It is hard to move government, except in incremental ways. But I think that poor child's death has been a catalyst for an enormous amount of public support -- demand, really."

After Francis Richard Bennett decided to recant statements implicating two brothers-in-law in the murder of the wife of one of them, he hired two lawyers to negotiate his appearances on television talk shows. The lawyers, Cornelius W. Daniel and Francis X. DeSevo, are now trying to block a prosecutor's attempt to get them to testify about what they learned from Mr. Bennett, the A.P. reported. Mr. Bennett has been implicated in a 1991 slaying. Prosecutors said he was an accomplice in a murder plot carried out by his brothers-in-law, Jamie and Joseph Pandure, against Jamie Pandure's wife, Wanda. Mr. Bennett is married to a sister of the brothers. The lawyers, who will appear in court tomorrow, said Mr. Bennett is protected by the attorney-client privilege. But the prosecution contends that he is not -- in part because a public defender represents him in the murder case. TERRY PRISTIN

After a year in which industry and environmental groups have been at war over Republican-led efforts to roll back Federal environmental regulations, a Presidential panel with adversaries from both sides has reached a rare consensus that while the existing system can be improved, it must not be weakened. Rather than strip away many environmental regulations, as Republicans in Congress tried to do last fall, the panel calls for a new regulatory framework to give businesses more flexibility in preventing pollution -- but only if they can perform better than is required under the current system of strict safeguards.