February 13, 1996

The discovery last month was grisly: a 71-year-old Staten Island man found beaten to death on his bedroom floor. The arrests that followed were equally unsettling: three boys, one 15 years old, the others 16, accused of walking out of their foster-care group home, breaking into the man's house and killing him. Now, bowing to public outrage over the killing and to the entreaties of Borough President Guy V. Molinari, the city's child welfare agency has agreed to stop the emergency placement of foster children in group homes on Staten Island.

Felix G. Rohatyn, the New York investment banker who has lobbied for the No. 2 seat on the Federal Reserve Board, drafted a letter to President Clinton today, withdrawing from consideration after concluding that his nomination would face insurmountable opposition from Senate Republicans, senior Administration officials said tonight. Mr. Rohatyn faxed a copy of the letter to the White House late today. But President Clinton's chief of staff, Leon Panetta, asked him to put off a formal withdrawal while the Administration tried to strike a last-minute deal on Capitol Hill linking his nomination to the renomination of Alan Greenspan as chairman of the Fed.

Continuing a remarkable run that has some Wall Street analysts making nervous comparisons to 1987, the stock market raced ahead again yesterday with the Dow Jones industrial average finishing above the 5,600 mark for the first time. The Dow jumped rose 58.53 points, or more than 1 percent, to 5,600.15. That put the index 9.4 percent ahead of where it started in January, more than many market analysts had predicted for the entire year. The Dow has passed three 100-point marks in the last six sessions and set six consecutive records.

The New York State Legislature voted today to override Gov. George E. Pataki's veto of a bill that will help New York City's police officers and firefighters win larger pay raises, utterly rejecting the pleas of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and his ally on this issue, Mr. Pataki. The swift and overwhelming votes in both houses, barely three days after the Governor's veto, were just the second time in 124 years and the first time since 1976 that the Legislature overrode a governor's veto of a bill.

When members of the Ogoni people began attacks three years ago on Royal Dutch/Shell's oilfields in Nigeria, the company appealed to the country's military Government for protection. The results, senior company officials now acknowledge, were utterly disastrous.