March 4, 1996

Longshoremen and truckers are scheduled to gather in Newark today to urge officials in Trenton and Albany to authorize the dredging of channels in the ports of Newark and New York. The ports employ 167,000 workers, most of them in New Jersey, but silt buildups have forced some freighters to dock in deeper ports like Baltimore and Norfolk, Va., said Al Cernadis, a spokesman for the International Longshoremen's Association.

For the first time this year, schools in all 21 counties in the state will take part in programs Friday celebrating International Women's Day. In New Jersey, the day was first commemorated in the Metuchen schools four years ago and is now part of the curriculum of all school districts in Middlesex County and some districts in each of the other counties. In Middlesex, women from varied backgrounds will visit schools to talk with students about their lives and careers, Shelley Jacobs Mintz, the statewide coordinator, said last week. TERRY PRISTIN

The 911 call could hardly have been more routine. A man wearing a denim jacket and fatigue pants was reported to be selling drugs outside a housing project in southern Brooklyn. Two plainclothes officers responded to the call on a mild night last month, frisked the man and found $400 under the seat of his bicycle. But finding no drugs, the police let him go.

In a broad plan intended to raise the historically low level of home ownership in New York City, Fannie Mae, the nation's largest provider of mortgage loans, is making $8 billion available and changing its rules so that more New Yorkers of all incomes qualify for loans. The five-year investment program, to be announced today by Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and senior officials of the Federal National Mortgage Association, or Fannie Mae, has been developed by the lending agency to supplement a nine-year-old housing rehabilitation program in which the city has spent $4 billion to build and renovate housing, selling most of it to people who could not otherwise afford houses or apartments.

In an Internet equivalent of zoned advertising by the print media, Hotwired, the on-line publication that is the cyberspace sibling of Wired magazine, is offering advertisers a way to aim their sales pitches more narrowly. The feature, on the home page of the Hotwired site on the World Wide Web (http://www.hotwired.com/), is getting its initial tryout in Britain, which represents 4 to 5 percent of the estimated Hotwired membership of more than 325,000. Hotwired signed a four-week sponsorship with the Argos Distributors Ltd. unit of Argos P.L.C. in Milton Keynes, England. Argos is a catalogue showroom retailer similar to the Service Merchandise Company in the United States.