April 2, 1996

A Federal appeals court in Manhattan ruled yesterday that Metro-North workers could sue the railroad for asbestos exposure, even though they are years away from any possible ill health effects. Legal experts said that the ruling broke important new ground because it allowed workers to sue for exposure to asbestos even if they could provide no evidence that they had yet been harmed.

Libel Suit Settled

It touched off one of the city's longest and bitterest legal battles, pitting scrappy environmentalists against elected officials who dreamed of a 20th-century project on the scale of that 19th-century uptown wonder, Central Park. It made public officials learn everything they wanted to know, and then some, about the sex life of the striped bass, whose spawning grounds lay under century-old piers it would have destroyed.

Teledyne Inc., moving to thwart the hostile-takeover efforts of the WHX Corporation, said yesterday that it had agreed to merge with the Allegheny Ludlum Corporation, the nation's largest producer of stainless steel. The two companies said the all-stock deal was valued at more than $3.2 billion, based on 176 million shares in the new Allegheny Teledyne Corporation, and the $19 closing price of Allegheny Ludlum's stock yesterday. WHX had planned to conduct a proxy fight to take control of the Teledyne board, which rejected WHX's most recent takeover proposal of $1.78 billion in February. A similar fight last year gained a board seat for Ronald LaBow, the chairman of WHX, whose principal subsidiary is the Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel Company.

If Boris N. Yeltsin is re-elected President of Russia in June, he will owe his victory in some part to one of Washington's least-known but most powerful people: Michel Camdessus. The 63-year-old Frenchman is head of the International Monetary Fund, the obscure global lending organization that gave a vital lift to Mr. Yeltsin's campaign when it formally approved a $10.2 billion loan to Russia last Tuesday.