April 3, 1996

Work is beginning this week on the West Side Highway, evoking visions of grandeur for city planners and easier travel for many motorists. But to several dozen homeless people, the work brought only disruption and pain yesterday. City officials had been warning the homeless for two years that the day would come, and a cadre of social workers accompanied police officers as what may have been the last colony of the homeless along the highway was evicted.

The Salem II nuclear reactor in southern New Jersey will start up again in August, a month sooner than expected, and its twin reactor, Salem I, may also return to service early next year, their operator, the Public Service Electric and Gas Company, said yesterday. Both reactors were shut down by a series of problems last spring. The utility company's announcement drew immediate criticism from environmentalists who would like to see the reactors closed down for good, The Associated Press reported.

About 40 police officers have swept through the area surrounding Martin Luther King Drive and Ocean Avenue as part of a three-day campaign aimed at catching drug dealers, the captain in charge of the operation said yesterday. On Monday, the first day of the sweep, 32 arrests were made and about $4,000 in drug money was seized, said the captain, Kenneth M. French. The police also shut down a crack house where they found 40 bags of heroin, Captain French said.

When SBC Communications and the Pacific Telesis Group announced their $17 billion merger on Monday, the companies said the deal would prep them for the competitive free-for-all promised by deregulation. With a few more mergers like this, however, some critics said the free-for-all would be neither free -- nor for all.

Daniel P. Weitz, a Morristown High School senior, has been thinking about fusion energy since he was 12, according to officials of the State Department of Education. More recently, he built a plasma generator, which creates an electrically charged gas of a type that might one day be the basis of fusion energy, and used it to test some of his theories. The project won him a $15,000 scholarship through the Westinghouse Science Talent Search. Among 40 students across the nation to receive that award, he was the only one from New Jersey. Today, the 17-year-old student will be honored by the State Board of Education.