April 6, 1996

One of the most difficult questions faced by investigators of the jet crash in Croatia that killed Commerce Secretary Ronald H. Brown and everyone else on board is whether the pilots took unnecessary risks to deliver their V.I.P. passengers. Going strictly by the book, the pilots on Wednesday's flight to Dubrovnik could have been justified in turning back from their approach to Dubrovnik's airport: The weather that day has been called the worst in a decade, the airport was not equipped with modern precision landing aids and the mountainous coastal terrain is tricky under any circumstances.

In the last four years, New York City's Board of Education and the Human Resources Administration have aggressively steered thousands of poor students classified with learning difficulties or emotional problems off municipal welfare and onto Federal disability payments, saving the city and state $5.2 million. But now, children's advocates and educational experts say the effort to cut costs takes special education's defects and makes them worse, encouraging families and officials to keep children in dead-end special-education programs --when many would do better in regular classrooms -- just because they are poor.

Families come from across the nation to stand at Fifth and Hudson Streets, in the heart of downtown, but there is nothing much to see: a chain-link fence, a huge empty lot and the blank wall of an underground parking garage. The Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building stood there until 9:02 A.M. on April 19 of last year, when a bomb shattered the building, ended 168 lives and etched a moment so deeply in the minds of many Oklahomans that it is now a point by which they measure time. They remember where they were at that day and hour the way other Americans recall Pearl Harbor or John F. Kennedy's assassination.

Breach at Social Security

Employers added a hefty number of new jobs to their payrolls in March, the Labor Department said today, providing solid evidence that the economy is in better shape than it appeared just a couple months ago. The gain of 140,000 jobs last month meant that the huge jump of more than 600,000 jobs reported in February was not a fluke, economists said. The revival, coming after a final quarter in 1995 when the economy was essentially flat, apparently dashed hopes that the Federal Reserve would relax monetary policy again any time soon. Indeed, some analysts suggested that the Federal Reserve might even move to tighten credit later in the year if the economy advanced at a brisker pace.