April 25, 1996

A 26-year-old Irvington man was convicted yesterday in the 1994 murder of a woman who was carjacked while unloading groceries in front of her East Orange home. The defendant, Alonzo Hill, admitted abducting Sandra McKnight, but said that he had not intended to kill her and had not known that an accomplice had a gun.

Newark International Airport is gaining passengers on international flights but losing a far greater number of domestic travelers, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey said yesterday. Last year, 22.8 million passengers traveling within the United States used the airport, 6.5 percent fewer than in 1994.

IN the public mind, celebrity couples tend to take on qualities as a unit, often as a result of the projects they made famous together. Think of the weathered passion of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, so brutally caricatured (or maybe not) in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" Or the crusty affection of Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy. True, Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker have a ways to go before they become a legendary pair. Relatively speaking, they're still children -- she turned 31 on Oscar Monday; he turned 34 a couple of weeks earlier; their careers, though well established, are still in their fledgling stages, and they're not married. But in their first attempt at working together, they may have already found the quintessential expression of themselves.

For the first time since he was elected to Congress in 1982, Representative Robert G. Torricelli made his tax return public yesterday, saying his 1995 income taxes totaled $64,006. His earnings, $254,274, included $126,648 from the sale of assets in a blind trust, said his campaign manager, David Plouffe. Mr. Torricelli's likely Republican opponent for a Senate seat, Representative Richard Zimmer of Delaware Township, reported 1995 earnings of $133,603 with taxes of $23,097.

After two days of intense negotiations and seven months of living with stopgap spending measures and partial Government shutdowns -- negotiators for Congress and the White House agreed late this afternoon on a permanent budget for the fiscal year that began on Oct. 1. Neither side would give details of the deal until they had shared the information with their leaders and colleagues. But the negotiators said the $160 billion spending plan included $23 billion in cuts demanded by the Republicans and $5 billion in increased spending on health, education, environment and jobs programs favored by the Clinton Administration.