May 7, 1996

CBS announced yesterday that it would provide free television time to the Presidential candidates for campaign statements in the final days before the November election. The time will be made available during CBS's news programs, network officials said, not during prime-time entertainment hours. CBS is the first of the three original broadcast networks to agree to try this approach, which has been championed by its own former anchor, Walter Cronkite, and a coalition of public-interest advocates. CBS gave few details yesterday on how long the candidates' statements would be, how frequently they might appear or what programs might include the statements.

President Clinton will travel to New Jersey considered a swing state in the November elections -- today for the third time since February. Mr. Clinton will visit Woodbridge High School to deliver an anti-smoking address to 3,000 students and other residents to mark a national event called "Kick Butts" day. Dr. Leroy Seitz, superintendent of schools in Woodbridge, said students would be asked to sign pledges not to smoke. Tonight, the President will attend Democratic fund-raisers in New Vernon and Jersey City. TERRY PRISTIN

CONTEMPLATING the pageant of evolution, biologists have long wondered how much of a role chance played in determining history's course. If researchers could turn back the clock and allow life to evolve again and again, would leaping frogs and blooming orchids always reappear? Or might evolution's path, punctuated by asteroid crashes and random genetic mutations, meander to produce something altogether different? Now, at last, a team of biologists has found a way to replay one piece of history, re-enacting the birth of a species three separate times and each time tracking the complex genetic changes of speciation. And they have shown that evolution, at least in this case, was much more repeatable and predictable than scientists have imagined.

The open-admissions policy that 25 years ago transformed the City University of New York by guaranteeing entry to almost all New York City high school graduates was far more successful in educating needy students than earlier research suggested, according to a new long-term study of thousands of students. The study, which surveyed students who entered the City University under the open-admissions policy, found that more than half received bachelor's degrees, sometimes more than a decade later, and they went on to better-paying jobs as a result. These students would have been denied entrance to CUNY under the selective admissions policy in force until 1970.

A motorist on Route 22 called the police yesterday to report a brush fire in Weequahic Park. But firefighters found something much worse: the bound bodies of a man and a woman, burning beneath a pile of leaves. The man had been stabbed several times and the woman strangled, the Essex County Police Director, Martin Hellwig, said, but investigators were not sure if they had been killed before being tied up with wire and set aflame. The bodies have not been identified, but neither was burned badly enough to make identification impossible, Mr. Hellwig said.