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.

Yuri D. Maslyukov took another puff from his cigarette and smiled about his recent meeting with a senior official from the International Monetary Fund. "It was like people from the Hawaiian Islands trying to talk to Eskimos," chuckled Mr. Maslyukov, who is a top adviser to the Communist candidate for President of Russia, Gennadi A. Zyuganov, and is also the chairman of Parliament's Committee for Economic Policy.

A mathematics professor at Rutgers University was charged yesterday with bludgeoning his wife to death. Walter Petryshyn, 67, was arrested after police officers responding to a 911 call from the couple's home found Arcadia Petryshyn dead. Mr. Petryshyn has taught at Rutgers since 1967. A spokesman for the university said he had been on medical leave this semester because he was having problems with his voice. He was being held in Middlesex County Jail on murder charges.

Kiyomi Kikuchi, a new saleswoman for Central Finance, was visiting clients with a male deputy branch manager, when the man suddenly turned their car into the parking lot of a "love hotel," an establishment, common in Japan, that rents rooms to couples by the hour. "I said, 'You must be joking,' " Miss Kikuchi recalled. Her strong protests got the man to turn back that day, but his advances continued for months. The branch manager ignored her complaints, she said, but finally realized they were true and gave her a new sales partner.

Government officials said today that classified documents strongly suggest that a Guatemalan Army colonel who was a C.I.A. informer may be guilty in connection with the 1992 killing of a guerrilla married to an American and the 1990 murder of an American innkeeper. The State Department provided the classified documents to Congress on Friday, but, citing national security and the secrecy demanded by intelligence services, omitted those documents from thousands of papers on human-rights abuses in Guatemala that it declassified and released to the public today.

The Mummies Wore Plaid

Throughout New Jersey, rising costs of delivering services, a stagnant tax base and cuts in state aid have prompted small towns to consider merging with larger municipalities. In a preliminary report being released today, the Joint Consolidation Study Commission of Princeton is recommending the union of Princeton borough (essentially the downtown area) and the surrounding township, Donald Stokes, the commission's co-chairman, said yesterday. The two entities currently share many services while retaining separate governments, police departments and courts.

Bishop Thomas V. Daily, the head of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn, yesterday accused the manager of the diocesan pension office -- a woman who had worked for the diocese for 32 years -- of embezzling more than $1 million in church money. At an unusual news conference -- held on the same day that the District Attorney's office was first notified -- the bishop identified the employee as Vincenza Bologna, who has managed the pension office since 1990.