May 28, 1996

The pilots of Valujet Flight 592 were some six minutes into a routine flight out of Miami when someone apparently burst through the cockpit door to warn of a fire in the passenger cabin, according to investigators' first analysis of the tape from the jet's battered cockpit voice recorder. "There was also an indication from the cabin that there were problems obtaining oxygen," Robert Francis, the vice chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said at a briefing today.

As House and Senate negotiators prepare to iron out the last details of a bill whose chief target is illegal immigration, a battle with the White House is looming over provisions that would drastically restrict public assistance to legal immigrants.

Robert N. Wilentz, Chief Justice of New Jersey, spent the Memorial Day weekend at Mount Sinai Medical Center, where he was admitted last Wednesday for problems with his legs. It was not certain when the 69-year-old judge would be released from the hospital, his housekeeper, Araminta Mustafa, said yesterday.

In 1981, a judge had labeled Jesse K. Timmendequas a "compulsive, repetitive sexual offender." In 1994, Mr. Timmendequas confessed to strangling and raping Megan Kanka, a 7-year-old who lived across the street, the police said. The crime has become part of the national psyche. Public records and interviews with people who knew Mr. Timmendequas and professionals who dealt with him draw a picture of a man who resisted therapy and whose impulses over many years could not be treated or controlled by the state. [Page A1.]

Flight Officer Frank D. Gallion was buried here near his home in Amish country today, Memorial Day, more than 52 years after his P-47 Thunderbolt fighter plane was downed by German machine gun fire and crashed into the waters of the Zuider Zee. The 29-year-old pilot was reported missing on Nov. 3, 1943, his body never found. Then last year the propeller of a Dutch dredging ship hit something, and when a diver went down to investigate, there, in 10 feet of water, was the skeleton of Flight Officer Gallion, almost intact, seated in the cockpit of his plane.