June 14, 1996

It was supposed to be a surprise. It was also supposed to be small and intimate. But Marla Trump found it difficult to plan a quiet, low-key 50th birthday party for her particular husband. "He just decided he wanted to do a big blowout," Mrs. Trump said in an interview yesterday afternoon. "He never changes."

The old woman on the poster is dressed entirely in black. She is wrapped in the arms of the only person she feels certain can guide Russia safely from the abyss, and a prayer for deliverance brightens her dark eyes. "You are our last hope and support," the campaign ad says, referring to the mournful, empathetic, troubled man to whom she clings.

He led a spare and tattered life of need on the fringes of the city, but mostly he seemed to occupy some other world accessible only to himself. John J. Royster moved through the universe of homelessness and food stamps and city refuges in a solemn and circumscribed nether life. He is a man who appeared to avoid saying much to anyone, who up until yesterday had never been accused of any criminal act beyond vaulting over a subway turnstile.

The highest administrative tribunal in the United States immigration system granted political asylum yesterday to a 19-year-old woman from Togo who said she had fled her homeland to escape having her genitals cut off. The decision of the Board of Immigration Appeals in the case of the woman, Fauziya Kasinga, is its first recognition ofgenital mutilation as a form of persecution and a basis for asylum. The rite has been practiced on millions of women in 26 African countries.

The national Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association said yesterday that it would terminate the licenses of Ohio Blue Cross and Blue Shield if the Ohio plan proceeded with a $299.5 million agreement to sell its main lines of business to the Columbia-HCA Healthcare Corporation, the nation's biggest investor-owned hospital chain. Analysts called it a warning to Blue Cross plans across the country not to try to auction themselves off to hospital chains or other well-heeled bidders outside the Blue Cross system.