June 17, 1996

When heavy winter snows blanketed this region just six months ago, President Boris N. Yeltsin's political prospects looked bleak indeed. Voters in this hard-hit and hotly contested region had made the Government their third choice in parliamentary elections -- behind the strident nationalists of Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky and the newly resurgent Communists. Anti-Yeltsin bitterness ran deep among workers in the decrepit military factories and chemical refineries of the southern Ural Mountains.

Steve Jones doesn't look like Ben Hogan. He doesn't play golf like Ben Hogan. But on an overcast and muggy afternoon at the Oakland Hills Country Club today, Jones won the United States Open on the same course that Hogan did by taking a page out of the Hogan book. Quite simply, he showed more guts than anyone else in the field. On a brutal layout under the intense pressure of the final round, Jones persevered while all those around him wilted. He shot 69, his third straight round under par, and -- after a three-year layoff from the game and after almost seven years without a victory -- he won the biggest prize in American golf.

Facing a glut of movies in an increasingly competitive marketplace and an uneven track record, the Walt Disney Company plans to reduce its annual output of films by 50 percent and trim its lineup of senior executives, company officials said today. The decision by Joe Roth, chairman of Walt Disney Studios, marks the first effort by a major Hollywood company to limit its output because of the spiraling costs of making and marketing movies, as well as the current Darwinian atmosphere in which numerous movies fail to survive after their first weekend in theaters.

New Jersey's strawberry crop is smaller than usual, and market prices have risen to reflect the shortage, some New Jersey farmers said last week. The unusual spring weather, in which a stretch of cold temperatures was broken by a three-day heat wave, is partly to blame, said John Ebert, co-owner of Springdale Farm and Market in Cherry Hill Township. His strawberry crops are as much as 25 percent smaller than last year's, and have been selling at $2.99 a quart, compared with $1.50 a quart. The crop is also suffering because many of the honeybees that farmers rely on to pollinate their crops are being killed by mites from Asia, said Bob Cooper, a consultant with the Gloucester County Agriculture Extension Service. TERRY PRISTIN

A Brutal Turning Point