June 18, 1996

Clearing the last hurdle in a regulatory steeplechase, Viacom Inc. said yesterday that the Internal Revenue Service had approved its plan to spin off its cable television systems on a tax-free basis to Tele-Communications Inc. A spokesman for Viacom, Carl D. Folta, said the company planned to begin an exchange offer for the systems on June 24. Tele-Communications said last March that if Viacom had not received I.R.S. approval for the spinoff by that date, the deal could have unraveled.

Having squeezed past the Communist leader, Gennadi A. Zyuganov, in the first round of Russia's presidential election, President Boris N. Yeltsin on Monday began wooing the also-rans and maneuvering for a runoff date favorable to his voters. Mr. Yeltsin took particular pains to court Aleksandr I. Lebed, the maverick general he forced into early retirement a year ago and who now, after a surprisingly strong finish in Sunday's race, could determine the president's fate. Mr. Lebed met with Mr. Yeltsin on Monday, but seemed to remain noncommittal pending a meeting with the Communists today.

A resolution that would ask voters to approve a school construction program to be financed by a 25-cent-a-pack cigarette tax increase passed its first legislative test yesterday when it cleared the Assembly Education Committee. Earlier this year, the Legislature rejected a plan to raise cigarette taxes to reimburse hospitals for treating uninsured patients.

A middle-aged steam pipe ruptured and spewed a pressurized plume of asbestos-laden debris onto a leafy block on the Upper East Side yesterday, less than 48 hours after Con Edison replaced the joints that linked two sections of the pipe farther down the block. Officials said residents of East 70th Street between First and Second avenues faced no long-term danger from the incident, the second on the East Side in less than five months. But more than 50 residents of a senior citizens' center were evacuated, and people who live in seven other buildings that were dusted by asbestos discovered that they could not go home last night, at least not without a Con Edison inspector.

AS climate experts firm up their view that human activity is seriously altering the atmosphere, one voice stands out in clarion dissent. It is that of Dr. Richard S. Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a shoemaker's son from the Bronx who has risen through the academic hierarchy as a leading expert on the physical processes of the atmosphere. Is there truly cause to worry that emissions of waste industrial gases that trap heat like carbon dioxide could disrupt the world's climate?