June 19, 1996

The Secretary of Transportation said today that he would ask Congress to eliminate the Federal Aviation Administration's mandate to promote aviation and leave safety as its primary concern, one of a number of steps to improve the agency's image and effectiveness after the Valujet crash near Miami on May 11. Also trying to rebuild confidence in his agency, the F.A.A. Administrator, David R. Hinson, said that his top safety deputy would leave at the end of next week and that the agency would tighten its supervision of airlines that rely on contractors for maintenance work, as Valujet did. A misunderstanding between Valujet and a maintenance contractor, Sabretech, has been implicated in the crash in the Everglades, which killed all 110 people aboard.

REDUCED to flickering television images, the sight of black churches burned to the ground may feel remote here up North. Watching from the comfort of living rooms in a bustling metropolis, some people might feel outrage, but no threat. Jack Rosenthal looks no further than his left forearm to understand that there is nothing abstract in any of this. Six characters changed his life, and ended the lives of six million others like him. Tattooed on his left forearm is "A 11832," that insane shorthand that reduced his life to a number in the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

Gov. Christine Todd Whitman said yesterday she would back a $300 million bond issue that would provide money for dredging the Newark and Elizabeth ports, but would oppose the other bond issues that are pending in the Legislature, including measures to finance construction of housing, new prisons and schools. The state, which now has more than $3 billion in bonds outstanding, can afford to issue only an additional $300 million, said Jayne Rebovich, a spokeswoman for the Governor. She said the dredging merits priority because of the urgent need to clean up the harbors. If approved by the Legislature and signed by the Governor, the measure would be on the November ballot.

In the old days that grizzled men remember sweetly, a wife like Noriko Mizuguchi would have been waiting up all night for her husband's drunken stumbling on the doorstep, so that she could fling open the door and kneel down with her forehead touching the floor as she called out, "Welcome home, honorable sir." Instead, when her husband comes home late and drunk, Mrs. Mizuguchi locks him out of the house. Mrs. Mizuguchi, a demure, quiet woman of 48 who at first seems to fit the Western image of a Japanese wife as a docile doormat, ignores his frantic banging on the doors and windows.

N. W. Ayer & Partners, the oldest and perhaps most troubled of the major American advertising agencies, said yesterday that it would be acquired by D'Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles, signaling a new crest in the wave of deals that are remaking Madison Avenue for the second time in a decade. The agreement closes a crucial chapter in the history of the agency founded in Philadelphia in 1869 as N. W. Ayer & Son. In a bit of legerdemain that may have prefigured the advertising world's flexibility with facts, the founder was not N. W. Ayer but the son, Francis Wayland Ayer.