June 21, 1996

Texas Instruments passed over its two top executives today to name Thomas J. Engibous, 43 years old, as its new president and chief executive. Mr. Engibous, the manager of the company's semiconductor group, succeeds Jerry R. Junkins, who died suddenly of a heart attack three weeks ago. The company's board decided to split off Mr. Junkins's additional post of chairman by giving it to James R. Adams, a board member and retired executive of SBC Communications.

The Westinghouse Electric Corporation announced yesterday that it would acquire the Infinity Broadcasting Corporation for $3.7 billion, merging the nation's two largest radio broadcasters in a deal made possible by a new telecommunications law that lifted the limits on radio station ownership. A merger of Westinghouse, the large industrial company that also owns the CBS radio and television networks, and Infinity, the nation's largest independent radio broadcaster, would create a radio giant with 83 stations and a constellation of radio stars from Howard Stern and Don Imus to Charles Osgood.

Substantially watering down California's tough "three-strikes" sentencing law, the state's highest court ruled today that judges had the right to disregard a defendant's prior convictions if they thought a mandatory prison sentence would be too cruel. The decision by the State Supreme Court is retroactive, meaning that most of the estimated 16,000 people who were sentenced to stiffer prison terms under the 1994 "three-strikes law" because they had multiple felony convictions can now appeal. The ruling allows them to argue that the judges who imposed their sentences were deprived of the discretionary role afforded the judiciary under the State Constitution.

IF you harbor any doubts about whether Winslow Homer was the greatest painter America produced in the 19th century, the Homer show that has just arrived at the Metropolitan Museum of Art should dispel them. The doubts are understandable, considering that his images of rocky seascapes, freckled urchins and Adirondack woodsmen have been so thoroughly absorbed into our collective memory, and so degraded by generations of outdoor magazine illustrators, that it is possible to take Homer for granted, if not unconsciously to confuse him with his imitators. To a degree, Homer has become synonymous with a certain quaint, populist, long-gone Americana, and this has caused people to misgauge his achievement. Quaint he never was, in art or in life. In his later years, he was a loner, the archetypal Yankee salt in his cottage on the Maine coast, though the truth is that Homer was always too diverse and complicated to be slotted into any of the usual categories. This show proves that. Grandly installed, a brilliant distillation of about 180 paintings, drawings and watercolors from the roughly 2,000 works by him that survive, the exhibition is a joy.

Seizing a chance to upstage the Republicans, officials of the Ross Perot-led Reform Party announced yesterday that its convention would open on Aug. 11 in Long Beach, Calif., the day before the Republicans begin meeting in San Diego. Reform Party officials also said that after one day of nominating speeches, its supporters will spend some part of the week of the Republican convention voting for their Presidential nominee, electronically and by mail.