June 27, 1996

The Continental Arena, home of the New Jersey Nets, was full of the rollicking rock-and-roll fervor that characterizes professional basketball games these days, with exhortatory music pounding through speakers and jazzy game highlights flashing on the scoreboard. It was also full of the sport's most serious fans: the earnest and studious hobbyists, the statistics mavens, the devotees with an eccentric if not obsessive bent. More than 10,000 men, women and children (all right, mostly men) showed up at the arena tonight, people with an affinity for the ceremony of sport, an adoration of the heroes of sport and a hunger for the gossip of sport -- not to mention a rock-solid belief in their own authority on matters of sport.

The Supreme Court said the Government may not limit how much political parties spend on their candidates unless it proves that party and candidate are working together. Article, page B9.

Inspecting a newly purchased $1 million computer for a customer, the technician from Tandem Computers Inc. noticed that the serial numbers had been obliterated. Suspicious, he turned to a hidden set of serial numbers and found that they matched those on a computer that had supposedly been melted down for scrap three months earlier. That discovery lighted the long fuse on a real-life "Mission: Impossible" in the heart of Silicon Valley. It pitted an unlikely team -- a wise-cracking Tandem executive, a retired New York City police detective, and a tight-lipped corporate lawyer -- against a criminal racket involved in stealing up to $10 million worth of new and used computer equipment and selling it to unsuspecting customers like the May Department Stores Company in St. Louis, a Bell Atlantic division in Phoenix and The Miami Herald.

New Jersey industries are continuing to emit fewer pollutants, the United States Environmental Protection Agency reported yesterday. Plants discharged 15.5 million pounds of pollutants in 1994, down from 18.8 million pounds in 1993, the agency said. But Curtis Fisher, program director for the New Jersey Public Interest Research Group Citizen Lobby, said that while toxic emissions had been reduced, the amount of toxic material being dumped into incinerators, recycling plants and sewers had increased for three years in a row.

The Supreme Court ruled today that under the "skeptical scrutiny" that applies to government action that treats men and women differently, the State of Virginia cannot justify keeping women out of its state-supported military college, the Virginia Military Institute. "Women seeking and fit for a V.M.I.-quality education cannot be offered anything less under the state's obligation to afford them genuinely equal protection," Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in a majority opinion for six Justices.

DEBATE about the law's treatment of domestic violence used to center on the definition of "violence." Now, the debate is about the definition of "domestic." The argument is not theoretical. It is stalling legislation that both major parties in New York claim they want. Yes, after a season of loud publicity about battered women; after the pointed political controversy about the death of Galina Komar, a woman killed by her former boyfriend shortly after a judge released him from jail; after a campaign by prosecutors frustrated with laws that impede their prosecution of suspected batterers, legislation to change those laws is going nowhere.

HUNKERED over computer screens, the six founders of an on-line magazine, five men and a woman, worked in a cramped Manhattan office late into the night to make their start-up business take flight. Occasionally, one of the men, a graphic designer, would call his male colleagues over to gawk and laugh at images he downloaded from the World Wide Web. One night he beckoned the company's 30-year-old business manager, the sole woman, and told her, "I want to show you a marketing program." It turned out to be a partially nude woman in a sex act with an animal.

After 11 years as an electrician at the old, smoke-stained General Motors plant that rises over the bank of the Hudson River here, Nancy McCague might be expected to be saddened, perhaps even angry, as the plant fades into the history of American manufacturing. The plant, to be closed on Friday, began assembling steam-powered cars in 1900 and has been making Chevys since 1915. And Ms. McCague's father, brother and sister all worked there.

Connecticut is so short of power as the season of peak demand begins that the Navy shipped in portable generators, police departments are preparing to direct traffic if deliberate blackouts darken traffic signals, and the oldest, most polluting plants, which usually run only a few hours at a time, are scheduled to run full out for the summer. Three nuclear power plants that can supply half the state's needs on the hottest summer day are shut and not likely to open for months or years while Northeast Utilities tries to solve a variety of safety problems. Neighboring regions, awash in power, are happy to help, but there is a limit to how much the transmission lines can handle.

Power-Hungry Connecticut

Two months ago, a labor activist pulled a thread and Kathie Lee Gifford's storybook life began to unravel. Overnight, the effervescent co-host of "Live With Regis and Kathie Lee," was branded a pariah after Charles Kernaghan, executive director of the National Labor Committee Education Fund in Support of Worker and Human Rights in Central America, told Congress on April 29 that her clothing line was being made by 13- and 14-year-olds working 20-hour days in factories in Honduras.

With more and more banks charging fees for the use of their automated teller machines, pressure is mounting in Congress for legislation to curb or ban some of these practices. Another proposal came today, when Representative Marge Roukema, the New Jersey Republican who heads the House Subcommittee on Financial Institutions, introduced legislation that would require banks to disclose any fees they levy for the use of their machines by customers other than their own.