June 29, 1996

Dreamers and schemers have been talking and building big in this town for as long as memory. Nelson Algren, the city's poet of the down and out, once dubbed Chicago the "city on the make," a compliment and a curse nearly 50 years old. Now, along comes Mayor Richard M. Daley with a $1 billion whopper of a plan that could help transform public housing or, some fear, destroy it. In the next few years, Mr. Daley hopes to turn the infamous Cabrini Green public housing development on the city's Near North Side into a national model for the wonders of public and private partnerships and a road map out of the swamp of urban decay.

New Jersey's Supreme Court rejected a request by a convicted murder to be executed, and instead ordered a new lower court review of his case. Exercising an option under New Jersey court rules, the inmate chose last fall not to continue to challenge his death sentence. Article, page 9.

The Central Intelligence Agency knowingly hired as paid informers a number of Guatemalan military officers suspected of political assassinations, kidnapping and torture, a Presidential panel reported yesterday. It also found that several Guatemalan officers and officials covered up the military's role in the 1990 killing of an American citizen there. Article, page 2.

A group of 50 major New York City corporations and business executives, led by Henry R. Kravis, the financier, said yesterday that they had raised $50 million for a new fund intended to make hard-eyed venture capital investments -- not for private gain, but to create jobs and promote economic development. The fund, which its organizers say is probably unique in the nation in its investment style and operation, will have the power under its charter to take high-risk positions and offer loans to everything from new, promising companies to retailers in poor neighborhoods where ordinary commercial lenders fear to tread. It plans to start this fall.

In a splintered decision indicating deep fissures and great uncertainty over how to approach free speech in new media, the Supreme Court ruled today that operators of cable television systems may ban indecent programming from certain commercial channels but not from the community-access channels used by local governments and community groups. Shifting majorities on the Court upheld part and struck down other parts of a 1992 Federal law intended to protect children from indecency on cable television. First Amendment lawyers scrutinized the decision, without reaching a consensus, for hints of how the Court will respond some months from now when it decides the constitutionality of a new Federal law governing indecency on the Internet.

The inquiry into the Clinton Administration's improper gathering of F.B.I. background files intensified today as a key witness invoked his constitutional right of silence and officials disclosed that the independent counsel's office had sealed a White House file vault to protect evidence. The witness, Anthony Marceca, the former White House security worker who improperly obtained the F.B.I. background files of hundreds of people, including dozens of prominent Republicans, exercised his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination before a Senate committee investigating the affair for political abuses and executive mismanagement.

Ruling unanimously and with unusual speed, the Supreme Court today upheld a new law's strict limits on Federal court appeals by state prisoners, on the understanding that the Supreme Court itself retains jurisdiction to hear these cases. Central to the decision was the Justices' view that Congress had left intact a route by which inmates can bring their appeals directly to the Supreme Court, bypassing obstacles to review in the Federal district and appellate courts that were imposed by the new Federal law.

Communists in India Cabinet

Forty-eight hours before a group of influential House members visited the Immigration and Naturalization Service's Miami operations last June, the top field managers of the agency's local district were panicking. The main detention center in Miami, designed to hold 226 immigrants, was bursting with 407, threatening serious health and security hazards. More than 50 women had to sleep on cots in the lobby of the center's medical clinic. Criminal detainees mixed with other immigrants, including children as young as 10 years old.

Breaking a chain of secular leadership in Turkey since since the founding of the republic in 1923, the leader of the nation's Islamic party became Prime Minister yesterday. Necmettin Erbakan, the new Prime Minister and leader of the Welfare Party, formed a coalition Government with the former Prime Minister, Tansu Ciller, who will serve as Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister.

An article on Tuesday about apartment rent increases in New York City mischaracterized a statement by the executive director of the Rent Guidelines Board, Douglas P. Hillstrom, about the findings of the board's staff regarding landlords' costs. While the staff reported that landlord costs had risen 6 percent in the last year, Mr. Hillstrom did not say those findings justified a rent increase; it is up to the board members, not the staff that Mr. Hillstrom heads, to determine what increase is justified.

We're going to be playing offense for a change, instead of just defense."