July 22, 1996

Commuting to his Manhattan office the other day, Gregory G. Coleman, the publisher of Reader's Digest, watched with interest as a young man who had been reading the magazine tucked it inside the pages of a newspaper before getting off the train. Mr. Coleman could not resist approaching him. "I said, 'I've got to ask you a question,' " Mr. Coleman recalled recently. "Why did you hide your magazine? It's like I caught you reading Penthouse."

HERE on the banks of the Chattahoochee River, at Golden Park off Lumpkin Boulevard, the first pitch in Olympic softball medal history was thrown a few minutes after 9 A.M. by an American buzz saw named Michele Granger. It was a fastball that arrived in the catcher's mitt with a considerable clap, for a called strike. Granger's next pitch was a blazing riser that crashed like a missile into the Plexiglas a ways behind the plate.

The owners of a gas manufacturing plant that blew up in March have been fined $14,000 by the Federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration. OSHA found that Hunterdon Industrial Gases did not have an emergency plan in place and had failed to assign shutdown responsibilities to its employees, The Associated Press reported yesterday. More than 200 homes had to be evacuated around the plant, which manufactured acetylene and other gases, after a gas line broke and set off an explosion.

The steel restraining cables that failed to stop a car from driving off a fourth-floor parking deck at the Claridge Casino Hotel were not subject to safety inspections, The Press of Atlantic City reported yesterday. Two sisters, Erna and Gertrude Martin, were killed July 11 when their car fell from the parking lot less than two weeks after it opened. Investigators have determined that the moorings that held the cables in place popped out when the Martins' car struck the cables. The state is in the process of adopting a new code that requires inspection of automobile crash barriers, but the 1993 inspection code followed by Atlantic City sets no safety standards for the barriers, state officials told The Press.

Seeking to reach beyond his party's conservative core, Bob Dole brushed aside the need for an endorsement from the National Rifle Association and asserted that Colin L. Powell's address at next month's Republican national convention should send a message of inclusion to abortion-rights supporters. Mr. Dole's comments, in an interview aboard his campaign plane on Friday, marked a notable turnabout from his posture during the Republican primaries, when he vigorously courted the N.R.A. and the organized foes of abortion. Mr. Dole, who recently announced that General Powell, a supporter of abortion rights, would speak on the convention's opening night, trumpeted that decision as a sign that the campaign is heading in the right direction.