July 23, 1996

A Family Court judge has been accused by New York State's judicial oversight body of exerting "improper" pressure on Child Welfare Administration workers to look into a case involving his lover's 9-year-old daughter. The judge, Bruce M. Kaplan, 56, has been publicly admonished by the Commission on Judicial Conduct, the lowest form of public sanction. The commission could have levied more serious sanctions, including removal from the bench.

The United States Department of Justice handed Schools Chancellor Rudy Crew a significant legal victory yesterday in his attempts to oust Carmelo Saez Jr., the resilient former president of Community School District 9 in the Bronx, who has been removed by three chancellors but returned to office by voters each time. In a letter issued Friday but not released until yesterday, Justice Department officials said they had no objection to Dr. Crew's action to keep Mr. Saez and four other District 9 board members from taking office. All of them served on the board suspended by Dr. Crew in February. All were re-elected in May.

If a 57-year-old farmer-owned company here, Raisio Group, a maker of french fries, wheat flour and pet food, plays its margarine right, it may produce one of those success stories usually associated with California software companies or, say, the maker of Nutrasweet. Raisio's new margarine, Benecol, contains an extract from pine trees that medical testing has shown not only controls but actually lowers levels of cholesterol in the bloodstream.

Stocks Continue Decline

FROM the two-lane road alongside Steve Pitstick's field here on the prairie an hour's drive west of Chicago, the close green rows of six-foot corn look uniform and healthy. Close up, though, a stark pattern emerges: eight shiny rows of corn that look as if they are right out of a seed company's sales brochure alternating with eight rows of stalks with leaves scarred by feasting insects. Mr. Pitstick breaks off one of the infested stalks, peels back its leafy casing and points to a half-inch-long caterpillar that is virtually colorless, except for its black head. "There's your European corn borer," he says.

Citing the Yeltsin Government's problems with tax collection, the International Monetary Fund said today that it would delay its $330 million payment to Russia this month for the first time. When Russia was granted a $10.2 billion three-year loan in February, the Fund set particularly stringent conditions, including monthly reviews of Russia's economic status.

Under a mass of blue-gray clouds that cast deep shadows along the shore, about 600 relatives and friends of the victims of Trans World Airlines Flight 800 gathered here today to gaze over the waters where the jet fell. They also came to remember their loved ones in a ceremony that, for many, provided the first semblance of a funeral since the disaster. The mourners sat in rows of white wooden chairs on the beach at Smith Point County Park, many in dark suits and dresses that looked strangely out of place against the pale sand. Instead of looking ahead at a coffin, they stared toward a spot on the dark waters about 20 miles southeast, where Fight 800 plunged into the ocean, the only place that many families can call a grave until more bodies are recovered. Late tonight it was reported that divers had seen the bodies of dozens of victims in the wreckage.

The Microsoft Corporation reported a 52 percent earnings increase for its fiscal fourth quarter today, slightly exceeding Wall Street's expectations. More noteworthy, perhaps, was the company's report that its assault on the corporate computing market is picking up speed, led by Windows NT, its network operating system software. The company reported that licenses for the program increased 150 percent from the quarter last year.

Three top advisers to Gov. George E. Pataki said today that they had each received payments of at least $20,000 from a fund created from private donations to finance Mr. Pataki's inauguration and transition. The advisers are Zenia Mucha, Mr. Pataki's director of communications; Michael C. Finnegan, the Governor's counsel, and John O'Mara, the chairman of the State Public Service Commission. They said the money was for the work they did helping Mr. Pataki set up a new administration immediately after he defeated Mario M. Cuomo in November 1994.

The State Supreme Court ruled yesterday that a person who lets a drunken driver take the wheel should not be allowed to plead to a lesser charge. In a unanimous decision, the court said that plea bargains in such cases undermined legislative efforts to curtail drunken driving.

NEW JERSEY is a fine place, and does not deserve nearly all the verbal abuse that it puts up with from New Yorkers. But let's be serious. It is hard to imagine that any man in the dark days of czarist Russia turned to his wife after a pogrom and said: "Malke, we're going to where people can live free. We're going to New Jersey." For the tired and poor of Europe who passed early in this century through the immigrant way station on Ellis Island, where were streets paved with gold? In New York, naturally. The glorious skyline that was a beacon of American opportunity was where, in lower Manhattan or Weehawken? And even if Hester and Mulberry Streets proved hardly paved with gold, that is where immigrants settled by the many thousands, on the Lower East Side of New York.

One of the first things the Republicans did when they took control of Congress last year was to pass, with great fanfare, a law that included a provision allowing Capitol Hill workers to form and join unions, just like workers in the private sector. Now that the provision is soon to take effect, though, several top Republicans are having second thoughts. They are trying, this time with no fanfare at all, to exempt "confidential" employees, which, as they define the term, would mean virtually all 15,000 people who work in House and Senate offices, even low-level employees like clerks and secretaries.