July 25, 1996

Small-company stocks, which for more than 18 months acted as the engine of growth for the stock market, mutual funds and the economy as a whole, continued to erode yesterday, as investors turned further away from that increasingly volatile sector of the market in favor of blue chips. That brought the decline in the Nasdaq composite index, the most-watched barometer of high-growth companies, to 16.6 percent for the seven weeks since June 5, when the index closed at its highest lever ever. The decline is more than twice that of the Dow industrials over the same period.

Attorney General Deborah T. Poritz has ordered the State Supreme Court and the superior courts closed at noon today in memory of Chief Justice Robert N. Wilentz, who died Tuesday. Justice Wilentz is to be buried today. TERRY PRISTIN

In a stinging rebuff to President Boris N. Yeltsin, the Communist-dominated Parliament has rejected legislation intended to encourage billions of dollars of foreign investment in the oil and gas industry.

For more than a year, the Governors of New York and New Jersey have pushed for a plan to dredge and dispose of the millions of tons of toxic mud that have begun to clog New York Harbor. Today, the Democratic White House finally announced such a plan. But instead of praise, the two Republican Governors complained that they were being upstaged for the sake of election-year politics.

Louie Pokrywka made a false start before bringing an elaborate schematic of the Kleenex production line to his computer screen. "Until a few weeks ago I hadn't sat down at a keyboard since high school typing class," apologized the line operator at Kimberly-Clark's paper products mill here. But his job is rapidly evolving from grunt work -- such as lifting boxes -- to the more demanding tasks of monitoring precision machinery. Mr. Pokrywka, one of the handful of employees who oversee the sophisticated robots that churn out Kleenex Pocket Packs, isn't feeling sorry for himself, though. And for good reason: he is on the right side of the invisible line dividing the industrial labor force into two camps -- a well-paid minority that tends machines and an unprivileged army of workers who, in effect, compete with them.