July 31, 1996

The front landing gear of the Boeing 747 that crashed off the coast here on July 17 shows such heavy damage that some investigators are convinced that it is the strongest evidence yet that the plane was destroyed by a bomb, Federal investigators said tonight. The investigators believe that the landing gear was blown off the plane by a bomb blast. But several senior law enforcement officials said tonight that the finding still fell short of the definitive evidence that they said they needed before they could declare the crash the result of a criminal act.

MCA Inc. said today that it was selling the German rights to its television shows and movies in two long-term agreements that MCA valued at about $2.5 billion. In one 10-year, $1.5 billion contract, MCA sold to RTL, Germany's largest television network in terms of viewers, the broadcast rights to shows like "Miami Vice" and "The Rockford Files" and Universal Pictures films like "Apollo 13" and "Out of Africa."

When its devoted readers reached into their mailboxes this morning for Russia's oldest and most famous Communist newspaper, they came up with a big surprise: nothing. Pravda, the ponderous organ of Communist thought founded by Lenin and his Bolshevik comrades in 1912, one of the enduring icons of the Soviet era and probably history's most inaccurately named publication (Pravda means truth in Russian), has ceased publication.

In 1991, the administration of Gov. Jim Florio said in a legal opinion that municipalities could charge property tax for billboards, and since then the appellate courts have agreed with that view. Yesterday, however, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that billboards were not subject to property taxes because they were not a permanent part of a real estate site, The Associated Press reported.

AS far as passing myself off as a Zulu is concerned, I blew it in the first five seconds, on the handshake. I quickly shifted from my plain vanilla American to the hand-thumb-hand African triple that the instructor used. But she told me my grip was too firm: "An African's handshake is typically mild." Two steps into the conference room where the class was being held, I blew it again.