November 1, 1997

A 19-year-old English nanny was sentenced yesterday to life in prison with no chance of parole for 15 years for murdering an 8-month-old Massachusetts boy she was caring for. In Britain, the guilty verdict on Thursday was met with shock, and many in the United States said they believed the profession of innocence made yesterday by the nanny, Louise Woodward, at her sentencing.

THE Indiana Pacers had finished their shoot-around at Continental Arena yesterday morning as workers scurried to complete the finishing touches for the Nets' season opener. Reporters descended in the direction of the players, but they went past Reggie Miller, past newly acquired Chris Mullin. Instead, the cameras and microphones encircled Larry Bird, the former Celtics star who made the surprising move last summer to become the Pacers' coach. Last night was his regular-season debut. Did he feel any pressure?

Voters in Wildwood will decide on Tuesday whether to close the bars in the seaside town two hours earlier -- at 3 A.M. instead of 5 A.M. Police have sought the change for years as a way to stop drunken revelers from flocking to Wildwood when bars close in neighboring towns, said Police Capt. William M. Fisher. Residents joined the cause when a North Wildwood man, John W. Vollrath Jr., was beaten to death outside a nightclub in February, he said.

On a Halloween Day filled with rumors that took on an almost ''War of the Worlds'' tone, hundreds of thousands of New York City students stayed away from public schools yesterday because they, or their parents, feared a rash of gang-related attacks. Those who did venture to school often found additional police officers patrolling in and near their classrooms and even escorting them to and from subway stations to keep them safe. By various accounts, they were.

Some 100,000 bottles of Italian perfume that were stolen last month from a container truck at the Sealand Terminal in Port Elizabeth were recovered yesterday by detectives from the Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor.

The Atlantic City Board of Education voted Thursday to defy an order from Leo F. Klagholz, the State Commissioner of Education, to remove fifth- and sixth-graders from the violence-plagued Albany Avenue School. Putting 900 pupils in the city's overcrowded elementary schools would be ''a grand mess,'' Marven F. Hill, the school board president, said yesterday.

A long-dormant board to investigate chemical accidents will soon be up and running, United States Senator Frank R. Lautenberg's office said yesterday. His aides said that President Clinton had assured the Senator that he would not veto a $4 million appropriation for the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board. No members have been appointed to the board since it was created in 1990, but Mr. Lautenberg sought to reactivate it following the 1995 chemical explosion at Napp Technologies in Lodi, in which five people died. The board would have the same authority in investigating chemical accidents that the National Transportation Safety Board has in investigating airline and train accidents.

Susan Friedland, a 29-year-old city planner, sounds a lot like many Park Slope residents when she talks about the mayoral election. She's a Democrat, she detests the Republican Party, and she thinks Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani's popularity shows that voters have abandoned the ideal of social change to vote for their narrow personal interests. ''I'm a Democrat and I'll vote Democratic in the election,'' Ms. Friedland said the other day. ''The Mayor's policy on welfare reform is cruel and inhumane. The economic regeneration is not due to increased jobs at all levels of the economy. All my friends are old-style New York Democrats. No one I know is voting for Giuliani, but I think the Democratic Party is falling apart.''

SHAMEL UPTEGROW says his classmates at Morris High School aren't into current events. Sure, he said, they knew about Nushawn Williams, the H.I.V.-positive man who the authorities said had had unprotected sex with dozens of young women and girls. But his friends did not dwell on the grim scenario. ''They heard about it,'' said Shamel, a 16-year-old freshman. ''But they ain't really into it.''

Fire broke out yesterday on the Central Pier, causing a section of the Boardwalk to be closed off for about two hours.

President Jiang Zemin of China trod a capitalist road yesterday from Wall Street to the suburban campuses of hi-tech American industry. Free of all the irksome talk about human rights he had had to endure in Washington, Mr. Jiang concentrated in his trip through New York yesterday on a matter closer to his heart: money. It was an interest enthusiastically reciprocated by American business executives eager to cash in on the world's most populous market.

The investigation into campaign finance practices led by Senator Fred Thompson never had the star witness or the surge of energy needed to generate heavy television coverage, but the greatest weakness of the inquiry was the failure of the chairman and committee to deliver on the opening pronouncement that a Chinese plot to pour money into American politics ''affected the 1996 Presidential race.'' That and the failure to score a direct hit on President Clinton left the inquiry without the steam to go on. News analysis, page A12.