January 7, 1999

Article discusses players and league preparing for abbreviated NBA season following end to lockout; league is studying possible schedules that will encompass post season play; photo (M)

Article discusses work of Poughkeepsie, NY, Police Detective K Skip Mannain in raising awareness of plight of Mexican immigrants working as menial laborers in city; examples cited; photo (M)

Smithsonian Institution's 1997 exhibition, The Jazz Age in Paris, 1914-1940, will open in reduced versions at Martin Luther King Jr Memorial Library in Washington, Newport News Public Library in Virginia, and at Delta State University Archives in Cleveland, Miss; photo; Brazil renames Rio de Janeiro's international airport in honor of Antonio Carlos Jobim, musician who popularized bossa nova; Noche Flamenca, troupe of musicians, singers and dancers, will perform flamenco at Kaye Playhouse at Hunter College; photo; novelist Salman Rushdie will be made commander in Order of Arts and Letters, France's most prestigious literary award; Jack Nicholson, who has received five Golden Globe awards from Hollywood Foreign Press Assn, will be honored with organization's Cecil B DeMille award for 'outstanding contribution to the entertainment world' (M)

Market Place column on robust start to world's stock markets that is wowing investors with one-day gains of better than 2 percent and some markets, more than 3 percent; says driving euphoria is investors' confidence that gloomy economic predictions have been overstated; holds one reason prices often rise in January is tendency among investors to change where they put their retirement accounts when they open new calendar; notes most common change is to shift more money into whatever performed best the previous year (M)

Norah Pierson, jeweler and artist, designed 2,300-square-foot home for herself in Lamy, NM, made of 10,000 pounds of simulated rock; inside it is normal house, but outside it appears that she lives in a cave; photos (M)