February 10, 1999

As more than 1,000 people gathered yesterday in the second angry demonstration in three days to protest the killing of an unarmed African street vendor by four police officers, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani canceled a political trip to Texas so he could meet with the victim's parents and perhaps attend a memorial service on Friday. The Mayor's announcement came as the mother of the victim arrived in New York from Guinea and visited the Bronx building where her son, Amadou Diallo, 22, died in a barrage of 41 bullets at 12:45 A.M. last Thursday, for reasons still unexplained. Protesters have denounced the shooting and called for the Federal Government to take over the inquiry, but there were indications yesterday that Federal prosecutors would defer to the Bronx District Attorney for now.

Famous if infrequently loved, Arnold Schoenberg's ''Moses und Aron'' arrived at the Metropolitan Opera on Monday night. The music world shies from excessive close contact with this exceedingly curious and much debated piece, but opera houses occasionally poke it with a stick just to make sure it is still alive. Schoenberg, a difficult man at best, seemed to relish making difficulties for his audiences. Leave aside the musical language, which in its systematic way floats free of musical laws of gravity, thus ignoring the enduring sensibilities of Western man. More important, what are we to make of an opera that is ostensibly about two brothers engaged in theological debate and yet has at its center one of the most eagerly lascivious orgy scenes in opera?

The Justice Department has decided to begin an inquiry to determine whether Kenneth W. Starr's prosecutors misled Attorney General Janet Reno about possible conflicts of interest when they obtained permission to investigate the Lewinsky matter in January 1998, Government officials said today. Among other concerns, the inquiry will focus on whether the prosecutors should have disclosed the contacts between Mr. Starr's office and the Paula Jones legal team in the weeks leading up to Mr. Starr's decision to ask Ms. Reno to expand his inquiry beyond the Whitewater matter, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The nation's productivity, the amount that a worker produces in an hour on the job, rose in the fourth quarter at an annual rate of 3.7 percent, giving the United States three years of robust improvement in labor efficiency, and suggesting that corporate America might indeed have become slightly more efficient after years of trying unsuccessfully to improve. The newest quarterly number, announced yesterday by the Labor Department, is the biggest increase since the first quarter of 1996, when labor productivity rose by 4.2 percent, inaugurating the three-year period of hefty gains.

The nation's second-largest airline was forced to cancel one-third of its flights yesterday after more than 2,000 of its pilots called in sick. The move inconvenienced tens of thousands of passengers around the country and threatened to disrupt the heavy air travel expected over the Presidents' Day weekend. American Airlines said that it grounded 750, or 33 percent, of its 2,250 daily flights yesterday, affecting about 75,000 passengers, many of whom waited hours before getting on other flights, or were stranded for the night. American carries about 225,000 people on a normal day.