April 19, 1999

As captain of New Jersey's ship of state, Gov. Christine Todd Whitman has shown time and again that she is not given to dawdling when it comes to throwing a political albatross overboard. Within days of the upset victory in 1993 that brought her to office, the man she credited with engineering that feat -- her campaign manager and family friend, Edward J. Rollins -- was declared persona non grata after he boasted that the campaign had paid black ministers to keep them from endorsing the Democratic rival. More recently, Col. Carl A. Williams, the State Police Superintendent, strayed into a political thicket when he said that when it came to drug trafficking, ''it's most likely a minority group that is involved.'' He was sent unceremoniously into retirement the very day his comments appeared in print.

The doctors were losing the patient. His heart was racing at 120 beats a minute. His blood-oxygen level was abysmal. The tone from the heart monitor dropped from high and cheerful to low and ominous, as if the batteries were running down. ''Call for help, Tom,'' ordered a man in scrubs.

In listing its bombing targets in Yugoslavia, NATO has generally described them as installations that feed Slobodan Milosevic's war machine. What the alliance does not usually say is that some of the refineries and factories have also been chosen as targets because they are run by close cronies of the Yugoslav President. The idea, according to senior NATO and Pentagon officials, is to undermine Mr. Milosevic's control by chipping away at his system of political and economic patronage.

When bombs fell on Baghdad in 1991, he was there, live, describing the action in what became the defining achievement for CNN; but when the bombs began falling on Belgrade last month, Peter Arnett, the most recognizable correspondent in the history of the all-news network, was nowhere to be seen. Nor is he likely to be seen again on CNN. The network is planning to exercise an exit clause in Mr. Arnett's contract in July, Mr. Arnett said, effectively dismissing him with more than two years left on his five-year agreement.

Threatened by the specter of irrelevance in an era of near-ubiquitous cellular phones and E-mail, most of the nation's largest paging companies have formed an alliance to deploy inexpensive hand-held computers that use a new two-way wireless technology developed by Motorola Inc. The companies intend to announce the alliance today at the Comdex technology conference in Chicago.