January 6, 2000

Revving up its pursuit of stock fraud on the Internet, the Securities and Exchange Commission yesterday filed a civil complaint contending that one of the Web's best-known stock pickers had committed four counts of fraud. According to the suit, he enriched himself at his customers' expense, lied about his past returns and secretly accepted payment in exchange for recommending one company's stock. The case, against Yun Soo Oh Park, known to his stock trading disciples as Tokyo Joe, is the most aggressive regulatory action so far against a Web guru. Previous S.E.C. Internet cases have been against relatively minor players. This is the agency's first move against an Internet celebrity, and is significant because it raises First Amendment issues.

Gov. George E. Pataki proposed a series of initiatives today intended to strengthen the state's educational system, including tuition subsidies for college students who pledge to teach in public schools and other plans to improve those schools that he said too often fail to live up to expectations. In his sixth annual address to the Legislature, Mr. Pataki also listed several environmental proposals, including creation of a research institute to study the ecology of the Hudson River as well as an expansion of the state's main program for cleaning up toxic waste sites to include less dangerously polluted properties.

So is that ''The Wild Party'' featuring Mandy Patinkin or ''The Wild Party'' featuring Taye Diggs? ''The Wild Party'' written by Andrew Lippa or the one by Michael John LaChiusa and George C. Wolfe? ''The Wild Party'' produced by Manhattan Theater Club that opens off Broadway on Feb. 24 or ''The Wild Party'' presented by the New York Shakespeare Festival/Joseph Papp Public Theater and several commercial producers that opens on Broadway on April 6? This is exactly the confusion that producers of both ''Wild Party'' productions are worried about creating in the months ahead. Both sets of producers find themselves part of what the League of American Theaters and Producers says appears to be a first for New York theater: two new musicals inspired by the same source material coming to the stage in the same season.

Encircled by Russian forces and subjected to constant bombardment, Chechen rebels in Grozny have begun to lash back, forcing furious firefights on the outskirts of the city. Rebel officials asserted today that they had left their hiding places in Grozny and seized the village of Alkhan-Kala, on the southwestern outskirts of the Chechen capital, according to independent media outlets in Russia.

Hoping to end an emotional diplomatic and political battle over a 6-year-old Cuban boy who survived the capsizing of a refugee boat, the Clinton administration decided today that the youngster should be sent back to his father in Cuba. ''This little boy, who has been through so much, belongs with his father,'' said Doris M. Meissner, the commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.