April 8, 2000

Salomon Adds Many Perks To Retain Junior Employees In a sign of changing times on Wall Street, Salomon Smith Barney is providing many perks to keep 500 junior employees from defecting to Internet companies.

Police officials say that third of overtime money earmarked for much criticized anti-narcotics initiative known as Operation Condor will be used instead to pay for increased uniformed patrols that will pursue variety of other offenses; critics of program contend that pressure to make arrests has driven narcotics officers to use aggressive tactics that led to incidents like shooting of Patrick M Dorismond (M)

John Tierney, in The Big City column, notes that Helen Gurley Brown was recently at Henri Bendel store on Fifth Avenue to discuss her new memoir I'm Wild Again (M)

Pres Robert Mugabe finds himself and his party at crossroads as Zimbabwe celebrates two decades of independence and they brace for national elections; many blacks blame him, not white minority, for nation's dramatic economic decline; percentage of people living in poverty has surged from 40 percent to over 63 percent in last decade, and wages have fallen to pre-independence levels; map; photo (M)

Atty Gen Janet Reno, after meeting with Juan Miguel Gonzalez, says government will quickly prepare order to let him return to Cuba with son, Elian, news conference; appeals to boy's Miami relatives to give up boy promptly and peacefully; orders relatives to meet with government lawyers and three psychiatric experts to prepare for transfer; says she will ask father to remain in United States pending appeal over boy's custody; photo (M)

Britain's Queen Elizabeth II emerges as one of her nation's newest Internet millionaires when Internet company she backed, Getmapping.com, goes public; her $160,000, 1.5 percent stake in company soared almost tenfold in paper value to beyond $1.56 million, just shy of 1 million pounds, when company began trading on Alternative Investment Market with initial offer price of $3.20 a share, closing around $3.60; Getmapping.com plans to produce first full aerial map of Elizabeth II's realm; company has been given permission to dedicate to her replicas of Domesday Book, ordered by William the Conquerer around 1086 as survey of English lands; Getmapping.com spokeswoman says Queen's stake had been worth $1.39 million at offer price, and had closed at 12.5 percent premium; company says it has so far mapped 85 percent of Britain and plans to make profit by selling aerial maps to real estate companies and local government offices; photo (M)

Smokers Awarded Damages A Miami jury has awarded $6.9 million to two smokers in a class-action tobacco lawsuit, setting the stage for a huge punitive-damage award against the industry. PAGE A7

New York Mets defeat Los Angeles Dodgers, 2-1, Shea Stadium; photo of Mets pitcher Rick Reed (M)

Scramble to extract methane, chief component of natural gas, from coal seams is viewed as key to Wyoming's ability to prop up its budget and maintain services; is markedly changing face of rugged prairie in northeastern part of state and touching nerves already frayed by long battles between land owners and owners of minerals below land; splits those who applaud economic benefits of mining and those fear who fear mining process will destroy ancient acquifers and surface ecosystems and dry up water sources; graph of methane output; photo (M)

Salomon Smith Barney executives, in response to list of demands compiled by junior investment banker Paul Leung, are piling on perks to stem flow of young employees defecting to Internet companies; are offering them more meal money, better laptop computers and access to company gym on weekends; memo contains list of 36 suggested ways firm can retain its bankers-in-training, pool of 500 people known as analysts (M)

There's nothing ''sub'' about the suburbs anymore. A special issue of The Times Magazine details the blurring of boundaries between city and suburb, and the result: that none of the generalizations about the Levittowns of America still fit, even in Levittown itself. Plus: Education Life looks at the state of standardized testing in a politically charged environment. And in the quarterly Mutual Funds Report, good news with the bad.

Business-to-business e-commerce is expected to surge as companies transfer much of their purchasing to the Internet; industries are banding together in buying and selling consortiums, while Internet start-ups like FreeMarkets, EDS CoNext and Ventro are running online buying services for all kinds of goods; EDS is unit of Electronic Data Systems; for now, they are a boon to purchasing managers, who just use them to buy nonstrategic supplies like stationery and maintenance contracts; whether procurement executives fade into woodwork, replaced in parts of their jobs by online companies, and in others by executives schooled more in finance and technology than in fine points of buying, remains to be seen; graph; photo (M)