June 29, 2001

One by one, the 11 boys sat down with police detectives to answer questions about their encounter last week with a homeless alcoholic who was nameless to them. They referred to him as ''some bum,'' the ''bummy-looking guy,'' the ''old guy'' and ''the man that died.'' None used the word murder in explaining how a band of boys had beaten the man to death, ending a violent spree on the last day of school. Rampaging through a city neighborhood, the band had already bloodied a boy's face and knocked a delivery man's teeth out by the time they came upon the slight Hispanic man drinking beer in the shadows of two tired factory buildings.

Citigroup will stop selling type of mortgage insurance that consumer advocates have criticized as tool for siphoning off home equity of low-income borrowers; will stop selling single-premium credit life insurance when people get their home loans; says as soon as state regulators approve switch, it will instead allow borrowers to pay monthly premiums for insurance, intended to pay off loan in event of borrower's death or disability; consumer groups hail decision (M)

More than 11 years ago, Jason Kidd played basketball at the Oakland Coliseum for the first time. He was a high school sophomore at St. Joseph's in Alameda, a private Catholic preparatory school taking on the most powerful team in northern California, the all-black Skyline of Oakland -- Gary Payton's old public school. Except on the gritty playgrounds of Mosswood Park and other Oakland haunts, no one had heard of Kidd or seen him play. He was, in many ways, a mystery. Light-skinned, his father is black and his mother is white. And among the predominantly black crowd that evening, he was heckled like only a kid not of the inner city could be heckled as he took the court.

British Nuclear Fuels lost 210 million pounds ($296 million) in year to March, in contrast to profit of 74 million pounds year earlier (S)

Seeking to curb profiteering by power plant owners, the federal government has granted New York the power to limit spikes in the price of electricity this summer, to prevent the soaring rates that hit consumers last summer. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission agreed today to the ''circuit-breaker'' on rising wholesale prices that had been sought by the Pataki administration and the New York Independent System Operator, the consortium that runs the state's power markets. The mechanism -- permitted through Oct. 31 -- will automatically lower a power producer's price bid that is significantly out of line with what it had been charging.