December 5, 2002

Russian government sells 50 million shares, or 5.9 percent, of Lukoil, Russia's largest oil company, for $775 million on London Stock Exchange, reducing its stake in company by about half (S)

New York City has long been a laboratory for the study of language, a petri dish in which dialects mingle and collide, where linguists have lurked incognito in department stores, luring unwitting natives into blurting out revealing phrases like, say, ''Fourth Floor.'' For many years, scholarly interest in New York language focused on indigenous varieties of English, the most notorious being Noo Yawkese. But as the city's demographics have shifted, scholars have turned their attention to such things as Spanglish and the nature of New York Spanish.

Analysis of mouse genome by international consortium of scientists shows it to be so similar to that of people that it should speed efforts to understand human genome and genetic roots of disease; this is first time reasonably complete genomes of two mammals, mouse and man, have become available for comparison; man and mouse are cousins, each descended from small mammal that split into two species toward end of dinosaur era; despite 75 million years of separate evolution, only about 300 genes--1 percent of number possessed by mouse--have no obvious counterpart in human genome; this is according to new analysis published in journal Nature; similarity makes mouse genome excellent surrogate for studying human genome, especially for tests that would be ethically impossible in people; international consortium's mouse genome is prepared by Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Mass, Genome Sequencing Center at Washington Univ School of Medicine in St Louis, and Sanger Institute near Cambridge, Eng; diagram; chart (M)

Box-office disappointment for Walt Disney Co's animated feature Treasure Planet has some in Hollywood concerned that Disney's animated division is running out of gas; opthers, however, are counseling patience; Disney announces that it is lowering its 2002 earning estimates as result of unexpectedly weak performance; $140 million production sold only $16.6 million of tickets in North American theaters in its first five days of release; photo (M)

Iraqi liaison with United Nations arms inspectors, Maj Gen Hussam Muhammad Amin, launches furious broadside against inspectors for their no-notice search of one of Pres Saddam Hussein's innumerable palaces and ascribes it to pressures from United States, Britain and Israel; holds news conference to again deny that Iraq has any banned nuclear, chemical or biological arms; day's events suggest conflicting pressures building in Baghdad, 72 hours before Iraq promises to deliver declaration on any secret weapons programs; Saddam Hussein will seek to meet UN's demands in ways that avoid war while saving his prestige, if not his weapons programs; Amin suggests that inspectors' palace visit was intended to humiliate Hussein; Iraq Foreign Ministry questions why inspectors did not wear protective suits for palace visit if they suspected there might be biological, chemical or nuclear weapons there (M)