February 21, 2003

Military wings of several main Palestinian factions are drawn together by their desire for revenge against Israel, but divisions in their ideology endure; more than two years of conflict and shared nationalist impulse have blurred their distinctions, but even in Nablus, which Israel calls center for terrorism in West Bank, members of Aksa Martyrs Brigades have little interest in meeting with members of Palestinian Authority or Hamas; Hamas representatives have no interest in meeting with Fatah leader; Israel has offered to ease retrictions and withdraw its forces from areas where Palestinians achieve calm, but Hamas and other groups scoff at idea that proposal should limit Palestinian uprising; some Fatah leaders argue that Palestinian attacks should be confined to soldiers and settlers in territories, believing such violence would be supported abroad as legitimate resistance to occupation; Hamas does not distinguish between boundaries, claiming all of Israel and territories belong to Palestinians; photo; map (L)

HERE is the chief difference between auto racing and auto racing on ice. If you spin a car 360 degrees on a dry track, your life will flash before your eyes. Do a 360 on a large frozen lake, and you just count the ice-fishing huts whizzing by until you slide to a stop. Last weekend, 62 drivers from the Boston chapter of the BMW Club of America converged on southern New Hampshire to test their mettle on the surface of the frozen Newfound Lake, north of Concord, and the wipeouts were plenty. The club meets here a dozen times a year, weather permitting, and while no one feared going through the ice, which was fully two feet thick, the surface itself had them talking.

Jesica Santillan undergoes second heart and lung transplant nearly two weeks after Duke University Hospital mistakenly gives her organs from donor with incompatible blood type; incredible stress of first botched transplant left her unconscious; her doctors give 17-year-old only 50-50 chance of surviving; doctors not connected to her case offer bleaker assessment, noting that one-year survival rate for transplanting heart and both lungs together is ordinarily about 60 percent; say second transplants are done in less than 1 percent of cases, and rarely are they done because of blood-type mix-ups; officials at Duke University Hospital admit to making several mistakes when doctors inserted wrong organs during original transplant; say chief surgeon 'falsely assumed' that blood match had been confirmed; spokesman for Duke says university would make public internal review and chronology of events in case; document might explain why Duke waited for week to disclose that girl was victim of mistake; photos; diagram (L)

Philosophy behind New York Gov George Pataki's proposed budget, which calls for $9.3 billion worth of nonrecurring revenue savings and sources, sharply contrasts with his first-term criticism of using such 'one-shot fiscal gimmicks', as he called them when his precedessor Mario Cuomo used them to balance budget; Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver has so far refused to approve borrowing against part of state's $12 billion tobacco settlement, mainstay of governor's package of nonrecurring revenue (M)

They weren't going to let Aquil Abdullah on the plane at Newark International Airport, at least not right away. ''We need you to step to the side,'' he was told by a reservations clerk for his prospective flight to Seattle. ''I have to call a police officer.''