June 25, 2005

Despite evidence to the contrary, more parents are blaming mercury in vaccines for their children's autism.

They market themselves as the New Mets, but as long as they are under .500, they cannot quite live up to that nickname. But there are games when the Mets show what they mean, and last night was one of them. The Mets charged into Yankee Stadium with their marquee additions, Pedro Martínez and Carlos Beltran, leading the way. They met a Yankees team in yet another deep funk, and they capitalized in a 6-4 victory, dazzling on defense on a night when the Yankees looked ragged.

Over the last eight months, there seemed to be at least 140 different men and women living in the same apartment at 2978 Nostrand Avenue in Brooklyn. Every one of them appeared to have a credit card and an insatiable appetite for jewelry from the glittering collections hawked on ShopNBC, a shopping network based in this suburb of Minneapolis. So it was particularly satisfying for Joan Radtke, the director of credit at ShopNBC, when a postal inspection agent in New York called to say that a 22-year-old man had been arrested Wednesday morning at the Nostrand Avenue address, partly on the basis of information provided by ShopNBC.

At the Urban Assembly School for Law and Justice in Brooklyn, the young principal has worked from 7 a.m. until 7 p.m. -- on her light days. Teachers have lined the walls with essays on the O.J. Simpson trial and other assignments reflecting the school's theme. Every other week, lawyers have regaled students with tales from the courtroom, over sandwiches brought by car service from the Manhattan office of Cravath, Swaine & Moore, the white-shoe law firm that is the school's partner and patron. Law and Justice, which opened in September in an elementary school overlooking the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, is one of 200 small schools, mostly high schools, that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is creating as part of his effort to overhaul public education in New York City.

A top executive at Chevron yesterday sharply criticized the $18.5 billion bid by the China National Offshore Oil Corporation for Unocal, calling it an inferior combination that would end up producing less oil and natural gas than a Chevron acquisition and would turn Unocal into a company ''strategically focused on China.'' The executive, Peter Robertson, Chevron's vice chairman, also accused the Chinese of not competing fairly.