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Business: Recruiting in Silicon Valley

Three-day work weeks. Sign-up bonuses as high as $7,000. A key to the company hot tub. Free orthodontia for all the children.

These are just a few of the goodies handed out by electronics companies in California's "Silicon Valley," some 40 miles south of San Francisco. It is the scene of a frenzied recruiting drive for anybody with a scientific skill—and many with no skills at all.

Some 500 companies are locked in a desperate recruiting battle for a severely limited number of workers. The more esoteric the specialty, the keener the competition. The mere...

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RAY KELLY, New York City Police Commissioner, on the arrest of a New Jersey man in one of the nation's most baffling missing-children cases, the disappearance more than three decades ago of 6-year-old Etan Patz.
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